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# The Matheson Trust

For the Study of Comparative Religion

## Posts

- [Transformative Sound and Songs, and a Pauper’s Meditation](https://www.themathesontrust.org/samaveda-merton) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear reader, • We begin our monthly selection with an article on the Josmani Yoga traditions of northeastern Nepal and Assam, introducing the specific features of their spiritual/initiatic lineages, and the prominent role of nada-yoga (yoga of sound) in their way. With the utterance of specific words—such as aha and so’ham—meshed
- [Calligraphy, Orthodoxy, and Archetypes](https://www.themathesontrust.org/calligraphy-chesterton-johnston) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear reader, • The first of our library selections this month is a brief piece by calligrapher Gina Jonas, “Calligraphy as a Spiritual ‘Way’”, exploring the incorporation of Buddhist insights and methods into the practice of Roman lettering. By approaching calligraphy as a Way—a spiritual tool or discipline—practicing became satisfying in
- [Modes of Prayer and the Heart of Wayfinding](https://www.themathesontrust.org/modes-of-prayer-navigation) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear reader, • Our first reading this month, the masterful chapter “Modes of Prayer” by Frithjof Schuon, illuminates the human and cosmic dimensions of prayer, its psychological aspects and metaphysical implications. Life is not a sort of space filled with possibilities offering themselves to our good pleasure, as children and worldly
- [Angelus, Sincerity, and a Sacred Craft](https://www.themathesontrust.org/angelus-sincerity-smiths) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear reader. • We begin our monthly selection with the latest addition to our Sacred Audio Library, a page on the Angelus prayer. Hearing the bells throughout a medieval town or city was an integral part of marking time for monastic and civil life, but a unique ring pattern was assigned
- [Indian Goddesses, Shadows Praised, Arrogance and Humility](https://www.themathesontrust.org/goddesses-tanizaki-arrogance) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear reader, • As our first new library addition this month, we present A Garland of Forgotten Goddesses: Tales of the Feminine Divine From India and Beyond. This excellent collection draws from sources which while little known outside the Indosphere, are intimately related to a myriad local and transnational devotional practices
- [African Philosophy, Art, Beauty, Eros, and a Welcoming Love](https://www.themathesontrust.org/african-art-eros-welcoming) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear reader, • Our first new library addition this month is the Introduction to the book Deep Knowledge by Oludamini Ogunaike, presenting and comparing two important “ways of knowing” in West Africa: Tijani Sufism and Ifa. As Amadou Hampâté Bâ writes, “To discover a new world, one must be able to
- [Holy Work, Funerals for Needles, and Imbibing the Universe](https://www.themathesontrust.org/gill-harikuyo-imbibing) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear reader, • We begin our monthly selection with a choice of pages from Eric Gill on the spirituality and theology of craft, art and everyday work. These reflections, at once very practical and profound, give the measure of Gill’s metaphysical penetration, and of the kinds of philosophical concerns that are
- [Sufi Women, Seals and Mudras in Sculpture and Dance](https://www.themathesontrust.org/sufi-women-mudras) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear reader, • Our first library novelty this month is the introductory section to Women in Sufism, an extraordinary anthology by Camille Adams Helminski, from the earliest times of the Hijra to our days. As Muhammad said, “He who knows himself knows his Lord.” It is love that carries and sustains
- [Logic of Birds, Ottoman Architecture, and All Souls](https://www.themathesontrust.org/logic-birds-ottoman-requiem) - Welcome to our monthly newsletter, dear reader, • Our first library novelty is an article by Oludamini Ogunnaike, “The Logic of the Birds”, on the metaphysics of poetic language and thus on the essential value of poetry, with a wealth of examples drawn from traditions all over the world. Poetry makes tangible and existentially realizable
- [Cassian on Prayer, Malay Nature, and Interreligious Hong Kong](https://www.themathesontrust.org/cassian-malay-hongkong) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear readers, • Our first library highlight this month is a translation of texts on prayer (Collationes IX–X) by St John Cassian, traditionally considered the foremost Latin interpreter of the early Christian monasticism of Egypt, the “Desert Fathers”, for the Western contemplatives. As one of the authors of the Philokalia, and
- [Psychology, Pacific Traditions, and an Unexpected Journey](https://www.themathesontrust.org/psychology-pacific-traditions-and-an-unexpected-journey) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear reader, • We begin our monthly selection with a double bill on the essential nature, limits and problems of modern psychology. In these selected chapters, from René Guénon’s The Reign of Quantity and from Titus Burckhardt’s Mirror of the Intellect, we find very clearly articulated, first, the traditional psychology found
- [Burckhardt, Alchemy and Yunus’ Grammar](https://www.themathesontrust.org/burckhardt-alchemy-and-yunus-grammar) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear readers, • We begin our monthly selection with excerpts from a major biographical work, Titus Burckhardt: Sufism Between East and West, full of insights into the extraordinary life, character and works of one of the best known and most beloved traditional authorities of recent times. In face of the efficaciousness
- [Hermes, the Ladder of Prayer, and Science vs Mysticism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/hermes-ladder-sciencevsmystic) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear readers, • Our first library selection this month is an excerpt from our soon to be published Hermes Trismegistus: The Way of Wisdom, by Algis Uzdavinys. In this prolonged and erudite meditation, the concept, image and influence of Hermes and the Hermetica through the centuries are analysed and put in
- [Chinnamasta, Korean Shamanism, and the Superstition of Science](https://www.themathesontrust.org/chinnamasta-korean-mudang-guenonscience) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear readers, • Our first new library item this month is a chapter on the divine play of Hindu/Buddhist deity Chinnamasta, one of the ten goddesses from the esoteric tradition of Tantra, and a ferocious aspect of Mahadevi, the Hindu Mother goddess. Chinnamasta indicates a transcendence of the ordinary and portrays
- [Canticle of the Creatures, Etymologies, and an Azhar Lecture](https://www.themathesontrust.org/canticle-etymologies-azhar-lecture) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear readers. • We open our monthly selection with a page on St Francis of Assisi’s 13th-century “Canticle of the Creatures” (Laudes Creaturarum), also known as “Canticle of Brother Sun,” including a bilingual text, an audio reading of the original and an interpretative essay. This beautiful and brief poem has been
- [African Tradition, Faces of God, and True Detachment](https://www.themathesontrust.org/african-faces-of-god-detachment) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear reader, • We begin our monthly selection with an article about “African Traditional Religion” reflecting on the essential convergence, the unanimity of the many native African religious paths and practices, allowing us to see beyond reductionist and trite labels like animism or pantheism. The Ewe-speaking people speak of Him as
- [The Litany, the Gunas, and the Way](https://www.themathesontrust.org/the-litany-the-gunas-and-the-way) - Welcome to our monthly newsletter, dear readers, Our first new library item is an introduction to “the most famous of early modern litanies”, the Litany of Loreto. We present some recordings of sung versions of this originally Latin prayer, the ritual recitation of Divine and Marian epithets, which is rooted in ancient and late antique
- [Desert Sounds, Sacred Cartography, and the Preaching Hoopoe](https://www.themathesontrust.org/desert-sounds-ise-mandara-hoopoe) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear readers, Our first new library highlight this month is an excerpt from Sonorous Desert, a book about how the sounds of the desert—sounds like wind, water, thunder, animals, and even humans—shaped the development of Christian monasticism in the Middle East. Reasons for choosing a monastic life naturally varied from person
- [A Heap of Jewels, the Gospel in Brief, and the End of a Cycle](https://www.themathesontrust.org/ratnakutra-tolstoy-gospel) - Welcome to our last newsletter of this year, with our wishes for a blessed 2025. • Our first new library addition this month is a selection from the Sutra of the Heap of Jewels, Ratnakuta Sutra, a major ancient collection of Buddhist sutras, which has been called a small encyclopedia of Indian Mahayana Buddhism. “…
- [Longing Songs, Unified Science, and the Jungle Goddess](https://www.themathesontrust.org/songs-unified-science-bonbibi) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear reader, • We begin our monthly selection with an article presenting a choice of ginans, hymns of wisdom (from the Sanskrit jnana) from the Nizari Ismaili tradition. These songs, often recited along ritual prayer, are accorded a near scriptural status, and regarded as conveying in the vernacular the inner meaning
- [A Desert Saint, Symbolic Colours, and Alchemy of Happiness](https://www.themathesontrust.org/a-desert-saint-symbolic-colours-and-alchemy-of-happiness) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear reader, • We begin our monthly selection with a life of one of the Desert Fathers, St Bishoy (Paisios) of Scetis (5th century), known in the Coptic Church of Alexandria as the “Star of the Desert”. He prayed constantly, without rest and without interruption, just as the Apostle Paul commanded.
- [Zen Koans, the Study Invocation, and Confucian Religion](https://www.themathesontrust.org/zen-koans-sahana-confucius) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear readers, We begin our monthly selection with some pages from a Japanese collection of Zen koans, Entangling Vines (Shumon Kattoshu). At times puzzling, obscure, dazzling or amusing, these often brief anecdotes and dialogues involving monks and all sorts of lay people serve to challenge the mind, shaking it awake from
- [A Shaykh’s Life, Hermetic Definitions, and the Star of the Sea](https://www.themathesontrust.org/a-shaykhs-life-hermetic-definitions-and-the-star-of-the-sea) - Welcome to our monthly newsletter, dear reader, Our first new library addition today is a biographical portrait of Shaykh Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, the famous jurist and Sufi mystic still revered and emulated throughout the Islamic world. If your heart is sound… then you will never lose the intimations of the Almighty Truth, and His wisdom
- [Deadly Sins, Dreaming Practice, and a Buddhist Pilgrim](https://www.themathesontrust.org/deadly-sins-dreaming-xuanzang-and) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear readers, • Our monthly selection starts with a chapter by Martin Lings on “The Seven Deadly Sins”, a very subtle analysis and overview of the symbolism and the spiritual aspects of sins and virtues, especially their meaning and correspondences in astrology and alchemy. By the implacable rhythmic regularity of the
- [Stages of the Soul, Singing Last Day Stars, and Divine Love](https://www.themathesontrust.org/stages-of-the-soul-singing-last-day-stars-and) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear reader, • Our first new library addition this month is an article on one of the works by Sanai of Ghazna, “The Stages of the Soul Through the Path of Perfection: The Journey of the Servants to the Place of Return” (Seyr al-‘Ibad ila al-Ma‘ad), presenting a detailed view of
- [Islamic Art, Yinyang Cosmology, and Leaving Religion](https://www.themathesontrust.org/islamic-art-yinyang-cosmology-and-leaving-religion) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear readers, • Our first new library item is an illustrated chapter, “The Message of Islamic Art”, by Jean-Louis Michon, distilling a lifetime of study, experience, and contemplation, into a few pages that try to grasp the essence of what may be rightly called “Islamic” in islamic art. The idea of
- [The Emerald Tablet, Mystical Friendship, and Kannon as a Boy](https://www.themathesontrust.org/emerald-tablet-zhuangzi-kannon) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear reader, • Our first new library addition this month is a long overdue page on the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistos, the acknowledged foundation and symbolic framework of the whole of Arabic and European alchemy from late Antiquity and through the Middle Ages. We present Latin and Arabic versions with
- [Fusion of Horizons, Yakshas, and Cosmic Grammar](https://www.themathesontrust.org/fusion-of-horizons-yakshas-and-cosmic-grammar) - Welcome to our monthly newsletter, dear reader, Our first new library selection is a key reference article by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy on the yakshas, the tutelary deities or patron-saints of nature in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain lore. If some elements of ancient Hindu cult, perhaps of millennial antiquity, are still preserved in the Christian office,
- [Two Selves, a Wealth of Splendour, and Yin-Yang Harmony](https://www.themathesontrust.org/two-selves-shogon-harmonizing) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear reader. • Our first new library addition this month is an insightful brief essay by Roger Lipsey, “The Two Selves: Coomaraswamy as Man and Metaphysician”, introducing the life and works of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy from a unique perspective. Coomaraswamy's sense of the drama of inner life—not so much the ups
- [Sufi Dancing, Archery, and Cinnabar Red](https://www.themathesontrust.org/sufi-dancing-archery-and-cinnabar-red) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear reader, Our first monthly selection is “Dancing the Islamic Way: Two Famous Sufi Masters”, an article presenting translations of two medieval treatises on the inspired dances of some Turkish and Central Asian Sufi brotherhoods. To dance requires space, which makes the action a means for sanctifying locations. All the places
- [Buddhist Music, the Indian Craftsman, and Sufi Generosity](https://www.themathesontrust.org/buddhist-music-craftsman-sufi-generosity) - Welcome to our last newsletter of 2023, dear readers, with our best wishes for the new year. • Our first library selection this month is an article on “Buddha as a Musician”, explaining the place of music in Buddhist scripture and life, its Paradisal associations, and the symbolism of the vina or arched harp. Ecclesiastical
- [Conversations, the Boat, and the View from Above](https://www.themathesontrust.org/conversations-boat) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear reader, • We begin our monthly selection with an excerpt from Conversations with My Own Heart by Metropolitan Anastasy of the Russian Orthodox Church, a collection of aphorisms reflecting on language and literature in the context of the power of prayer. When a word, like a fiery coal, comes out
- [On Light, Knowledge, and a Japanese Goddess](https://www.themathesontrust.org/on-light-knowledge-and-a-japanese-goddess) - Welcome to our monthly newsletter, dear reader, • We begin our selection with De luce (“On Light”), a brief treatise on the physics and metaphysics of light, by Robert Grosseteste, 13th-century Bishop of Lincoln. This famous work, a challenging blend of philosophy, psychology and theology, carries echoes of the Persian “Philosophy of Illumination” by Suhrawardi,
- [An Adventure, Lines of Heaven, and Balkan Sufism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/adventure-heaven-alieyes) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear reader. • We begin our monthly selection with a precious little book on the individual and collective adventure of prayer, by B.C. Butler, recommended by Rowan Williams as one of the influential books of his youth. No one can pursue the life of prayer, within the context of a whole
- [Divine Feminine, Work Spiritual, and a Musical Mantra](https://www.themathesontrust.org/divine-feminine-work-spiritual-and-a-musical-mantra) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear readers, • We begin our monthly selection with an article by Eric Geoffroy on “The Eternal Feminine in Sufism,” drawing from the writings of Ibn Arabi and the Emir Abd el-Kader. In his commentary of the Divine Name al-Qawwi (“the Strong”), Ibn ‘Arabi concludes that “in the created world there
- [Dream Conversations, Cultivating the Mind, and the Earthly Angel](https://www.themathesontrust.org/dream-conversations-tolak) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear readers, • We begin our monthly selection with Thomas Cleary’s translation of Dream Conversations on Buddhism and Zen, a collection of excerpts from letters by Muso Soseki, the “Nation’s Master” (kokushi) of 14th-century Japan, teacher of emperors and generals. These selections from his letters may be best described as a
- [A Goddess of Depth, Overcoming Nature, and Flying Home](https://www.themathesontrust.org/goddess-of-depth-overcoming-nature-swallows) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear readers, We begin our monthly selection with an intimate account, almost an “ethnological meditation”, of the myth and rites of the goddess Paiditalli, in Andhra Pradesh, southeast India, elaborating on the fluid dynamics of the Telugu cosmos of the kingdom of Vizianagaram, which she inhabits and enlivens and where she
- [The Dreaming, the Living Awaken, and the Five Dreams](https://www.themathesontrust.org/dreaming-hayy-five-dreams) - Welcome, dear readers, to our May newsletter. We begin our monthly selection with a lecture by W.E.H. Stanner on the Dreaming, the no-time and no-place of myth and revelation among Australian aboriginal cultures. Although The Dreaming conjures up the notion of a sacred, heroic time of the indefinitely remote past, such a time is also,
- [Seven Sleepers, Eloquent Images, and Weaving Mantras](https://www.themathesontrust.org/sleepers-weaving-eloquent) - Welcome to our monthly newsletter, dear reader, • Our first library addition this month is a small selection of texts and articles about the Seven Holy Sleepers of Ephesus (the “Companions of the Cave” of the Qur’an), including their precedents as told in a number of ancient narratives, and their influential depiction in the medieval
- [A Rabbi and a Shaykh, Korean Buddhism, and the Arrow Prayer](https://www.themathesontrust.org/rabbi-shaykh-wongyo-arrow) - Welcome to our monthly newsletter, dear reader. • We begin our selection with an article on “An Awesome Tale that Took Place in the City of Damascus in the Time of Rabbi Moshe Galante of Blessed Memory”. This marvellous and moving tale is about the initiatic relation between the chief rabbi of Damascus and an
- [Recollection, Providence, Memory, and Knowledge](https://www.themathesontrust.org/recollection-providence-memory-and-knowledge) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear readers. Our first library selection this month, “Recollection, Indian and Platonic”, is a chapter by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy on the universality of the doctrines regarding memory, considered from its metaphysical correspondences and with all its human concomitants in theology and the spiritual life. It includes what is perhaps the most
- [Orthodox Eros, Jewish Compassion, and the Spiritual Master](https://www.themathesontrust.org/eros-jewish-compassion-master) - Welcome to our first newsletter of this year, dear readers. • We begin our monthly selection with an article on the deep understanding of marriage and love within the Christian Orthodox tradition, “Transfiguring Voluptuous Choice” by Fr Stephen Muse. God is our true lover and this is why it is only through the call and
- [Cosmic Weaving, Fire in the Heart, and Skilful Happiness](https://www.themathesontrust.org/cosmic-weaving-fire-in-the-heart-and-skilful-happiness) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear readers. We begin our monthly selection with one of René Guénon’s masterful chapters on symbolism and metaphysics, “The Symbolism of Weaving”. The threads of the warp, by which the corresponding points in all states are connected, form the sacred book which is the prototype (or rather, archetype) of all traditional
- [Retreat, Remembrance and Purification: Sufi, Shinto & Native American](https://www.themathesontrust.org/simnani-shinto-blackelk) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear readers. We start our monthly selection with a technical chapter on seclusion and recollection (khalwa and dhikr) according to the 14th-century Persian Sufi Ala al-Dawla al-Simnani, master of the Kubrawi order. Within the framework of a subtle and complex Islamic cosmological exposition, Simnani elaborates on the different deaths and resurrections
- [Forms of Sanctity, of Philosophy, and a Sicilian Church](https://www.themathesontrust.org/forms-of-sanctity-of-philosophy-and-a-sicilian-church) - Welcome to our monthly newsletter, dear readers. • Our first new library selection is a chapter from Michel Chodkiewicz’s Seal of the Saints, “The Four Pillars”, detailing the hierarchy of Muslim saints through time and space, the “Council of the Saints” (diwan al-awliya’) as explained by Ibn ‘Arabi and other great Sufi masters. One of
- [Pythagorean Lives and Sacred Work](https://www.themathesontrust.org/pythagorean-lives-and-sacred-work) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear readers, We present this month two fundamental texts on the life and the doctrines of Pythagoras, the “pre-Platonic philosopher or sage or religious genius of the sixth century BC. The first is by Iamblichus, the fourth-century Platonist, who begins with these words, All right-minded people, embarking on any study of philosophy,
- [Javanese and Christian Luminaries, and Theravada–Carmelite Studies](https://www.themathesontrust.org/javanese-and-christian-luminaries-and-theravada-carmelite-studies) - Welcome to our monthly newsletter, dear readers, • We open our selection with “Faith comes from the sea,” an article on the Wali Songo, the legendary Muslim Saints of Java. The author retells “stories that play out on the frontier between the boundless ocean of Islam’s truth and the land-bound, finite abode of human frailty.”
- [Rules for Solitaries and Metaphysics of Music](https://www.themathesontrust.org/rules-metaphysics-music) - Welcome to our July newsletter, dear readers. We begin this month’s selection with two of the most influential documents of the Western monastic tradition, the Rule of Saint Benedict and the Rule of Saint Columbanus, which have for centuries inspired and guided the spiritual and practical lives of countless communities throughout the world. St Benedict’s
- [On Coomaraswamy, Ornament, and the Keepers of Memory](https://www.themathesontrust.org/on-coomaraswamy-ornament-and-the-keepers-of-memory) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear readers. We present this month both an article by Ananda Coomaraswamy and an introduction to his life and work by Harry Oldmeadow. In “Ornament”, Coomaraswamy explains the basics of art in traditional cultures, with a lively comparison to some of the assumptions of modern art. To explain the nature of
- [Mar Sharbel, the Imitation, and Lebanese Pilgrimages](https://www.themathesontrust.org/mar-sharbel-the-imitation-and-lebanese-pilgrimages) - Welcome to our newsletter, dear readers. • Our first new library addition this month is a brief biography of Saint Sharbel of Lebanon, one of the most influential and beloved Maronite saints of recent times. A monk and a priest of the 19th century, Mar Charbel’s tomb has become a major pilgrimage destination frequented by
- [Symbolism: Essential, Primordial, Abstract and Concrete](https://www.themathesontrust.org/symbolism-shuokua-zuowang) - Welcome, dear readers, We begin our monthly selection with an essential essay by Martin Lings, “What is Symbolism?”, explaining and illustrating the spiritual and metaphysical relevance of symbols, for every individual path and for sacred traditions in general. All created things are both disconnected projections of their creative Principle while being at the same time
- [Aspects of the Divine Veil: Hidden God, Protective Mother](https://www.themathesontrust.org/aspects-of-the-divine-veil) - Welcome to our latest newsletter, dear readers. • We open our monthly selection with a new addition to the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection, a very special Jewish song El Mistater (“The God Who Hides”), composed around the 15th century within the Kabbalistic community of Safed (Tsefat), and transmitted for centuries among the Jews of
- [A Shared House, Sinai Icons, and Ascent in Song](https://www.themathesontrust.org/meryemana-sinai-icons-nigunim) - Welcome to our monthly newsletter! We begin our selection with a brief video documentary about the House of Mary (Meryem Ana Evi) in Ephesus, Turkey, as part of the exhibition “Shared Sacred Spaces”, held at the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations, Marseille, France. The 2015 exhibition was part of an effort to provide new
- [Towards the Essential, Science, Knowledge and Religion](https://www.themathesontrust.org/towards-essential-science-religion) - Welcome to our last newsletter for 2021, with best wishes for the new year. • We are happy to launch a new publication, a collection of letters by Frithjof Schuon with correspondents from various religious traditions. The selection, titled Towards the Essential, gives precious insights into the spiritual guidance given by Schuon to disciples and
- [On God’s Name, Sound and Liturgy, Jewish-Muslim Places](https://www.themathesontrust.org/on-gods-name-sound-and-liturgy-jewish-muslim-places) - Welcome to our November newsletter, dear readers. • We start our monthly selection with an important article, “One God, Many Names”, on the translation of the Name Allah and on traditional Divine Names in English and other languages. God and his names are part of a universal human legacy. They are hardly unique to anyone,
- [Lord of Dance, Bektashi Songs, and Cosmic Love](https://www.themathesontrust.org/lord-of-dance-bektashi-songs-and-cosmic-love) - Welcome to our October newsletter. We start our monthly selection with “The Dance of Shiva”, an article by Ananda Coomaraswamy on the symbolism of the dance, starting from the Hindu scriptures to reveal its metaphysical symbolism. The Essential Significance of Shiva’s Dance is threefold: First, it is the image of his Rhythmic Play as the
- [Voices of Fire, Indian Alchemy, and a Sufi Master’s Letters](https://www.themathesontrust.org/voices-of-fire-indian-alchemy-and-a-sufi-masters-letters) - Welcome to our September newsletter, • We begin our monthly selection with an article by Algis Uzdavinys, “Voices of Fire: Understanding Theurgy,” which situates in a comparative perspective, and within the philosophical tradition proper, the major traits of ancient Graeco-Egyptian religion and initiatic mysteries. In the Neoplatonic view, all manifested reality consists of different modes
- [Saints and Heroes, Christic Peace and Unveiling](https://www.themathesontrust.org/devotional-christian-unveiling) - Welcome to our August newsletter. This month we present first two articles on aspects of sainthood, followed by a study on Christian initiation. • Our first text is by Martin Lings, who takes the reader by the hand to disclose the metaphysical depths and symbolic associations of the “Archetypes of Devotional Homage”, including hero-worship and
- [Sacred Music, the Seven Castles of the Soul, and Jewish-Muslim Encounters](https://www.themathesontrust.org/sacred-music-the-seven-castles-of-the-soul-and-jewish-muslim-encounters) - Welcome to our July newsletter. We begin our monthly selection with an article on “Sacred Music and Hindu Religious Experience: From Ancient Roots to the Modern Classical Tradition.” It gives us a summary of the cosmological and spiritual import of traditional Hindu music, with links to listen to various pieces of the Khayal genre, shared
- [The Rose Blooming, Kumulipo Chant and Infinite Life](https://www.themathesontrust.org/lakhani-rose-kumulipo-infinite-life) - Dear readers, welcome to our June newsletter. • We are very happy to announce the publication of our latest title, When the Rose Blooms, a collection of spiritual aphorisms by Ali Lakhani, illustrated by Nigel Jackson and prefaced by Barry McDonald. The geography of these utterances, each like a signpost, maps a vast and ancient
- [No Other Word](https://www.themathesontrust.org/no-other-word) - by Barry McDonald, 2020. ISBN 978-1-908092-21-2 No Destination Like all the blessings that a lifetime brings The snowflakes fall and purify the night. A sandalwood stick burns, a candle sings, A man in silence prays for love and light. Outside a snowy path leads to the world- There is no destination but the Name. Because
- [Gardens of Heaven and Earth, Sufi Masters and Disciples, and a Marian Hymn](https://www.themathesontrust.org/gardens-dabbagh-akathistos) - Welcome to our May newsletter, dear readers. We begin our monthly selection with a work by Michaela Eskew on the symbolism and practice of enclosed gardens, drawing from scriptural and liturgical sources, and from a wide range of medieval works of art. The Garden of Eden set a tone that work was going to be
- [A Sufi Dragon, Ethiopian Dabtaras, and the Flower Garland Sutra](https://www.themathesontrust.org/a-sufi-dragon-ethiopian-dabtaras-and-the-flower-garland-sutra) - Welcome to our April newsletter. We begin our selection with “A Mountain of Saints and Sages”, an article about a central shrine of the Sufi Qadiriyah order in China, the Pavilion of Lingering Illumination. This was one node in a vast network of Sufi zawiyas that stretched from China to Morocco. It was located at
- [Who Is Man, Seven Liberal Arts, and Kapleau’s Life](https://www.themathesontrust.org/who-is-man-liberal-arts-kapleau) - Welcome to our March newsletter. We begin our selection with a wide-ranging article by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “Who Is Man? The Perennial Answer of Islam,” drawing particular attention to man’s relation to the natural environment and to the traditional and modern understanding of “science”. To know himself, man must come to know the “Face of
- [The Wheel of Joy, Spirit Medicine, and the O Antiphons](https://www.themathesontrust.org/37-medicine-antiphons) - Welcome to our February newsletter. • Our first new library addition this month is a commentary on The Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva, one of the key texts from the Kagyu or “Whispered Transmission” of Tibetan Buddhism. Death is a continuation of birth. Death is not nothingness or a blank state; it is the time
- [Alchemical Insights, Goddess of the Sea, and Inspired Sense](https://www.themathesontrust.org/alchemical-insights-goddess-of-the-sea-and-inspired-sense) - Welcome to our January newsletter! Our library novelties this month include an “Insight into Alchemy” by Titus Burckhardt, detailing the essentials of the Sacred Art intended “to make of the body a spirit and of the spirit a body.” It is through bodily consciousness, apparently closed in on itself, and within its innermost enclosure that
- [Knots Untied, Rabbi Nachman, and Bread Making](https://www.themathesontrust.org/knots-untied-rabbi-nachman-and-bread-making) - Welcome to our final newsletter of the year. • Our first library highlight is an article by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy on the symbolism of knots, and on Dürer and Leonardo, with important considerations on Renaissance art and craftsmanship. All determinations or knots are bonds from which one could wish to be freed rather than remain
- [Heart Prayer, the Oupnek’hat, and Lives of Man](https://www.themathesontrust.org/heart-prayer-the-oupnekhat-and-lives-of-man) - Welcome to our November newsletter! • We begin our selection with a new addition to our Sacred Audio Collection: audio recordings of the “Jesus Prayer” or “Prayer of the Heart”, as used in the Orthodox churches from the earliest times. We present authentic recordings, directly from within the Greek monastic hesychast tradition. • Next,
- [In That Luminous Darkness](https://www.themathesontrust.org/in-that-luminous-darkness) - by Vincente Pascual Rodrigo, 2020. ISBN 978-1-908092-19-9 Of Life Here and now I close these eyes murmuring in the grotto. I feel the eastern breeze underneath the leafy plum. Here and now I close my eyes murmuring under the tree. And on this noble mountain fragrances envelop me. I close those eyes now, murmuring on
- [An Algonquin Sage, Uncreated Icons and Flute Melodies](https://www.themathesontrust.org/an-algonquin-sage-uncreated-icons-and-flute-melodies) - Welcome to our monthly newsletter. • Our first library highlight this month is a video interview of the late Algonquin chief and sage Ojigkwanong, “Morning Star”, telling us about his own path to reconciliation through forgiveness. …very early in the morning, it was still dusk. Through the window, I heard a bird singing outside. It
- [Sufism and Ancient Wisdom](https://www.themathesontrust.org/sufism-and-ancient-wisdom) - by Algis Uzdavinys, 2020. ISBN 978-1-901383-37-9 Our aim is to discern a few metaphysical and mythical patterns sufficient to show the common background and continuity (albeit through constant transformations and readaptations) of those socio-spiritual tendencies that may be attested from ancient Mesopotamia to the theocratic empire of Islam. Regarded as the restored religion of Abraham
- [Seven Dragons, Time and Aeviternity](https://www.themathesontrust.org/seven-dragons-time-and-aeviternity) - Welcome to our monthly newsletter. • We open our selection with an audio recording of a Friday sermon given in Cambridge by Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad. Starting from the Prophetic injunction to “Beware of the seven destructive ones,” the Shaykh speaks of seven poisonous tendencies lurking as demons or dragons in the recesses of the
- [Skeletons, Cosmic Cycles, Stars and Saints](https://www.themathesontrust.org/skeletons-cosmic-cycles-stars-and-saints) - Welcome to our monthly newsletter! Our first selection is a famous Zen classic by 15th century master Ikkyu, “The Skeletons”, a poignant and lyrical memento mori, with echoes of the imagery of the European danse macabre and even of the Mexican Day of the Dead. When are we not in a dream, when are we
- [Play of Masks, African Sufism, and Game Symbolism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/play-of-masks-african-sufism-and-game-symbolism) - Thinking of the now ubiquitous face coverings we habitually call masks, it may be worth drawing attention to the difference between the two. We present a chapter by Frithjof Schuon on the deepest meanings of the mask (the Latin persona), its essential relation to symbolism, and its implications for spiritual life. Jivatma, the “living soul”,
- [Chinese Qin Music, Saint Amaro, and the Dao](https://www.themathesontrust.org/chinese-qin-music-saint-amaro-and-the-dao) - Welcome to our monthly update! We begin our selection with an article on “Music as a Tool for Self-Realization in Chinese Culture, Based on the Practice of Playing the Guqin.” We provide links to recordings of traditional interpreters of this unique instrument, known as “the instrument of the sages” and as “the father of Chinese
- [Weil on Prayer, a Voyage, and Friendship through Centuries](https://www.themathesontrust.org/weil-on-prayer-a-voyage-and-friendship-through-centuries) - Welcome to our monthly newsletter! The first of our highlights is a very brief and compelling text by Simone Weil on her experience with the Lord’s Prayer. In a few lines she gives us a very practical method for deep contemplative prayer, and a glimpse into the depths of her metaphysical insights and her mystical
- [Paths, Playing Cards with God, and Gregorian Voices](https://www.themathesontrust.org/paths-playing-cards-with-god-and-gregorian-voices) - Welcome to our April newsletter! We are happy to announce the publication of our latest title, Paths That Lead to the Same Summit, by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos, a collection of carefully selected reviews on spiritual literature, meant as “a guide to aid the seeker on a pilgrimage through the distinct religious and spiritual universes and
- [Yogaswami, Metaphysics of Noah’s Ark and the Letter Nun](https://www.themathesontrust.org/yogaswami-metaphysics-of-noahs-ark-and-the-letter-nun) - Welcome to our monthly newsletter. We start our selection with a series of biographical notes and pictures of Yogaswami, the “Lion of Lanka” (1872–1964), a great representative of the highest Hindu Shaivite spirituality from Sri Lanka. You must meditate in the morning and evening and at night before you go to bed. Just pronounce the
- [St Catherine’s Library, and the Jasmine in the Heart](https://www.themathesontrust.org/st-catherines-library-islamic-enoch-and-the-jasmine-in-the-heart) - Welcome to our monthly newsletter. • We open our February selection with a brief text about the library at Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, where the profound contemplative life of the monks has been accompanied over the centuries by their scholarly and philological endeavours. Following in the footsteps of John Klimakos and the Desert Fathers,
- [The Pearl of Eternity, Colours of Intention, and Syriac Chants](https://www.themathesontrust.org/the-pearl-of-eternity-colours-of-intention-and-syriac-chants) - Welcome to our monthly newsletter! We open our selection with the long due addition of a text by the English mystic William Law, from his book, Wholly for God: the True Christian Life, about turning to the heart, how to do it and what is found there. Thou needest not, therefore, run here, or there,
- [Maori Education, Eight Trigrams, and the Solitary Bird](https://www.themathesontrust.org/maori-education-trigrams-solitary-bird) - Welcome to our December newsletter! We open our selection with an article by Lesley Rameka on the traditional principles of education among the Maori, based on the godliness or spiritual essence that “each child inherits from their ancestors when they are born.” The child is viewed as being born with three ira (essences) which are
- [Sacred Architecture, Silent Dhikr, and Wild Stones](https://www.themathesontrust.org/sacred-architecture-silent-dhikr-and-wild-stones) - Welcome to our November newsletter! Our first new selection this month is “Twelve Criteria for Sacred Architecture”, a key and influential article by master geometer Keith Critchlow, laying out the principles distilled from a lifetime of study and practice of traditional architecture. A sacred edifice in the highest or fullest sense is a crystallization of
- [The Craft of the Heart, Seeing the Saints, and the Maiden of Ludmir](https://www.themathesontrust.org/craft-of-the-heart-visualization-maiden) - Welcome to our August newsletter! We bring to our readers one of the most comprehensive works by Ajaan Lee, the renowned master in the Thai Buddhist Forest Tradition. The Craft of the Heart includes teachings on every level—elementary, intermediate, and advanced—so that the reader can conveniently pick out the teachings appropriate for his or her
- [Dame Julian, the Chinese Sage and Architecture](https://www.themathesontrust.org/julian-sage-architecture) - Our latest library additions include an original recording of selections of the Revelations of Divine Love, by Julian of Norwich, including some of the earliest and best known passages of mystical literature in the English language. He showed a little thing, the size of a hazel nut in the palm of my hand, and it
- [Christian Pilgrimage, Shugendo, and Seven Difficulties](https://www.themathesontrust.org/christian-pilgrimage-shugendo-and-seven-difficulties) - Ages pass, the rock remains. Like the rock, the spirit remains… In Subiaco, at the grotto of St Benedict, the Latin inscription carved in the rock by the entrance addresses Benedict, and the pilgrim: “Continue in the darkness to seek the shining light, for only on a dark night do the stars shine. Perge in
- [Orthodox Gems, Gaelic Psalms, and Dream Yoga](https://www.themathesontrust.org/ascetic-dreams-gaelic) - Welcome to our October newsletter! We open our monthly selection with a collection of aphorisms titled “On Those who Think that They are Made Righteous by Works.” Attributed to St Mark The Ascetic, one of the Holy Fathers from the Philokalia, these little gems from the heart of the Orthodoxy are full of penetrating insights,
- [Kebra Nagast, A Good Life, and a Luminous Darkness](https://www.themathesontrust.org/kebra-nagast-a-good-life-and-a-luminous-darkness) - Welcome to our September newsletter. This month our library highlights include a fascinating extract from the Kebra Nagast, the foundational scripture of the Ethiopian church and imperial dynasty, originating from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. And Solomon was working at the building of the House of God, and he rose up and went to
- [Ignatian and Hesychast Prayer, Central Asian Sufi Music](https://www.themathesontrust.org/ignatian-hesychast-munojot) - Welcome to our July newsletter! • One of our most recent library additions is an article by Tim Noble on common traits of Ignatian and Hesychast Spirituality, exploring some of the shared fundamentals between Catholic and Orthodox approaches to prayer. Hesychast and Ignatian spiritualities can be seen as guide books for the journey of divinization.
- [“Puppet Complex”, the Essence of Virtue, and the Mystery of Ali](https://www.themathesontrust.org/puppet-wang-de-ali-book) - Welcome to our June newsletter. In an exceptional article, even by his own standards, Ananda Coomaraswamy explores the traditional answers given to the Upanishad question: “Do you know that Thread, by which, and that Inner Controller by whom this world and the other and all beings are strung together and controlled from within, so that
- [The Intermediate State, Perennial Philosophy, and <em>Juz’ Amma</em>](https://www.themathesontrust.org/bardo-juz-amma-perennial-philosophy) - We are happy to share with our readers two new pages introducing the Bardo Thodol or “Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State”, often known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. We present a Commentary showing the relevance of these teachings to our daily deaths and rebirths, and two recordings of “The Precious Garland”
- [Science Examined, The Origin of ‘Scripture’, and Kabbalistic Retreats](https://www.themathesontrust.org/sherrard-scripture-hitbodedut) - Welcome to our April newsletter! Our first new library addition this month is an article by Philip Sherrard, “Modern Science and the Dehumanization of Man”, a close and detailed look at the foundations of contemporary science, considering them in relation to the traditional pre-modern and religious worldview. The smell of the rose is still as
- [Matheson Website Launched](https://www.themathesontrust.org/matheson-website-launched) - We are pleased to announce that our website is now open to the public. You can access it by following this link. Although this is a first version of the site and many details need to be adjusted, we think that the resources so far included will help further the Trust's aims, as they constitute
- [Donate Online to Support The Matheson Trust](https://www.themathesontrust.org/donate-online-to-support-the-matheson-trust) - If you are interested in supporting the work of The Matheson trust, please follow this link to our donations page, where you will find the relevant information. We shall be glad to give detailed accounts to potential donors who want to sponsor particular projects, be they related to website development, our growing Monographs collection or
- [Adyan Articles / Nasr Lectures](https://www.themathesontrust.org/adyan-articles-nasr-lectures) - This week we have completed uploading our S.H. Nasr audio lectures, with renewed thanks to The Foundation for Traditional Studies. The last two lectures are: “The Prophet of Islam, the Chain of Prophecy, and the Relationship between Religions Today” (2010) and “Islam and Ecology” (2011). We are happy to include for the first time five
- [A Missed Image](https://www.themathesontrust.org/an-image-corrected) - After some recent technical improvements behind the scenes, we are confident that our readers, especially in India, the Far East and Oceania, will have felt major improvements in our website responsiveness and speed. Unfortunately, as a side-effect of these recent changes, one of the image links in yesterday’s newsletter was broken, and you may have
- [The Great War, an Ethiopian Saint, Sufism and Yoga](https://www.themathesontrust.org/great-war-sufism-yoga-walatta) - We are happy to announce the publication of our latest title, The Great War of the Dark Age: Keys to the Mahabharata. This collection of essays has something of an introduction to the greatest Indian epic poem, and it has much of a meditation on the universal and deepest themes found through its verses. With
- [Cosmic Dance, Hindu & Buddhist Techniques, and Moroccan Jewish Songs](https://www.themathesontrust.org/cosmic-dance-hindu-buddhist-techniques-and-moroccan-jewish-songs) - Our first library novelty this month is “The Cosmic Dance”, an article relating St Augustine’s De Musica with the Hindu image of Shiva as lord of universal harmony. Fr Aelred Squire, OP, brings out some of their deepest affinities in the light of a careful reading of the Latin text. The hierarchy established as the
- [Melotherapy, the Deeper Sense of Studying, and Carthusian Guidance](https://www.themathesontrust.org/melotherapy-the-deeper-sense-of-studying-and-carthusian-guidance) - Welcome to our first newsletter of 2019, dear readers. We are pleased to start the year by introducing a recent work on melotherapy, or healing through music, by the Romanian scholar Severina-Maria Oprea, relating Orthodox liturgical music to ancient and contemporary practices of art therapy, particularly in the treatment of depression and aggressiveness. Science, art
- [Books and Contemplative Life, the Royal Society, and Psychology Analysed](https://www.themathesontrust.org/books-and-contemplative-life-the-royal-society-and-psychology-analysed) - Our first new library selection this month is a Matheson Trust original audio recording of a conversation with Rowan Williams. The former Archbishop of Canterbury and current Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, talks of the relevance of literature and reading for the spiritual life, including a precious insight into his personal library of spiritual classics.
- [On the Philokalia and the Vision of God](https://www.themathesontrust.org/on-the-philokalia-and-the-vision-of-god) - Our Audio Library has been recently enriched with the addition of a lecture by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, on "The Image of Humanity in the Philokalia", delivered at St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in 2010. We plan to be adding other selected talks and sermons by the Archbishop over the oncoming weeks, with thanks
- [Christ Through Jewish Eyes / The Syrian Diaspora](https://www.themathesontrust.org/christ-through-jewish-syrian-diaspora) - Our Judaism section welcomes a new article by Rabbi Mark L. Solomon. In a candid attempt to formulate a Jewish theological understanding of the significance of Jesus Christ for Christians, the author traces the illuminating parallelisms between some of the roles played by the Torah and Jesus Christ in their respective traditions. Additionally, in our
- [Chartwell Interfaith Tea](https://www.themathesontrust.org/chartwell-interfaith-tea) - As part of the events celebrating the UN World Interfaith Harmony Week, The Matheson Trust hosted on Friday 4 February an Interfaith Tea at the former home of Sir Winston Churchill, a few miles away from Westerham, Kent. This event brought together local church leaders—Anglican, Catholic and Evangelical—to initiate in a relaxed atmosphere an interfaith
- [Prayer of the Heart, Love, Jihad and Tolerance](https://www.themathesontrust.org/prayer-heart) - With a major redesign of our website under way, we continue to build our online library. Over the last few weeks we have added two new audio lectures and some articles. In our Audio section we have first, a double talk by Sebastian Brock and Ahmad Achtar on the Prayer of the Heart, as viewed
- [Relativism, to be a Person, and the Mysteries of Sound, Word and Reality](https://www.themathesontrust.org/relativism-to-be-a-person-and-the-mysteries-of-sound-word-and-reality) - We open our library selection this month with one of Frithjof Schuon’s most important articles on the differences between traditional and modern mentalities, “The Contradiction of Relativism.” The primordial and normative attitude is this: to think only in reference to what surpasses us and to live for the sake of surpassing ourselves; to seek greatness
- [Sacred Audio Collection](https://www.themathesontrust.org/sacred-audio-collection) - We are pleased to offer to the public, as an unparalleled resource, a carefully curated section of our audio library: the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection, bringing together a “unique selection of live recordings from the world’s major religious traditions: prayers, hymns and scriptural recitations performed in all corners of the world for thousands of
- [The Yoga Sutras in Sanskrit and Arabic, and Mozart’s Eternal Vision](https://www.themathesontrust.org/patanjali-mozart) - The first new addition to our library is an introduction to “the Bible of yoga,” the Yoga Sutras or aphorisms by Patanjali compiled before the 5th century AD. We include the Sanskrit recitation from our Sacred Audio Collection, and several English translations and commentaries, to allow for careful study of this veritable survey of the
- [Mysteries of Divine and Human Speech, Light upon Light](https://www.themathesontrust.org/mysteries-of-speech-and-breath-light-upon-light) - Our monthly selection includes an excerpt from a study and translation of a Japanese Buddhist classic on the concord between esoteric and exoteric ways, and how despite all the diversity of approaches to the Dharma, they all fundamentally arise from the utterance of A, and the saving method of the Buddha. Dohan suggests that the
- [Counting the Zen Way, Gaelic Songs and Hasidic Wisdom](https://www.themathesontrust.org/susokukan-gaelic-songs-buber-rungs) - Our library selections for this month include an influential primer on the Zen practice of Susokukan, breath-counting concentration, known in early Buddhist literature as anapanasmriti, “mindfulness of inhalation and exhalation”, and considered by some to be “the first step as well as the final destination of Zazen.” Susokukan breath counting is designed to free you
- [Tolkien, Mulla Sadra on Prayer, and Conservatism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/tolkien-sadra-prayer-consevatism) - Welcome to our belated July newsletter! Our first new library item this month is a brief and insightful article by Bradley J. Birzer on J.R.R. Tolkien’s religiosity, in an attempt to discern what exactly were Tolkien’s views on the things that his followers seem so readily to divide over. Tolkien didn’t love religion and only
- [One-Letter Mantra, Folk Indian Art and the “Centuries”](https://www.themathesontrust.org/one-letter-mantra-mithila-art-centuries) - We open our selection this month with a little dossier and an article on the Far Eastern tradition of invocation of the “one-syllable mantra”, the sound “A”. Known particularly in Shingon Buddhism as Ajikan, it is a practice of central importance within many schools, and with echoes in other faiths. The A is inherent
- [The Power of Prayers, and Illusion and Reality](https://www.themathesontrust.org/hart-ghazali-power) - Our library selections for this month include a chapter by Imam al-Ghazali on “Prayers for Every Emergent Occasion”, including the original Arabic text of the prayers and a famous passage on the causality of prayer. Should you ask: What is the benefit of supplication [du‘a], while Preordination [qada’] is irrevocable?—then you should know that the
- [The Angel of Light, Dance of Condors and the Matter of Metaphysics](https://www.themathesontrust.org/prelest-kunturi-matter-immaterial) - • Our first new library addition this month is an article by Mother Macaria Corbett, “The Angel of Light and Spiritual Discernment in the Orthodox Tradition”, on the subject of spiritual delusions, prelest in the Russian terminology, “a wounding of human nature by falsehood”. The first rule of unseen warfare is “distrust of self to
- [Aikido & Cosmology, John Main and a Hindu <em>Summa</em>](https://www.themathesontrust.org/aikido-john-main-avinash-chandra) - We start our selection this month with an article in the lineage of Ueshiba Morihei, founder of Aikido, pointing at the intimate correspondences between the traditional Far Eastern vision of the universe and the fundamental structure of the human being, and how these correspondences are actualized in the martial arts practice. Aikido is the way
- [Kiondos, Pure Land Wisdom, and the Thirty-Six Hidden Saints](https://www.themathesontrust.org/kiondos-pure-land-wisdom-and-the-thirty-six-hidden-saints) - Our first library addition this month is an article on the symbolism of the kiondo or handwoven handbag of the Kikuyu and Kamba of Kenya, showing how everyday craftsmanship is intimately related to architecture and traditional cosmology. Linking together all realities both natural and supernatural the kiondo basket is a complex document written in a
- [The Queen and the Avatar, the Name of Jesus, Where We Are](https://www.themathesontrust.org/the-queen-and-the-avatar-the-name-of-jesus-where-we-are) - We are pleased to announce the publication of our latest title, Dominique Wohlschlag’s “The Queen and the Avatar”, where the author shares his questions with the readers and takes them deep into the Indian epic world in order to understand the nature of Krishna and of divine incarnation in general. What really is an avatar?
- [Poliphony, Heavenly Sounds and the Tipi of the Heart](https://www.themathesontrust.org/poliphony-norito-circles) - Our first new library addition this month is an article on the “Metaphysics of Musical Polyphony”, by Marco Pallis, who was not only a renowned metaphysician and mountaineer, but also an accomplished violist and an important promoter of early English music. His understanding of musical harmony comes from a lifetime of personal experience. That counterpoint
- [Seven Subtleties, Ghazali’s Light and Hatha Yoga](https://www.themathesontrust.org/seven-subtleties-ghazalis-light-hatha-yoga) - Our latest additions this month include an article by Kristian Petersen, “The Seven Subtleties of Islamic Spiritual Physiology according to Wang Daiyu”, giving a glimpse into a centuries-long dialogue between Islam and Confucianism. The true heart’s grand nature grasps the sage’s knowledge and sees what has been and what shall come, what has appeared and
- [New Audio and Articles on Islam / Building Bridges 2011](https://www.themathesontrust.org/new-audio-and-articles-on-islam-building-bridges-2011) - With thanks to Shaykh Hamza Yusuf and the friends at Sandala, we have two new articles in our Islam page: "Climbing Mount Purgatorio" and "Foundations of the Spiritual Path", a translation from Qawa'id al-Tasawwuf by Sidi Ahmad Zarruq (1442–1493), one of the masters of the Shadhili lineage. In our audio library we have an insightful
- [Cambridge Interfaith Gathering of Voices](https://www.themathesontrust.org/cambridge-gathering) - In an effort to promote the UN World Interfaith Harmony Week initiative, we have teamed up with the Woolf Institute for a unique event to be held next week, on Tuesday 7 February, in the grounds of St Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge. Representatives of five major religious traditions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam,
- [Great Learning, a Festival, and Aquinas and Islam](https://www.themathesontrust.org/daxue-festival-aquinas) - The Great Learning (in Chinese Daxue), a very brief and poetic treatise, has been the cornerstone of Far Eastern social organisation and politics for thousands of years. The impact of its deep yet simple message over the centuries is immeasurable. Follow this link to read and listen to our original recordings of this jewel of
- [The Garden, the Sibyl and a Conversation on Islam](https://www.themathesontrust.org/garden-sibyl-conversation) - Our first library addition this month is a chapter by Jean Hani on “The Celestial Garden”, explaining its ancient macrocosmic and microcosmic symbolism and how the four ways of watering the garden correspond to the four types of prayer. Amber Palace, Jaipur • A new addition to our Sacred Audio Collection is The Song of
- [The Self as the Enemy and the Friend, and a Hundred Word Eulogy](https://www.themathesontrust.org/self-enemy-eulogy-satan) - Our first new library addition this month is a searching article by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, probing the questions “Who is Satan and Where is Hell?” That in this day and age… men no longer take either God or Satan seriously, arises from the fact that they have come to think of both alike only objectively,
- [Musical Metaphysics, Japanese Synthesis, and the Identity of the Church](https://www.themathesontrust.org/musical-metaphysics-japanese-synthesis-and-the-identity-of-the-church) - Our first contribution this month is an article by Sebastian Moro on the metaphysics of music and harmony, as detailed in Plato’s Timaeus and studied by later philosophers, in the intersection between cosmology, mathematics and art theory. The paradigmatic relation between the world, the World-Soul and numbers is such that what is seen in numbers
- [Wonder, Comparing Philosophy, and Breaking the Spell](https://www.themathesontrust.org/wonder-corbin-breakingspell) - Our latest library addition is a chapter on “Wonder” by Rabbi Abraham Heschel, studying an often overlooked and subtle shortcoming of modern mentality. Among the many things that religious tradition holds in store for us is a legacy of wonder. The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the
- [Many Sides, Arhuaco Wisdom and a Personal Journey](https://www.themathesontrust.org/anekantavada-mamos-needleman) - We open our library selections this month with an article by Alok Tandon, University of Pune, on one of the most important historical precedents of a deep approach to interreligious dialogue, the Jain doctrine of anekantavada or “many-sidedness” and its intimate relation to attaining peace. The Jaina outlook towards the ideas of others combines tolerance
- [Two Swords, and Songs of Joy and the Four Worlds](https://www.themathesontrust.org/two-swords-nigunim) - Our two latest library additions, coming from very geographically and historically remote traditions, have to do with the meaning of the sword. The first one is a treatise on Japanese swordsmanship by Kimura Kyuho, “Ignorance in Swordsmanship” (Kenjutsu Fushiki Hen), We have the sword of worship, of asceticism, as spiritual armor. Beyond this, there are
- [The Holy Mountain, Sacred Art and Progress](https://www.themathesontrust.org/clark-art-progress-athos) - Our library additions this month include an audio lecture by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, “Fifty-four Years as an Athonite Pilgrim”, with reflections and anecdotes of Mount Athos, “the Holy Mountain” (Agion Oros), about nature, silence and the importance of monastic life. The primary task of the monk is prayer, not just intercessory prayer, but prayer in
- [Adastra, the Cosmic Luth and Confessional Accounting](https://www.themathesontrust.org/adastra-luth-accounting) - Our first library novelty this month is a small selection of poems by Frithjof Schuon, including audio recordings of his original German. These poems belong to the numerous collections of contemplative and sapiential verse published by Schuon towards the end of his life. O süsse Lied, das alles Sehnen stillt — Das Gnadenlicht; schein in
- [New Monograph: Sacred Royalty / BESHT on Prayer](https://www.themathesontrust.org/new-monograph-sacred-royalty-besht-on-prayer) - Our Matheson Monographs series is honoured to include now Sacred Royalty: From The Pharaoh to The Most Christian King, one of the few previously untranslated works by Jean Hani, the well known French classicist and metaphysician. This work is a vast and profound account of monarchies worldwide, explaining their exalted intrinsic character and shedding a
- [New Monograph: Sacred Royalty / BESHT on Prayer](https://www.themathesontrust.org/new-monograph) - Our Matheson Monographs series is honoured to include now Sacred Royalty: From The Pharaoh to The Most Christian King, one of the few previously untranslated works by Jean Hani, the well known French classicist and metaphysician. This work is a vast and profound account of monarchies worldwide, explaining their exalted intrinsic character and shedding a new
- [Keats and Shakespeare](https://www.themathesontrust.org/keats-and-shakespeare) - As we continue to add to our library the lectures given by Martin Lings at the Temenos Academy, we have uploaded the following two this week: Keats & Shakespeare: the brief life of Keats and his works are considered in detail and on their deepest dimensions, having as a constant reference Shakespeare's plays and poems,
- [The Heart / Emir Abdelkader / Iroha Song](https://www.themathesontrust.org/the-heart-diversity-iroha) - Our new library additions include “The Heart”, one of the most important chapters from Martin Lings' What is Sufism?, which we are pleased to offer both as a PDF file and as an original audio recording. You can access and download both clicking here. In virtue of being the centre of the body, the heart
- [Presence, Elias Returning, and a Shared Saint](https://www.themathesontrust.org/presence-elias-returning-and-a-shared-saint) - Our first library addition this month is an article by William C. Chittick on a Sufi understanding of “Presence with God”, and how “being” is an aware and conscious “finding”. Each part of the cosmos must find an intimacy with something, whether constantly, or by way of transferral to an intimacy that it finds with
- [<em>Kintsugi</em>, Hermetica and Beauty as State](https://www.themathesontrust.org/kintsugi-hermetica-and-beauty-as-state) - Our first contribution this month is a brief article on Kintsugi, the Japanese art of “gold joinery” or patching broken pottery with gold lacquer, repairing the brokenness in a way that makes the object even more beautiful for being broken. It is a long and laborious process which requires much patience and some gold.
- [Love Conversion, <em>Timaeus</em> and Hasidic Prayer](https://www.themathesontrust.org/love-conversion-timaeus-and-hasidic-prayer) - Our first new library addition this month is an article by Kerrie Hide, “Insights from the Revelations of Divine Love and the Contemplation to Attain Love”, on religious “conversion” (metanoia) as an “other-worldly falling in love” and “one-ing”, where ultimately God’s love for us and ours for God includes all things, the totality of the
- [An ABC Garland, Sacred Masks and William of Tripoli](https://www.themathesontrust.org/an-abc-garland-sacred-masks-and-william-of-tripoli) - Varna-mala, the “garland” or “rosary of letters”, is the ancient Hindu recitation of the Sanskrit alphabet, an image and human reenactment of the primordial tune to which Shiva created the universe. Two very good recordings of these Shiva Sutras are the latest addition to our internationally acclaimed Sacred Audio Collection. • We are happy to
- [Before Your Eyes, the Divine Vision, and Lover and Beloved](https://www.themathesontrust.org/before-your-eyes-the-divine-vision-and-lover-and-beloved) - • Our first new library addition this month is Genjo Koan, one of the best known chapters of Dogen’s Shobogenzo, the great early summa of Zen monastic teaching, and “the best text to start to study Dogen’s work”. When someone has spiritually awakened, he resembles the moon’s ‘residing’ in water: the moon does not get
- [Chinese Gleams, Language Depths, and Hindu and Christian Avatars](https://www.themathesontrust.org/chinese-gleams-language-depths-and-hindu-and-christian-avatars) - • The latest item in our library is an article by William Chittick on dialogue between Chinese and Islamic civilizations, specifically about the place of one of the most widely read books among Chinese Muslims, the Tian Fang Xing Li, and its place in the Islamic tradition. The intellect—the heart—once it is awakened through the
- [Weighing the Word, the mystic OM, a little mystagogy and the five hearts](https://www.themathesontrust.org/weighing-the-word-the-mystic-om-a-little-mystagogy-and-the-five-hearts) - • We are happy to announce the publication of our latest Matheson Monograph, Weighing the Word: Reasoning the Qur’an as Revelation, by Peter Samsel, available today from booksellers worldwide. This book is pioneering as an exercise in Muslim apologetics, exploring the many arguments, studies and traditions regarding the status of the Qur’an as a revealed
- [Silence, Bach, Collective Work and Presence](https://www.themathesontrust.org/prabhavananda-tureck-guenon) - Our first new library addition is a rare audio lecture “On Silence” by Swami Prabhavananda, of the Ramakrishna Order, giving a powerful insight into the Vedantine way. None of us has ever been satisfied with finite knowledge of the finite… But why is it that we do not find God? Of course it is ignorance,
- [Islam without Sufism, Leibniz and an Old Master](https://www.themathesontrust.org/islam-sufism-leibniz) - New to our library is a recent talk by Abdal Hakim Murad (T.J. Winter), answering the question “Is Orthodox Islam Possible without Sufism?” The basic principle of self-awareness, of awareness of the needs and vulnerabilities of others, the duty to see the hand of God in nature and in other human beings, the obligation to
- [Lady Philosophy, India and the Vale of the Soul](https://www.themathesontrust.org/lady-philosophy-india-and-the-vale-of-the-soul) - This week we bring a collection of excerpts from The Consolation of Philosophy, one of the books that defined European intellectual life with its engaging blend of Neoplatonist and Christian ethics. In the words of C.S. Lewis, “To acquire a taste for it is almost to become naturalised in the Middle Ages.” ‘Now,’ said she,
- [The Aim, Alchemy for Sisters, and Divine Help](https://www.themathesontrust.org/sarov-avataras-sisters) - We start the new year with a translation of the very influential treatise by St Seraphim of Sarov on the “acquisition of the Holy Spirit”, a testament to the vitality of a truly genuine Christian esoterism. The soul speaks and converses during prayer, but at the descent of the Holy Spirit we must remain in
- [The Song of Songs of Divine Love, and a Modern Reform](https://www.themathesontrust.org/song-reform) - Our latest library additions include several approaches to the Song of Songs, considered for centuries the most direct expression of the deepest religious life, “where in love it is the same to give all, and receive all, and keep all forever.” • In our Sacred Audio Collection we have an original Hebrew recitation by Fr
- [The Underlying Religion, the Emperor’s Vigil and the Book of Formation](https://www.themathesontrust.org/the-underlying-religion-the-emperors-vigil-and-the-book-of-formation) - Our latest library additions include an introduction by Clinton Minnaar to The Underlying Religion. Like the book itself, these pages are an introduction to the Perennial Philosophy in both width and depth, providing information on key authors and works, but most importantly bringing home the vital implications of the transcendent unity of religions for our
- [Singing Birds, Abu Bakr’s Prayer and Cooking Instructions](https://www.themathesontrust.org/guenon-birds-abubakr-tenzo) - We start this week’s selection with a now classic article by René Guénon on the symbolism of “The Language of the Birds”, which can also be called “angelic language”, and is symbolized in the human world by rhythmic language, for the science of rhythm, which has many applications, is in fact ultimately the basis of
- [Returning to the World, Indian Music and Stray Camels](https://www.themathesontrust.org/returning-indian-music-stray-camels) - We come back to our library news with an article by Michio Tokunaga on the Pure Land Buddhist understanding of reaching Paradise and then “returning to the world”. A “practicer of shinjin” lives in linear time when viewed from the perspective of living in this world with a limited physical existence, and, at the same
- [Bach’s Musical Geometry, Kabbalah Origins and The Dragon Gate](https://www.themathesontrust.org/bachs-musical-geometry-kabbalah-origins-and-dragon) - Our recent library additions include an article by Dutch pianist Tjako van Schie, “Bach as Architect and Servant of the Spiritual: a closer look at the Goldberg Variations”, sharing a glimpse into the symbolic depth of one of the most popular works by J.S. Bach, with links to audio recordings. Music reflects a large scale
- [Gladsome Light, Kabbalistic Prayer and Heeding the Self](https://www.themathesontrust.org/gladsome-light-kabbalistic-prayer-olieva) - • Phos Hilaron, in Greek “Joyful Light” or “Gladdening Light” is the earliest known Christian hymn recorded outside of the Bible that is still in use today. It is the latest addition to our popular Sacred Audio Collection, including authentic recordings in Greek, Latin, Arabic, Armenian and English. Click here to visit the page and
- [New book: Primordial Meditation](https://www.themathesontrust.org/newbook-schuon-primordial) - We are very pleased to announce the publication of our new book, Primordial Meditation: Contemplating Reality. This is the first book ever written by Frithjof Schuon, compiled from his personal notebooks in the early 1930s. It was written in his native German, and this is the first time it is published as a book in
- [A Mustard Seed, Infinite Finitude and Calmness](https://www.themathesontrust.org/a-mustard-seed-infinite-finitude-and-calmness) - Considered one the greatest mystical poems of German medieval literature, and usually attributed to Meister Eckhart, the Granum Sinapis or “Grain of Mustard Seed of the Most Beautiful Deity” is presented here in three English translations, with an audio recording of the original poem. It is, yet truly none knows what. 'Tis there, 'tis here,
- [A Master Gardener, the 24 Philosophers and Nation and Religion](https://www.themathesontrust.org/chadwick-xxiv-nichiren) - Our selections this week include a video interview with renowned horticulturalist Alan Chadwick, filmed in Covelo, California, in 1978. Man utterly belongs, is adored by nature, is utterly requisite in the ordination of the totality of nature, spiritual, mental and physical, as an absolute necessity for the procedure of destiny in the revolvement of the
- [Kiss of Life, Learning from Islam and the Power of Melancholy](https://www.themathesontrust.org/kiss-of-life-learning-from-islam-and-the-power-of-melancholy) - Our first new library addition this week is an article by Prof. Admiel Kosman on the Jewish traditions linking the breath of life with the revealed Word and the kisses of the Song of Songs. For the Sages, the resurrection of the world at Mount Sinai was completely analogous to the bestowal of life to
- [Primordial Meditation, the Swiss Hermit and Birds and Flight](https://www.themathesontrust.org/primordial-bruderklaus-birds) - We open our selection this week with a glimpse of our forthcoming publication of Frithjof Schuon’s Primordial Meditation, an arresting work of his early years, rich in symbolic power and metaphysical penetration. The world is a silken pall, in which lies a king, rigid and deeply enshrouded. He loves the silk in which he is
- [Womanhood, Religious Craftsmen and Confucian Politics,](https://www.themathesontrust.org/womanhood-craftsman-confucian-politics) - We open our selection this week with a rare audio recorded lecture, “Womanhood, an Islamic Perspective”, by Thomas Cleary, the renowned translator of Far Eastern classics: The instructive metaphors for meditative processes are in fact metaphors from the processes of gestation and nursing. There is the image of the man becoming pregnant… These are representations
- [Three Things, Ritual Prayer and Martial Arts](https://www.themathesontrust.org/ruysbroeck-sanseverino-acevedo) - We open our selection this week with an excerpt from The Sparkling Stone, by the Flemish medieval mystic John of Ruysbroeck: The God-seeing man who has forsaken self and all things, and does not feel himself drawn away because he no longer possesses anything as his own, but stands empty of all, he can always
- [Shinto Mediation, Liberating the Heart and Yogic Mindfulness](https://www.themathesontrust.org/shinto-mediation-liberating-heart-caraka) - Considered one of the traditional thirteen sects of Shinto, and called by some “the fulfilment of Shinto”, the Konko-Kyo school is based on the concept of “deliverance through mediation”. An article by Delwin B. Schneider gives us an introduction to this new and old Japanese faith: When man becomes a living Kami, it follows that
- [Lent Joy, Tiantai Contemplation and Teaching Religion](https://www.themathesontrust.org/lent-joy-tiantai-puzzles) - Our first new piece this week is a reflection on Lent by Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, explaining how “contrary to what many think or feel, Lent is a time of joy” It is a time when we come back to life… Unless we understand this quality of joy in Lent, we will make of it
- [Truth Loved, Buddhist-Christian Dialogue and Eastern Wisdom](https://www.themathesontrust.org/florensky-akizuki-easternwestern) - We open our selection this week with a brief article on the Russian philosopher and mystic Pavel Florensky, “Truth Is Not Known Unless It Is Loved”, by Fr Patrick Henry Reardon: With few exceptions… the twentieth-century Western philosopher stands several steps removed from the ancient understanding of metaphysics, so that on the whole he does
- [What is Man, Music and Harmony, and Confucian Rites](https://www.themathesontrust.org/what-is-man-music-and-harmony-and-confucian-rites) - We open this week’s selection with a brief article by Fr Patrick Reardon, “What Is Man?”: If we adhere to the full anthropology of divine revelation, it is strictly speaking not true that "human nature does not change." Indeed, it is the very business of divine revelation to cause human nature to change. • “Music
- [Intra-Religious Dialogue, a Cloistered Garden and Future Tradition](https://www.themathesontrust.org/intrarreligious-cloistered-garden-looking) - We start the new year with our recent December lecture by Harry Oldmeadow, “Looking Forward to Tradition: Ancient Truths and Modern Delusions”, where the author examines the conventional notions of progress in contrast with the timelessness of the perennial wisdom: No one will deny that modernity has its compensations, though these are often of a
- [“Death, Resurrection & Human Destiny: Christian and Muslim Perspectives” / Testimonials](https://www.themathesontrust.org/bb-death-resurrection-testimonials-news) - This week we are grateful to have seven new audio talks belonging to the public day of lectures of the 11th Building Bridges Seminar, chaired by the Archbishop of Canterbury at King’s College London, on 23 April 2012. With the title “Death, Resurrection & Human Destiny: Christian and Muslim Perspectives”, the conference comprises six lectures
- [Wisdom Mantra, Snakes and Ladders, and Chinese Harmony](https://www.themathesontrust.org/manjusri-snakes-popular-belief) - • The mantra of Transcendent Wisdom of Manjusri, widely recited in Tibetan and Chinese traditions, is this week’s latest addition to our Sacred Audio collection. • In “Road Maps for the Soul”, an original article by Jacob Schmidt-Madsen, we have a glimpse into the origin and meaning of the popular game of Snakes and Ladders,
- [New Books, on Being-Time and Sufi Letters](https://www.themathesontrust.org/new-books-uji-darqawi) - • We are very happy to announce the publication of the first titles of our Words of Wisdom Series, two sister volumes of lectures by Martin Lings: Enduring Utterance: Collected Lectures (1993–2001) and To Take Upon Us the Mystery of Things: The Shakespeare Lectures. Follow the title links for downloadable excerpts. These books can be
- [Oxherding, the University and Lasting Joy](https://www.themathesontrust.org/oxherding-university-joy) - Our first new addition this week is a commentary by Zen master Shodo Harada on the ancient series of Ten Oxherding Pictures tracing the path to enlightenment and beyond. If we are burning completely, nothing we do or see catches us. We have gathered it all into one, seeing with no sense of having seen,
- [Yoga and Power, Survival and the Cherubinic Wanderer](https://www.themathesontrust.org/yogavidhi-northbourne-silesius) - • Our first new addition this week is an article by James L. Fitzgerald on “A Prescription for Yoga and Power in the Mahabharata,” with a brief text on the truths relating to moksha, the “freedom of an arrow in flight”: …as a pilot who concentrates intently guides his ocean-going ship swiftly into port, so
- [Why Work, the Zen Lectures and Anatheism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/why-work-yasutani-anatheism) - This week, from our shelves, a now famous article by Dorothy Sayers, “Why Work?”, more than ever a timely reminder of what a normal relation between man and his work is: …we should fight tooth and nail, not for mere employment, but for the quality of the work that we had to do. We should
- [Human Body, the Temple at Ise and the Rose-Garden](https://www.themathesontrust.org/human-body-ise-rose-garden) - Our first article this week is an interpretation of “The Image of the Human Body in Premodern India” by Dominik Wujastyk, University of Vienna. The Taittiriya Upanishad… posits five bodies, or “atmans”: annamaya, or the physical body derived from food; pranamaya, or the body of the vital breath or airs; manomaya, or the self of
- [Meaning of Intellect and the Christian Desert](https://www.themathesontrust.org/meaning-of-intellect-and-the-christian-desert) - This week we present a video recording of a lecture by Reza Shah-Kazemi, “Imam Ali and the Spiritual Meaning of ‘Intellect’”, given in Karachi in 2013: Without hilm (forbearance, self-control, far-sightedness) there can be no intellect, without contentment there can be no intellectual activity, without kindness one cannot be called an intellectual, without generosity one
- [Know Thyself, Divine Energies and Human Perfection](https://www.themathesontrust.org/know-thyself-energies-kamila) - Our first addition this week is a brief homily by Demetrios, Greek Orthodox Archbishop of America, on the ancient Delphic maxim, “Know Thyself”, and its place in Christian spirituality. “If you give heed to yourself, you will not need to look for signs of the Creator in the structure of the universe; but in yourself,
- [The Roman Philosopher, Sherrard and Nature](https://www.themathesontrust.org/the-roman-philosopher-sherrard-and-nature) - Our new library additions include a selection of letters by Seneca “the Younger”, one of the favourite Roman authors of medieval Christendom, in whose works ancient philosophy is clearly seen as a way of inner purification and self-transcendence, akin to the contemplative lives of the religious traditions. Let us become intimate with poverty, so that
- [How to Enter the Heart, the Hindu Sacraments and the Oneness of Being](https://www.themathesontrust.org/howtoenter-samskaras-oneness) - From the late Islamic scholar and Sufi master, Dr Martin Lings, we publish this week an article long considered to be “an unsurpassed distillation” of the doctrine of wahdat al-wujud. “Oneness of Being” is published as a chapter of the now classic A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century, and its brief and dense pages
- [A spiritual vademecum, a board game and others](https://www.themathesontrust.org/hikam-go-dalloglio-thirst) - After some weeks of work behind the scenes, we are glad to announce the latest additions to our library: By the Sufi master Ibn Ata Allah from Alexandria, third in the line of the Tariqa Shadhiliyya, we have added to our library an English translation of his Kitab al-Hikam, or Book of Aphorisms. Victor Danner,
- [Yudhishthira and His Dog, Exploring Interiority and the Classic on the Ka‘bah](https://www.themathesontrust.org/yudhishthira-and-his-dog-exploring-interiority-and-the-classic-on-the-kabah) - The high-souled Pandavas and Draupadi of great fame, having observed the preliminary fast, set out with their faces towards the east. Setting themselves on Yoga, those high-souled ones resolved to observe the religion of Renunciation, traversed through various countries and reached diverse rivers and seas… While the Pandavas set out for the forest, a dog
- [Bhagavad Gita, Intellectual Freedom and Interreligious Dialogue](https://www.themathesontrust.org/gita-freedom-dialogue) - This week we are giving access through our shelves to an English translation of the Bhagavad Gita with the famous commentary by Shankara. Following this link you will be able to read a short selection and also to download the entire work, including the original Sanskrit text. Whatever fruit of merit is declared by the
- [Walking as Duty, Common Ground and Confucian Analects](https://www.themathesontrust.org/walking-confucius-cg) - Our latest library additions include an article by Elliot Wolfson on the symbolism of walking in the Jewish tradition, especially as elaborated in Hasidic writings: The proper worship of God was said to be realized even as one physically walked about and was engaged in social commerce. As such, halikhah, walking, became a popular metaphor
- [The Temple, Beauty and the Wisdom of a Cat](https://www.themathesontrust.org/temple-beauty-cat) - This week our library additions include an article by Leo Schaya on “The Meaning of the Temple” in the Jewish tradition: One with God’s entire creation, man’s sanctified soul (neshamah) rises like incense from the golden altar of his heart and presses through the most inward curtain of his being to the Holy of Holies
- [Monastic Rules and the Death of a Sufi Saint](https://www.themathesontrust.org/monastic-rules-and-the-death-of-a-sufi-saint) - This week we bring to our library some of the rich Vinaya literature—guidance for the monastic life—of the Theravada Buddhist tradition, in parallel with a Christian counterpart from the Carmelite order. • The two volumes of translations from the Pali encompass the rules and the customs of the monks. Discipline is for the sake of
- [The Passion, <i>Anitas</i>, the Jewel in the Lotus](https://www.themathesontrust.org/passion-anitas-ommani) - Our first addition this week is “Praying the Passion”, a Catholic meditation on the spiritual exercises related to the Passion of Christ, by Fr Donal O’Sullivan: “It is not abundance of knowledge that fills and satisfies the soul, but the inward sense and taste of things”… the man who has thoroughly soaked his understanding and
- [Flowers, Pure Land and Indian Saints](https://www.themathesontrust.org/flowers-jodo-indian-saints) - Our latest library additions include a now classic article by Lord Northbourne on the symbolism of flowers: …we are speaking of the world, and that is exactly what the world is, perfection manifested in imperfection, the absolute in the relative, the infinite in the finite; every part of the world mirrors the whole. The paradoxical
- [Common Word Conversation, Psycho-Analysis and Arabic Wisdom ](https://www.themathesontrust.org/common-word-dmm-ps-hikam-ar) - This week we present the video recording of our “Common Word” 2013 conversation, as it took place at Clare College Cambridge last November, involving Rowan Williams, Abdal Hakim Murad (T.J. Winter) and David Ford in deep and convivial shared reflections on the theology and implications of Christian-Islamic dialogue. • From the rare articles penned by
- [Knowledge, Gold and Principles of Nature](https://www.themathesontrust.org/gold-matheson) - Our latest library additions include the first of a series of articles by the founder of our Trust, Donald Macleod Matheson, on “Knowledge and KNOWLEDGE”: If, as has been said, this new kind of knowledge is indescribable, its nature has none the less been indicated through the use of paradox and symbols and its quality
- [Ajahn Chah, the Name of Jesus, and Enlightenment for Ordinary People](https://www.themathesontrust.org/ajahn-ordinary-bernardine) - Our first new addition this week is a video clip with the Thai Forest Buddhist master Ajahn Chah, recorded while on a visit to England during the 1970s. The ultimate truth is like the flavour of an apple: you can’t see it with the eye, or hear it with the ear. The only way to
- [Julius Caesar, Blessed Passion, Endless Travelling and Sacred Gardens](https://www.themathesontrust.org/caesar-passions-voyage-sacred-gardens) - Recent additions to our library include an article by Adrian Paterson, on a subtle point relating to Roman history and politics, Divus Julius Caesar (Julius Caesar the Divine): …combien peu importantes pour Jules César étaient ses conquêtes et ses œuvres littéraires par comparaison avec son rôle de chef spirituel de tout l'empire romain et avec
- [Impossible Pluralism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/impossible-pluralism) - In a very illuminating article by Gavin D'Costa, the notion of "religious pluralism" is probed and found to be misguided, pointing instead, and rigorously, towards the need for a really transcendental understanding at the basis of interfaith approaches. In our Audio library we have a new lecture by Archbishop Rowan Williams, an examination of the
- [From Religious Form, Chinese Time and the Redemption of the Sparks](https://www.themathesontrust.org/from-religious-form-chinese-time-sparks) - This week our first contribution is a recent talk by Reza Shah-Kazemi, “From Religious Form to Spiritual Essence: Esoteric Perspectives on Islam and Christianity,” dealing in particular with insights from Ibn Arabi and Meister Eckhart: We call this humility ‘radical’ because it goes to the very root of our existence, or rather, it uncovers the
- [Basho’s Narrow Road, Beowulf, the <em>Axis Mundi</em> and the Wine Song](https://www.themathesontrust.org/bashos-narrow-road-beowulf-the-axis-mundi-sharibna) - • This week our library news include an introduction and audio recording of one of the most revered works in Japanese contemplative literature, Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior (Oku no Hosomichi), called by some “a study in Eternity”, under the guise of a poet’s travel diary. • A rare gem, one of the only
- [Giqatila, Sufi Encounters, Tibetan Wisdom, Metaphysics of Beauty](https://www.themathesontrust.org/giqatila-sufi-encounters-tibetan-wisdom-metaphysics-of-beauty) - • From Rabbi Shlomo Blickstein, a dissertation on the Philosophical-Qabbalistic Writings of Joseph Giqatila, a key figure in the development of the Kabbalah in the Middle Ages, author of the seminal Ginnat Egoz (The Garden of the Nut). Any person who is considered Perfect Man conjoins with the name of YHWH; there is no intermediary
- [Divine Love, Science Dogmas, Leonard Cohen and the Metaphysics of Money](https://www.themathesontrust.org/loveprose-freescience-cohen-money) - • Our latest library additions include a Temenos Academy video recorded lecture by Prof. William C. Chittick, speaking about “Divine Love in Early Persian Prose”: Know that in reality no fragant herb subtler than the herb of love grew in the meadows of lordhood and servanthood. It is Love that conveys a man to the
- [Shaykh Yusuf, Wisdom of Animals, Pico’s Secret and Chinese and Hindu Art](https://www.themathesontrust.org/shaykh-yusuf-animals-pico-chinese-hindu) - • Recent additions to our library include a rare collection of Sufi writings by the influential Southeast Asian Shaykh Yusuf al-Khalwati al-Maqassari (d. 1699): So make good the transformation of your soul and the flow of entry into your soul and confine it to the remembrance of Allah, ponder on the glorious Name of the
- [New Monograph: Ascent to Heaven / Chief Rabbi Lectures](https://www.themathesontrust.org/new-monograph-ascent-to-heaven-chief-rabbi-lectures) - We are pleased to announce the publication of the latest title in our Matheson Monographs: Ascent to Heaven in Islamic and Jewish Mysticism, by the late Lithuanian scholar Algis Uždavinys. A downloadable excerpt and more details are available as usual from our Publications page. Thanks to the kindness of the Chief Rabbi office, we have
- [Martin Lings Remembered](https://www.themathesontrust.org/martin-lings-remembered) - An account of the Martin Lings Centenary Lecture delivered by Dr Reza Shah Kazemi at the Royal Asiatic Society, November 28, 2009 The Royal Asiatic Society auditorium was filled to capacity with people who had come to hear the third and final lecture in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of the late Dr
- [American Indian Ways, Health for Scholars and the Art of Dying](https://www.themathesontrust.org/trosper-ficino-taylor-sugich) - • Our latest library addition is an exclusive and generous audio recorded interview with Chief James Trosper, Sun Dance Chief of the Shoshone people in Wyoming, who tells us about Native American spirituality, history and perspectives: There is a lot of good blessings that have come to our people through this way of praying. It
- [<em>Sahaja</em>, Sacrifice, the Garden and the Phoenix](https://www.themathesontrust.org/sahaja-sacrifice-herbs-phoenix) - This week our new additions include an unusual article by Ananda Coomaraswamy where he expounds the Hindu concept of Sahaja, reaching deeply into the mystery of love, both in its metaphysical reality and in its earthly manifestations: In reading of romantic love we are apt to ponder over what is left unsaid. What did the
- [The 33 Questions, the Stone, Beauty and Three Sufi Poems](https://www.themathesontrust.org/the-33-questions-stone-beauty) - Our latest library additions include the famous Yaksha Prashna, a passage from the Mahabharata forest exile section, where king Yudhishthira must go through a climactic interrogation in the direst circumstances: “Who is truly happy? What is most wonderful?” Yudhishthira answered, “A man who cooketh in his own house, on the fifth or the sixth part
- [On Women, Cosmogony and Sacred Doctrine, with Two Lectures](https://www.themathesontrust.org/women-cosmogony-sacred-doctrine) - • This week our selections include a lecture by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom “On the Creation of Women”, with many insights into the symbolism of marriage and the depths of love. We are like a damaged icon; we are an image of God which has been badly damaged, but potentially can be brought back to perfection
- [The Principle of Love, Radha and Krishna, Scholars vs Mystics and Sufi Wine](https://www.themathesontrust.org/principle-of-love-vidyapati-anguttara-sufipoems) - Here are the latest additions to our online library: • By Joseph L. Cumming, “The Principle of Love as the Key to Peacemaking in the Abrahamic Faiths and in the Teaching of Jesus” The word “love” sounds nice, but what practical implications does it have in every day life? What would a “policy of love”
- [Martin Lings Talks](https://www.themathesontrust.org/martin-lings-talks) - We are glad to bring to our audio library a collection of talks by Martin Lings. Most of them were recorded in London at The Temenos Academy, and are republished here with their kind permission. Delivered over the last two decades, these talks cover a wide range of themes, from Sufism and comparative mysticism to
- [Intention, “Son of God”, al-Shadhili and Om and Amen](https://www.themathesontrust.org/intention-om-amen-sonofgod) - • Our first new work for this week is an article by Elliot R. Wolfson, “Iconic Visualization and the Imaginal Body of God”, on the role of kawwanah or “intentionality” in prayer, affording precious glimpses into the Jewish life of prayer: “Through the proper kawwanah the heart of the devotee becomes the throne upon which
- [Fasting, on Translation, the Problem of Evil and the Parliament of Religions](https://www.themathesontrust.org/fasting-on-translation-the-problem-of-evil-and-the-parliament-of-religions) - • This week, the first new addition to our library is a talk by Abdal Hakim Murad (T. J. Winter), delivered on the 1st of Ramadan 2009, where he elaborates on the divine saying “fasting is mine.” … but still, there is this illa siyam, “except for fasting”, fa innahu li, “for it is mine”,
- [Mirror of Gesture, Ibn Gabirol, Imam Ali and Wabi-Sabi](https://www.themathesontrust.org/gesture-ibn-gabirol-imam-ali-wabi) - • The Mirror of Gesture (Abhinaya Darpana) is a 2nd century CE classic of Indian dramatic art. Translated and introduced by A.K. Coomaraswamy, it is invaluable reference for all those interested in the performance arts or arts in general. This book includes many plates illustrating the different mudras, and the details of the twenty-four movements
- [May 2013 Symposium: A Search for the Time-Less in Sacred Art and Architecture](https://www.themathesontrust.org/may-2013-symposium) - A Search for the Time-Less in Sacred Art and Architecture: The Case of an Architectural Practice in Lahore & an Arts and Crafts Institution in London This symposium is to discuss the place of traditional art and architecture in the contemporary world together with its underlying language of geometry, and to examine the different challenges
- [The Vedanta, the Chariot, a Qur’anic Response and Christian-Muslim Dialogue](https://www.themathesontrust.org/vedanta-chariot-crises-appreciating) - This week we bring four new additions to our online library. From Frithjof Schuon’s classic Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, an audio recording of two chapters on “The Vedanta”, affording precious insight into the heart of the Sanatana Dharma: The sacred formula, the mantra, symbolizes and incarnates the Subject by objectivizing It; and by ‘covering’
- [Native audio recordings / Paths to the Same Summit](https://www.themathesontrust.org/native-audio-paths-to-same-summit) - After months of selection and editing, we can finally present the Native Religions section of our Sacred Audio collection. Needless to say, and while still a representative sample, this remains only an introduction to a vast field, somehow reflecting the fact that indigenous traditions worldwide mirror the pervasiveness of nature. Our selection includes authentic recordings
- [On the symbolism of letters, on death, and on divine pedagogy](https://www.themathesontrust.org/symbolism-of-letters-on-death-divine-pedagog) - This week we have two particularly esoteric approaches to the powerful symbolism of the written word. In “The Symbolism of the Letters of the Alphabet”, Martin Lings partially translates and comments on a brief treatise, Al-Unmudhaj al-Farid, by the Algerian Shaykh Ahmad al-Alawi, widely recognised in the Islamic world as a Sufi saint of first
- [The “Word of God”, Acceptance, Forgiveness & a Chinese Mantra](https://www.themathesontrust.org/kalam-rida-forgiveness-chunti) - Our first new library addition is an enlightening article by Joseph L. Cumming, from Yale University, showing the range of meanings and implications of the expression “the Word of God” (Kalam Allah) in Semitic languages. This article, coupling compassion to rigorous discernment, is fundamental reading for anyone working on interfaith relations, especially between the Abrahamic
- [Doubt & Questioning · Forgiveness · In the Shade of the Leaves](https://www.themathesontrust.org/doubt-forgiveness-hagakure) - This week we have a new video talk with Metropolitan Anthony Bloom on “Doubt & Questioning”, giving answers to the questions: Can one claim to be a sincere and honest believer and question things? Can one claim to be a believer that is to believe in God and say: “I can’t understand You”? A sermon
- [Two New Lectures](https://www.themathesontrust.org/two-new-lectures) - We are grateful to have in our audio library one new lecture by Archbishop Rowan Williams: "The Finality of Jesus Christ," elucidating the doctrine of the finality and uniqueness of Christ in a way that shows its potential of divine compassion and understanding within our contemporary interfaith societies. We are also happy to announce the
- [New S. H. Nasr Lectures](https://www.themathesontrust.org/new-s-h-nasr-lectures) - Throughout this month we will be uploading ten new lectures by Seyyed Hossein Nasr to our Audio Library, with much gratitude to our friends at the Foundation for Traditional Studies and the journal Sophia for making this possible. The first three lectures are now online: “Reading the Cosmic Qur'an” (2008), “The State of Religious Dialogue:
- [New Content: Poems, Book of Tea ...](https://www.themathesontrust.org/new-content-poems-book-of-tea) - Our library keeps growing slowly and steadily, and we encourage you to have a look at some of our recent additions: In the Audio section we have three new poems by Martin Lings, read by himself, including "The Legend of Seyis and Halcyon". In the Far Eastern section of our Library, you will now find
- [Martin Lings Poems](https://www.themathesontrust.org/martin-lings-poems) - With the addition of ten new poems in MP3 format, we have now made available from our audio page all currently extant recordings of Martin Lings reading his own poems. This collection includes all but one of those published in his Collected Poems (available from Archetype). All the poems are free to listen to online
- [Growing in Prayer / Beijing Forum](https://www.themathesontrust.org/growing-in-prayer-beijing-forum) - With thanks to the Archbishop's Press office, we have a new audio lecture by Rowan Williams: Growing in Prayer: what the saints tell us about the spiritual journey. Dr Williams delivered this series through Holy Week (2009) in three parts: “The Early Church”, “Reformers, Catholic & Protestant”, and “The Quest for God in the Modern
- [Two New Talks: “Othello” and “Seeing God Everywhere”](https://www.themathesontrust.org/two-new-talks-othello-seeing-god) - This week we continue to expand our Martin Lings Shakespeare lectures collection with the addition of Othello, a lecture organised in London in the late 1990’s by The Temenos Academy. Referring to this play, Dr Lings explains that “Shakespeare achieves here an overwhelming impact of a kind which drama alone, of all the arts, makes
- [Volf: <em>Allah</em>, a Christian Response / More from the Hear! project](https://www.themathesontrust.org/volf-allah-more-from-hear-project) - Following the publication of his book Allah: A Christian Response, Miroslav Volf, from Yale University, explains how some typical misconceptions of the Trinity hinder the dialogue between Christians and Muslims, while a better understanding of the doctrine reveals fundamental agreement. The talk, given at Wheaton College, can be listened to or downloaded here with an
- [New Monograph: Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/new-monograph-orpheus-and-the-roots-of-platonism) - We are pleased to announce the publication of our most recent title by the late Lithuanian scholar Algis Uždavinys: Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism. Orpheus is both a mythical hero and an important figure in the development of Greek religion and philosophy. Uždavinys provides us in this book with a dense survey of ancient
- [Macbeth / The Metaphysics of Relativity](https://www.themathesontrust.org/macbeth-metaphysics-of-relativity) - This week we have a new Temenos lecture by Martin Lings: “Macbeth”, which, Dr Lings explains: “unfolds before us the whole panorama of human history, from the primordial age represented by the reign of Duncan to the millenium represented by the reign of Malcolm.” In addition to this we have a new article by Patrick
- [King Lear / Zen Autobiography](https://www.themathesontrust.org/king-lear-zen-autobiography) - This week we have a new Martin Lings lecture: King Lear, recorded in London in 1994 by The Temenos Academy. Dr Lings explains how with King Lear “we are kept conscious throughout of the presence of the allegory, that is, of the play as an image of the history of mankind.” We also have this
- [St Malachy, Metropolitan Anthony, Tolkien and the Dark Night](https://www.themathesontrust.org/stmalachy-anthony-tolkien) - St Malachy’s Prophecy of the Popes (Prophetia de Summis Pontificibus) has been again in the news after Pope Benedict’s resignation. We bring you this week the original Latin text together with an illuminating interpretation by Martin Lings, who examines soberly the import of the prophecy for our times. “St. Malachy was a man of so
- [Concerning Prayer, Peace, Certainty and Silence](https://www.themathesontrust.org/concerning-prayer-peace-certainty-silence) - This week we have four new additions to our library: a chapter from The Book of Certainty, by Martin Lings, plumbing the depths of Qur'anic and Sufi doctrine with an elucidation of “The Truth of Certainty” (haqq al-yaqin). “...this nothingness and poverty is the key by which alone one may have access to the Infinite
- ['Cuthbert, Guthlac and the Life of St Antony' - Dr Benedicta Ward SLG](https://www.themathesontrust.org/cuthbert-guthlac-st-antony-dr-ward) - ‘Cuthbert, Guthlac and the Life of St Antony’ - Dr Benedicta Ward SLG from Matheson Trust2 on Vimeo. Christians far from Egypt have drawn inspiration from the Life of St Antony, including England’s two most popular pre-Conquest hermit saints: Cuthbert of Lindisfarne (c.634-687) and Guthlac (c.673-714) whose hermitage in the fens became the Abbey of
- [International Symposium on Islam, Salvation, and the fate of others](https://www.themathesontrust.org/symposium-islam-fate-of-others) - On April 16 and 17, 2010, the University of Illinois Department of Religion will host an international symposium entitled “Islam, Salvation, and the Fate of Others.” The purpose of this symposium is to explore views on salvation in Islamic thought, particularly as it pertains to “Others,” i.e., non-Muslims. The participants of this conference (and book
- ['St John Climacus of Sinai and the Ladder of Spiritual Ascent in Iconography' - Dr Elena Ene D-Vasilescu](https://www.themathesontrust.org/st-john-climacus-ladder-iconography-dr-vasilescu) - 'St John Climacus of Sinai and the Ladder of Spiritual Ascent in Iconography' - Dr Elena Ene D-Vasilescu from Matheson Trust on Vimeo. A pictorial exploration of this formative text for Orthodox monasticism, the work of ‘St John of the Ladder’, Abbot of St Catherine’s monastery, Sinai in the late sixth century. (The Ladder of
- [The Icon, the Labyrinth, the Cross and the Song of Enlightenment](https://www.themathesontrust.org/icon-labyrinth-song-cross) - This month we bring by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware a new lecture titled “The Holy Icon – Doorway into Heaven”: The art of the icon is not only a liturgical art and not only a theological art: it is also sacramental… the icon performs a mediating function: it makes present. By Sarah Jane Boss, a rich
- [<em>Hear!</em> Project / Cymbeline](https://www.themathesontrust.org/cymbeline-hear-symbolist-mind) - We are pleased to announce the launch of our Hear! project, which aims to make available for the first time audio recordings of some foundational texts in comparative studies, including works by Frithjof Schuon, Martin Lings and others. Our first recording, read by Emma Clark especially for our website, is “The Symbolist Mind”, an important
- [Prayer, Poetry, the True Eye beyond Words](https://www.themathesontrust.org/prayer-poetry-the-true-eye-beyond-words) - This week, with a lively and enlightening audio lecture entitled “What is Prayer?”, we introduce a series of lectures by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware. “…it is not necessary always to be asking for things, it is not necessary always to be using words: the deepest prayer is simply to wait on God.” Some reflections by Fr.
- [The Universality of the Qur’an / KJV Theology / Shin Buddhism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/universality-cloven-naturalness) - This week we have three new additions to our library: a talk by Martin Lings on The Universality of the Qur’an, recorded by the Temenos Academy in London, October 2003, followed by an interesting round of questions and answers: When did God ever send a religion which was not a religion of truth? Did He
- [The Winter’s Tale & an Isma‘ili Muslim view of the Crucifixion](https://www.themathesontrust.org/winters-tale-andani-crucifixion) - Continuing with our series of Martin Lings Temenos recordings, this week we have added to our library The Winter’s Tale, a play considered by Dr Lings to be the closest of all Shakespeare's to Dante’s Divine Comedy, dealing symbolically with the rediscovery and then purification and reintegration of the human soul. Please follow this link
- [Measure for Measure and a lecture undelivered](https://www.themathesontrust.org/measure-for-measure-and-lecture-undelivered) - We have two new talks on our audio library this week: in The Sound of a Lecture Undelivered: Jesus and the World’s Religions, Prof. James Cutsinger, from the University of South Carolina, makes use of an ingenious rhetorical device to elucidate a penetrating Christian view of the plurality of religions. A PDF version of this
- [World Interfaith Harmony Week 2012 Gathering](https://www.themathesontrust.org/2012-gathering-news) - The pitfalls of expression are always lurking in interfaith exchanges, and those engaged feel as if treading on thin ice lest they are misinterpreted and then misquoted and misjudged... how could it be otherwise, if what is involved is trying to express what is beyond words and even beyond language? “...music easily presents itself as a sufficient vehicle, or in any case as a subtler vehicle... reaching inwards, or upwards, or at least, through its rhythm, closer in language to our beating hearts, and even closer when use is made of the human voice as an instrument. True and timeless bridges between the corporeal and the subtle realms, we don’t seem to be able to determine exactly where is it that our intonations and invocations spring from, and how far they reach in their subtle repercussions
- [New Website / New Author: John Bussanich](https://www.themathesontrust.org/new-website-new-bussanich) - We are very happy to announce the launch of our new website design which, apart from obvious visual improvements, introduces a more dynamic structure better suited to our library of different media. It is hoped that by introducing these aesthetic and structural improvements we are bringing the appearance of the website a little closer to
- [The Martin Lings Centenary Lecture - The Temenos Academy](https://www.themathesontrust.org/the-martin-lings-centenary-lecture-the-temenos-academy) - This special lecture by Seyyed Hossein Nasr is in memory of Dr Martin Lings, who was born in 1909 and died in 2005. Friday 15 May 2009 at 1.30pm The Royal Geographical Society, 1 Kensington Gore, London SW7 Doors open at 1pm The lecture will be followed by refreshments and the sale of books by
- [Matheson Monographs: first three volumes published](https://www.themathesontrust.org/matheson-monographs-first-three-volumes-published) - We are happy to announce the publication of our first three Monographs: they include some translations and some original English works, ranging from the deep philological analysis to the lighthearted and lyrical Jewish parable. Louis Massignon: The Vow and the Oath by Patrick Laude, translated by Edin Q. Lohja. The Living Palm Tree: Parables, Stories,
- [The Gospel of Thomas published](https://www.themathesontrust.org/the-gospel-of-thomas-published) - The fourth title in our Monographs series is now available: The Gospel of Thomas by Samuel Zinner, with the subtitle: In the Light of Early Jewish, Christian and Islamic Esoteric Trajectories. This is a new translation of the short collection of Christic aphorisms found among the Gnostic texts at Nag Hammadi in 1945, with attention
- [Searching the Matheson Library](https://www.themathesontrust.org/searching-the-matheson-library) - We are pleased to announce that our growing online library is now searchable (courtesy of Google), thus providing an invaluable research tool to all those interested in our selection of documents and texts. You will find a new small search box on top of our Library menu, which allows you to do a basic search,
- [New Issue of Sacred Web](https://www.themathesontrust.org/new-issue-of-sacred-web) - Our friends at Sacred Web have just released a new issue, packed with interesting articles. Here is their announcement: Volume 27 of Sacred Web is now available through www.sacredweb.com. Please follow this link for abstracts, links to download free contents and more information. This volume contains the following articles: Editorial: On Freedom and Necessity by
- [Theravada Buddhism, Christianity and Atheism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/theravada-buddhism-christianity-and-atheism) - Last week our Buddhism section welcomed the addition of two contributions from the Thai Theravada tradition: a collection of aphorisms by Venerable Ajahn Chah (1918-1992), and the Autobiography of a Forest Monk by Venerable Ajahn Thate, with thanks to Dhamma Talks and Amaravati Monastery. In our Christianity section we gratefully acknowledge a new contribution on

## Pages

- [Welcome](https://www.themathesontrust.org/) - The Matheson Trust promotes the study of comparative religion by supporting the publication and dissemination of scholarly works which elucidate the philosophical, metaphysical, cosmological and aesthetic dimensions of the great religious traditions of the world. Our website has been hailed for years as a treasure trove by those interested either in the deeper aspects of
- [The Schuon Lectures](https://www.themathesontrust.org/links/the-schuon-lectures) - The Frithjof Schuon Lectures are an annual series featuring distinguished international scholars who explore the perennial philosophy and the spiritual, metaphysical, and religious insights of Frithjof Schuon. The lectures seek to draw audiences to Schuon’s writings, promote scholarly engagement across disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, theology, and religious studies, and foster inter-religious dialogue by showing
- [Publications](https://www.themathesontrust.org/publications) - Publications Current Titles Co-Publications Forthcoming Titles The Matheson Monographs cover a wide range of themes within the field of comparative religion: scriptural exegesis in different religious traditions; the modalities of spiritual and contemplative life; in-depth mystical studies of particular religious traditions; broad comparative analyses taking in a series of religious forms; studies of traditional arts,
- [Academic Contacts](https://www.themathesontrust.org/links/academic-contacts) - Academic Contacts Association of the Friends of Henry and of Stella Corbin This website, rich in free materials in English, French, Persian and other languages, furthers the diffusion of works on and by Henry Corbin (1903–1978), one of the 20th century’s most prolific scholars of Islamic mysticism, and Professor of Islam & Islamic Philosophy at
- [Miscellanea](https://www.themathesontrust.org/links/miscellanea) - Sources Contemplative Life Interfaith Academic Contacts Journals Publishers Miscellanea Miscellanea Audio Glossary of the World Religions Produced by The Shap Working Party on World Religions in Education, this innovative resource will be useful not only for the Religious Education teachers for whom it was created, but for any student of comparative religious who needs to
- [Contemplative Life](https://www.themathesontrust.org/links/contemplative-life) - Contemplative Life Contemplative Outreach Contemplative Outreach is an international network of individuals and small faith communities committed to living the contemplative dimension of the Gospel. They also publish and distribute the wisdom teachings of Fr. Thomas Keating and other resources that support the contemplative life. Holy Hill Hermitage A place of retreat where people of
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## Library

- [Meditatio pauperis in solitudine](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/meditatio-pauperis-in-solitudine) - Epilogue to The Seven Storey Mountain, by Thomas Merton He it is also that is born each instant in our hearts: for this unending birth, this everlasting beginning, without end, this everlasting, perfect newness of God begotten of Himself issuing from Himself without leaving Himself or altering His one-ness, this is the life that is
- [Songs of Transformation](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/songs-of-transformation) - Vernacular Josmani Literature and the Yoga of Cosmic Awareness Sthaneshwar Timalsina Just as their spiritual awakening is not a process of alienation, but rather the harmony of cosmic forces, so too is their social understanding. The role of a Sant as detailed in this study is to tie together otherwise untidy factors in society. Their
- [Sacred Audio: Hinduism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/sacred-audio-hinduism) - The tradition of Vedic chant is often considered the oldest unbroken oral tradition in existence, dating back to several centuries BC. The preservation of Sanskrit phonetics by an unbroken chain of transmission, aided by sophisticated manuals and memorisation techniques, make of these recitations living witnesses of a high past, “where the stars of wisdom flame.”
- [Samaveda](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/samaveda) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection The Samaveda Samhita, that is, the most ancient layer of text of the Samaveda (“the Veda of song”), has had since antiquity a special relation to the music of the cosmos, what in the Western tradition eventually came to be called the “music of the spheres”, or
- [The Earth's Complaint](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-earths-complaint) - When the earth is shaken by a mighty shaking, and the earth yields up her burdens, and man cries out “What ails her?”—On that Day she will tells her tales, as thy Lord will have inspired her. On that Day mankind will issue, separately, to be shown their deeds. Whosoever has done an atom’s weight of good will see it then, and whosoever has done an atom’s weight of ill will see it then. Quran 99:1-8 Reinforcing the implications of this short S?ra, the Prophet is reported to have said that, when the Last Day dawns, the earth herself will bear witness to everything that man has done. It might be said that we leave our ?ngerprints upon all that we touch, and they remain in place long after we have gone on our way. We forget so much of the past, but the past is still there and cannot be wiped out, unless God—under His Name “The Effacer” (al-‘Af?)—chooses to erase it from our record. But how can this earth, upon which we walk so carelessly, be said to bear witness against us? The Quranic answer is that God will inspire it to reveal its secrets, but still one asks: How could this be? There are several possible answers to the question, but I will suggest only one. Among the divine Names revealed in the Quran is al-Hayy, the “Ever-Living” or, quite simply, “Life.” Since the Creator lends His attributes to everything that He creates, there can be nothing in existence that does not possess a kind of life, even if we do not understand in what sense to take this. Like all the other rigid distinctions which apply in this world, that between the animate and the inanimate is provisional, not absolute. This brings me, once again, to the problem of terminology and the way in which words change their meaning. The word “psychic” has come to refer to fortune-tellers, spooks and things that go bump in the night. Yet, when it takes a suffix and becomes “psychology,” we know at once that we are dealing, not with magic but with the science of the soul as practiced by scientists who do not believe in the soul. The realm of the psyche, the “subtle realm” as it is sometimes called, is not open to sense-perception but that does not mean that it is supernatural. It is the unseen face of the natural world. For Muslims it is also the realm of the jinn, those mysterious beings who form communities, as we do, and are equally capable of virtue or vice. The whole of nature has an unseen face, a “subtle” aspect of which we are generally unaware, although we speak sometimes of the “spirit” of a place without realizing that this “spirit” is just as real as the place in its physical presence. It is upon this hidden side of the natural world that we leave our ineradicable imprint. There are no hiding places. We are, as the Quran re minds us in many different ways, surrounded by a host of witnesses, ranging from God Himself and His angels to the earth we tread. We can have no secrets from them. I have wondered sometimes if this is why the Arabs tend to be so secretive. Knowing that they are observed from every side, from above and from below, they treasure the only privacy they have, placing a discrete veil between themselves and their fellow men and women. In contrast, people in the West today eagerly confess all, not only to their friends but also on television and in the press. Believing themselves alone, self-enclosed and unobserved, they feel the need for self-exposure as a way of escaping from their isolation. The spoor which we leave behind us on the earth is, however, only one side of the relationship we have with everything around us, a relationship of reciprocity. We are not insulated but, as it were, porous. We soak up elements from whatever we see, hear or touch, absorbing them into our substance. When we treat the natural world as an object to be exploited and conquered, we are damaging ourselves. The environmentalists are, no doubt, correct when they predict that our abuse of the earth will have disastrous consequences for humanity as a whole, but that should be the least of our worries. The consequences are on many different levels; the higher the level, the more deadly they are likely to be. The Quran commands: “Work not confusion in the earth after the fair ordering thereof.” When it says also that the earth and everything in it is created for our use, this does not imply a transfer of ownership; it is a trust delegated to us, and we are answerable to the “Owner of all things” for our stewardship. The Muslim is reminded again and again, both in the Quran and in the recorded sayings of the Prophet, that greed and wastefulness are among the major sins. We may use what is made so readily available to us for our sustenance, but that is all, and even that little is no more than theft if we have abandoned our human function and opted out of the universal prayer which carries the whole of creation back towards its source. The Muslim is assured that the whole earth is a mosque for him. The walled buildings to which he is summoned for prayer are simply 234 The Earth’s Complaint a convenience. The fields, the forests and the desert are equally fitting as places of prayer and therefore demand the same respect that is ac corded to a conventional mosque. The link with heaven can be established anywhere and everywhere (“Whereso ever you turn, there is the Face of God”). One of the essential features of Islam is expressed in the Arabic word adab, which means “manners,” “courtesy” or “correct behavior,” and it goes hand-in-hand with the dignity which the Muslim is required to demonstrate under all circumstances. God’s Viceregent on earth is, after all, no mean figure, whether he is in robes or in rags. To show good manners, not only to our fellows but also towards every thing that God has created is a part of faith, for everything bears the imprint of His hand. The man or woman who stands, bows and prostrates in the midst of nature is a member of a universal congregation, joining in a universal prayer. “All that is in the heavens and the earth glorifies God,” says the Quran. This is such a constant theme in the Quranic revela tion that one can only be astonished by the fact that so many Muslims—unless they are Sufis—ignore it. Have you not seen that all who are in the heavens and the earth glorify God, and the birds in their flight? Indeed He knows the worship and the praise of each, and God is aware of what they do. Moreover He “disdains not to coin the similitude even of a gnat.” How much greater the similitude of a lion or a swan, a mountain or a tree. Again, “See! In the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the difference of night and day . . . and the water which God sends down from the sky, thereby reviving the earth after its death, and dispersing all kinds of animals therein, and the ordering of the winds, and the clouds obedient be tween heaven and earth: (in these) are signs for people who have sense.” Whatsoever He has created in the earth “of different colors” conveys a message to us. So: “Look therefore upon the imprints of God’s mercy.” They are everywhere. The earth’s beauties—its “ornaments”—are, the Quran tells us, a “reminder to mankind,” a reminder to those who are disposed to remember their origin and their end. For such as these, the natural world sparkles with light, but it would be dark if unperceived by man as the central being in creation, that is to say the link between what is above and what is below. Here again there is reciprocity. This world is not some chance agglomeration of material atoms, unrelated to our innermost being. It gives and it receives. We receive and we give. There is inter course and mutuality; the objective world and human subjectivity might be compared to two circles which intersect rather than float, separate and divided, quite independent of each other. This is already implicit also in the word “cosmos” (as opposed to universe a neutral term that implies nothing). The cosmos is, by definition, an ordered whole, organized and harmonious, in which the parts are inter-dependent. As such it has meaning and, as the English word “cosmetics” suggests, it is beautiful. But to perceive, even dimly, the “signs of God” around us—those signs to which the Quran refers repeatedly —requires a child’s eye preserved in maturity. The Prophet is said to have prayed: “Lord, increase me in marveling!” This is how a child sees the world, fresh from the hand of God and full of marvels but, with the passage of the years and the passing anxieties which time imposes, the vision fades; yet, in the words of the Quran, “It is not the eyes that grow blind, but the hearts within the breasts that grow blind.” Imbued with faith, the heart may still regain its sight, its insight. After the Call to Prayer, when Muslims have assembled in tightly packed ranks behind their Imam, their prayer leader, they are required to spend a few moments divesting themselves of the day’s cares and all those urgent matters which had seized their attention, turning to face their Creator and address Him. It some times happens that the Imam turns to advise them: “Pray as if this is your last prayer!” So it will be for those fated to die before the next prayer is called, but one might equally say: “Pray as if this is your first prayer!” Every time we turn to God is a new beginning, a rebirth, and so it should be when we look, with awakened hearts, upon the world around us. In doing so we have to remember that nothing is what it seems, or rather nothing is only what it seems. As with the verses of the Quran (the same Arabic word is used both for these verses and for the “signs” in nature), there is a literal meaning and, at the same time, a deeper mean ing. The verses are sacred, and so are the “signs.” It is here that we come to one of the most dangerous symptoms of alienation; the loss of the sense of the sacred in the modern world, a loss—a deprivation—which affects the Muslim Umma as it does the West. The Quran condemns those who separate that which God has joined, and the fragmentation which we see today is an obvious example of this severing of connections. The French critic of our technological civilization, Jacques Ellul, has pointed out that, in the past, man’s deepest experience of the sacred was his immediate contact with the natural world. It is almost impossible fully to comprehend religion as such—or the great myths that bore witness to the unity of the cosmos—when nature has become remote and wholly “other.” As Ellul says, the sense of the sacred withers when it is no longer rejuvenated by experience. The city dweller’s awareness dries up for lack of support in his new experience with the artificial world of urban technology. The loss of harmony between man and his natural environment is but an aspect of the loss of harmony be tween man and his Creator. Those who turn their backs on their Creator and forget Him can no longer feel at home in creation. They assume the role of bacteria which ultimately destroy the body they have invaded. “God’s Viceregent on earth” is then no longer the custodian of nature and, having lost his function, he is a stranger who cannot recognize the landmarks or conform to the customs of this place; alienated—in the literal sense of “having become an alien”—he can see it only as raw material to be exploited. He may find riches and comfort in exploitation, but not happiness. He can never hope to sing with the Persian poet, Sa’di: I am joyous with the cosmos, For the cosmos receives its joy from Him: I love the world, For the world belongs to Him. We are, according to the Quran, “the poor” in relation to God, needy from the moment of birth till the end of our lives, and another of His Quranic Names is al-K?f?, “the Satisfier of all needs.” The Source of this hunger, inherent in our substance as human beings, is the need for Him, however it may be disguised or sidetracked by worldly desires. Since He is the only ultimate satisfier of desire it follows that, when we turn our backs and walk away, we will be perpetually unsatisfied and, still seeking to assuage our hungers, exceed all bounds. Until the development of technology this may have harmed only the perpetrator, but it did little harm to the earth. Our range has now been extended immeasurably, and we have become the great destroyers. One of the Buddhist hells is inhabited by huge creatures who were once men and women, ravaged by greed, but now their mouths are no bigger than a pin-head. Surrounded by a feast of nourishment, they can take in only the tiniest crumbs. Today, whether we are Muslims or Christians, we seem to have lost the key to the language of “signs,” God’s language. It has become both incomprehensible and irrelevant. This is particularly dangerous for the Muslim for whom the Quran must eventually become a partially closed book if the constant references to the natural world as a tissue of “signs” no longer coincide with his experience or touch his heart. That world, when seen through the window of a motor car or from a height of 30,000 feet, has nothing to say to us, even if it presents a pretty picture. Moreover, since everything has to be spelled out nowadays, it is typical of the modern mindset to ask: What exactly do these “signs” mean? If they could be expressed in words they would be redundant. They touch us at a deeper level than articulate speech, but this is already so with the Quran which, when it is recited to those who have no knowledge of Arabic, still moves their hearts though they understand nothing in terms of human language. So God has at His disposal two languages, the one composed of words and the other of “signs,” although it could also be said that, in practice, He has three means of communication, the third being our personal destinies. These too contain messages for us if we are prepared to understand, and even the most arid skeptic, when struck down by bitter misfortune, asks: “Why? Why me?” He is not supposed to believe that life has any meaning, but he believes none the less, or rather he knows in his heart what his mind denies. To speak of the natural world is to speak of beauty. Since “God is beautiful,” beauty must in some sense be universally present since He is everywhere present. The common saying that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is one of those half-truths which can either enlighten or deceive us according to our disposition. A particular individual or a particular culture will find the sacred in places where it is hidden from others who, in their turn, will discover it elsewhere. The same applies to the perception of what is beautiful. This does not make it any less real, any less objective. But the prophetic saying that “God is beautiful, He loves beauty” is a statement about the nature of Reality, and it indicates something very important. Just as good and evil are on different levels—the former closer to the Real than the latter—so beauty and ugliness belong to different orders. Ugliness is not one of a pair, like hot and cold, black and white. It represents the spoil ing of beauty, the unmaking of what has been well made. It might be compared to a stain on the fabric and belongs to that class of things which, the Quran tells us, last for but a short while and are then extinguished. This is why the Muslim, when he encounters things that are ugly or unseemly, tends to look away, not because he wishes to deny their existence but because not everything that exists is worth his attention. There is a story of Jesus in the Islamic tradition which makes this point. He was walk ing with his disciples when they passed a dead dog. “How it stinks!”, said his companions. Jesus replied: “How white its teeth are!” What is the beauty of nature if not an act of adoration, in that it reflects the divine Beauty? “Do you not see,” asks the Quran, “that everything in the heavens and all that is in the earth pays adoration to God, as do the sun and the moon and the stars, the hills and the trees and the beasts . . . ?” There is a Turkish story of a spiritual teacher who sent his pupils to gather flowers for the house. All but one returned with the finest blooms they could find. One, however, was gone for a long time and, when he returned, held in his hand only a single, faded flower. “When I went out to pick the flowers,” he said, “I found them all singing the praises of their Creator and I dared not interrupt them. Finally I saw one that had finished her song, and this is the one that I have brought you.” It would be a mistake to regard this little story as a poetic fancy. The blood that courses through our bodies may lend itself to poetry and to myth, but the fact remains that it has a very important practical function. When the Quran speaks of this perpetual and universal adoration it is do ing neither more nor less than telling us what happens, the down-to-earth reality of the situation. Our subjective awareness—or unawareness—cannot alter the facts. If there is nothing in existence that is only and exclusively what it seems to be, then everything has its own particular significance. I can imagine someone saying: “This is too much! Women’s rights, animal rights, even plant rights, and now you talk about the rights of sticks and stones! Where will it end?” It has no end. That is the only possible answer. We did not make the world, we do not own it. You cannot, the Quran reminds us, create even a fly. This vast picture-book, filled with the “signs” of God, is what it is. Appearances, as we are so often told, are deceptive and, if we float only on the surface of our world, then we are indeed deceived. There is always more to it than that, then more and then still more, until you have plumbed the depths and found—behind the “seventy- thousand veils of light and darkness”—the Face of God. The modern age is frequently condemned for its “materialism.” Perhaps it is not materialistic enough, that is to say it no longer seeks, beyond the shifting surface of material objects—these clouds that constantly form and re-form—what it is that they both veil and reveal. Two further Names by which God has defined Him self in the Quran are al-Muh?t, the “All-Embracing” or the “All-Surrounding” and al-Z?hir, which means “the Outward.” It follows that, ultimately and behind all the appearances, He is our “environment” and there is no other. But that is an intellectual statement which might seem to rob the things we see and touch of their due mea sure of reality. While we are in this life, situated amidst the “veils,” they are the only reality we know, reflecting after their fashion the greater realities which remain hid den, too bright for our perception. It is their meaning rather than their material structure that should be our prime concern. The mechanism of a clock may be of prac tical interest, but the purpose of the clock is to tell the time. The very sounds of nature may add to this universe of meaning, this flood of communication between Creator and creation. I remember a certain Shaykh who was about to deliver his sermon when the thunder sounded, rolling on and on. He fell silent and kept silent even after the heavens had spoken. What could he have added? But we must be very patient and very attentive to catch, through hearing as through sight, that note of universal praise. When the Muslim is at prayer in the early hours of the day or in the act of remembering God, birdsong, the ocean’s roar or the drumming of rain do not disturb him, on the contrary they contribute to his remembrance. But the noise of cars or machinery introduces into the harmony of his worship a discord against which he is obliged to struggle. Prayer and contemplation, supported by a cosmic environment which, in a sense, cries out to be seen, heard and understood are central to the religious life. But there is also involvement, but for which we are still situated at a distance from the natural world. There are children in Europe and America who are not even aware of the fact that the packaged meat on supermarket shelves is the flesh of living creatures or that the vegetables from which every grain of earth has been washed once grew in open fields and took their time to grow. The patience of the agriculturist is unimaginable to an increasingly impatient generation. Their needs are satisfied in relation to the moving hands of a clock, not by the seasons or by the discipline imposed by the weather. They are “out of touch,” and this phrase can have a profound significance. It rep resents remoteness, separation and—once again—alienation. In towns and cities the stars are blot ted out by street lighting, their brightness hidden and their message dimmed. Here too it is not only contemplation but also involvement that has been lost. “He it is,” says the Quran, “who has set for you the stars that you may guide your course by them amidst the darkness of the land and the sea.” We no longer need them. They can be left to the specialists who talk in terms of light years and have nothing to offer that would help us on our way through the darkness that has penetrated within our breasts and within our minds. This, of course, is “progress,” and it is certainly convenience, although one of the ironies of the situation is that our contemporaries in the West, freed from the labor once required of them in their encounter with the natural world and their dependence upon it, now have to work harder than ever as ciphers in the industrial or bureaucratic machine to afford the lifestyle to which they have a “right.” This work offers no spiritual nourishment. It is not expected to do so. It provides no contact with reality on any level and no involvement with the “signs” that point our way and remind us of who we are. An almost superhuman effort would be required for us to remember that we are God’s “Viceregents,” responsible for our province just as the farmer is responsible for his stock and his crops. We keep the wheels turning, but they turn to no purpose except to keep the speeding train on tracks which lead nowhere. Eventually it will hit the buffers, the invisible limits which frame our worldly existence. The Muslim tries to live within the limits of the Shar?‘ah, the road or path which leads safely to the water ing place and so, beyond all limits, to Paradise and the ultimate satisfaction of all needs. Being human, we are free to wander from the road. The rest of creation does not have this freedom. In terms of the Islamic perspective, the animals and the plants, the mountains and the oceans have, each of them, their own Shar?‘ah. They are bound inescapably to the function decreed for them. They cannot be other than they are meant to be and there is, in this, a lesson for mankind. Our environment obeys God and encourages us to do the same. The rocks and the rivers are subject to the “laws of nature,” the animals follow their “instincts”; this is but one way of describing the divine Decree which governs their existence. They cannot sin, they cannot break bounds, and this exposes the absurdity of the remark frequently addressed to vicious criminals by a learned Judge: “You are no better than an animal!” As human creatures we can be better than the animals or worse than them; we cannot, however, exist on their level since we are not subject to the laws which direct and enclose their lives. “There is not an animal on earth,” says the Quran, “nor a bird flying on two wings but they are communities like you” (or “in your likeness”), and the verse ends: “And unto their Lord they will be gathered.” It is not open to us to join one or other of their communities but we can, if we depart from the Shar?‘ah laid down for us, become not only subhuman but subanimal. There is great confusion in the Western mind concerning the animal species. Hardly a day passes that one does not hear someone say: “After all, we’re only animals.” This is not an opinion but an ideo- 241 Gai Eaton logical statement regarding the origin and status of the human being. It proclaims an unquestioning adherence to the Darwinian theory and often sounds like a political slogan. The curious thing is that its implications are ignored. At least for the time being—although this may change—men and women are treated quite differently from animals. It does not occur to us to bring a pig to Court, as sometimes happened in the Middle Ages, and charge it with a crime. The owner of an animal that is mortally sick is blamed for not having it “put down”; the same person will be tried for murder if he or she “puts down” a terminally ill patient. Most people believe that we are neither more nor less than clever primates (or so they are told), but they are horrified if human beings are treated as if they were apes. It seems to me that there is also confusion, although of a different kind, in the Muslim mind. No religion lays greater stress on the good treatment of animals than does Islam, yet Muslims have in general a bad reputation in this regard (as did Christians until very recently). If we represent a religion—any traditional religion—as a circle or a sphere, then it is likely that its adherents will absorb and practice only a segment of the whole. They will also emphasize this segment, as though to fill the empty space, so that they are blinded to all that they have ignored. Their religion, one might say, is too big for them. You cannot pour the ocean into a pint pot. The fact that people of the same Faith may choose different segments for their exclusive attention is one of the reasons for conflicts within the religion, not least within the Islamic Umma. The good Muslim’s life is lived in imitation of the Prophet’s example, followed as faithfully as circumstances permit. It is in this example, the acts and the sayings of God’s Messenger, that we find the most uncompromising references to animal welfare. If they are taken seriously —and how can the Muslim not take them seriously?—they have very grave implications for all who fall short in their care for the animals in their charge. Not only are there the famous stories of the woman sent to hell for shutting up a cat till it died of hunger and of the prostitute for given all her sins because she gave water to a dog that was dying of thirst, but there are also a number of small incidents in the record which emphasize the same principle. When the Prophet saw a donkey that had been branded on the face he cried out: “God curse the one who branded it.” A man who was about to slaughter a goat for food was severely reproached for allowing the animal to see him sharpening his knife. A prophet of earlier times was scolded by God Himself for burning an ant’s nest because an ant had stung him—“You have destroyed a community that glorified Me”—and there is, according to another saying, a reward in Paradise for whoever shows kindness to a creature possessed of “a living heart.” The law books instruct us as to what to do if we find a poisonous snake in our garden. It is to be warned to leave. If it returns a second time, it is to be warned again, but if it makes a third visit it may be killed. The Quran tells us: “Your Lord inspired the bee, say ing: Choose dwellings in the hills and in the trees and in what is built; then eat all manner of fruit and follow humbly the ways of your Lord made smooth”; in other words, follow your Shar?‘ah, for that is your path and your destiny. This again brings out the Islamic view that each of the diverse non-human “communities” has a particular relationship with its Lord, but the Lord is one; ours as well as theirs. The relationships differ and so the paths differ, but the goal is the same. It is the harmonious inter action of all the components of the cosmos, both animate and inanimate, which reflects in countless different ways the unity of the Real. The killing of an animal except for food, and then only the permitted minimum, and even the unnecessary cutting down of a tree or uprooting of a plant goes, as it were, against the grain. It exceeds, from motives of greed, the bounds laid down for humankind. There is no place here, no excuse, for the luxuries of modern civilization. Were it not for the divine Mercy, scattered like rain throughout creation, and God’s readiness to forgive all sins if they are followed by sincere repentance, we would be in a bad way, but what matters most is to keep these principles always in mind, and that is possible only if we observe what might aptly be called the Prime Directive of Islam: the constant “remembrance of God.” All that we need to know and all that we are required to do is encompassed in this remembrance; it is the shield against temptation and the spur to keep us on the “straight path” made smooth for us. In choosing to follow it, we are in step with the animals, the plants and the earth itself which, then and only then, has no cause for complaint.
- [The Metaphysics of Ecology](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/metaphysics-of-ecology) - The Metaphysics of Ecology By Peter Milward To begin at the beginning, especially when speaking about a word in such common use nowadays as “ecology”, is so important. It is so importanttobeclearinourmindsaboutthewordsweareusing. Itisso important,asphilosopherssay,todefineourterms. Afterall,asT.S.Eliot laments, “Words strain,/ Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,/ Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,/ Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,/ Will not stay still.” Such a word is “ecology”. Then, what is “ecology”? Simply, to resolve the compound Greek noun into its component parts, they are oikos meaning “house” and logos meaning “word”. Yet who is there nowadays, speaking of “ecology”,willthinkofeither“house”or“word”. Allthesame,theystillretain their distinctive importance even in the compound meaning of the word asusednowadays. Theyaretheoldpartsthatstillretaintheirmeaningin the new whole. Sowhatdowethinkwemeanby“ecology”? Well,itmaybedefinedas that branch of biological science which deals with the balance of living things in the natural world. The natural world which surrounds us, the world in which we live, move and have our being, from birth to death, is basedonacertaindelicatebalance. Butthatbalanceisincreasinglybeing disturbed and overthrown by our excessive use, or exploitation, of the elements in nature. Formerly, most human beings lived in an agricultural society and found it natural to live in harmony withtheworld. But latterly,withtheriseof experimental science, based on the Baconian principle of “Knowledge is Power”, the balance of nature has come to be upset by human greed – L.L. Fitzgerald, Poplar Woods (1929) and nevermore sothaninthe present age,sinceWorldWarII. Inseeking to dominate the world of nature, we have succeeded in pulling that worlddownaboutourears. AstheRomanpoetsays,“Naturamexpellas furca, tamen usque recurrit” – Expel nature with a pitchfork, yet it ever comes back. Therewehavethemeaningof“house”. Itisn’tjustahousebuiltwith humanhands,forafamilytolivein. Itisn’t“thehousethat Jackbuilt”,at which he can proudly exclaim, “What a clever boy am I!” It is the house of the natural world, built by divine hands for human beings to live in – peaceablyandin harmony witheachother. Itisthe housewhosebuilding is so charmingly described in the first chapter of Genesis. There we begin with the creation of light above. Then come the roof and the walls, then the foundation of the earth and the seas, then the ornamentation of the house, with a floor of grass and other forms of vegetation, then the dwellers in the house, the birds of the air, the fishes of the sea, the beasts of the field, until all is ready for the arrival of the first man and woman. God is himself the architect, the builder, the designer, the artist, the gardener – in a word, the creator. Then, who is God? Ah, there is the mystery behind it all, the seer unseen, the creator uncreated, the one pure being present in and above all these many varied beings. Then there is his name, revealed to the reputed author of the five books of the Law, the Pentateuch. To Moses, tending his sheep on the slopes of Mount Sinai, God reveals his name as “I am who am”. Thus what characterizes God in and above all things is simply “I AM”, preferably written in capital letters. God makes his own the first person singular of the present tense of the verb “To be”. He simply affirms his present, singular, personal being. He tells Moses, as the centerpiece of divine revelation in the Old Testament, that HE IS. Here one senses an objection to what God says of himself. Isn’t he transcendent, far above all being? Isn’t he incomparable, unique, in himself alone? Yet here we find God, even as creator, descending to the levelofcreatedbeings. HerewehaveGodspeakingofhimselflikeoneof his creatures. Yes, God may be uncreated Being, in the unique singular, with a capital B for “Being”, whereas we are all created beings, in the common plural, with only a small letter for “beings”. Still, we aren’t only plural. Nor are we only common. Each of us is singular and unique, each in his or her own way. As such we can, each of us, say, “I am” – while keeping to the humble way of small letters. Here I am chiefly speaking of human beings, men and women, who have received from God the gift of his word, by which we can say, “I am.” No animal, not even a monkey, a parrot, a raven, has ever said “I am” – with any kind of consciousness or degree of understanding. A parrot maybetrainedtorepeatthewords,“Iam”,after hismaster. Butthenthe words are merely sounds whose meaning is dependent not on the wel ltrained bird but on his patient trainer. Now I come to the other, simple component of the compound word “ecology”. I come not only to the “house” of this natural world, the house built with divine hands, but also to the “word” with which he built it. For so we read in the beginning of the first chapter of Genesis, “And God said, Let there be light. And there was light.” Nor was there only light, but already before the creation of light there was the Word of God, implied in the past tense of the verb “To say.” God who is utters his creating word, and things come into being, not all at once but one by one, in due order in the process of time. And so, as a result of that first word spoken in the beginning, we have a procession ofcreatedbeingsparadedbeforeourenrapturedeyes. Andso,withGod himself, we utter the appreciative “Good!” In this way, as St. John says in his recapitulation of Genesis, “In the beginning was the Word”, and “In him was Light.” We, too, like St. John, and like the infant Wisdom in that other account of the creation in Proverbs viii, may think of ourselves – without blasphemy – as present with God from the beginning of creation. We, too, may look on the unfolding of light even from the moment of what scientists call “the Big Bang” – though I would prefer to call it “the Big Flash”, considering that sound travels more slowly than light. We see the lightning first, before the thunder hits our ears. Then we may further watch the light taking various shapes in the form of galaxies, stars and planets, till it crystallizes and solidifies in the various formsofplantsandanimalsonthistinyplanetEarth. Itisallsofascinating. We feel impelled to clap our hands and shout, not just “Good!” at each thing, but “Very good!” at them all together. In this way we may compare ourselves to the sons of God in the morning of the world, when they sang for joy, “Glory to God in the highest,andpeacetohispeopleonearth!” Nowwehaveatlast,afterall the aeons of the scientific imagination, come down to Earth. Now we see all the things to which we have become familiar from the time of our birth – flowers and trees, birds and fishes, and so many animals. Now we can even put names to them, as God brings them before us, as he brought them before Adam, one by one. We can even recognize ourselves in them and in him who is naming them on our behalf. We can see ourselves first in Adam, then in Eve. And with them we may say, each of us, “I am!” Thus we echo the word of God, taking to ourselves the very name of God. In all this long procession of created beings, however, from the original form of light, through various forms of life, down to the animals and birds with their varied noises, there has been something wanting. Fascinating as they all are, one by one, and intriguing as it is to devise names for them, they all have, we find, one defect in common. We can speak to them, calling them by the names we have devised for them, but they can’t answer us. We may say to the cow, “Moo-moo!” but the only answer the cow can give us is an echoing “Moo-moo!” And that is the end of our conversation. It is a conversation without real communication. On the other hand, when Adam meets Eve, he is so delighted. In her he recognizes himself, yet not himself. She is like him, for they share the common privilege of echoing the divine name, “I am.” They can each introduce themselves, the one to the other, “I am Adam”, and “I am Eve.” In each of them is present, as not in any of the hitherto created beings, the word of God, the power of speech, or logos in Greek. Eve is unlike Adam, for she is Woman and he is Man. But what joins them together as Man and Woman is the power of Love. And that Love, with the Word of God, is shown as present from the beginning in the divine Breath or Spirit which moves over the face of the waters of primeval chaos. We think of the creative Word descending from God, as Son from Father, in the beginning. We think of him coming down, down, down, through the procession of creatures in the Great Chain of Being – from spiritual to material, from animate to inanimate, from pure Being above to non-being below, from all to nothing. Such is the way Pope speaks, in his Essay on Man, with admiration at the immense order of the world. And before him we have St. Paul commenting on the incarnation of the Word, coming down from heaven to earth, emptying himself of his godhead to become one with sinful humanity, making himself even nothing to give us everything. This is called “a new creation”, but it still follows along the lines of the old. Beginning, as Dryden sings, “from harmony to heavenly harmony”, it proceeds in an impressive diapason, “closing full in man.” Now, we may ask, how does all this apply to what we know as “ecology” in the world of today? How does it enable us to solve the practical problem of restoring that balance in nature which we are now in process of destroying with our blind greed? Destroying, I may add, with the assistance of all the scientific, technological, mechanical means at our disposal. Well, let me answer in the words of the prophet Jeremiah, “For want of a vision the people perish.” After all, it is necessary to go back to the beginning, to the simple words “house” and “word”, in order to understand thetruemeaningofthe compound word“ecology”. Itisnecessary to see the natural world as the “house” in which we have to live, the house built not with human but divine hands. It is necessary to peruse the several parts of that house, passing in procession before our delighted eyes, with the amazed realization, “This is all mine!” Only, it is mine not to abuse but to use, to enjoy, even to love. What is more, when we reflect on ourselves, as men and women to whom is granted the power of logos, the ability to speak in words – when we further reflect on our power of echoing the divine name, “I am” – when we realize how unlike we are to the other beings in the house of God that is the natural world – then it is only natural for us to feel overwhelmed by all this weight of glory. It is only natural for us to ask, with wonder,“Who amIto receive suchan honour?” Atthesametimeit is only natural for us to exclaim, with Peter on the holy mountain, “It is good for us to be here!” We may also reflect, with Hopkins, “What is Earth’s eye, tongue, or heart else, where/ Else, but in dear and dogged man?” Yes, we may reflect, “How dear I am to God, who has made all these things in heaven andon earth for me! How immense,and generous,and uncalculating,is his love for me!” Earth can’t speak for itself. All Earth can do is but to be. If it makes any sound, it is through the wind in the trees, the birds singing on the branches, the animals playing round the roots. Only man can speak on Earth’s behalf, as Hopkins speaks for Earth in this poem of his. Thus man isn’t so much the ruler as the representative of Earth. At this point in my discourse on Earth, as the house or temple built with divine hands, I can’t help thinking of two more poems by English poets. For this is the domain, not of scientists, who only speak of Earth in cold, objective terms; it is the proper domain of poets, whose speech is subjective – not from the head but from the heart. The first is Coleridge, who speaks of prayer in relation to all creatures on the face of Earth, and of love as the heart of prayer. “He prayeth best,” he says, “who loveth best/ All things both great and small./ For the dear God wholovethus,/He madeandlovethall.” Thepointofthis prayer is that the divine Word, in coming down from the height of heaven to the depth of Earth, in emptying himself even of his godhead, comes not only as “Word” in relation to understanding, but also as “Love” in relation to spiritual power. Thus, as I have mentioned with reference to the second chapter of Genesis, not only does Adam name the various animals brought to him by the Lord God, but he is also filled with love when God brings him Eve as his companion. At the same time, what I wish to emphasize, in view of the above-quoted poem, is that the love of Adam and Eve is not to be exclusive – as if (in the words of a once popular song) “you were the only girl in the world, and I were the only boy”. It has to be all-inclusive, as it were spilling all over the face of Earth, according to the language of true love. After all, in the eyes of Adam, Eve isn’t only herself. She reminds him of everything else in the world – not least in the flowers, which are so feminine. In his eyes the flowers are there to be picked and made into a bouquet for him to present to Eve, in token of his love for her. And in the eyes of Eve, Adam isn’t only himself. He reminds her of everything else in the heavens above – not least in the stars shining in the sky. Indeed, the stars above are like the flowers below. So Man is traditionally compared to the sky as sky-father, while Woman is according to the same tradition regarded as earth-mother. Nor is that all. In the flowers below and in the stars above, Adam and Eve are to see not only each other, but also the handiwork of their creator. They are to thank him for his generosity in giving them all these things. Then, considering how he is present in them all, and at work in them all, they are to love him in them and them in him. For he has made all things both great and small. So as he is in them and reveals himself in them, they are all worthy objects of his love. We may even imagine them, for all that we may be accused of “the pathetic fallacy”, as each speaking to us in its own way and each echoing the divine name according to its degree of being, “I am.” Here we may recognize this implied in another poem of Hopkins, “Each mortal thing does one thing and the same,/ Selves, goes itself, Myself it speaks and spells,/ Crying, What I do is me, for that I came.” Not only are human beings privileged to echo the divine name, “I am”, in their use of words. All other beings, too, whether on the earth or below the earth, or in the sea or the air, can say, each in its own way, “I am.” Then, because they all share in this divine name, whether as “images” or as “vestiges” of God (according to the old mediaeval distinction between rational and irrational creatures), they are all obliged – literally, “bound together” – to love each other. This is the love which St. Paul calls “the bond of perfection”. It is the harmony of the Spirit from which SACRED WEB 14 125 all things began, no less than from the creative Word. Now I come to my second poet, Henry Vaughan. One morning he imagines how “the quick world awakes and sings./ The rising winds and falling springs,/ Birds, beasts, all things/ Adore him (namely God) in their kinds./ Thus all is hurl’d/ In sacred hymns and order, the great chime/ And symphony of nature.” Here is precisely the ideal of ecology, consisting not just in a scientifically determined balance of forces in the natural world, but in “the great chime/ And symphony of nature.” This is also what Vivaldi recognized in his musical concerti on the Four Seasons and what Beethoven heard in his Pastoral Symphony. It is also what great poets and musicians have all recognized in the world, or “house”, of nature, and what has most inspired them in their poetry and music. It is they who show us the true way to a restoration of the upset order of nature, reminding us as they do of the original order – the true way to the end of nature by directing us back to the beginning. Finally, I have to add that what I have been saying is truly, not academically, metaphysical. For it goes beyond that physics which originally (in the meaning of Aristotle) meant the study of the nature (or physis) of things. It goes beyond the “new science” of Bacon and Galileo and Newton, which has, alas, contributed to the present upset of the ecological balance in the natural world. It goes beyond the world of nature itself, as we see it with our eyes and hear it with our ears. For the “house” of nature in which we live, built as it is with divine hands, isn’t only what we see with our eyes or hear with our ears or measure with precise mathematical calculations. It is as much unseen as seen, as much unheard as heard. As John Keats observed in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.” More mystically, if paradoxically, another poet, Francis Thompson added, “O world invisible, we view thee!/ O world intangible, we touch thee!/ O world unknowable, we know thee!/ Inapprehensible,we clutch thee!” This is what we know and appreciate and love in the outward forms of the natural things around us, while at the same time we join their inner harmony and take our human part in the symphony of nature. Such metaphysics is, as I have implied, not at all scientific, or impartial, or objective – in the old, conventional way of thinking about experimental science. For it recognizes that we human beings are ourselves part of the “house” of nature around us. It recognizes that not only are we subjects, in contrast to other things that may be studied objectively, but all things are subjective as well as objective. We can only enter into them by sympathizing with them, without being deterred by the accusation of “pathetic fallacy” – a term that may well be cast into the teeth of those who use it! What is more, such metaphysics isn’t at all secular, according to the hitherto accepted idea of science, but verging on the sacred. To all things it aims at restoring the original ideal of the sacred. According to that ideal all things are seen as proceeding in the beginning from the creative Word and Spirit of God. At the same time, it looks by way of poetic prayer to return to the end, as Hopkins also says, echoing the Roman poet Virgil, “Thee, God, I come from, to thee go,/ All day long I like fountain flow,/ From thy hand out, round about,/ Mote-like in thy mighty glow.”
- [Archetype as Letterform](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/archetype-as-letterform) - The “Dream” of Edward Johnston by Brian Keeble You may be familiar with the old adage that “to work is to pray”, a saying which gives some indication of the fact that the crafts were traditionally practiced as if it were possible that they possessed a spiritual dimension and that they might act as a
- [<em>Orthodoxy</em>, by G.K. Chesterton](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/chesterton-orthodoxy) - G.K. Chesterton Joy (…) is the gigantic secret of the Christian (…) The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never
- [Calligraphy as a Spiritual ‘Way’](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/calligraphy-as-way) - Gina Jonas Unforeseen to me, I’d embarked upon a journey of self-discovery in my desire to develop as a calligrapher. This larger project, I learned, was not without precedent: in the Japanese tradition, arts such as calligraphy are undertaken with just such an intention—as a ‘Way’ to self-knowledge. Although Roman calligraphy has not developed methods
- [Patanjali <em>Yoga Sutras</em>](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/patanjali-yoga-sutras) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection This page provides links to several translations and versions of the Sanskrit text and audio of Patanjali Yoga Sutras, the ancient collection of aphorisms on the theory and practice of yoga, “the science of joy, founded on a profound and unerring understanding of the human condition.” •
- [Na’au: The Heart of Wayfinding](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/naau-the-heart-of-wayfinding) - Sam Low It’s as if a door opens up to a new way of knowledge that you never even knew existed… That's when I recognized the true meaning of being a navigator—that certain levels of traditional navigation are really realms of the spirit. Click here to read the article. Originally published by Hana Hou Magazine.
- [Frithjof Schuon and Prayer](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/frithjof-schuon-and-prayer) - Reza Shah-Kazemi The invocation of the Name of God is the key methodic support for this perpetuation of the consciousness of the Absolute. The invocation of the Name, by virtue of its unitive nature, is proportioned to the pure Absolute, whilst other prayers, differentiated and multiple, correspond to the Personal Divinity. This basic division indicates
- [Modes of Prayer](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/modes-of-prayer) - Frithjof Schuon Death is an exit, a world that closes down; the meeting with God is like an opening toward a fulgurating and immutable infinitude; eternity is a fullness of being in pure light; and the present moment is an almost ungraspable “place” in our duration where we are already eternal—a drop of eternity amid
- [Sacred Audio: Christianity](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/sacred-audio-christianity) - The recordings in this section reflect the worldwide expansion of the Christian faith over centuries, with its ensuing linguistic and cultural diversity. We hope this selection will represent the fundamentals of the major Christian denominations. The Lord’s Prayer (“Our Father”) Akathistos Hymn The Angelus Coptic Liturgy Gaelic Psalm Singing from the Hebrides O Gladsome Light
- [The <em>Angelus</em> Prayer](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/sa-angelus) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection The prayer known commonly by its incipit, the Angelus, recalls the Annunciation by recreating the time and space of Nazareth in the imagination and experience of the one at prayer through a series of antiphons and recitations of the Ave Maria prayed three times a day, at
- [What Sincerity Is and Is Not](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/schuon-sincerity) - Frithjof Schuon Both cynicism and hypocrisy are forms of pride: cynicism is the caricature of sincerity or frankness, whereas hypocrisy is the caricature of scrupulousness or self-discipline, or of virtue in general. Cynics believe that sincerity consists in exhibiting shortcomings and passions and that to hide them is to be a hypocrite; they do not
- [Smiths, Shamans, and Mystagogues](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/eliade-smiths-shamans) - Mircea Eliade Even now, when the armourer is getting ready to forge a kris, the workshop is decorated as though it were a kayon, i.e. a holy place; the offerings brought before the work starts are like those brought for the ceremony of circumcision or marriage. At Bali there are initiation rites for apprentice smiths
- [In Praise of Shadows](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/in-praise-of-shadows) - Jun’ichiro Tanizaki When we gaze upon the darkness that fills the space behind the tokonoma’s lintel, around the flower arrangement or under the shelves, even though we know it is nothing but shadow, we get the impression that it is in this space alone that we can be totally submerged in silence, as if gifted
- [On Arrogance and Humility](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/on-arrogance-and-humility) - Imam Birgivi Seven qualities are said to be causes of pride: education and knowledge; religious piety; the fame and nobility of one’s family and ancestors; physical attractiveness or physical strength; wealth; achievement; and the number of one’s admirers and followers. In reality, none of these qualities necessarily produces arrogance. On the contrary, they are positive
- [A Garland of Forgotten Goddesses](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/garland-of-goddesses) - Tales of the Feminine Divine from India and Beyond Introduction, by Michael Slouber Central to early Tantras is the power of mantras and vidyas (gendered masculine and feminine respectively). Tantric practitioners repeat these sacred utterances both to accomplish spiritual salvation and to gain worldly powers such as rainmaking or the attainment of godlike longevity and
- [The Theatre of Ecstasy](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-theatre-of-ecstasy) - Dominique Wohlschlag (translated by Deborah Bell), 2025. ISBN 978-1-908092-26-7 It is not because they are ignorant of his real sovereignty (aisvarya), which shields him from all danger, that they are prey to such anxiety, but only because they are supremely attached to his person do they feel this way, as their love for the avatar
- [Hermes Trismegistus: The Way of Wisdom](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/hermes-trismegistus-the-way-of-wisdom) - Algis Uzdavinys (translated by Ruta Rimkiene), 2025. ISBN 978-1-908092-25-0 Earthly ignorance can be eliminated on the spur of the moment if the student suddenly realizes his divine nature and fully accepts God; however, such enlightenment is very rare. Usually, the process of rebirth lasts a lifetime and takes place only after the death of the
- [Don’t Take Your Life Personally: Welcoming Everything](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/dont-take-your-life-personally-welcoming-everything) - Ajahn Sumedho Metta is more like unconditional love. It is this welcoming, a kind of generosity, an uncritical acceptance of the whole range of phenomena in whatever form it takes. As many of you know, we develop metta beginning with ourselves. The formula we use is something like: ‘May I abide in wellbeing. ’ So
- [Coomaraswamy on Art–Beauty–Eros](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/coomaraswamy-art-beauty-eros) - Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Art is a language, and will be a dead language if no change in it be permitted; if it is not to be a medium of expression of new ideas and new thoughts, it will lose relatively to the national life. But like the spoken language it can only change nobly, in
- [Deep Knowledge—Introduction](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/deep-knowledge-introduction) - Oludamini Ogunnaike Introduction to Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions To take the epistemologies of Tijani Sufism and Ifa seriously on their own terms means to be open to possibilities that may seem foreign, strange, or uncomfortable, such as the possibility of a “deep knowledge” that is
- [Imbibing the Universe: Methods of Ingesting the Five Sprouts](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/imbibing-the-universe-methods-of-ingesting-the-five-sprouts) - Gil Raz All masters of Dao and physicians know how to prepare medicines to heal the body but do not know that the crouching corpses are within the body. The medicines prepared by men are proved ineffective because of the three worms. The superior corpse enjoys treasures and valuables in the billions, the middle corpse
- [Mortuary Rites for Inanimate Objects: The Case of Hari Kuyo](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/kretschmer-mortuary-rites) - Angelika Kretschmer In Japan, rites of separation are performed not only for human beings and animals, but also for inanimate objects. In most cases, the term used for these rites is kuyo. This is the Japanese translation of the Sanskrit puja or pujana, which means “to bring offerings.” Click here to read the article. For
- [Eric Gill: Aphorisms](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/eric-gill-aphorisms) - Eric Gill There is no before or after in spiritual matters. There is only being and non-being. If a spirit is, it is and there is no temporal or spatial beginning or end of it. You cannot say that the mind began with the body and ends with it. You can only say that the
- [Coomaraswamy: the Buddha Image, Siva](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/coomaraswamy-the-buddha-image-siva) - Ananda K. Coomaraswamy The Hindus do not regard the religious, aesthetic, and scientific standpoints as necessarily conflicting, and in all their finest work, whether musical, literary, or plastic, those points of view, nowadays so sharply distinguished, are inseparably united. Click here to read the text. Originally published in The Wisdom of Ananda Coomaraswamy: Reflections on
- [Seals as Conceptual and Ritual Tools in Chinese Buddhism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/seals-as-conceptual-and-ritual-tools-in-chinese-buddhism) - Paul Copp Most famously, seals became guiding figures of practice in the Chan tradition—better known in the West by its Japanese name, Zen—in which received metaphors, such as “mind seal” (xinyin) and “seal of approval” (yinke), framed the ideal spiritual careers of monks, especially in their relationships with their teachers and with the traditional past.
- [The Role of Culture in Education](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-role-of-culture-in-education) - William Stoddart The spiritual life has been described as the “interiorization of the outward” (khalwa) and the “exteriorization of the inward” (jalwa). Education is an aspect of the latter process; the very etymology of the word (e-ducare, “to lead out”) is an indication of this. As a “leading-out”, education is a rendering explicit of the
- [Women of Sufism—Introduction](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/women-of-sufism-introduction) - Camille Adams Helminski Whether we choose celibacy or committed partnership, whether we are female or male, the same work remains of polishing the mirror of the heart, of being in remembrance moment by moment, breath by breath. Each moment, we reaffirm the inner marriage until there is no longer lover or Beloved but only Unity
- [The Logic of the Birds](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/logic-of-the-birds) - Oludamini Ogunnaike The traditional poet and poetry are “pontifical,” a brilliant bridge between heaven and earth, God and creation, ultimate and conventional reality, the universal and the particular, the objective and the subjective, while the secular or modern poet tends toward the “Promethean,” attempting to storm and eavesdrop at the gates of heaven. Click here
- [Ottoman Renaissance](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/ottoman-renaissance) - Faris Hajamaideen a chapter from the thesis Body, Soul, and Architecture: A Study of the Premodern Islamic and Western Traditions. Sinan also claims, rather confidently, that his mosques were a re-creation of Paradise, here on earth. In this manner Sinan joins the likes of Avicenna, al-Ghazali, and al-Suhrawardi, philosophers and sages who granted a preview
- [Requiem](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/requiem) - a poem by Martin Lings Could these, and these, and these be wrong, And these, and these? Could they be wrong, And ye be right, ye right alone, Sects that pray not for departed souls? Shalt thou, and thou, and thou the gates Enter of Paradise, only for being Not bad enough to burn in
- [The Way of Interreligious Dialogue: The Hong Kong Experience](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/interreligious-hong-kong) - Peter K.H. Lee Rarely do the religious representatives at a meeting take a vote; they prefer to reach a consensus of mind. When they have the occasion to make a public statement, it is a consensus of opinions. Now, this being the case, two questions arise: Is reaching a consensus the goal of interreligious dialogue?
- [The Concept of Nature in Malay Tradition](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/nature-in-malay-tradition) - The Perspective of Islamic Cosmology and Local Wisdom Choirun Niswah, Alya Khoirunnisah, Ratu Triana Ulya, Husnul Khotimah Islamic cosmology, which places God as the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, was translated into Nusantara’s natural symbols—such as the moon, the sea, and rice—that serve as spiritual and moral vehicles for humanity. This process was not
- [St John Cassian on Prayer](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/cassian-on-prayer) - St John Cassian Translated by A. M. Casiday The first thing to be investigated is what is meant by supplication, by prayer, by intercession and by thanksgiving. Next it must be asked whether these four kinds are to be attempted all at once by one who prays: that is, are they all to be linked
- [Traditional Religions of the Pacific – An Introduction](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/traditional-religions-of-the-pacific-an-introduction) - Tony Swain and Garry Trompf We are not to forget here the masters of navigation, or owners of canoes, or spiritual sponsors of deep-sea expeditions… During the Hiri journeys of Papuan Motu, when pot-laden lakatoi were sailed to the Gulf to exchange for sago, the most crucial man on board these sturdy vessels was a
- [Melodies from the Beyond: Australian Aboriginal Religion in Schuonian Perspective](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/melodies-from-the-beyond) - "MELODIES FROM THE BEYOND" Australian Aboriginal Religion in Schuonian Perspective * Harry Oldmeadow Published in P.Laude (ed), Frithjof Schuon, Paris: Connaissance des Religions (English translation here) "In all epochs and all countries there have been revelations, wisdoms, religions: tradition is a part of mankind, just as man is part of tradition." (Frithjof Schuon)1 Frithjof Schuon's oeuvre comprises a peerless explication of the sophia perennis which informs all integral traditions, including those of primordial origin. His writings, along with those of René Guénon and Ananda Coomaraswamy, have fulfilled a providential function by answering to certain spiritual necessities arising from the peculiar cyclic conditions of the time.2 Schuon's understanding of different spiritual universes and his ability to penetrate religious forms is of a more or miraculous order. Amongst his most poignant writings are those on the American Plains Indians, many of which were gathered together in The Feathered Sun (1990), accompanied by reproductions of Schuon's luminous paintings on Indian themes. The metaphysical and cosmological doctrines of the Indians, the symbolic language of their myths, rituals and art, the arcane practices of shamanism, and many other aspects of their religious life are elucidated with the clarity, profundity and beauty which characterise all of Schuon's work. His writings on the religious heritage of the Indians provide us with an exemplary account of a mythologically-based spiritual economy. What follows is an application of the principles so magisterially expounded by Schuon to an understanding of a particular spiritual heritage, that of the Australian Aborigines. Background • Parts of this essay previously appeared in The Religious Tradition of the Australian Aborigines, Colombo: Sri Lanka Institute of Traditional Studies, 1990, which was reproduced, with minor alterations, in Fragments of Infinity: Essays in Religion and Philosophy, ed. Arvind Sharma, Bridport: Prism, 1991. 1 Frithjof Schuon, In the Tracks of Buddhism, London: Allen & Unwin, 1965, p. 125. 2 See Harry Oldmeadow, "A Sage for the Times: The Role and Oeuvre of Frithjof Schuon", Sophia 4:2, 1998, pp. 56-77. 2 Since the arrival of the Europeans, late in the eighteenth century, Australia’s indigenous inhabitants have been the subject of feelings ranging from a sentimental romanticism to deep hostility and contempt. The Aborigine has been cast in various roles: the "Noble Savage"; a harmless and infantile figure of fun; an embodiment of all that is morally repugnant in man's nature; an anthropological relic of the Stone Age; a biological curio; a victim of a divine curse; a social misfit incapable of living a responsible and productive life. The stereotypes have changed under the pressure of new circumstances and the shifting ideological presuppositions of the observers but throughout them all runs the persistent European failure to understand Aboriginal culture, in particular that network of beliefs, values, attitudes, relationships and patterned behaviours which we can loosely assemble under the canopy of "Aboriginal religion". The factors which have shaped European attitudes are precisely those which have fuelled the ongoing cultural vandalism of modern, industrial societies against indigenous cultures across the globe. To name a few: ignorance about the culture in question; ideas about the cultural superiority of modern, industrial civilisation, often buttressed by evolutionism of both a biological and social kind; the claims of an aggressive Christian exclusivism, operating as an accomplice to European colonialism; the inadequacies of the conceptual apparatus brought to the study of "primitive" cultures. The attitude to Aboriginal religion of most European observers has been "a melancholy mixture of neglect, condescension and misunderstanding".3 From the outset there has been a tenacious, often wilful, refusal to acknowledge that the Aborigines had any religion at all. In 1798, for instance, an early colonist wrote: It has been asserted by an eminent divine, that no country has yet been discovered where some trace of religion was not to be found. From every observation and inquiry that I could make among these people, from the first to the last of my acquaintance with them, I can safely pronounce them an exception to this opinion. 4 The recognition that the Aborigines had a vibrant spiritual life and an ongoing tradition came slowly and was never more than partial. Such nineteenth-century scholarship as there was concerning Aboriginal religion often rested on rotten foundations, namely, those vague but potent Victorian prejudices and cultural valuations which assumed the biological and cultural superiority of the white man, the belief that British institutions 3 4 Max Charlesworth: Religion in Aboriginal Australia ed M. Charlesworth et al., St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1984, p. 1. David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, 1798, quoted in W.E.H. Stanner, "Religion, totemism and symbolism" in Religion in Aboriginal Australia, p. 138. Such a view is echoed in the words of an otherwise sympathetic missionary, writing in the mid-19th century: "The Aborigines of New Holland, in this part of the Colony, have no priesthood, no altar, no sacrifice, nor any religious service, strictly so-called; their superstitious observances can scarcely be designated as divine rites being only mysterious works of darkness, revellings and suchlike." L.E. Threlkeld, quoted in Religion in Aboriginal Australia, p. 2. 3 marked the apotheosis of civilisation, and the notion that the extinction of the indigenous peoples of Australia was not only inevitable but divinely appointed.5 Notions of cultural superiority had a long and sordid pedigree in Europe, refurbished by evolutionism in both its scientific and sociological guises. The global decline of the darker races was a theme which enjoyed widespread currency in the Victorian era. Thus a late 19th century writer: It seems a law of nature where two races whose stages of progression differ greatly are brought into contact, the inferior race is doomed to disappear...The process seems to be in accordance with a natural law which...is clearly beneficial to mankind at large by providing for the survival of the fittest. Human progress has all been achieved by the spread of the progressive race and the squeezing out of the inferior ones...It may be doubted that the Australian aborigine would ever have advanced much beyond the status of the neolithic races...we need not therefore lament his disappearance.6 A militant Christian evangelism helped to erode the early Romantic image of the Noble Savage which had been derived, in large part, from the writings of Rousseau. (We should note in passing Schuon's remark that although the Noble Savage motif was no doubt largely sentimental, it was not drawn entirely "out of thin air".7) With widespread missionizing activity in Australia and the Pacific came a reaction against romantic primitivism: to churchmen of evangelical persuasion it was less than proper that "pagan savages" should be idealized as either noble or innocent.8 The theme of the Aborigines' moral abasement was in vogue by mid-century and all manner of pseudo-Biblical rationales were invoked to legitimate racialist and self-interested prejudices. The story of how the whites made the Aborigines exiles in their own land is, to say the least, a dismal one. The introduction of European diseases such as tuberculosis, influenza and syphilis, the appropriation of Aboriginal hunting grounds, the spreading of malign influences such as alcohol and gunpowder, the sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women, brutal physical violence escalating into a program of genocidal extermination in parts of the continent,9 institutionalized racial discrimination ranging from a well- 5 6 7 8 9 See the historical survey of European attitudes in Tony Swain, Interpreting Aboriginal Religion, Adelaide: Australian Association for the Study of Religion, 1985. The Age January 11th, 1889, quoted in Henry Reynolds (ed), Dispossession: Black Australians and White Invaders, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, p. 9. Frithjof Schuon, The Feathered Sun: Plains Indians in Art and Philosophy, Bloomington: World Wisdom Books, 1990, p. 77. The role of Christian missionaries and their impact on Aboriginal culture is an extremely complex one which has been vastly oversimplified by apologists on both sides of the fence. It would certainly be misleading to suggest that the role of the missionaries was entirely destructive. In some areas the missionaries were instrumental in providing a refuge in which Aboriginal people were able to survive physically and in which at least some remnants of traditional culture were preserved. Nonetheless, a good deal of evil was perpetrated in the name of Christianity. For a balanced discussion of this issue see Monica Furlong, The Flight of the Kingfisher, London, Harper Collins, 1996, esp. Ch 4. As late as 1902 white commentators were still justifying the deliberate killing of Aborigines in terms such as these: "The substitution of more than a million of industrious and peaceful people for a roaming, fighting contingent of six thousand cannot be said to be dearly purchased even at the cost of the violent deaths of a fraction of the most aggressive among them." H.A. Turner, History of the Colony 4 intentioned paternalism to programs of vicious repression, the legal fiction of terra nullius, and governmental policies of "assimilation" and "integration" all played a significant role in this tragic story.10 More crucial perhaps than any of these depradations has been the desecration of sacred sites without which Aboriginal religious life cannot survive. Recent anthropologists have certainly abandoned many of the cruder racist assumptions of their predecessors but all too often have succeeded only in replacing Victorian prejudices with those more characteristic of our own age whilst still retaining a childish faith in the capacity of a rationalistic and materialistic pseudo-science to grasp the mysteries of a complex spiritual tradition. Nothing more dramatically betokens the failure of Durkheimian anthropology than its continuing insistence that Aboriginal "religion" is, essentially, a system for legitimizing certain social functions and relationships. Not for nothing has Mircea Eliade written of the "religious illiteracy" of so many scholars of so-called "primitive" religious traditions.11 Whilst intellectual fashions amongst ethnologists and anthropologists have changed over the last two hundred years the one constant factor has been an intransigent reductionism which refuses to treat Aboriginal religion in its own terms or, indeed, in terms appropriate to any religious tradition. The theories of Freud, Durkheim and Levy-Bruhl, for instance, are all variations on the reductionist theme.12 Furthermore, as Whitall Perry once observed, "...the scientific pursuit of religion puts the saddle on the wrong horse, since it is the domain of religion to evaluate science, and not vice versa."13 Nothing so characterizes the mentality of modernism as the naive belief that the greater can be contained in the lesser, which is precisely the impossibility attempted when a profane scholarship, immune to anything of a spiritual order, tries to force a living spiritual tradition into the sterile categories of a quasi-scientific reductionism—no matter whether the reductionism in question be Durkheimian, Freudian, or Marxist! In the words of W.E.H. Stanner, It is preposterous that something like a century of study, because of rationalism, positivism and materialism, should have produced two options: that Aboriginal religion is either (to follow Durkheim) what someone called "the mirage of society" or (to follow Freud) the neurosis of society. 14 of Victoria Vol 1, London, 1902, p.239, quoted in Dispossession: Black Australians and White Invaders, p. 9. 10 As well as the work by Reynolds already cited see Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, Ringwood: Penguin, 1982, and C.D. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, Ringwood: Penguin, 1972. 11 Mircea Eliade, Australian Religions, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971, pp. xiii-xiv. 12 See E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965, and Mircea Eliade, Australian Religions , p. xvii. 13 Whitall Perry, Review of Ninian Smart's The Phenomena of Religion in Studies in Comparative Religion 7:2, 1973, p. 127. 14 W. E. H. Stanner, "Religion, totemism and symbolism", in Religion in Aboriginal Australia, p. 155. One must, in fairness, concede that anthropology has produced some imaginative, sensitive and 5 Such a situation should alert us to the dangers and impostures of modernism in its many different "scholarly" guises. Furthermore, from a religious viewpoint, we cannot too often recall Schuon's reminder that, "it is the spiritual, not the temporal, which culturally, socially and politically is the criterion of all other values."15 Aboriginal Culture In terms of its socio-economic organisation Aboriginal culture can be described, over most of the continent, as a hunter-gatherer society in which tribal members were highly mobile within clearly understood geographical boundaries, and in which the social dynamics were governed by complex kinship and totemic systems, and by principles of reciprocity and exchange. The web of beliefs and practices, which might loosely be labelled "religious", is best described as mythologically-based and embedded in a ritual- ceremonial complex centering on a sacramental relationship with the land itself.16 Aboriginal religion can also be described as "primal" which is to say that it is prehistoric in origin, non-literate, tribal, and one in which the distinction between "religion" and "culture" at large has no meaning.17 The qualities which Hilton Deakin has identified as characteristic of primal cultures apply specifically to Aboriginal society: such cultures are ethnocentric, non-universal, non-missionizing; they are intimately related to the natural world by a perceived spiritual kinship; they emphasize the existence of supernatural powers which are accessible to the human world; and they experience the world as saturated with spiritual power.18 Schuon's words concerning the American Indians apply equally well to the Aborigines: The Indian is predisposed towards the suprasensible and strives to penetrate the hard wall of the sensible world, seeks openings where he can, and finds them chiefly in phenomena themselves, which indeed, in their contents, are nothing other than signposts to the suprasensible. Things are hard-frozen melodies from the Beyond.19 sympathetic scholars who have alerted us to the many misdemeanours of their predecessors and who have helped to foster a more respectful approach which tries to understand Aboriginal religion in its own terms. The late Professor Stanner, for instance, insisted that Aboriginal religion must be studied "as religion and not as the mirror of something else" and strenuously refuted the fallacy that "the social order is primary and in some sense causal, and the religious order secondary and in some sense consequential". (W.E.H. Stanner, On Aboriginal Religion, Oceania Monograph No 11, Sydney, 1963, quoted in Mircea Eliade, Australian Religions , pp. 196-197. See also W.E.H. Stanner, White Man Got No Dreaming, Essays 1938-1973, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979.) 15 Frithjof Schuon, The Transfiguration of Man, Bloomington: World Wisdom Books, 1995, p. 28. 16 If it be asked what is meant by the term "sacramental" one can hardly do better than the traditional Christian formulation that a sacrament is "an outer and visible sign of an inner and invisible grace". 17 See Max Charlesworth, Religion in Aboriginal Australia, pp. 13-14. 18 See Hilton Deakin, "Some thoughts on transcendence in tribal societies" in Ways of Transcendence, ed Edwin Dowdy, Adelaide: Australian Association for the Study of Religion, 1982, pp. 95-109. 19 Frithjof Schuon, The Feathered Sun, p. 154. 6 Such cultures are also governed by sacred mythic accounts which leave them indifferent to the linear and chronological conception of history as it is understood in the modern West.20 Of course, we here use "myth" not in its pejorative modern sense of a meaningless fabrication but rather in its perennial sense as a narrative account carrying metaphysical and spiritual messages. Recall Ananda Coomaraswamy words: The myth (he wrote) is the penultimate truth, of which all experience is the temporal reflection. The mythical narrative is of timeless and placeless validity, true nowhere and everywhere...Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words.21 The Aboriginal worldview is also underpinned by a "visionary geography" which constitutes an ordered and meaningful world and, indeed, which situates both the community and individual in relation to the whole cosmos.22 The Religious Heritage Let us turn to several highly significant and suggestive manifestations of the Aboriginal religious heritage: the central conception of the Dreaming; beliefs about transcendental powers and the soul; the metaphysics of their sacred geography; the role of the karadji, or "medicine man". The Dreaming is a "plurivocal term with a number of distinct though connected meanings", expressed variously as altjiranga, wongar, and bugari. First, it is a narrative mythical account of the foundation and shaping of the entire world by the ancestor heroes who are uncreated and eternal. Second, "the Dreaming" refers to the embodiment of the spiritual power of the ancestor heroes in the land in certain sites, and in species of fauna and flora, so that this power is available to people today. Indeed, one might say that for the Aboriginal his land is a kind of religious icon, since it both represents the power of the Dreamtime beings and also effects and transmits that power. Third, "the Dreaming" denotes the general way of life or "Law"—moral and social precepts, ritual and ceremonial practices, etc—based upon these mythical foundations. Fourth, "the Dreaming" may refer to the personal "way" or vocation that an individual Aboriginal might have by virtue of his membership of a clan, or by virtue of his spirit conception relating him to particular sites.23 The Dreaming is an ever-present reality, not only "a long-past period in a time when life filled the void. It is rather the ever-present, unseen, ground of being—of existence". As A.P. Elkin has also said, "The concept is not of a 'horizontal' line extending back chronologically through a series of pasts, but rather a 'vertical' line in which the past underlies and is within the present."24 The landscape as a whole, particular sites, objects, 20 Mircea Eliade, Australian Religions , pp. xvff. 21 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism, New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1995, p. 6. 22 On this general subject see Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959. (The phrase "visionary geography" is Henri Corbin's.) 23 Max Charlesworth, Religion in Aboriginal Australia, p. 10. 24 A.P. Elkin quoted in Max Charlesworth, Religion in Aboriginal Australia, p. 10. 7 myths, and rituals, and human groups and individuals are all inter-related within the Dreaming which is "... the most real and concrete and fundamental aspect of Aboriginal life and has nothing to do with the Western concept of dreaming as an imaginary, fantastic and illusory state of consciousness".25 All of the cardinal features of Aboriginal society are derived from the Dreaming: The most momentous communication is the plan of life itself, the all-encompassing scope of which is shown in the shapes of the landscape, the events narrated in myth, the acts performed in rites, the codes observed in conduct, and the habits and characteristics of other forms of life.26 We find here a feature characteristic of all religions: the notion of a Revelation of supra- human origins which lays down the "will of heaven", and which invites but does not compel conformity to its dictates. As a recent anthropologist has noted, The way in which the plan was "passed on" to humans as the powers withdrew above or below the earth is left obscure... but at least it is certain that men are not constrained to fidelity by their nature. The Aborigines know that they can fall away from what their traditional culture requires...27 This is to say that they were no strangers to that fundamental freedom which constitutes the human estate, its dignity and its most terrible responsibility. The Dreaming constitutes a revealed mythology whilst the ongoing ritual and ceremonial life can be seen as the cord which joins Aboriginal society to its supernatural origins. Indeed, as Lord Northbourne observed, "Tradition, in the rightful sense of the word, is the chain that joins civilisation to Revelation."28 Or again, tradition might also usefully be thought of as "the mediator between time and eternity". Each of these definitions is perfectly apposite in the Aboriginal context. The transcendental, world-creative power is known under a variety of names (Baiame, Bunjil, Daramulan, Nurelli, Mangela) and is anthropomorphic, masculine, creative, sky- dwelling, ethical, and paternally related to all of humankind—perhaps best translated in English as the "All-Father". This Deity is immutable and eternal, existing before all things. Indeed, the belief in the divinity who created both man and the world and then ascended into heaven after bestowing on humankind the rudiments of culture, "is attested in many other archaic cultures".29 The same kind of transcendent, world-creative power is 25 Max Charlesworth, Religion in Aboriginal Australia, p. 11. See also Mircea Eliade, Australian Religions , pp. 1-3 26 Kenneth Maddock, "The World Creative Powers" in Max Charlesworth, Religion in Aboriginal Australia, pp. 86-87 27 ibid. 28 Lord Northbourne, Religion in the Modern World, London: J.M. Dent, 1963, p. 34. In this context we might also recall Marco Pallis's definition of tradition as "an effective communication of principles of more-than-human origin... through use of forms that will have arisen by applying those principles to contingent needs." Marco Pallis, The Way and the Mountain London: Peter Owen, 1960, p. 203. 29 Mircea Eliade, Australian Religions, p. 7. The early ethnologists, especially those of an evolutionist bent, were unable to grasp the possibility of any religious conception amongst the Aborigines which 8 portrayed in some tribes, particularly those of Northern Australia, as feminine—the "All- Mother".30 Between the supreme being and more parochial and so-called "totemic" spirits and powers are supernatural beings, "sky heroes", with whom much of the mythology is concerned. The Rainbow Serpent, representing the generative force, is one of the most widespread of such figures.31 As to the Aboriginal relationship with the natural world, what Joseph Epes Brown has said of the American Indians is also, in large measure, true of the Australian Aborigines: ...the world of nature was their temple, and within this sanctuary they showed great respect to every form, function and power. That the Indians held as sacred all the natural forms around them is not unique...But what is almost unique in the Indians' attitude is that their reverence for life and nature is central to their religion: each form in the world around them bears such a host of precise values and meanings that taken altogether they constitute what one would call their "doctrine".32 It is not too much to say that for the Aborigines, as for the Indians, not only is nature their temple but also their Scripture. In the case of the Aborigines we have already seen how a mythic and sacred geography is derived from the Dreaming itself. Indeed, "in the end, the land is no more than a bridge between [them] and the sacred realm of the Dreaming".33 Much of their sacred art was directed towards the preservation of the tribal knowledge of that mythic geography. It is also worth remembering a point frequently stressed by Eliade: for homo religiosus, who is also necessarily homo symbolicus, everything in nature is capable of revealing itself as a "cosmic sacrality", as a hierophany, in contrast to the profane outlook of modern man, an outlook which makes the universe "opaque, inert, mute", a swirling chaos of dead matter.34 The Aborigines' semi-nomadic lifestyle ensured that they remained immersed in the realm of nature. It is as well to remember that such a relationship, of itself, confers spiritual gifts. As Frithjof Schuon so eloquently put it, Virgin Nature is at one with holy poverty and also with spiritual childlikeness; she is an open book containing an inexhaustible teaching of truth and beauty. It is in the midst of his own artifices that man most easily becomes corrupted, it is they that make him might be comparable to the belief in a supreme, benevolent and ethical Deity such as was to be found in the great Occidental monotheisms; it ran counter to their assumptions about the intellectual and spiritual inferiority of the Aborigines. Nevertheless, as Eliade has remarked, "There is no doubt that the belief in such a celestial Supreme Being belongs among the most archaic and genuine traditions of the southeastern Aborigines." The ethnologists likewise had difficulty in coming to terms with Aboriginal notions about the pre-existent and eternal soul in which most tribes believed. Again, Eliade has emphasized that "the indestructibility of the human spirit seems to be a fundamental and pan-Australian conception." (p. 172) 30 Kenneth Maddock, "The World Creative Powers", pp. 88-92. 31 Mircea Eliade, Australian Religions , pp. 79ff. 32 Joseph Epes Brown, The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indians, New York: Crossroad, 1972, p. 37. 33 James Cowan, "The Dream Journey: Ritual Renewal among Australian Aborigines", Temenos 7, p.181 34 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, p. 12 and p. 178. 9 covetous and impious; close to virgin Nature, who knows neither agitation nor falsehood, he has the hope of remaining contemplative like Nature herself. 35 Elsewhere he reminds us that in our own time "the timeless message of Nature constitutes a spiritual viaticum of the first importance."36 Ritual life was largely given over to a re-entry into the illud tempus of the Dreaming, a time which is sacred because it [is] sanctified by the real presence and activity of the Supernatural Beings. But like all other species of "sacred time", although infinitely remote, it is not inaccessible. It can be reactualized through ritual. 37 Through ritual life the members of the tribe not only recuperated sacred time but by reiterating the paradigmatic acts of the supernatural powers they helped to regenerate life by "recreating the world".38 To neglect these awesome cosmic responsibilities would be to allow the world to regress into darkness and chaos.39 The spiritual integrity of the Aboriginal tradition was preserved by individuals variously called karadjis, "medicine men", "clever men", shamans, or, in Elkin's terms, "men of high degree". It was their role to cure the sick, defend the community against "black" magic, perform vital functions in the communal ritual life, especially in initiation rituals, and to serve as cultural and spiritual exemplars by way of their access to occult powers and their custody of the mythological and ceremonial heritage. These men were viaducts, so to speak, between the supernatural and mundane worlds.40 The initiation ceremonies (always involving a death and rebirth experience), the central role of visions and other ecstatic experiences, and the healing functions of the men of high degree are reminiscent of shamanic practices in Tibet, Siberia and amongst the Indians of both North and South America.41 Nevertheless, the Aboriginal tradition developed its own esoteric spiritual practices and metaphysical wisdom to which the medicine men conformed themselves and by which they were sanctified.42 35 Frithjof Schuon, The Feathered Sun, p. 41. 36 Frithjof Schuon, The Feathered Sun, p. 13. 37 Mircea Eliade, Australian Religions, p.43. 38 Mircea Eliade, Australian Religions, p.61. 39 Indeed here we have one of the keys to the demoralisation of those survivors who must live in a world made meaningless by their separation from the land and the consequent annihilation of their ritual life. They are no longer able to participate in the Dreamtime nor to fulfil those ritual obligations which gave life dignity and purpose. The substitutes and palliatives the modern white world offers are, of course, tawdry and trivial in comparison whether they be sinister, as in the case of alcohol, or comparatively benign and well-intentioned—a Western "education" for instance. 40 See Mircea Eliade, Australian Religions, pp.128ff and 156ff; A. P. Elkin, Aboriginal Men of High Degree St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1977; and James Cowan, The Aborigine Tradition, Shaftesbury: Element, 1992, Ch. 6. 41 See Mircea Eliade, Shamanism, Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Princeton: Bollingen Series, 1964, and Australian Religions, pp. 128-164, and A. P. Elkin, Aboriginal Men of High Degree, pp. 57-58, 60-64. 42 See James Cowan, Mysteries of the Dreaming: The Spiritual Life of Australian Aborigines, Bridport: Prism, 1989, Ch. 1. 10 The Marks of Tradition Aboriginal culture exhibited four emblems of all religious traditions. Firstly, a divine source. As we have seen, the origins of this tradition are primordial, stretching back into time immemorial. We cannot anchor its origins in historical time nor tie it to any place, person, event or book. Nonetheless, we can declare that this mythological-ritual complex was not and could not have been of merely human provenance though doubtless its spiritual economy providentially reflected the psychic receptivities of the Aboriginal peoples. As Schuon has affirmed, "Traditions appear out of the Infinite like flowers; they can no more be invented than the sacred art which is their witness and proof."43 Secondly the Aboriginal tradition enshrined a doctrine about the nature and "relationship" of the Absolute and the relative, the Real and the relatively or provisionally real. In the case of the Aborigines, as with the American Indians, the doctrines were not cast in the mould of a book or a collection of canonical writings, nor formulated in abstract dogmatic language but, rather, inhered in the relationship of the Aboriginal to the whole cosmos. As Schuon remarked, metaphysical doctrines do not of necessity find their expression only in verbal forms but can be expressed visually and ritually: ...the criterion of metaphysical truth or of its depth lies not in the complexity or difficulty of its expression, but in the quality and effectiveness of its symbolism, having regard to a particular capacity of understanding or style of thinking. Wisdom does not lie in any complication of words but in the profundity of the intention...44 The doctrine of the Aborigines is ingrained in their mythology, ritual life and sacred art, each of these dimensions of Aboriginal culture hinging, so to speak, on a sacramental relationship with the land itself. It is also worth pointing out that their sense of the sacred expresses itself most readily in spatial rather than temporal terms. A failure to understand this principle lies behind the evident incomprehension of the anthropologists in the face of the central conception of the Dreaming, a category of the sacred which escapes completely the grip of all profane and linear notions of time, not to say of "history". The third mark of any integral tradition, inseparable from the doctrine, is a spiritual method, a way which enables its practitioners to cleave to the Absolute, to conform their being to the demands of Eternity. Aboriginal spirituality was expressed primarily through rites and ceremonies. Indeed, one commentator has remarked that there can have been few cultures so dominated by ritual life.45 Contrary to anthropologists' claims about the social "functions" of these rituals the crucial purpose of ceremonial life was to put both the tribe 43 44 45 Frithjof Schuon, In the Tracks of Buddhism, p120. Frithjof Schuon, Understanding Islam, p.11. James Cowan, The Aborigine Tradition, p. 53. 11 and the individual into right relationship with the Dreaming and with the natural world, the material vestment in which the Eternal was clothed. Fourthly we find the formal embodiment of tradition in the sacred arts and sciences which determine the character of a civilisation and which give it its own spiritual "personality", if one might so express it. Here we need look no further than Aboriginal art: far from being the "childish scratchings" of "ignorant savages" this art constitutes a rich symbolic vocabulary, always rooted in the natural order but comprising the vehicle for the most complex metaphysical ideas and the most resonant spiritual messages. Here we find an art that conforms to Schuon's claim that, Traditional art derives from a creativity which combines heavenly inspiration with ethnic genius, and which does so in the manner of a science endowed with rules and not by way of individual improvisation: ars sine scientia nihil.46 Aboriginal art assumed many different forms: sand sculptures, rock wall art, body painting and decoration, ritual objects, and, in later times, bark paintings. Many of these incorporated pictorial designs and all were symbolic, not in the superficial modern sense whereby a symbol "stands in" for something else, more or less arbitrarily, but in the traditional sense which was re-articulated by Coleridge: A symbol is characterized...above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity of which it is representative.47 Traditional art is never arbitrary nor subjective but informed by a language which rests on the analogies between spiritual realities and transitory material phenomena which, by way of this relationship, carry qualitative symbolic significances. It is in this context that we must understand the indifference of Aboriginal art to the claims of a naturalistic aesthetic which seeks to "imitate" nature, to accurately reproduce the surfaces and appearances of the material world. As Schuon so often insisted, artistic naturalism proceeds from an exteriorizing and materialistic mentality which could not be normative in any traditional civilisation.48 Aboriginal art conveyed transcendental values and metaphysical truths to the social collectivity. By-passing the pitfalls of abstract and merely ratiocinative thought it was accessible to all mentalities and through its symbolism addressed the whole person rather than the mind only, thereby actualizing the teachings of tradition. The contrast with our own modern art could hardly be more dramatic, confronted as we so often are by an "art" 46 Frithjof Schuon, Esoterism as Principle and as Way, London: Perennial Books, 1981, p. 83. 47 Coleridge quoted in Adrian Snodgrass, Time, Architecture and Eternity: The Stellar and Temporal Symbolism of Traditional Buildings, Vol 1, New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, 1990, p. 44. 48 See Frithjof Schuon, "The Degrees of Art" in Esoterism as Principle and as Way, pp. 183-198; "Principles and Criteria of Art" in The Language of the Self, Ganesh, Madras, 1959, pp. 102-135; and "Aesthetics and Symbolism in Art and Nature" in Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, Perennial Books, London, 1959, pp. 24-49. 12 which is flagrantly, indeed boastfully anti-traditional, governed by a rampant individualism and an insatiable appetite for novelty, preoccupied with an aestheticism attuned to the fashions of the day, directed towards little more than the stimulation of the senses, and quite indifferent to any spiritual function, an art characterized by stylistic excesses veering from a pedantic naturalism on one side to the grotesqueries of an inhuman surrealism on the other. Aboriginal art which retains even some of its traditional character is like a mountain stream next to the cesspit of much modern art.49 The Lessons of Aboriginal Tradition The Aboriginal tradition enshrined a sense of proportion and an ordered scheme of values and priorities which gave precedence to the spiritual, which stamped everyday life with a sense of the imperishable, and which afforded humankind an ontological dignity all but impossible to recover in a world which is prepared to countenance talk of the human being as a "naked ape". In our own culture, swayed by the sentimental prejudices of the age and dedicated to the pursuit of a selfish and barbarous "progress", Aboriginal culture can stand as a reminder of those human possibilities on which we have so often turned our backs. It can remind us anew that we live, in the fullest sense, only in relation to the Absolute. In a culture tyrannized by time and imprisoned in historicism, the Aboriginal indifference to profane history can provide us with another perspective on our earthly existence. The messages implicit in Aboriginal culture can, of course, have no meaning for those whose materialistic worldview leaves them utterly obtuse to anything and everything of a spiritual order. As Eliade has remarked, many students of archaic religions ultimately "take refuge in a materialism or behaviourism impervious to every spiritual shock".50 Anyone not in the grip of prejudices of this kind cannot study Aboriginal religion without being continually reawakened to a sense of the sacred. If we are to ask what 49 It is true that in recent years Aboriginal art has been afforded a new respect and a rather fashionable "status" within both the Australian and the international art establishment. Unhappily this new attitude is often informed by altogether anti-traditional values whereby Aboriginal art is seen primarily in terms of aesthetically pleasing "craft" objects which are expressions of the material culture of the Aborigines. As one commentator has recently observed "Australian Aboriginal art remains the last great non- European cultural form available to the voracious appetite of the European art machine." (T. Smith, "Black Art: Its Genius Explained", The Independent Monthly September 1989, p.18.) A sacred art resonant with symbolic and spiritual messages is thus wrenched out of its ceremonial context, is culturally appropriated and eventually becomes an art commodity on which the art market fixes a monetary value. Again, a sad and familiar story in many parts of the globe. See Joseph Epes Brown, The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indians, p. 134. 50 M. Eliade, The Quest: Meaning and History in Religion, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969, p. 62. See also p. 36. 13 precisely constitutes the "sacred" we can do no better than turn again to Schuon. That is sacred, he writes, which in the first place is attached to the transcendent order, secondly possesses the character of absolute certainty, and thirdly, eludes the comprehension and power of investigation of the ordinary human mind...The sacred introduces a quality of the absolute into relativities and confers on perishable things a texture of eternity.51 To reanimate such a sense is one of the most invaluable services which cultures such as that of the Australian Aborigines might perform for the contemporary world. Without a sense of the sacred we are lost in the world of accidental contingencies. As Schuon again reminds us, When people talk about "civilisation" they generally attribute a qualitative meaning to the term, but really civilisation only represents a value provided it is supra-human in origin and implies for the civilised man a sense of the sacred...A sense of the sacred is fundamental for every civilisation because fundamental for man: the sacred—that which is immutable, inviolable and so infinitely majestic—is in the very substance of our spirit and of our existence. 52 It is not without some irony that it is the so-called "primitive", quite free from any complicity in the pathologies of modernity, who recalls us to this sense of the sacred. Aboriginal society was one in harmony with nature rather than one intent on "conquest" and plunder; the millennia during which the Aborigines lived alone on the continent left it in a more or less primordial state of "Edenic innocence", if one might so express it. As Schuon has remarked of the American Indians, if there is an element of ineluctable fatality in the disappearance of this paradise, this in no wise excuses the villainies to which the Aborigines have been subjected over the last two centuries.53 The Aborigines found in the world about them not only beauty and harmony but signs of divine intent to which men could and should conform themselves. This lies at the heart of their relationship to the land. One of the many lessons we can learn is that a properly- constituted ecological awareness can only be built on the foundations of what is ultimately a spiritual recognition of the holiness of the world around us: furthermore, this sacredness is conferred by the immaterial and spiritual realities which the world of nature reflects. At the same time we can say that Aboriginal religion was life-affirming in the most down-to-earth fashion, or, to put it another way, for the Aboriginal outlook the sacred was always materially incarnated in the realm of nature. 51 F. Schuon, Understanding Islam, London: Allen & Unwin, 1976, p. 48. 52 ibid., p.33. Elsewhere Schuon writes, "It is one of the most pernicious of errors to believe, firstly, that the human collectivity as such represents an unconditional or absolute value, and secondly that the well- being of this collectivity represents any such value...". Light on the Ancient Worlds, London: Perennial Books, 1965, p. 443. 53 See Frithjof Schuon, The Feathered Sun, pp. 41-43. 14 No amount of fashionable concern about the evils of pollution, no amount of "socially responsible" science, nor of the idolisation of "Nature" can in any way substitute for the spiritual intuition which lies at the heart of many primal cultures. For modern man, It is not a matter of projecting a supersaturated and disillusioned individualism into a desecrated Nature—this would be a worldliness like any other—but, on the contrary, of rediscovering in Nature, on the basis of the traditional outlook, the divine substance which is inherent in it; in other words, to "see God everywhere..."54 Of course, the sacredness of the world is necessarily inaccessible to a view which sees the planet as nothing more than a configuration of physical properties and energies, and "knowledge" as a quantitative accumulation of data about these material phenomena. The symbolist outlook, exemplified by the Aborigines, eludes the grasp of "Single Vision" in absolute fashion.55 Aboriginal man also offers us an exemplum of spiritual responsibility and authenticity. As Mircea Eliade has observed ..it would be wrong to believe that the religious man of primitive and archaic societies refuses to assume the responsibility for a genuine existence. On the contrary...he courageously assumes immense responsibilities—for example, that of collaborating in the creation of the cosmos, or of creating his own world, or of ensuring the life of plants and animals, and so on. But it is a different kind of responsibility from those that, to us moderns, appear to be the only genuine and valid responsibilities. It is a responsibility on the cosmic plane, in contradistinction to the moral, social or historical responsibilities that are alone regarded as valid in modern civilisations. From the point of view of profane existence, man feels no responsibility except to himself and to society...56 In his magisterial study of the crisis of modern civilisation, The Reign of Quantity, René Guénon refers to ...the darkest enigmas of the modern world, enigmas which the world itself denies because it is incapable of perceiving them although it carries them within itself, and because this denial is an indispensable condition for the maintenance of the special mentality whereby it exists.57 Those enigmas can only be unravelled by recourse to the wisdom which existed within the cadre of all integral traditions, including that of Australia's indigenous people. As Schuon reminds us, no people anywhere has been bereft of a religious tradition animated by spiritual insights and values. It is only we moderns who have invented a godless and spiritless world, a desacralized universe. The ultimately important lessons of any traditional culture do not invite any kind of "imitation", which would be quite fruitless, but a return to the sources of the perennial wisdom which can always be found within our own religious tradition if only we have the will to look. 54 Frithjof Schuon, The Feathered Sun, p. 13. 55 See Frithjof Schuon, "The Symbolist Mind" in The Feathered Sun, pp. 3-13. "Single Vision"—William Blake's characterisation of the scientistic mentality. 56 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane , p. 93. 57 René Guénon, The Reign of Quantity , Penguin, 1972, p. 11. 15 *** Suggested reading (a) Background Richard Broome E.E. Evans-Pritchard Henry Reynolds Henry Reynolds (ed) (b) Aboriginal Religion Max Charlesworth et al. James Cowan _______ Hilton Deakin Mircea Eliade ______ ______ A.P. Elkin Monica Furlong W.E.H. Stanner Tony Swain _______ (c) on Tradition Joseph Epes Brown A. K. Coomaraswamy René Guénon ______ Seyyed Hossein Nasr Lord Northbourne Kenneth Oldmeadow Marco Pallis Frithjof Schuon ______ _____ ______ Aboriginal Australia Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1982. Theories of Primitive Religion Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. The Other Side of the Frontier Ringwood: Penguin, 1982. Dispossession: Black Australians and White Invaders Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989. Religion in Aboriginal Australia St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1986. Mysteries of the Dreaming Bridport: Prism, 1989. The Aborigine Tradition Shaftesbury: Element, 1992. "Some thoughts on transcendence in tribal societies" in Ways of Transcendence ed Edwin Dowdy, Adelaide: Australian Association for the Study of Religion, 1982. Australian Religions Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971. The Sacred and the Profane New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy Princeton: Bollingen Series, 1964. Aboriginal Men of High Degree St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1977. The Flight of the Kingfisher: A Journey among the Kukatja Aborigines London: Harper Collins, 1996. White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays 1938-1973 Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979. Interpreting Aboriginal Religion Adelaide: Australian Association for the Study of Religion, 1985. A place for strangers: towards a history of Australian Aboriginal being Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indians New York: Crossroad, 1972. Selected Papers, Vol.1: Traditional Art and Symbolism and Vol. 2: Metaphysics, ed. Roger Lipsey, Princeton: Bollingen Series, 1977. The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1972. Fundamental Symbols Cambridge: Quinta Essentia, 1995. Knowledge and the Sacred New York: Crossroad, 1981. Religion in the Modern World J.M. Dent, London, 1963 (Perennial reprint). Traditionalism: religion in the light of the perennial philosophy Colombo: Sri Lanka Institute of Traditional Studies (forthcoming). The Way and the Mountain London: Peter Owen, 1960. The Transfiguration of Man Bloomington: World Wisdom Books, 1995. The Feathered Sun: Plains Indians in Art and Philosophy Bloomington: World Wisdom Books, 1990. Esoterism as Principle and as Way, London: Perennial Books, 1981. Understanding Islam London: Allen & Unwin, 1976. 16 ______ ______ ______ ______ Huston Smith Spiritual Facts and Human Perspectives London: Perennial Books, 1969. In the Tracks of Buddhism London: Allen & Unwin, 1968. Light on the Ancient Worlds London: Perennial Books, 1965. Language of the Self Madras: Ganesh, 1959. Forgotten Truth: The Primordial Tradition New York: Harper & Row, 1977. 17
- [Journey into God (excerpts)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/journey-into-god-excerpts) - Delia Smith While there is still a widespread belief that there is some knack to prayer, some secret method that brings results, it is always going to be difficult to grasp that our role in prayer is profoundly passive. “But when you pray” Jesus said, “go to your private room and, when you have shut
- [Guénon and Burckhardt on Modern Psychology](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/guenon-burckhardt-psychoanalysis) - René Guénon and Titus Burckhardt There has been occasion elsewhere to call attention to the initiatic symbolism of a “navigation” across the ocean (representing the psychic domain), which must be crossed while avoiding all its dangers in order to reach the goal; but what is to be said of someone who flings himself into the
- [Yunus Emre’s Grammar of the Self](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/yunus-emres-grammar-of-the-self) - Francesco Conte In one instance he becomes a rebel, and God takes away his mind But reaching another, he has asceticism and faith as fellow travelers. In one instant he contemplates his sins and goes straight to Hell. In another, he sees the mercy of the Truth and becomes worthy of Paradise. Click here to
- [Nature and Language of Alchemy](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/nature-and-language-of-alchemy) - Titus Burckhardt a chapter from his book “Copper is restless until it becomes gold”, said Meister Eckhart, referring in reality to the soul, which longs for its own eternal being… The alchemical symbols of perfection refer to the spiritual mastery of the human state, to the return to the centre or mean, to what the
- [Titus Burckhardt: Sufism Between East and West](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/titus-burckhardt-sufism-between-east-and-west) - Titus Burckhardt Tayyeb Chouiref Some English excerpts of the French edition by Editions Tasnim, Titus Burckhardt: Le soufisme entre orient et occident. The two men of the same generation exchanged anecdotes on Sufi masters of their youth and wise evocations on the beauties and virtues of Shadhilite brotherhoods as well as the methodical invocation of
- [The Ladder of Prayer](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-ladder-of-prayer) - Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony Like Isaac of Nineveh Hazzaya perceived prayer as a ladder, ‘which takes you up to the holy height’, and asserted that what he had in mind is not only prayer of the body, but that of the body and the soul. As man is composed of two parts, he elucidated, the body and
- [Mysticism Versus Philosophy in Earlier Islamic History](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/chittick-mysticism-vs-philosophy) - William C. Chittick Certainly the Muslim mystics and philosophers sometimes display a certain mutual opposition and antagonism, but never does their relationship even approach incompatibility. The debates and discussions between the two schools are concerned mainly with the limitations and shortcomings of their respective methods of acquiring knowledge… In general, the later we move in
- [The Way of Hermes](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-way-of-hermes) - Algis Uzdavinys an excerpt from The Way of Hermes, 2025. Hermetic books show to the soul the way of theurgic liberation. As a means of spiritual ascension, theurgy itself is a part of the esoteric Egyptian, Chaldean and Hellenic heritage. However, Damascius proposes a theory that theurgy originates strictly in Egypt. Hermeticists themselves often compared
- [Civilization, Progress, Science](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/guenon-progress-science) - René Guénon Two chapters from East & West, transl. by Martin Lings. The civilization of the modern West appears in history as a veritable anomaly. Among all those which are known to us more or less completely, this civilization is the only one that has developed along purely material lines. Click here to read. and
- [The Origin and Formation of Korean Shamanism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/korean-shamanistic) - Jun Young Lee Dan Gun could be considered to be the great shaman through whom an intimate relationship between Heavenly Spirit and earthly life was made possible. Since he was capable of communion with the Heavenly Spirit, he as the one who initiated worship of the Heavenly King… Dan Gun worshipped and prayed to the
- [The Divine Play of Chinnamasta](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/play-chinnamasta) - Elisabeth Anne Benard According to Indian cosmology we are in the age of decline, the Kaliyuga, wherein a person’s life-span is limited to a hundred years or so. Therefore many spiritual practices which require a long-term commitment and perhaps costly rituals are no longer suited to this age of decline. The recitation of the namastotra
- [Address at al-Azhar al-Sharif, Cairo, by the Archbishop of Canterbury](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/williams-azhar) - Rowan Williams So when the Christian, the Muslim or the Jew sees his neighbour of an­other faith following the ways of this world instead of the peaceful will of God, he must remind his neighbour of the nature of the one God we look to, whose will cannot be changed and who will himself see
- [Nirukta = Hermeneia](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/etymology-hindu-nirukta) - Ananda K. Coomaraswamy It is by the enunciation of names that a “more than human power” not merely designates existing things correctly but endows them with their being, and the All-maker can do this because He is omniscient of the hidden or titanic names of things that are not yet in themselves; it is by
- [Canticle of the Creatures (Laudes Creaturarum)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/canticle-of-the-creatures-laudes-creaturarum) - Saint Francis of Assisi Isidro Pereira Lamelas “Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars; in heaven You formed them clear and precious and beautiful. Praised be You, my Lord, through Brother Wind, and through the air, cloudy and serene, and every kind of weather through which You give sustenance to Your
- [Of Detachment and Spiritual Courtesy](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/detachment-and-courtesy) - Of Detachment and Spiritual Courtesy by M. Ali Lakhani This essay was first published in Volume 5 (2000) of the journal, Sacred Web (www.sacredweb.com), and is reproduced here with the kind permission of Sacred Web Publishing. The saint is effectively the void made for the passage of God. Frithjof Schuon He who clings to the Void And neglects Compassion Does not reach the highest stage. But he who practises only Compassion Does not gain release from the toils of existence. He, however, who is strong in practice of both, Remains neither in Samsara nor in Nirvana. Saraha It is a curious fact of modern lives, particularly in urban societies, that people are increasingly hard-edged and jaded, burying their vulnerabilities deep within an exterior of toughness and resignation. Their detachment renders them capable of gazing vacantly at images of violence and depravity or of shrugging indifferently at news of war, famine or disaster. For them, in the words of Tennessee Williams, "happiness is insensitivity". This insensitivity - the detachment of modernity - is very different to the quality of detachment advocated by tradition as a virtue. It is not a detachment of compassion and serenity, rather a paradoxical amalgam of unconcern and craving. The detachment of tradition, by contrast, is grounded in humane compassion, not in insensitivity. The basis for this detachment is a view of reality as both transcendent (hence the distance of detachment) and immanent (hence the intimacy of compassion). The acceptance of transcendence necessarily imparts a recognition of our own indigence and contingency in relation to the Absolute, producing a sense of wonder and humility that are all but lacking in the modern outlook. At the same time, the acceptance of immanence imparts an awareness of the integrity of reality, producing a sense of its sacred inter-relatedness and an abiding compassion for all things that is the very antithesis of insensitivity. It is, from the traditional point of view, fundamentally erroneous either to lose sight of our essential connectedness or to attempt to locate it outside transcendence and the integrity of reality. This is a principal error of modernity. By this, it is not suggested that to live in the contemporary world is necessarily to deny transcendence - merely that the denial of transcendence is a defining feature of the modern ethos - an ethos that has been labeled by contemporary commentators variously as narcissistic and apathetic. This denial, where it exists, lies at the root of modern humanity’s conflation of compassion and passion, of joy and pleasure, of depth and intensity. And it is the cause of humankind’s abstraction of virtue into The Matheson Trust empty forms and gestures, and its relativization into privatized morality or self-indulgent excesses of sentimentality. It is not difficult to understand how the denial of transcendence can lead to the post-modern excesses of relativism, subjectivism and, ultimately, nihilism. However, a more insidious threat to humanity lies in the modern inversion of transcendence - through abstraction. It is the abstraction of transcendence that ultimately breeds apathy. It is interesting to note that the hesychasts used the original Greek word apatheia, not to mean what we now call "apathy", but to mean "detachment" in the traditional sense of an absence of egoism and distorting passion - that is, dispassion and the purity of the heart. This is the "void made for the passage of God". It is only in such virgin soil that the flower of compassion - of love that is not self- contained but out-pouring and engaged - can grow. Contrast the disengaged "love" of abstraction. It was the statement of a clearly modern sensibility that uttered Ivan Karamazov’s celebrated commentary on one of Jesus’ central teachings: The idea of loving one’s neighbor is possible only as an abstraction: it may be conceivable to love one’s fellow man at a distance, but it is almost never possible to love him at close quarters. How easy it is to love in the abstract! And how much more demanding it is to actualize the needs of love in the concrete context of our relationships and the exigencies of daily living! It is helpful to remember that in Christianity, the commandment to "love thy neighbor as thyself" is subordinate to "the first and great commandment": to "love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind." It is Principle that informs Process. It is the vertical relationship of man and God that gives meaning to all creaturely relationships on the horizontal plane. Humanity’s love for the creatures of God is therefore grounded in the transcendental affirmation of humanity’s love of God. This is not an abstract love, but a love that is animated, imbued with the presence of life. It is only by witnessing the spiritual basis of all creation that humanity can discover the criterion for the love of itself - not narcissistically but selflessly (i.e. loving the neighbor as oneself). It is helpful, perhaps, to recall, that, based on its etymology and in its traditional usage, the word "theoretical" (derived from the Greek theoria, suggesting "vision") does not signify an abstraction, as its modern usage implies, but rather imparts the sense of "presence" or an "envisioning" of reality. This is one of the reasons why traditional sages are often referred to as "seers". What distinguishes their perception from that of the common man is precisely their ability to "see" beyond the "veil" of metaphysical transparency - to perceive the transcendent dimension and its pervasive manifestation in all things. This is why, in Vedantic terms, ayam atma brahma ("The Atman is the Brahman") - in other words, immanence is, paradoxically, an aspect of transcendence. It is interesting to note how the modern usage of the word "theoretical" suggests a distancing - or abstraction - of reality, hence of God (or supra-formal, spiritual reality) and, a fortiori, of the self (the divine or spiritual imprint within each human being), devaluing these terms and reducing them to their peripheral meanings. Evidence of such a reduction is also apparent by contrasting the different outlooks of the traditional and modern worlds regarding the term "humanism". Following Jacques Maritain, one can distinguish between two forms of humanism: the traditional (l’humanisme integral), which is premised on spiritual reality (or God) as the center of human existence, and the modern, which views human beings as their own center and the center of all things. Traditional humanism, then, is a form of spiritual courtesy which is more than mere social or religious convention. In Islam, for example, the Arabic term for "humanism", adab, is usually translated as "courtesy". Adab signifies the manifestation of ihsan, that is to say, intrinsic beauty, projected in the sincere virtuous conduct (spiritual courtesy) of the individual, or in a culture and ethos of spiritual (or theocentric) humanism. It is an attitude of attention to the inner qualities which exist within all human beings as marks of their spiritual Origin. It is also an inner sensitivity to the divine image within each of us and a specific awareness of that spiritual Presence residing within each individual, no matter how faint or weak. By contrast, in the case of modern (or anthropocentric) humanism, the ignored human soul - because it perforce must demand order - produces merely the counterfeit of adab in the forms of societal norms of civility, privatized morality, and procedurally-regulated "values" or codes of behavior. These are not the transforming virtue of tradition "which wounds our nature as the plough wounds the soil" (Schuon), but mere - often conscienceless - pragmatism. The distancing or abstraction that marks the detachment (a better term might be dis- connectedness or apathy) of modernity is none other than our ontological distance from our spiritual Source - and therefore, in traditional metaphysics, also from our own humanity and our rightful place in the cosmos. It is this ontological distance that religion seeks to bridge, reconnecting us to our Center and Origin - as is evident from the etymology of the term "religion" (derived from the Latin root, ligare, signifying a binding). True adab, on the part of human beings, is a matter of orientation. In traditional societies, human beings are oriented - both in intellect and will - towards the Source of Illumination, that is to say, theocentrically. It is helpful to note that the Orient (from which the term "orientation" is derived) is the source of the physical light of the Sun - a felicitous metaphor for the discerning intellect. It is only by correctly orienting ourselves that we can begin to efface the darkness of our ignorance and lassitude and begin to reconnect with the Light that radiates in all beings. In the words of Niffari: "You will not come out from your veil except through my Light". The detachment of tradition, then, is the voiding of all that is human in order to merit the grace of reconnecting with our spiritual center - the Light that transcends metaphor. It is this Light of compassionate serenity that constitutes the core of our very being, radiating within us as true adab, genuine spiritual courtesy, and within humankind as the traditional humanism that can be our only salvation.
- [What is African Traditional Religion?](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/african-traditional-religion) - J. O. Awolalu The truth of the matter is that Africans hold the Supreme Being as a venerable majesty who has several servants (the divinities) under Him to carry out His desires. He is in a class by Himself. This is why it is not appropriate to describe the religion as polytheistic. Click here to
- [Sufi in the Garb of a Yogi: Visual and Literary Articulations of Sanctity](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/sufi-in-the-garb-of-a-yogi) - Murad Khan Mumtaz Sufis borrowed the garb of the yogi—both literally and metaphorically—because they identified with the ideals of the yogi. They inhabited the same environment, spoke the same language and in some cases even shared practices… Over time, the idea of the renunciate yogi became so deeply embedded in the Indo-Muslim fold that today,
- [Sword and Brush: Tao](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/sword-and-brush-tao) - Dave Lowry An excerpt from the book Sword and Brush: The Spirit of the Martial Arts. The shakuhachi flutist plays his instrument from his body center and perfects his breathing. The swordsman strikes from his center and the efficacy of his blow is assured by a proper attention to his own respiration. The goals differ,
- [Nature’s Web: The Gunas of Prakrti in the Bhagavad Gita and Yogasutra](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/slatoff-natures-web-gunas) - Zoë Slatoff In Tantra, the gunas are often represented as the three corners of a triangle or the three aspects of Om; one cannot exist without the others. The state beyond the gunas is often represented by a bindu or dot in the middle of the triangle. A still point at the centre, situated in
- [Litany of Loreto](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/litany-of-loreto) - The Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary or Litany of Loreto (Litaniae lauretanae) is a Marian Litany, the often sung recitation of Divine and Marian attributes. While in its current form it dates to the late 16th century, many of its elements can be found in devotional Christian hymns and prayers of Late Antiquity and
- [“Delivering the last blade of grass”: Aspects of the Bodhisattva Ideal in the Mahayana](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/delivering-the-last-blade) - "Delivering the last blade of grass" Page 1 The Matheson Trust "Delivering the last blade of grass": Aspects of the Bodhisattva Ideal in the Mahayana HARRY OLDMEADOW Published in Asian Philosophy, 7:3, November 1997, pp.181-194 _______________________________________________________________ Doers of what is hard are the Bodhisattvas, the great beings who have set out to win supreme enlightenment. They do not wish to attain their own private nirvana. On the contrary. They have surveyed the highly painful world of being, and yet, desirous to win supreme enlightenment, they do not tremble at birth and death. They have set out for the benefit of the world, for the ease of the world, out of pity for the world. They have resolved: 'We will become a shelter for the world, a refuge for the world, the world's place of rest, the final relief of the world, islands of the world, lights of the world, leaders of the world, the world's means of salvation. (Prajñaparamita Sutra) Introduction The unfolding of the Mahayana marked a decisive phase in the history of the Buddhist tradition. Against earlier forms of Buddhism the Mahayana represented a metaphysical shift from a radical pluralism to an absolutism anchored in the doctrine of sunyata; epistemologically, through Nagarjuna's Madhyamika, the Mahayana moved from a psychologically-oriented empiricism to a mode of dialectical criticism; ethically the centre of gravity shifted from the arhat ideal of private salvation to that of the Bodhisattva, one attuned to the universal deliverance of all beings "down to the last blade of grass". It has often been remarked that the two pre-eminent contributions of the Mahayana to the spiritual treasury of Buddhism are the metaphysic of sunyata and the Bodhisattva ideal. To these might be added the Mahayanist doctrine of the Trikaya, the Three Bodies of the Buddha who now appears as a cosmic and metacosmic figure. After some prefatory remarks about the emergence of the Bodhisattva ideal this article focuses on its significance within the spiritual economy of the Mahayana, and its relationship to the pivotal Mahayanist doctrines centering on karuna (compassion), prajña (wisdom) and sunyata (voidness). The latter part of the article takes up some subsidiary questions relating to the Bodhisattva's "status" viz the Buddha, the issue of "self-power" and "other-power", and the popular appeal of the Bodhisattva ideal. Although our knowledge of early Buddhism is somewhat sketchy there is some evidence to suggest that by about the second century AD the pre-Mahayanist tradition "Delivering the last blade of grass" Page 2 The Matheson Trust was affected by a kind of dogmatic constriction and possibly by certain pharisaic currents within the sangha. From the (later) Mahayanist perspective there had developed an exaggerated reliance on the Abhidharma (the systematic explication of the doctrines) and the Vinaya (the disciplinary rules of the monastic community), and an undue emphasis on the ideal of private salvation. Dr Har Dayal has herein located the source of the Bodhisattva ideal: They [the monks] became too self-centered and contemplative...The Bodhisattva doctrine was promulgated by some Buddhist leaders as a protest against this lack of true spiritual fervour and altruism among the monks of that period. [ i ] This suggests rather too narrow a view of the impulses behind the ideal. Leaving aside the exigencies of the historical period in which it emerged, it can be said that the blossoming of the Bodhisattva conception, in one form or another, was inevitable. Frithjof Schuon has elaborated the "spiritual logic", so to speak, which made it so: In considering the Bodhisattva ideal, account must be taken of the following fundamental situation: Buddhism unfolds itself in a sense between the empirical notions of suffering and cessation of suffering; the notion of compassion springs from this very fact and is an inevitable or necessary link in what might be called the spiritual mythology of the Buddhist tradition. The fact of suffering and the possibility of putting an end to it must needs imply compassion unless a man were living alone upon the earth. [ ii ] We are not here concerned with either the early Theravadin-Mahayanist disputations on the issues raised by the emergence of the Bodhisattva ideal except to say that some polemical excesses perhaps answered to certain necessities insofar as they were "defensive reflexes" to preserve or affirm the integrity of the spiritual outlook in question. Be that as it may, one is still exposed in the scholarly literature to certain prejudices and over-simplifications which discolour any overview of the Buddhist tradition. Edward Conze, for instance, is guilty of the charge when he makes a claim as imprudent and as astonishing as the following: The rationalist orthodoxy of Ceylon has a vision of Buddhism which is as truncated and impoverished as the fideism of Shinran, and it is no accident that they are both geographically located at the outer periphery of the Buddhist world. [ iii ] Such asseverations betoken a failure to grasp the principle that under the canopy of any great religious tradition there will inevitably emerge a variety of spiritual perspectives answering to different needs. In some of the literature on the Bodhisattva ideal one finds a good many wasted words on the "selfishness" of the arhat ideal in the Theravada - another polemical abuse. On such indiscretions nothing need to be added to Schuon's salutary remarks that"Delivering the last blade of grass" Page 3 The Matheson Trust ...if there is the Mahayana an element which calls for some caution from a metaphysical point of view it is not, of course, the vocation of the Bodhisattva as such but, what is quite different, the Bodhisattvic ideal in so far as this is polemically opposed to the "non-altruistic" spirituality of the pure contemplative, as if, firstly, all true spirituality do not necessarily include charity, and secondly, as if the consideration of some contingency or other could enter into competition with pure and total Knowledge. [ iv ] Finally, by way of prefatory remarks, it should be noted that the Bodhisattva conception is not exclusively Mahayanist. For all Buddhists the Buddha himself was a Bodhisattva before his complete enlightenment. The Theravadin perspective generally restricts itself to this understanding of the term although the Sarvastivadins had elaborated a fairly full-bodied ideal before the time of the Mahayana. [ v ] The decisive contribution of the Mahayana was to "unfold to its furthest limits all that was to be found in the ideal" [ vi ], to give it its richest and most resonant expression. The Bodhisattva Ideal and the Path to its Attainment There is no shortage of either traditional accounts or scholarly explications of the Bodhisattva ideal and of the path to be followed by its adherents. Let us state the matter briefly. The Bodhisattva is one who voluntarily renounces the right to enter nirvana, who, under certain inextinguishable vows, undergoes countless rebirths in the samsaric realm in order to devote his/her energies, in a spirit of boundless compassion, to the deliverance of all beings down to "the last blade of grass". The Bodhisattva is committed to the practice of the six paramitas (perfections), particularly the all-encompassing ideal of prajña (wisdom). The Bodhisattva advanced on the path becomes an exemplar of sacrificial heroism and moral idealism as well as an aspirant to complete enlightenment. The Bodhisattva path can be summarized this way. Firstly there is the awakening of the thought of enlightenment which matures into a decisive resolve to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. After making the Great Resolves, marked by the taking of many vows, the Bodhisattva (for such he/she now is, although still on the early part of the path) perfects the six paramitas and progresses through ten bhumis (levels or stages). A crucial transformation takes place at the seventh bhumi by which stage the Bodhisattva has fully penetrated the nature of sunyata and has thus perfected the paramita of wisdom. The Bodhisattva is now "eligible" for entry into nirvana which he/she has perpetually renounced. However, the Bodhisattva now takes on the nature and functions of a celestial or transcendent figure and assumes a dharmic body - the monomayakaya, a mind-made body of wonder-working powers whereby he/she can manifest anywhere, anytime. The Bodhisattva is now beyond the terrestrial limitations of time and space, and is free from all karmic determinations "Delivering the last blade of grass" Page 4 The Matheson Trust having now entered a realm of pure, effortless compassionate activity, of spiritual action undefiled by any of the contaminations of ignorance (dualistic notions, for instance). The Bodhisattva's compassionate wisdom (or, more strictly, wisdom-in-itscompassionate-aspect) is now a super-abundance and universal in its applications. On completion of the tenth and final bhumi the Bodhisattva becomes Tathagata, fully Perfect Being. [ vii ] The importance of the initial vows cannot be over-estimated. They take many different forms but are always variations on a theme, as it were. Here we shall note one such form which sounds the keynote of all the vows: I take upon myself...the deeds of all beings, even of those in the hells...I take their suffering upon me... I bear it, I do not draw back from it, I do not tremble at it, I do not lose heart...I must bear the burden of all beings, for I have vowed to save all things living, to bring them safe through the forest of birth, age, disease, death and rebirth. I think not of my own salvation, but strive to bestow on all beings the royalty of supreme wisdom. So I take upon myself all the sorrows of all beings...Truly I will not abandon them. For I have resolved to gain supreme wisdom for the sake of all that lives, to save the world. [ viii ] The similarity to the sacrificial ideal incarnated in Christ is striking. We can also discern a parallel with Christian doctrine in the idea of the transference of suffering and of merit. This was a bold doctrinal innovation within Buddhism, and was integral to the Mahayanist conception of both the Buddha and the Bodhisattva. Nevertheless one must be wary of attempts to explain the Bodhisattva ideal in terms of "borrowings" from Christianity. The differences are no less striking. We note, for instance, the emphasis in the Buddhist vow on the attainment of wisdom which assumes a secondary place in the Christian perspective, addressed as it is primarily to man's affective and volitional nature. The vows set before the Bodhisattva the goal for all time, and direct all spiritual development. Furthermore, and this point is fundamental in the Mahayana, Man becomes what he wills...Spiritual realisation is a growth from within, selfcreative and self-determining. It is not too much to say that the nature of the resolve determines the nature of the final attainment. [ ix ] Lama Anagarika Govinda articulates the same Mahayanist principle when he writes If...we take the view that consciousness is not a product of the world but that the world is a product of consciousness...it becomes obvious that we live in exactly the type of world we have created...and that the remedy cannot be an "escape" from the world but only a change of "mind". Such a change, however, can only take place if we know the innermost nature of this mind and its power. [ x ] It is, of course, a change of "mind", a transformation of consciousness, that the Bodhisattva envisages in the original vows. The vows are re-affirmed during the ninth "Delivering the last blade of grass" Page 5 The Matheson Trust bhumi by which time they are no longer statements of intent but pure spiritual acts with incalculable effects. [ xi ] The six paramitas to be actualized in the Bodhisattva are charity (dana), morality (sila), forbearance (ksanti), vigour (virya), concentration (samadhi), and wisdom (prajña). In some schools these six paramitas are linked with the first six bhumis, the correspondence first being postulated by Candrakirti in the Madhyamakavatara. [ xii ] However, the practice of the six paramitas is simultaneous, all of them being informed by the all-embracing ideals of karuna and prajña. Indeed, the first five paramitas cannot be separated from prajña of which they are secondary aspects, each destined to contribute in their own way to the attainment of liberating knowledge. During the early bhumis the Bodhisattva's energies must be dedicated in the first place to the realisation of sunyata without which the perfection of prajña is not possible. Recall the incident in the Life of Milarepa when the great Tibetan sage is asked by his disciples whether they should engage in an active life of good deeds. His reply: If there is not attachment to selfish aims, you can. But that is difficult. Those who are full of worldly desires can do nothing to help others. They do not even profit themselves. It is as if a man, carried away by a torrent, pretended to save others. Nobody can do anything for sentient beings without first attaining transcendent insight into Reality. Like the blind leading the blind, one would risk being carried away by desires. Because space is limitless and sentient beings innumerable, you will always have a chance to help others when you become capable of doing so. Until then, cultivate the aspiration toward Complete Enlightenment by loving others more than yourselves while practising the Dharma. [ xiii ] In considering the later stages of the Bodhisattva's spiritual trajectory we enter realms where any verbal articulation of the realities in question becomes problematical. Any formulation must be in the nature of a suggestive metaphor, a signpost fashioned out of the limited resources of human language. Much of the Mahayanist literature concerning this subject, especially in the Himalayan regions, resorts to a densely symbolic mythology and its accompanying iconography. [ xiv ] The attainment of insight into sunyata makes possible the compassionate mission of the Bodhisattva, unhindered by dualistic misconceptions. Once in the seventh bhumi, with the assumption of the monomayakaya, the Bodhisattva can appear in manifold guises, each one appropriate to the spiritual necessities of the case. Thus the Bodhisattva can appear in forms fierce and gruesome as well as benign and attractive - as we see in the resplendent and sometimes startling iconography of the Vajyarana. Before reaching the seventh level the Bodhisattva remains in the phenomenal realm and his compassionate acts partake of "strain and strenuosity", but now the Bodhisattva leaves behind all terrestrial and karmic constraints and enters the realm of "Delivering the last blade of grass" Page 6 The Matheson Trust spontaneous, effortless, and pure spiritual action. The Dasa-bhumika explains the transition to effortlessness thus: It is like a man in a dream who finds himself drowning in a river; he musters all his courage and is determined at all costs to get out of it. And because of these efforts and desperate contrivances he is awakened from the dream and when thus awakened he at once perceives that no further doings are needed now. So with the Bodhisattva... [ xv ] This does not mean that the Bodhisattva settles into quietistic inertia but rather that his/her being has been transformed into compassionate wisdom radiating through the universe. It might be compared to the Christian conception of God's love which is universal, non-discriminating, indifferent, making the sun to rise on the evil as well as the good, and sending rain on both the just and the unjust. [ xvi ] Murti speaks of the Bodhisattva being "actuated by motiveless altruism...his freedom is full and complete by itself; but he condescends to raise others to his level. This is a free phenomenalizing act of grace and compassion." [ xvii ] If we return to Schuon's claim that the Bodhisattva ideal is implicit in the Buddhist vision which turns on the two poles of suffering and deliverance, we can now, perhaps, see more clearly what is meant by this claim. Schuon elaborates the claim in writing that the Bodhisattva incarnates the element of compassion - the ontological link as it were between Pain and Felicity - just as the Buddha incarnates Felicity and just as ordinary beings incarnate suffering: he must be present in the cosmos as long as there is both a Samsara and a Nirvana, this presence of his being expressed by the statement that the Bodhisattva wishes to deliver "all beings". [ xviii ] The Bodhisattva Ideal and the Metaphysic of Sunyata The Bodhisattva enterprise is oriented towards enlightenment, as the etymology of the term itself makes clear: Prajña informs and inspires the entire spiritual discipline; every virtue and each act of concentration is dedicated to the gaining of insight into the real. The stress has shifted [viz earlier Buddhist practices] from the moral to the metaphysical axis...all the other paramitas are meant to purify the mind and make it fit to receive the intuition of the absolute. It is prajña that can make of each of them a paramita - a perfection. [ xix ] We have already noted, in the cautionary advice of Milarepa, the emphasis on prajña. Without the guidance of insight, would-be compassion is often no more than sentiment, all too easily conscripted by what Chögyam Trungpa has called "the bureaucracy of the ego" and turned, unwittingly, to destructive and futile ends."Delivering the last blade of grass" Page 7 The Matheson Trust In the Mahayanist perspective karuna (compassion) is inseparable from prajña - insight into sunyata which, for the moment, we can translate in conventional fashion as "emptiness" or "voidness". The relationship is stated by Milarepa in this characteristic formulation: If ye realize Voidness, Compassion will arise within your hearts; If ye lose all differentiation between yourself and others, fit to serve others ye will be... [ xx ] Karuna arises out of insight into prajña. Compassion, at least in its full amplitude, cannot precede prajña; it is a function of prajña. On this point the Mahayanists are unyielding. As Herbert Guenther has pointed out, karuna means not only compassion but also action. [ xxi ] This anticipates the point at issue here: karuna is the action attending an awareness of sunyata. However, even this formulation implies a dualism not to be found in the reality itself. Compassion, it might be said, is the dynamic aspect of knowledge or awareness and as such, is a criterion of its authenticity. To recast this in moral terms more characteristic of the Occidental religious traditions we can say that virtue is integral to wisdom. As Schuon has remarked, "a wisdom without virtue is in fact imposture and hypocrisy...". [ xxii ] At this juncture an interesting comparison with Christianity arises. Buddhism insists that karuna without prajña is a contradiction in terms, a chimera, the blind leading the blind. Christianity, with its more "bhaktic" orientation, alerts us, in the first place, to the illusoriness of a wisdom bereft of caritas - a "sounding brass" or a "tinkling cymbal". [ xxiii ] Ultimately, of course, the principle at stake is the same, but the different accents are illuminating. In the Mahayana karuna and prajña come to be seen not only as inseparable but as identical: reference to one or the other signifies the same reality when viewed from a particular angle. The fully-fledged Bodhisattva is simultaneously fully enlightened and boundlessly compassionate. The compassionate aspect of the Bodhisattvas is stressed not because they are in any sense deficient in wisdom but because their cosmic function is to highlight and to radiate this dimension of wisdom-awareness. Ultimately karuna is identified not only with prajña but with sunyata itself. This is so because the duality of knower and known must be transcended. Further, because the universe itself is of the nature of sunyata, karuna also comes to be identified with the universe itself. Heinrich Zimmer put it this way: Within the hearts of all creatures compassion is present as the sign of their potential Bodhisattvahood; for all things are sunyata, the void - and the pure reflex of the void...is compassion. Compassion, indeed, is the force that holds things in manifestation - just as it with-holds the Bodhisattva from nirvana. The whole universe, therefore, is karuna, compassion, which is also known as sunyata, the void. [ xxiv ]"Delivering the last blade of grass" Page 8 The Matheson Trust The same principle is approached from a different angle in this formulation: ...the Mahayana under its sapiential aspect aims at maintaining its solidarity with the heroic ideal of the Bodhisattva, while nonetheless referring back that ideal to a strictly metaphysical perspective. It first declares that compassion is a dimension of Knowledge, then it adds that one's neighbour (and one's self) is non-real...there is no one whom our charity could concern, nor is there a charity which could be "ours". [ xxv ] Now this, to say the least, is somewhat perplexing to the ratiocinative mind. There is no gainsaying the fact that, at least on the level of mundane experience and "common sense", we are here faced with several conundrums. What is the meaning of the Bodhisattva's mission in the face of sunyata? If all is "emptiness" is this much ado about nothing? Is the Bodhisattva's enterprise somewhat akin to the monkey trying to take hold of the moon in the water? [ xxvi ] What are to make of such characteristic claims as "Where an attitude in which sunyata and karuna are indivisible is developed, there is the message of the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha"? [ xxvii ] And then too, we must ask, in what sense should we understand the Bodhisattva's refusal to enter nirvana until all beings are saved? How be it that an enlightened being is not thereby "in" nirvana? And what of the well-known formulation that "Samsara is nirvana", and vice versa, or, similarly, that "Form is void, Void is form"? Such questions can only adequately be answered through an understanding of the term upaya, usually translated as "skilful means" but perhaps more adequately rendered as "provisional means which have a spiritually therapeutic effect" or, to use Schuon's more poetic term, "saving mirages". Buddhism is directed in the first place to our most urgent spiritual needs, the soteriological purpose everywhere informing and shaping the means of which the tradition avails itself. In other words, Buddhism, like all religious traditions, resorts to certain mythological and doctrinal "accommodations" which ...are objectively inadequate [ie. in the light of a pure metaphysic] but which are none the less logically appropriate to the religious axiom they serve and justified by their effectiveness pro domo as well as by their symbolic and indirect truth. [ xxviii ] Of course, Buddhism is not peculiar in dealing with "partial truths" in respect of its formal elements but the Madhyamika-based traditions have been conspicuously alert to the dangers of identifying Truth or Reality with any dogmatic or conceptual forms which can never be more than markers guiding the aspirant. Nagarjuna's whole dialectic (nearly two millennia before our own much vaunted post-modernists!) is directed towards demonstrating the inadequacy and self-contradiction of all mental and conceptual formulations. Indeed, the Mahayanists speak of Reality itself only in apparently negative terms reminiscent of the Upanisadic neti neti. Nevertheless, certain truths can be brought within the purview of the average mentality through "Delivering the last blade of grass" Page 9 The Matheson Trust "therapeutic errors". It is therefore important to make the necessary discriminations in considering myths and doctrines which might be situated on different levels and which may answer to varying spiritual needs and temperaments. With these considerations in mind let us return to the questions before us. Clearly any adequate understanding of the Bodhisattva ideal rests on an understanding of sunyata. Unhappily the conventional English translations - "emptiness", "voidness" - often carry negative implications and associations which can only blur our understanding of sunyata. We cannot here recapitulate the Nagarjunian dialectic nor explore the ramifications of the doctrine of sunyata. However, it is useful to note Guenther's remark that "openness" is at least as helpful a pointer as "emptiness". In similar vein, Lama Govinda stresses that an understanding of sunyata heightens our awareness of the "transparency" of phenomena. Sunyata, he writes, is not a negative property but a state of freedom from impediments and limitations, a state of spontaneous receptivity...sunyata is the emptiness of all conceptual designations and at the same time the recognition of a higher, incommensurable and indefinable reality which can only be experienced in the state of perfect enlightenment. [ xxix ] The penetration of sunyata allows the Bodhisattva to experience the phenomenal realm as it actually is and not under the illusory aspects it assumes when experienced in a state of ignorance. Understanding sunyata, the Bodhisattva does not repudiate the world of suffering beings as an utter non-reality; to do so would be to succumb to what the Mahayanists call uccheddadarsanam - ie. a kind of nihilism. As D.T. Suzuki has pointed out, That the world is like a mirage, that it is thus empty, does not mean that it is unreal in the sense that it has no reality whatsoever. But it means that its real nature cannot be understood by a mind that cannot rise above the dualism of "to be" (sat) and "not to be" (asat). [ xxx ] The Bodhisattva's karuna issues from the overcoming of this dualism. As one translation of the Lankavatara Sutra has it, The world transcends (the dualism of) birth and death, it is like the flower in the air; the wise are free from (the ideas of being and non-being); yet a great compassionate heart is awakened in them. [ xxxi ] The mission of the Bodhisattva, far from being "invalidated" by sunyata, actually derives from it. T.R.V. Murti has explicated this in commanding fashion, especially in the light of the sunyata-prajña-karuna-universe equation already discussed: Sunyata is prajña, intellectual intuition, and is identical with the Absolute. Karuna is the active principle of compassion that gives concrete expression to sunyata in phenomena. If the first is Transcendent and looks to the Absolute, the second is fully immanent and looks down towards phenomena. The first is the...universal reality of "Delivering the last blade of grass" Page 10 The Matheson Trust which no determinations can be predicated; it is beyond the duality of good and evil, love and hatred, virtue and vice; the second is goodness, love and pure act...the Bodhisattva...is thus an amphibious being with one foot in the Absolute and the other in phenomena. [ xxxii ] Prajña perceives the emptiness, openness and indivisibility of the Absolute while karuna sees the diversity of the phenomenal realm. But these aspects of awareness are inseparable: the Bodhisattva is the living embodiment, the "personification" of this truth. The Bodhisattva appreciates the lack of any self-existent reality in the phenomenal world and understands the impermanent and fugitive nature of all things within the world of time and space. Simultaneously the Bodhisattva takes account of the relative reality of manifested beings and thus sets out to eradicate evil on the samsaric plane and to help deliver all beings from the Round of Existence. In other words, the Bodhisattva experiences whatever measure of reality belongs to the phenomenal world while being immune to dualistic misconceptions and their karmic effects. "The Bodhisattva weeps with suffering beings and at the same time realizes that there is one who never weeps, being above sufferings, tribulations and contaminations." [ xxxiii ] Because of his identification with all beings the Bodhisattva suffers; because of his wisdom he experiences the blissful awareness of the full plenitude of the Void. [ xxxiv ] What of the Bodhisattva's "location" in samsara/nirvana? In the Mahayanist literature we can find different formulations of the Bodhisattva's "whereabouts": he remains in samsara; he is "on the brink" of nirvana; he is in nirvana because nirvana is samsara. Here we are in a realm not amenable to factual exactitude and will only succeed in tightening the "mental knots" if we approach these expressions in the either/or mode of rationalist, analytical and empiricist philosophy; rather, we need to understand the truths enshrined in these different formulations. The first expression, as well as signalling various truths which we have already discussed, suggests that enlightenment is possible within the samsaric realm: The condition of the gnostic Bodhisattva would be neither conceivable nor tolerable if it were not a matter of contemplating the Absolute in the heart and in the world at one and the same time. [ xxxv ] The second symbolizes the truth that time and eternity, phenomena and the Void, do not exist as independent opposites but are aspects of the one reality, all of the nature of sunyata. The Bodhisattva is a link or axis that joins the apparently separate realms of the phenomenal, the celestial and the metacosmic. (In this context the Bodhisattva conception is closely related to the doctrine of the Trikaya.) Thirdly, from the enlightened "point of view" the opposition between samsara and nirvana is seen to be illusory, all dualities having been transcended in the light of the supreme unitive "Delivering the last blade of grass" Page 11 The Matheson Trust knowledge. Thus there can be no question of the Bodhisattva being either "here" or "there". When the Prajñaparamita Sutra and other scriptures tell us that "Form is void and Void is form" this must be understood in the sense of what is before we project our conceptualisations and designations onto it. The formulation cannot be fully understood prior to the intuition of sunyata. Once the liberative knowledge has been attained then, and then only, will the duality of samsara and nirvana disappear. Thus the Lankavatara Sutra speaks in one and the same breath of the Bodhisattva both being and not being "in" nirvana: The Bodhisattvas, O Mahatmi, who rejoice in the bliss of the samadhi of cessation are well furnished with the original vows and the pitying heart, and realizing the import of the inextinguishable vows, do not enter nirvana. They are already in nirvana because their views are not at all beclouded by discrimination. [ xxxvi ] Many of these considerations are synthesized in a magisterial passage by Frithjof Schuon, one which can stand as a conclusion to this part of our inquiry: If the Bodhisattva is supposed to "refuse entry into Nirvana so long as a single blade of grass remains undelivered" this means two things: firstly (this is the cosmic viewpoint) it means that the function of the Bodhisattva coincides with what in Western language may be termed the permanent "angelic presence" in the world, a presence which only disappears with the world itself at the final reintegration, called "apokatastasis" in the language of Western gnosticism; secondly (this is the metaphysical viewpoint) it means that the Bodhisattva, realizing the "emptiness" of things, thereby realizes on the same showing the nirvanic quality of Samsara as such... expressed in the sentence "Form is void and Void is form." The Samsara which seems at first to be inexhaustible, so that the Bodhisattva's vow appears to have something excessive or even crazy about it, becomes "instantly" reduced - in the non-temporal instaneity of prajña - to universal Enlightenment (Sambodhi); on this plane, every antinomy is transcended and as it were consumed. "Delivering the last blade of grass" amounts, in this sense, to beholding it in its nirvanic essence or to apprehending the unreality of its non-deliverance. [ xxxvii ] The Bodhisattva and the Buddha(s) In keeping with its cosmic perspective, the Mahayana, unlike the Theravadin tradition, sees the Buddha as the embodiment of a spiritual principle, one who "acted out" his life for the benefit of all sentient beings still lost in the "forest of birth, disease, old age, death and rebirth", his own enlightenment, in the words of the Sadhamapundarika Sutra, having been attained "inconceivable thousands of millions of world ages" ago. [ xxxviii ] The Theravadins had recognized three ultimate spiritual possibilities: SelfBuddhas (Paccekebuddha), the perfected saint (arhat) and the Complete Perfect Buddha (Sammasambuddha). The arhat ideal occupied the pivotal position, it being "Delivering the last blade of grass" Page 12 The Matheson Trust the possibility open to the ordinary human being who was prepared to tread the path mapped by Sakyamuni. This ideal rested on an austere monastic asceticism. The Mahayana, on the other hand, established the Perfect Buddha as an ideal whose realisation was open to all and equated it with the aspirations of the Bodhisattva. It also elaborated a conception of a host of transcendent Buddhas and celestial BuddhaLands - Pure Lands or Paradises, of which Amitabha's Western Paradise has been, historically, the most important. The celestial Buddhas and Paradises, as well as the Bodhisattvic figures such as Avalokitesvara, Mañjusri, Vajrapani and Tara, have played a particularly important part in the iconography of the Tibeto-Himalayan branches of the Mahayana. The most significant Mahayanist distinction between the Buddha and the Bodhisattva is not determined by "degrees" of enlightenment but by function. That of the Bodhisattva is a dynamic and salvatory one implying a perpetual "descent" into samsara (thus recalling the Hindu conception of the avatar). From one point of view it might be said that "the Buddha represents the contemplative aspect and the Bodhisattva the dynamic aspect of nirvana", or that "the former is turned towards the Absolute and the latter towards contingency". [ xxxix ] As the Bodhisattva and the Buddha are of the same nature there is no rigid distinction between them but a subtle relationship which appears in different guises under different lights. It is said in the Lankavatara Sutra, for instance, that the Bodhisattvas are incapable of reaching their final goal without the "other-power" (adhisthana) of the Buddha, without his allpervading power. [ xl ] However, it is also sometimes said in the Mahayanist texts that it is by virtue of the compassion of the Bodhisattva that the Buddhas come into the world. In the Sadharmapundarika Sutra , for instance, we find this: "From the Buddhas arises only the disciples and the Pratyekabuddhas but from the Bodhisattva the perfect Buddha himself is born." [ xli ] Self-Power, Other-Power and the Bodhisattva The question of self-power and other-power has generated a good deal of reckless and polarizing polemic within nearly all of the major religious traditions. Buddhism is no exception. Edward Conze has remarked that the ineffable reality of salvation can be viewed from three distinct vantage points: (a) as the product of self-striving under the guidance of an infallible teacher, (b) as the work of an external and personified agent accepted in faith, and (c) as the doing of the Absolute itself. From a metaphysical point of view doubtless the third represents the least restricted outlook. However, the relative merits of these perspectives are not at issue here; rather we must consider this question in the context of our primary concern, the Mahayanist understanding of the Bodhisattva."Delivering the last blade of grass" Page 13 The Matheson Trust The Theravadins, by and large hold to the first of these views. Take this from an eminent contemporary Theravadin: ...man has the power to liberate himself from all bondage through his own personal effort and intelligence...If the Buddha is to be called a "saviour" at all, it is only in the sense that he discovered and showed the path to Liberation, Nirvana. But we must tread the path ourselves...according to the Buddha, man's emancipation depends on his own realization of the Truth, and not on the benevolent grace of a god or any external power... [ xlii ] In the Mahayana we find a less monolithic attitude. The Zen schools, in the main, also emphasize self-power (jiriki) rather than other-power (tariki) while the Jodo and Shin branches of Buddhism place overwhelming importance on both faith and grace. [ xliii ] Taken overall the Mahayana encompasses all the points of view posited above. The precise way in which the saving power of the Buddha(s) and Boddhisattvas is envisaged varies according to the prevailing spiritual climate and the proclivities of the peoples in question. However, the Bodhisattva conception can provide a meetingplace for the truths which underlie the different attitudes under discussion. Lama Govinda, by way of example, pays due respect to both the "other-power" of the Bodhisattva and the "self-power" of the aspirant which, so to speak, "collaborate": The help of a Bodhisattva is not something that comes from outside or is pressed upon those who are helped, but is the awakening of a force which dwells in the innermost nature of every being, a force which, awakened by the spiritual influence or example of a Bodhisattva, enables us to meet fearlessly every situation... [ xliv ] Before leaving this question we might profitably remind ourselves of a general point, one highly pertinent to the discussion at hand and best laid bare by further recourse to the writings of Frithjof Schuon, the most profound of contemporary exponents of the sophia perennis: All great spiritual experiences agree in this: there is no common measure between the means put into operation and the result. "With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible", says the Gospel. In fact, what separates man from divine Reality is the slightest of barriers: God is infinitely close to man, but man is infinitely far from God. This barrier, for man, is a mountain: man stands in front of a mountain which he must remove with his own hands. He digs away the earth, but in vain, the mountain remains; man however goes on digging, in the name of God. And the mountain vanishes. It was never there. [ xlv ] Despite its theistic vocabulary this has a certain Buddhist resonance and recalls the man drowning in the river. The multivalent spirituality of the Mahayana certainly takes full account of the spiritual possibilities latent in the principle. No doubt Buddhism as a whole is founded upon "self-power" but since "otherpower" is a spiritually efficacious possibility it was bound to appear somewhere within the orbit of the tradition. In the Tibeto-Himalayan area, where the Bodhisattva "Delivering the last blade of grass" Page 14 The Matheson Trust ideal is pre-eminent, we find a happy and judicious blend of the two elements. In the everyday life of the common people there was unquestionably a great deal of emphasis on the miraculous effects flowing from a faithful devotion to the Buddha and the Bodhisattvas. As Conze has observed, the Madhyamika dialectic and the doctrine of sunyata has exercised a potent appeal for Buddhists of a "jñanic" disposition. However, the popular appeal of the Mahayana is, in good measure, to be explained by the "spiritual magnetism" of the Bodhisattva ideal which could "stir the hearts of all" and provide "the basis for immediate action". [ xlvi ] Furthermore, the Bodhisattva ideal helped introduce into Buddhism a more explicitly religious element, particularly through "bhaktic" practices, as well as a cosmic perspective without which Buddhism might easily have degenerated into what Murti calls "an exalted moral naturalism". [ xlvii ] In the popular teachings much is made of the unlimited merits and "boundless treasury of virtues" (gunasambhava) of the Bodhisattvas. It is worth noting that the three principal virtues - Merit, Compassion, Wisdom - correspond analogically with the paths of karma-yoga, bhakti-yoga and jñana yoga in the Hindu tradition. [ xlviii ] The Bodhisattva ideal also provided fertile ground for the flowering of Buddhist mythology and iconography, particularly in the Vajyarana and in the Far East where the cult of Kuan-Yin remains pervasive to this day. [ xlix ] Conclusion The Bodhisattva ideal has been of incalculable importance in the Mahayana, although it has not everywhere received the same emphasis. It gathered together in a vivid, living ideal the principles of prajña and karuna and tied them firmly to the metaphysic of sunyata. The conception found its most luxuriant expression in the Vajyarana where it played an integrative role for many different aspects of Buddhist teaching and practice. On the popular level the Bodhisattva provided an exemplar of the spiritual life and a devotional focus. Cosmologically, the Bodhisattva was an axial figure running through terrestrial, celestial and transcendental realms. Metaphysically considered the Bodhisattva conception, rooted in the doctrine of sunyata, provided a resolution of dualistic conceptions of samsara and nirvana and provided a bridge between the Absolute and the relative. In its reconciliation of all these elements in the Bodhisattva Mahayana Buddhism finds one of its most characteristic and elevated expressions. Let us leave the final word with Saraha, reputedly the teacher of the Mahayana's greatest metaphysician, Nagarjuna: He who clings to the Void And neglects Compassion Does not reach the highest stage. But he who practises only Compassion Does not gain release from the toils of existence."Delivering the last blade of grass" Page 15 The Matheson Trust He, however, who is strong in the practice of both, Remains neither in Samsara nor in Nirvana. [ l ] **** Harry Oldmeadow, School of Arts and Education, La Trobe University Bendigo, PO Box 199, Bendigo, 3552, Australia. [ i] DAYAL, HAR (1970) The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhist Sanskrit Literature (New Delhi, Motilal Barnisidass, reprint; first published 1932), pp. 2-3. [ ii ] SCHUON, FRITHJOF (1968) In the Tracks of Buddhism (London, Allen & Unwin), p. 132. See also SUZUKI, D.T. (1973) Essays in Zen Buddhism, Third Series (London, Rider), p. 78. [ iii ] CONZE, EDWARD (1967) Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies (Oxford, Bruno Cassirer), p. 40. [ iv ] SCHUON, op. cit., p. 139. [ v ] See CONZE, EDWARD (1959) Buddhism: Its Essence and Development (New York, Harper & Row), pp. 125-126. [ vi ] SUZUKI, op.cit., p. 79. [ vii ] This adumbrated version of the ideal and the path is derived from several sources; it is an unexceptional account which follows the traditional sources. For a detailed discussion of the significance of the Tathagata, not canvassed in this article, see MURTI, T.R.V. (1980) The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (London, Allen & Unwin). For a detailed account of the ten bhumis see DUTT, N. (1976) Mahayana Buddhism (Calcutta, Firma KLM), Chapters 4 & 5. [ viii ] Taken from BASHAM, A.L. (1967) The Wonder that was India (London, Collins Fontana), pp. 277-278. For an extended version of the Bodhisattva's vows see SANTIDEVA (1979) A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life (Bodhisattvacharyavatara), trans. BATCHELOR, STEPHEN (Dharamsala, Library of Tibetan Works & Archives), pp. 29-34. [ ix ] MURTI, op. cit., pp. 266-267. [ x ] GOVINDA, ANAGARIKA (1969) Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism (London, Rider), p. 274. This passage might suggest the Yogacarin view of "mind-only" but as Lama Govinda makes clear in the same work, this is not the intention of the passage above. For a similar statement but one protected by the appropriate qualifications see GOVINDA, ANAGARIKA (1974) The Way of the White Clouds (London, Rider), p. 123. [ xi ] See CONZE (1967), op. cit., pp. 42-43."Delivering the last blade of grass" Page 16 The Matheson Trust [ xii ] See MURTI, op. cit., p. 269. [ xiii ] LHALUNGPA, LOBSANG, translator (1977) The Life of Milarepa (New York, E.P. Dutton), p.171. [ xiv ] For an illuminating disciussion of the often-misunderstood nature, in a traditional context, of both "symbol" and "myth", see essays on these subjects in RAINE, KATHLEEN (1985) Defending Ancient Springs (Cambridge, Golgonooza; first published 1967). [ xv ] Quoted in SUZUKI, op. cit., p. 225. See also SHURMANN, HANS W. (1973) Buddhism: An outline of its teaching and schools (London, Rider), pp. 112-113. [ xvi ] See ST. MATTHEW 5:45. [ xvii ] MURTI, op. cit., p. 263. [ xviii ] SCHUON, op. cit., p. 132. [ xix ] MURTI, op. cit., p. 267. [ xx ] This translation from EVANS-WENTZ, W., ed (1951) Tibet's Great Yogi Milarepa (London, Oxford University Press) trans. DAWA-SAMDUP, KAZI, p. 273. [ xxi ] GUENTHER, H.V. & TRUNGPA, CHÖGYAM (1975) The Dawn of Tantra (Berkeley, Shambala), p. 31. [ xxii ] SCHUON, FRITHJOF (1991) Roots of the Human Condition (Bloomington, World Wisdom Books), p. 86. [ xxiii ] 1 CORINTHIANS 12:1. [ xxiv ] ZIMMER, HEINRICH (1951) The Philosophies of India ed. CAMPBELL, JOSEPH (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul), p. 553. [ xxv ] SCHUON (1968), op. cit., p. 130. [ xxvi ] A traditional metaphor referred to, in this context, in SUZUKI, op.cit., p.215. [ xxvii ] Quoted in GUENTHER & TRUNGPA, op. cit., p. 32. [ xxviii ] SCHUON, FRITHJOF (1969) Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts (London, Perennial Books), p. 70. See also SCHUON, FRITHJOF (1976) Understanding Islam (London, Allen & Unwin), pp. 144ff. [ xxix ] GOVINDA, ANAGARIKA (1976) Creative Meditation and Multi-Level Consciousness (Wheaton, Quest), p. 11. On the "transparency" of sunyata see also p. 51. [ xxx ] SUZUKI, op.cit., p. 215. [ xxxi ] Sung translation, quoted by SUZUKI, D.T., op. cit., p. 215. [ xxxii ] MURTI, op. cit., p. 264. [ xxxiii ] SUZUKI, op. cit., pp. 229 & 216. [ xxxiv ] See PALLIS, MARCO (1960) The Way and the Mountain (London, Peter Owen), p. 182. See also Pallis's remarks in a footnote on the parallels with the doctrine of the Two Natures of Christ."Delivering the last blade of grass" Page 17 The Matheson Trust [ xxxv ] SCHUON (1968), op. cit., p. 136. [ xxxvi ] LANKAVATARA SUTRA, ed. SUZUKI, D.T. (1973) (Routledge & Kegan Paul), p. 184. [ xxxvii ] SCHUON (1968), op. cit., p. 156. [ xxxviii ] SADHARMAPUNDARIKA SUTRA (Lotus of the Good Law Sutra), cited in SHURMANN, op. cit., p. 99. [ xxxix ] SCHUON (1968), op. cit., p. 144. [ xl ] See SUZUKI, op. cit., pp. 202-205. [ xli ] See Tattvasangraha per ZIMMER, op. cit., pp. 552. For discussion of some recent scholarly debate about the relationship of the Boddhisattvas and Buddhas see WILLIAMS, PAUL (1989) Mahayana Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations (London, Routledge), pp. 204-214. [ xlii ] RAPOLA, WAHULA (1978) What the Buddha Taught (London, Gordon Fraser), pp. 1-2. [ xliii ] A great deal of ink has been spilt on the question of Buddhist attitudes to faith and grace. For a salutary corrective to overheated polemics on this subject see PALLIS, MARCO (1980) A Buddhist Spectrum (London, Allen & Unwin), pp. 52-71. [ xliv ] GOVINDA (1969), op. cit., p. 233. [ xlv ] SCHUON, FRITHJOF (1961) Stations of Wisdom (London, John Murray), p. 157. [ xlvi ] CONZE (1967), op. cit., p. 54. [ xlvii ] MURTI, op.cit., p. 263. On the place of the Bodhisattvas in devotional practices see WILLIAMS, op. cit., pp. 215-276. [ xlviii ] SCHUON (1968), op. cit., p. 135. See also ZIMMER, op. cit., p. 535. [ xlix ] See BLOFELD, JOHN (1977) Bodhisattva of Compassion: The Mystical Tradition of Kuan Yin (Boston, Shambala). [ l ] From SARAHA Treasury of Songs, quoted in PERRY, WHITALL (1971) A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom (London, Allen & Unwin), p. 607
- [Shimmering Reality: The Metaphysics of Relativity in Mystical Traditions](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/shimmering-reality) - It can be argued that what most clearly sets “mystical theology” apart from ordinary religious consciousness and rational 1 or apologetic theology is its treatment of the relationship between the Ultimate Reality and the non-ultimate. In fact mysticism tends to combine the strictest concept of the Absolute, one that points to transcending any polarity, duality and distinction, and a vision of relativity that both denies the reality of the world of manifestation, when considered independently from its Source, and affirms an essential continuity or unity between the Ultimate and that which is not in an ultimate sense. The Absolute is literally ab-solutum, which means that it is “unbound,” “detached” and “free.” Although most often understood as “complete” and “self- sufficient,” and therefore also “cause of itself,” the Absolute must also and consequently be approached in terms of its perfect freedom, which is itself a dimension of its transcendence vis-à-vis any “relationality.” In this connection “relationality” entails an aspect of “obligation” or “reciprocity” by virtue of the “relationships” and “relations” it involves. Therefore, our understanding of “absoluteness” as utter freedom immediately brings the central question of this inquiry to the fore by highlighting the apparent logical impossibility of positing concurrently the ontological reality of both the Absolute and “non-absolute realities” –including ourselves. In other words, is the Absolute conceivable side by side with the existence of a myriad of “non-absolute” realities given that such a mode of “co-being” or “co-existence” would perforce imply some sort of “relationality” between the former and the latter, and thereby run contrary to the notion of an ab-solutum? It is this question that we would like to ponder in this 1 Let us specify from the outset that “mystical theology” is not “irrational” even though it highlights the supra-rational source of spiritual knowledge and the limitations of reason: in fact any “mystical theology” makes use of reason when providing doctrinal and theoretical concepts. To be aware of the limitations of reason does not amount to a disqualification of its power and usefulness within the scope of its epistemological “jurisdiction.” Moreover what we call “rational theology,” even though it is by definition a rational discourse, depends on the supra-rational data of revelation for its development. 1 essay through a liminal survey of some of the most rigorous concepts of the Absolute provided by a cross-religious spectrum of teachings of “mystical theology,” or rather “mystical metaphysics.” We readily acknowledge that the term “mystical” is approximative, possibly even misleading and given to likely misunderstandings. We consider nonetheless the use of this term suitable as a distinct indication that we will be considering doctrines and teachings that are not understood by their proponents as mere conceptual descriptions of Reality, but are also intimately associated by them to ways of spiritual realization, thereby highlighting the vital coalescence of epistemology, ontology and soteriology. Within the manifold tradition of Hinduism the Advaitin or non-dual perspective of Shankara (788-820 AD) provides a fitting starting point for an analysis of the ontological status of relativity, or “other-than-the-Ultimate,” when characterizing M?y? --which has been variously translated as “veil,” “illusion,” “art,” “wonder” or “appearance”-- as “neither real, nor unreal ” 2 in his Vivekac?d?mani 3 or Crest Jewel of Discrimination. We will use these perplexing words as keys to argue that wisdom and mystical traditions, across religious boundaries, tend to assign an ambiguous ontological status to phenomenal realities as apprehended “outside” of the realm of the Ultimate Reality or Recognition. Furthermore, we propose to show that each of these traditions does emphasize one of the two aforesaid characterizations in its approach of the mystery of universal metaphysical relativity, or universal existence: neither “being” or real, nor “non-being” or unreal. 4 It bears specifying that the terms “is,” “real, “ and “being” are used alternatively in this essay 2 « San ?pi asan api ubhay?tmik? no bhinna api abhinn? api ubhay?tmik? no s?nga ?pi anahga hi ubhay?tmik? no maha ?dbhuta anirvacan?ya r?p? – If you ask of its form, it cannot be stated. It is beyond description. It is neither real nor non-real ; neither is it the mixture of the two. Is it separate from the ?tman ? It is neither separate, nor yet non-separate ; nor part of the ?tman, yet neither can you say it is not part. It is not the body. It is most wonderful and beyond all description. » Sri Sankar?c?rya, Viveka- c?d?mani, verses 109-111, translated by Sv?m? Tur?y?nanda, Sri Ramakrishna Math, Madras, 1991, 46-47. 3 The fact that the attribution of the Vivekac?d?mani to Shankara has been disputed by scholars is not directly relevant to our purpose since this text has been, and continues to be, a classical reference for the perspective of Advaita. 4 We need to acknowledge that Shankara adds a third negation to these two: M?y? is “neither real, nor unreal, nor both, ” or a mixture of two. In the limits of this essay we will only touch marginally and as it were incidentally upon this third negative characterization, although we do intend to approach this complex third exclusion more directly in a future essay. 2 without significant difference in meaning to imply ontological substantiality and permanence. The term “existence” will sometimes be understood in a similar sense, sometimes more technically with the specific nuance of the Latin exsistere, from ek- sistere which connotes manifestation as in “phenomenon” or a coming into being out of nothingness that is contingent upon a higher “existentiating” agency. In other words “being” and “real” or reality will point to ontological substance, and “existence” to phenomenal manifestation. We will also keep to the principle that such emphases do not amount to exclusive doctrinal propositions since “mystical theologies” should not be understood as philosophical systems rationally denoting realities, but rather as symbolic approaches by way of conceptual representations intended to open the mind to a spiritual, existential, “experiential” realization or assimilation of Reality. In other words, some teachings lay emphasis on the “not real” dimension of relativity, while others stress its being “not unreal,” and others still both its being “not real and not unreal;” but at any rate such conceptual characterizations can never be totally exclusive of their counterpart positions since they tend to suggest ontological aspects and epistemological points-of-views, being thereby akin to the Jain principle of Anek?ntav?da, or limitless plurality of perspectives.5 The need to consider these perspectives in a non-exclusive fashion stems from their implying a gap between their doctrinal formulations and the ontological and existential realities they denote. Dispelling Appearance. The first approach of metaphysical relativity consists in predicating it primarily as “not real.” Among all the expressions of this approach, two of the most powerfully suggestive are no doubt Shankara’s Advaita and N?g?rjuna’s Mahayanic M?dhyamaka. Two words of caution are in order before we move further: first, it bears stressing from the outset that these two doctrines are traditionally at odds on 5 « Anek?ntav?da may be translated as the „non-one-sided? or „many-sided doctrine?, or the „doctrine of many-sidedness? (...) Anek?ntav?da is an ontological doctrine. Its fundamental claim, as it eventually came to be understood by the tradition, is that all existent entities have infinite attributes. (...) The apparent contradictions that our perceptions of reality involve –continuity and change, emergence and perishing, permanence and flux, identity and difference – reflect the interdependent, relationally constituted nature of things. Reality is a synthesis of opposites.” Jeffery D. Long, Jainism: An Introduction, I.B. Tauris: London, New York, 2009, 141. 3 fundamental points touching upon their respective understandings of Ultimate Reality, and secondly they both can be read –as we will see later and as we have already intimated—in a way that qualifies their overall “non-realism.” While Shankara’s perspective is a priori epistemological, in the sense that its chief concern is to dispel ignorance or avidy? to reveal the true nature of being and consciousness, N?g?rjuna’s perspective can be deemed to be primarily soteriological since its ontology chiefly responds to the central question of Buddhism, i.e. suffering and the way to free oneself from it. This being said, it is in fact nearly impossible, in both cases, to disconnect epistemology, soteriology and metaphysics or ontology: as we will see Shankara can at times approach the problem of M?y? in onto-cosmological terms, and N?g?rjuna’s concepts of “emptiness” and “co-dependent origination” are intrinsically connected to ontological and epistemological stances that are aligned with a spiritual intent. 6 As aforementioned, metaphysical relativity is, in Advaita Ved?nta, primarily identified with M?y?. Now M?y? is most often approached by Shankara as an epistemological phenomenon of superimposition upon Reality. In other words M?y? is that which makes us mistake “the rope for the snake.” 7 It is a principle of distortion of Reality that stems from one’s inability to recognize Reality as it is, that is as the non-dual Self or ?tman. On the one hand, M?y? is the “epistemological” fruit of a false identification of the Self with the body, on the other hand it is M?y? itself, or more specifically tamas --the lowest, most opaque of the three cosmological elements that enter into the composition of M?y?’s world of relativity, that is constitutional of delusion as such: The power of tamas is a veiling power. It makes things appear to be other than what they are. It is this which is the original cause of an individual’s transmigration and is the cause of the origination of the action of the 6 “All of N?g?rjuna?s works are broadly soteriological in nature: he is trying to break the habit of reification that is at the root of grasping and craving and hence all suffering.” Richard H. Jones, N?g?rjuna: Buddhism’s Most Important Philosopher, New York, 2010, 135. 7 Cf. Arvind Sharma, The Rope and the Snake: Metaphorical Exploration of Advaita Vedanta, Manohar, 1997. 4 projecting power. 8 It must be noted, furthermore, that the ontological status of M?y? is incomprehensible: “She is most strange. Her nature is inexplicable,” to use Shankara’s words. 9 M?y? is fundamentally the unintelligible, and this lack of intelligibility is a function of the “obscurity” or uncertainty of its origin, as well as being bound to the undecidability of its ontological status. Although M?y? is most often not accounted for in terms of creation or emanation, since it is an “inexplicable wonder,” some Advaitin authoritative texts do relate M?y? to a creative process on the part of the Lord. 10 In such cases, M?y? tends to be identified with l?l?, or the divine sport or play that “symbolizes” creation. In Shankara’s Dak?i??m?rti Stotra, for example, we read that “Isvara amuses Himself assuming, of His own accord, the forms of worshipper and the worshipped, of teacher and disciple, of master and servant, and so on.” 11 Inasmuch as these dualities pertain to M?y?, the latter may be read to be implicitly ascribed to the Lord, or to the Personal God, as its Originator. In fact the very consideration of the Lord entails a duality, or a relationship between the One Lord and the multiplicity that relates to Him.12 This deluding duality and multiplicity that is in the very nature of M?y? is sometimes compared by Advaitin authors to a fishing net that expands or contracts depending upon the will of the 8 The Vivekac???ma?i of ?a?kar?c?rya Bhagavatp?da: an introduction and translation by John A. Grimes, ?a?kar?c?rya, Ashgate: Aldershot, Hants and Burlington, Vermont, 2004, 113. « Taking this world as a tree, the seed of this tree of the world is tamas. » Vivekac?d?mani, Tur?y?nanda, 64. Tamas is the third of the gunas—cosmological « strings » with which the entire relative realm, including the Divine Being or Saguna Brahman, is woven-- the two others being sattva and rajas. Sattva corresponds to light, ascension and purity, rajas to fire, desire and passion and tamas to heaviness, obscurity and ignorance. The Bhagavad G?t?, by contrast with the Vivekac?d?mani, considers all of the three gunas to be principles of delusion: “All this universe is deluded by these three states of being/ Composed of the qualities./It does not recognize Me,/ Who am higher than these, and eternal.” (The Bhagavad G?t?, translated by Winthrop Sargeant, State University of New York Press: Albany, 1994, VII, 13, 331.) 9 Vivekac?d?mani, Tur?y?nanda, 49. 10 Although Advaitin writers most often refrain from treating M?y? in terms of creation by or from ?tman, this is not the case of the Upanisads, which frequently refer to Brahman as creator: “Unlike Advaita commentators, the Upanisads are not reticent about brahman as the creator and are not hesitant to suggest desire and purpose. Aitareya Upanisads (1.1), for example, begins with the act of creation. „In the beginning this world was the self (?tman), one alone, and there was no other being at all that blinked an eye. He thought to himself: --Let me create the worlds.? “ Anantanand Rambachan, The Advaita Worldview. God, World, and Humanity, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006, 92. 11 Sri Shankaracharya, Dak?i??m?rti Stotra, translated by Alladi Mahadeva Sastry, Samata Books : Chennai, 152. 12 « The Sruti says : By M?y?, Siva became two birds always associated together ; the One, clinging to the one unborn (Prakriti), became many as it were. » Dak?i??m?rti Stotra, VII-27, 158. 5 Lord. The fishing net is to be understood here as a power of allure and delusion, and its contraction to a divine grace, so that M?y? is in such cases considered as being under the control of a sometimes misguiding –-i.e. “expanding” M?y?--, sometimes liberating –i.e. “contracting” M?y?-- Lord . 13 However, the main focus of Advaita is not on the origin or cause of M?y?, which is in a way an ever open question, but rather on its “end,” or its being dispelled by knowledge. It could actually be said that the only fully satisfactory “definition” of M?y? is to found in the words “that which can be nullified,” or to use Eliot Deutsch’s terminology “that which can be subrated by other experience.” 14 In other words, M?y? is not as much “definable” as it is “recognizable” by and through its ontological and spiritual “reduction,” or else M?y? is known by being dispelled. M?y? as appearance has no meaning independently from Reality which, in Advaita Ved?nta, is none other than the Supreme Divine Selfhood, or ?tman. So it is precisely because “M?y? is nullified by knowledge of ?tman,” 15 and because this nullification is in fact the only way of knowing M?y? for what it is. If there is a way to “know” the unknowable, undefinable, inexplicable M?y? it is in fact through the realization of ?tman. It is this very fact that allows us to consider Advaita Ved?nta as a set of metaphysical doctrines that lay emphasis on the “non-real” character of that which is not the Ultimate, notwithstanding the ontologically undecidable and ambiguous nature of M?y?. The latter is best described by Shankara in the following passage: “It is not non-existent, because it appears; neither is it existent, because it is nullified.” 16 Such terms would seem to contradict our characterization of Advaita Ved?nta as a perspective emphasizing the “non-reality” of universal relativity, since they deny both the “non-existent” and 13 “M?y?, the binding capacity of Hari, and the generator of things external and internal, spreads out like the net of the fisherman, in respect of ignorant j?vas, and contracts (in the case of j?vas with knowledge) through the will of the Lord. Be this m?y? real or illusory, (but) contraction and the opposite (expansion) are natural (therefore); and, thus, too (say some).” In Sarvaj??tman?s Samksepas?r?raka, Eliot Deutsch and Rohit Dalvi, editors, The Essential Ved?nta, Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom, 2004, 344. 14 « Reality is that which cannot be subrated by any other experiences. (...) Appearance is that which can be subrated by other experience. (...) Unreality is that which neither can nor cannot be subrated by other experience. » Eliot Deutsch, Advaita Ved?nta : A Philosophical Reconstruction, The University Press of Hawaii : Honolulu, 1969, p18-24. On the basis of such epistemological distinctions, M?y? is clearly to be identified with appearance. 15 Dak?i??m?rti Stotra, VII-12, 153. 16 Dak?i??m?rti Stotra, VII-13, 154. 6 “existent” aspects of M?y?. However, it is quite clear that the negation of the “non- existent” nature of M?y? is methodologically and epistemologically less important than the negation of its “existence.” In fact, or in practice, the state of epistemological and spiritual delusion from which the Advaitin practitioner is called to awaken is not so much connected to the need to recognize the “non-non- existence” of M?y? as it is to the necessity of discerning its “non-existence.” If it were not so, M?y? could not be refered symbolically by Shankara, for example, as a “harlot” whose “coquetry” allures only those who do not make use of discerning scrutiny (viveka). 17 It is clearly the seductively “non-real” aspect of M?y? that serves as point of reference for the Advaitin discriminating meditation toward deliverance, especially when considering the ability of M?y? to shortchange the human mind in posing as reality. M?dhyamaka Buddhism, or the Middle Way initiated by the Indian “Patriarch” of Mah?y?na, N?g?rjuna (2nd and 3rd Century AD) , is no less adamant than Advaita in asserting the “non-essentiality” or “non-self-nature” of what we have been refering to as “metaphysical relativity.” In fact, the ultimate lack of substance of phenomena is extended by N?g?rjuna to everything, including the Self, in concordance with the Buddhist teaching of anatta or no-self. In this respect, it could be argued that N?g?rjuna emphasizes further than Advaita the “unreal” character of phenomena in the sense that no absolute Selfhood is posited by him that would “lend” some reality to the latter. One of the fundamental reasons for this state of affairs lies in that, from a Buddhist point-of-view, metaphysics is determined by soteriology, and the concern for doctrinal conceptualization or “perspective” superseded by a focus on method. In other terms, the spiritual and moral reality of suffering is connected to craving, and craving is itself a function of an ignorance of the status of reality. The whole issue revolves, therefore, around an erroneous notion of the “substantiality” or “essence”” of phenomena and the self. The fundamental intent of N?g?rjuna, therefore, is to deny the “own being” (svabh?va) 18 17 Dak?i??m?rti Stotra, VII-16, 155. 18 The term svabh?va (literally “own nature”) can be closely approximated by the notion of “essence.” David Kalupahana translates it as “inherent nature” (cf. Buddhist Philosphy: A Historical Analysis, 7 of the latter, thereby freeing consciousness from its attachment to the sources of delusion (moha) and suffering. The Nagarjunian rejection of “self-existence,” “own being” or “inherent essence” is not to be equated, however, with an utter negation of the reality or existence of phenomena. It simply means, as we will discuss further, that there is no such thing, for N?g?rjuna, as an inherent, essential, timeless nature of phenomena that would define them as discrete entities. What has just been specified indicates that the most proper way to characterize the ontological status of phenomena consists in denying both that they are “existent” and that they are “non-existent,” hence the characterization of M?dhyamaka as Middle Way. This Middle Way is defined in contradistinction with two metaphysical pitfalls which are often refered to, in Buddhist commentaries, as “eternalism” and “nihilism.” Eternalism refers to the status of “essences” as independent from time and change, whereas nihilism is simply the negation of any existence whatsoever: ‘Exists’ implies grasping after eternalism. ‘Does not exist’ implies the philosophy of annihilation. Therefore, a discerning person should not rely upon either existence or non-existence.19 According to Candrak?rti, a major seventh-century disciple and commentator of N?g?rjuna, a lack of insightful and contemplative intelligence may result in either of two errors, with respect to the doctrine of emptiness: The first is a confusion between emptiness and nothingness, or ??nyat? and abh?va. This is the basis for the common Western misinterpretations of Buddhism as a form of “pessimism,” or else nihilism. The second erroneous interpretation of ??nyat? consists, in Guy Bugault’s terms, in “hypostasizing” it, misleading one thereby into a mental fixation that University of Hawaii Press, 1976, 27). Christian Lindtner (Master of Wisdom. Writings of the Buddhist Master N?g?rjuna, Dharma Publishing, 1986-1997) translates it by “own being,” while Jay Garfield prefers to render it as “self-nature”: “When a M?dhyamika philosopher says of a table that it is empty, that assertion by itself is incomplete. It invites the question, empty of what? And the answer is, empty of inherent existence, or self-nature, or in more Western terms, essence. Now, to say that the table is empty is hence simply to say that it lacks essence and importantly not to say that it is completely nonexistent.” Jay L. Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, Oxford University Press, 1995, 89 19 N?g?rjuna, The Philosophy of the Middle Way - M?lamadhyamakak?rik?, translated by David J. Kalupahana, SUNY Press, 1986, 234. 8 prevents one from recognizing emptiness. 20 Let us note, in this connection, that the characterization of phenomena as neither “existent” nor “non-existent” appears as analogous, but not identical, to the Advaitin status of M?y? as neither “real” nor “unreal.” A closer examination shows that the matter is both ontological and epistemological in M?dhyamaka and Advaita alike, but with a definitely different emphasis in each case. Here is a passage from N?g?rjuna that epitomizes the M?dhyamaka outlook and will help us bring it into sharp contrast with Advaita: When something is not related to anything, how then can that thing exist? For example, when it is not related to ‘long’, how can ‘short’ exist? When there is existence there is non-existence, as there is short when there is long. Since there is existence when there is non-existence, each of the two does not exist. 21 As it appears plainly in the previous passage, the refutation of both “existence” and “non-existence” is entirely connected to relationality, relativity, and the duality and multiplicity they entail. Without relation there is no existence because existence is empirically and ontologically relational, and always implies non-existence, the same holding true in return for non-existence in regard to existence. For N?g?rjuna, the refutation of existence and non-existence is therefore founded both on ontological relationality and epistemological and linguistic relativity. There is nothing that lies outside the range of this relativity, and therefore everything is “empty,” neither existent nor non-existent. 22 The originality of N?g?rjuna’s perspective is to connect nirv?na to an existential recognition of the “emptiness” of all phenomena, without which the “blowing out” of bound, deluded and alienated consciousness would be impossible. 23 In this view, the origin and cessation of suffering, that lies at the core of the 20 “A wrongly perceived emptiness ruins a person of meager intelligence. It is like a snake that is wrongly grasped or knowledge that is wrongly cultivated.” N?g?rjuna, The Philosophy of the Middle Way - M?lamadhyamakak?rik?, translarted by David J. Kalupahana, SUNY Press, 1986, 335. Cf. also, N?g?rjuna, Stances du milieu par excellence (Madhyamaka-k?rik?s), translated, introduced and annotated by Guy Bugault, Paris : Gallimard, 2002, 309. 21 Ibid., 12-13, 17. 22 This has implications on the use of language in the sense that the exclusion of both existence and non- existence leaves us with a clear sense of the limitations of linguistic categories, thereby opening the way to a transcending of conceptual crystallizations. 23 This is in critical reaction to Abhidharma Buddhists who postulated a continuity of the dharmas and their “nature” or svabh?va. 9 10 Buddhist intuition of reality, are accounted for in terms of “emptiness,” which is none other than “dependent co-origination” or “relative conditioning,” prat?tyasamutp?da.24 Accordingly, the direct methodical implication of prat?tyasamutp?da appears on an existential level when refered to the central focus of Buddhism, i.e. suffering. As is well-known, the latter is conceived as the result of a chain of conditioning that begins with ignorance and ends with birth and the manifold limitations and frustrations it entails: And what is dependent co-arising? From ignorance as a requisite condition come fabrications. From fabrications as a requisite condition comes consciousness. From consciousness as a requisite condition comes name- and-form. From name-and-form as a requisite condition come the six sense media. From the six sense media as a requisite condition comes contact. From contact as a requisite condition comes feeling. From feeling as a requisite condition comes craving. From craving as a requisite condition comes clinging/sustenance. From clinging/sustenance as a requisite condition comes becoming. From becoming as a requisite condition comes birth. From birth as a requisite condition, then aging and death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, and despair come into play. Such is the origination of this entire mass of stress and suffering. 25 The end of ignorance, first link of this chain, is none other than the cessation of the delusion of ontological causality or “arising” that makes “substances” out of objects of experience. This cessation is the realization that there is in reality no arising and no ceasing. The doctrine of dependent co-origination is therefore intimately bound to the practical goal of the Buddha’s teachings, which is the eradication of suffering. In other words, prat?tyasamutp?da teaches that the above “chain” should not be understood as a sequence of causal links, since its doctrine reveals, through meditative intuition, the non-substantiality and “emptiness” of the various “links” 25The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, A Translation of the Samyutta Nik?ya, translated from the P?li by Bhikkhu Bodhi, Wisdom Publications, Boston, 2000, 12 Nid?nasamyutta 1(1), 533. 24 One of the most famous classical statements of prat?tyasamutp?da teaches that nothing is caused by itself, by another, by itself and another, and by nothing: “No existents whatsoever are evident anywhere that are arisen from themselves, from another, from both, or from a non-cause. “ Kalupahana, 105. These four negations amount to an affirmation of the « relative conditioning » of all beings. In summary this fondational passage amounts to 1) the negation of a self-caused cause as God or causa sui that would be independent from relations, 2) the idea that a cause would be antecedent in relation to its effect and therefore independent from it, quod absit, and 3) the idea of a relationship with nothing, which is an impossibility. themselves, and in fact of the whole chain of phenomena. Realizing nirv?na means realizing the truth of prat?tyasamutp?da. This realization means the recognition of the unsubstantiality of suffering itself, without which recognition there would not be any way out of the latter into nirv?na. 26 To sum up our previous reflections, Prat?tyasamutp?da could be succinctly outlined as follows. Everything whatsoever is relational, and therefore relative and contingent, that is neither ontologically independent nor metaphysically necessary. Nothing, therefore, can be legitimately substantialized, objectified, reified, nor even quite adequately “verbalized. ” Nothing is a self-existent substance ontologically separated from other existents, nothing is an object independent from a subject, nothing is a “thing” if by “thing” is meant a reality defined by a substance and circumscribed by it. Paradoxes of Reality and Non-Reality: Appearance and Emptiness What precedes is indicative of a sharp contrast between M?dhyamaka “emptiness” and the relativity of the Advaitic M?y? which is, as we have seen, revealed by That which is not relative, or ?tman. In fact, M?y? is not real because it is not ?tman, but it is –in a sense-- not unreal because there is only ?tman, and ?tman is Reality as such. It is important to note, in this connection, the way in which the “not-real” aspect of “other-than-the-Ultimate” is qualified in Shankara’s Advaita. This is illustrated by the onto-cosmological dimensions of Shankara’s doctrine of M?y?, and more specifically the doctrine of the gunas, upon which we touched earlier. The gunas are the three cosmological principles known as tamas, rajas and sattva. Now, it is quite clear that as cosmological principles these three gunas belong to M?y? since the cosmos pertains to the latter. However it appears that the principles of inertia and passion respectively epitomized by tamas and rajas are not to be placed on the same ontological level as the ascending quality of sattva, which is luminous, pure and Reality-centered. Therefore, sattva is like a seed or a trace of the “Real” in the “non-real,” and it is as such “not unreal.” Shankara writes: 26 N?g?rjuna considers that no nirv?na would be possible if one were to posit the reality of “essences.” “If all this is non-empty, there exists neither arising nor ceasing, [As such,] through relinquishing and ceasing of what does ne expect freedom?” M?lamadhyamakak?rik?, 25:2, Kalupahana, 356. 11 The property of tamas is to cover, as scattering is the property of rajas. It makes things appear to be what they are not, and that is the cause of bondage, and even of decentralization [projection]. (113) (...) Pure sattva is blissfulness, realization of Self, supreme peace of attainment, cheerfulness, and an abiding quality in the Self, by which one becomes ever blissful.27 The preceding quotes make it plain that one can distinguish, within relativity, levels of reality that could be approximately referred to as “higher M?y?” and “lower M?y?.” The “higher M?y?,” as epitomized by the guna sattva provides us with a picture of relativity in which the perspective of M?y? as “not real” is largely counterbalanced by the point of view of M?y? “not being unreal.” This means that M?y? is in a certain sense a “manifestation” of ?tman, although the term manifestation would normally not be satisfactorily applicable in the context of Advaita inasmuch as the main Advaitin emphasis lies upon M?y? as an epistemological obstacle to metaphysical recognition, rather than as positive projection of ?tman. In contradistinction with Advaita, the perspective of M?dhyamaka is less prone to acknowledge this secondary “not unreal” dimension of relativity, and more inclined to emphasize more exclusively its “not real” aspect by ignoring qualitative distinctions within the context of prat?tyasamutp?da. There are three ways, however, in which one must qualify this statement. First, as we have mentioned, phenomena are no less “non-existent” than “existent.” Secondly M?dhyamaka Buddhism makes use of a concept of reality, or tattva, which, without being the equivalent of the concept of Self, or ?tman, is nevertheless denotative of truth or “things as they are.” In this context, M?dhyamaka draws a very clear distinction between svabh?va, which is an ontological notion, and tattva, which pertains primarily to epistemology. The latter refers to reality as it is, in its truth, but this reality is not to be identified with existence as commonly understood, nor with non- existence either: its status transcends the duality of existence and non-existence. Tattva is the “object of a cognition without an object” 28 in the sense that it is a 27 Viveka-c?d?mani, p 49 and 52. 28 Christian Lindtner, Master of Wisdom. Writings of the Buddhist Master N?g?rjuna, Dharma Publishing, 1986-1997, xx. 12 recognition of the emptiness of all objects, and of the subject itself as dependent upon an object. Non-duality is here radicalized to the point of abolishing not only the duality of subject and object, as in Advaita, but even the very terms of the duality. This “consciousness-without-an-object,” to make use of Franklin Merrell- Wolff’s expression, or non-dual wisdom, Advayajñ?na, coincides with the recognition of tattva. The recognition of tattva is none other than the “goal” of Buddhism: it points to the end of the Buddhist wayfaring as leading from suffering, dukkha, to a state of “blowing out” of the causes of suffering, nirv?na. But at the same time, in its ultimate truth, it denies the essential reality of the path and its goal. This is the supreme spiritual paradox of M?dhyamaka that introduces us to the third qualification of our argument concerning the M?dhyamaka non-recognition of the “not unreal” aspect of phenomena. This paradox is most directly expressed by N?g?rjuna in his M?lamadhyamakak?rik?: The Buddha did not teach the appeasement of all objects, the appeasement of obsession, and the auspicious as some thing to some one at some place. 29 The meaning of this prima facie perplexing statement makes full sense when refered to the fundamental distinction between two kinds of truth; this is the doctrine of satyadvayavibh?ga. N?g?rjuna articulates the distinction between conventional truth (sammuti-sacca or voh?ra-sacca) and ultimate truth (paramattha-sacca) as follows: The teaching of the doctrine by the Buddhas is based upon two truths: truth relating to worldly conventions and truth in terms of ultimate fruit. Those who do not understand the distinction between these two truths do not understand the profund truth embodied in the Buuddha’s message. Without relying upon convention, the ultimate fruit is not taught. Without understanding the ultimate fruit, freedom is not attained. 30 The truth, in an ultimate sense, is none other than emptiness or co-dependent origination. However, the teachings of the Buddhas need to make use of conventional truth in order to lead mankind toward the ultimate truth. In that sense 29 M?lamadhyamakak?rik?, 25: 24. Kalupahana, 369. 30 M?lamadhyamakak?rik?, 24: 8,9,10. Kalupahana, 331-333. 13 14 conventional truth is none other than the up?ya, or the “expedient mean” par excellence, through which people may be brought up to ultimate reality. The The paramount distinction between “teaching” and “ultimate fruit” is akin to that between “doctrine” and “method,” or that between intellectual cognition and spiritual recognition. Conventional truth is both a necessity in terms of teaching and a potential impediment in terms of recognition.31 The latter aspect appears in the fact that conventional truth unknowingly relies on linguistic phenomena that pertain to what the M?dhyamaka tradition refers to as prajñaptir up?d?ya, which is understood by most commentators as “dependent designations.” A radical interpretation of this concept, in the wake of Candrak?rti, sees all designations as not related in any essential way to objects, but as constituting, rather, a conventional network of metaphorical modes of cognitive perception, that are ultimately illusory. This view implies that emptiness itself as a concept is necessarily a dependent and provisional designation and therefore itself empty. Such an understanding allows fr a maximal, and indeed radical, differentiation between emptiness as such and the doctrine of emptiness, the latter being subsumed under the realm of conventional truth, the former denoting ultimate truth. When other commentators and translators have resisted such an understanding of the concept of co-dependent origination as pure “dependent designation” they have done so on account of its effectiveness in leading to spiritual recognition, an effectiveness that seems incompatible with pure emptiness and utter lack of referentiality. 32 Douglas Berger has thus argued, against the emptiness of all uses of language as implying “being,” in 31 This is analogous, incidentally, to Shankara?s distinction between the real and figurative senses of ?tman?s “binding” by M?y?: “That ?tman does acts, that He bound by them, and that He is released from them, is true only in a figurative sense; it is a mere illusion.” Dak?i??m?rti Stotra, VIII-21 156. 32 “ If the concepts „conditioned co-arising” and “emptiness” don't refer at all to the way the world works, if impermanence, birth-and-death, ignorance, and desirous attachment are not in fact features of unenlightened human existence, then why would the Buddha even bother to claim that they are at the root of our suffering and point toward an effective solution ? Why again, in this case, would Mah?y?na Buddhists bother to argue against theories that espouse some notion of svabh?va in the first place, since, if no words refer to reality anyway, there would seem to be nothing about an accurate understanding of human existence at stake in the dispute? If the answer is that the conventional meaning of conditioned co- arising is a more effective means of bringing about enlightenment, then we would seem entitled to ask why it is so ? » Douglas L. Berger ,« A Reply to Garfield and Westerhoff on "Acquiring Emptiness" » Philosophy East and West - Volume 61, Number 2, April 2011, p. 369. 15 favour of a distinction between two kinds of linguistic practices, one assuming being and the other not. The latter is the language of up?ya which makes it possible to refer to the emptiness of reality through its own referential ”transparence,” as it were, that is without falling into a kind of self-substantalization. In this sense, the most effective up?ya is the one that invites us not to treat it as an independent substance. Regardless of whether one universalizes the view that designations are co-dependently arisen and empty or one leaves room for a conventional language adequate to convey the truth of emptiness, epistemological truth needs be equated with that which produces positive outcomes or recognition. 33 As the previous pages have intimated, emptiness is not the essence of realities in the sense in which a transcendent source, or a transcendent paradigm of their being would, but it is so if we understand by essence the fundamental “structure” of reality: “We state that whatever is dependent arising, that is emptiness.” 34 This explanation, for Buddhists, is not the recognition of a Supreme Object, because no object can be supreme in the sense of being independent from reciprocal conditioning in its being. It is not the recognition of a Substantial Subject either, since no subject is without being relational to an object upon which it depends to be a subject. For N?g?rjuna, the position of a Subject or Self as ?tman, necessarily gives, or lends, some substantial existence to all phenomena. This is so because the position of an ?tman that would be independent, as it were, from co- dependent origination, is incompatible with the latter and therefore implies the self- substantiality of everything else. To postulate a Self is to substantialize not only the Self but also, by the same token, everything else through and by Its being immanent 34 M?lamadhyamakak?rik?, 24 :18, Kalupahana 339. 33 « For the Buddha, language derives its "meaning" (attha) when it is able to produce results (attha), and thus what is true (bhuta, taccha) is that which bears results (attha- samhita). The Buddha did not recognize anything that is false to be productive of results Truth in this sense can be equated with “meaningful" language.Thus, linguistic expressions that imply permanence and annihilation would be "meaningless" (an- attha) in that they do not communicate anything that in experience (dhamma) , where experience is understood in terms of the felt results (attha) rather than in terms of an indefinable ultimate reality. » M?lamadhyamakak?rik? of Nagarjuna: The Philosophy of the Middle Way, translated by David J. Kaupahana, Motilal Barnasidass, Delhi, p.19. « Some more skillful, more illuminating constructions might just be better in bringng us to see that no construction is true. That is the nature of up?ya. » Jay L. Garfield and Jan Westerhoff, « Acquiring the Notion of a Dependent Designation : A Response to Douglas L. Berger. » Philosophy East and West, Volume 61, Number 2, April 2011, p. 367. to everything that is not unreal. In that sense, N?g?rjuna goes a step further than Advaitin metaphysics in stressing the “non-reality” of phenomena. By excluding the consideration of a reality that would be “exempt” from prat?tyasamutp?da, N?g?rjuna asserts an utter and fundamental emphasis on the conditioned unsubstantiality of everything to which the mind could cling. The all-encompassing validity of prat?tyasamutp?da must lead us to ponder its meaning with respect to the ontological status of nirv?na itself; it must be considered, in particular, whether prat?tyasamutp?da does not deprive nirv?na of any ultimate reality and meaning, thereby betraying a fundamental incompatibility with the ultimate goal of Buddhism itself, as some of N?g?rjuna’s opponents have argued. Early Buddhist teachings from the Abhidharma canon 35 point to a nirv?nic mode of being from the vantage point of which the relatively conditioned can be perceived as such, without being itself relatively conditioned, but on the contrary literally unconditioned. This is expressed by one of the most famous canonical Pali passages: There exists, monks, that which is unborn, that which is unbecome, that which is uncreated, that which is unconditioned. For if there were not, monks, that which is uncreated, that which is unconditioned, there would not be made known here the escape from that which is born, from that which is become, from that which is created, from that which is conditioned. Yet since there exists, monks, that which is unborn, that which is unbecome, that which is uncreated, that which is unconditioned, there is therefore made known the escape from that which is born, from that which is become, from that which is created, from that which is conditioned." 36 Thus, there is a sense in which the “not unreal,” the “unbecome,” the “unborn,” which is transcendent to the “unreal,” the “become” and the “born” is also mysteriously immanent to them, without which the validity and effectiveness of the path itself would be called into question. Mah?y?na Buddhism has drawn the ultimate conclusions from this principle in the paradoxical recognition that “nirv?na is sams?ra and sams?ra is nirv?na,” or that the “unbecome is the become and the 35 Abhidharma texts, dating back as early as the 3rd century B.C, include abstracts of doctrinal elements from the earlier s?tras, the scriptures that are largely comprised of words of the Buddha. 36 Ud?na, Khuddakanik?ya, Suttapi?aka. Quoted in Joseph Walser, N?g?rjuna in context: Mah?y?na Buddhism and early Indian culture, Columbia University Press, 2005, 177. 16 become is the unbecome,” or else transcendence is immanence and immanence is transcendence. In this perspective, however, the transcendent is neither apprehended as a supreme Object (God) nor as an ultimate Subject (?tman). It is neither Object nor Substance: Neither an ob-ject, that is an element of a cognitive duality, nor a sub-stance, i.e. a reality that would be independent from co-dependent relationality by being as it were “sub-jacent” to it. In N?g?rjuna’s thought, transcendence is envisaged as immanent in that the “object” of recognition or “ultimate truth” is the very “structure” of an experienced reality. The empirical problem, for Buddhists, is a “subjective” problem, or how to stop the mental process that inherently objectifies and substantializes, and is, thereby, a source of craving and suffering. The Buddhist response is that this is only possible through “negation,” or rather through the “negation of negation” --since conditioned consciousness is a negation of the unconditioned, that opens access to an adequate perception of reality.37 The Unity of Reality By contrast with the previously examined metaphysical accounts of relativity, we would like to review and analyze, in a second section of this essay, the ways in which some major and influential forms of mystical theology are characterized by an emphasis on the “not unreal” dimension of that which is not the Ultimate Reality. In doing so, our objective will not merely be to draw a contrast with the Advaita and M?dhyamaka perspectives, but also to look into some of the theoretical and spiritual implications of this contrast. In order to do so, we will focus on the ?aivite perspective of Abhinavagupta (ca 950-1020 AD) and some other authoritative figures and texts of the non-dualistic Tantric tradition on the one hand, and on the 37 In parallel, there needs not be a “subject,” the latter being necessarily caught into the net of a relationship with an “object” and the two-fold “substantialization” that ensues. However, because “objectification” and “substantialization” are spiritual possibilities, and perhaps even necessities on some level, we find, in later Mah?y?na, an objectification of nirv?na as Amida, the “Other,” in Jodo Shin, and a substantialization of nirv?na as Buddha-Nature or Buddha-dh?tu in the Mah?y?na Mah?parinirv?na S?tra and later, among other schools, in Zen. One may infer from these developments that it may be too arduous for most practitioners to keep to the principles of emptiness and conditioned co-origination. It bears stressing, however, that the “objectification” that we are considering here is in a sense “abstracted” from a “subject,” at least efficiently or operatively, since the whole stress is on tariki, or the Power of the Other, while the kind of “substantialization” at stake in Buddha-dh?tu is still vacuity of “forms.” 17 other hand on the doctrine of the “Unity of Being” (wahdat al-wuj?d) exemplified by Sufi masters of gnosis such as Ibn ‘Arab? (1167-1240) and ‘Abd-al-Kar?m al-J?l? (1366-1424). It is important to recognize, as a starting point, that both perspectives are focused, a priori, on the Divine Reality as it is envisaged respectively by the Hindu ?aivite and Islamic traditions. In this context, ?iva and All?h –notwithstandng the profound contextual differences that shape their reality-- are considered on the level of the Personal Divinity refered to in Hindu and Islamic scriptures as well in devotional practices, but also on the level of the Divine Essence as such, which both traditions understand to lie beyond all determinations, qualities and actions, including the personal dimension of Divinity. Mystical metaphysicians hailing from these traditions, such as Abhinavagupta and Ibn ‘Arab?, have in fact no difficulty whatsoever envisaging ?iva and All?h on these two distinct ontological levels. 38 Hence, ?aivism considers ?iva as Parama?iva, or Ultimate Reality, and as such, “It is non-relational consciousness.” 39 At the same time, each and every ?aivite treatise begins with words of dedication and worship to ?iva, and the latter has been the focus of devotional adoration on the part of those Hindus who made him the more and more exclusive object of religious fervor.40 Similarly, All?h is both the Personal Deity who speaks in and through the Qur’?n, and the super-ontological Essence (dh?t) that is both boundless and unknowable. J?l? clearly characterizes the latter as follows: Know that the Essence (adh-dh?t) signifies the Absolute Being in its state of being stripped of all connection, relation, assignation and aspect. (...) This is the pure Essence in which are manifested neither Names nor Attributes nor 38 This must be qualified by the fact that the Quranic context of definition of All?h is much less ambiguous, or much less fluid, than that of ?iva. 39 Jaideva Singh?s Introduction to ?iva S?tras – The Yoga of Supreme Identity, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1979, xix. 40 “There are simply too many large gaps in the sequence that leads from the Mohenjo-Dara Proto-?iva through the Vedic Rudra, the Yajur Vedic ?atarudr?ya, the Rudra-?iva of the ?vet??vatara Upanisad, the astam?rtï and pañcavaktra of the Pur?nic ?iva, and the notions of early sectarian groups such as the P??upatas, to the increasingly complex theologies of Siva in different ?gamic revelations that finally result, in one branch of the process, in the concept of ?iva as taught by Abhinavagupta. What we do know of this process is that ?iva, from being one in a pantheon of divinities, increasingly became the focus of sectarian groups who worshipped him exclusively.” Paul Eduardo Muller-Ortega, The Triadic Heart of ?iva, Albany: State University of New York, 1989, 26. 18 relations nor connections nor anything else. 41 This passage marks without any ambiguity the distinction between the Divine Essence and the Personal God as comprised of aspects and involved in relationships. Two general conclusions may be drawn from the preceding remarks: first, ?aivism and Sufism present us with perspectives that are centered a priori on the objective Reality of the Divine rather than being primarily focused on the subjective need for deliverance or freedom from suffering ---in other words they begin with God’s fullness rather than man’s lack; secondly, their capacity to envisage the Divine both as unconditionally absolute and personally “engaged” allow them to recognize the Divine Presence both in its ontological immanence and creativity as flowing from its own infinite Essence, as well as in its revelatory and devotional relationality. Now both dimensions ascribe a significant coefficient of reality to the relative realm, since relationality and creativity presuppose a degree of ontological reality on the part of the latter. Furthermore, let us note that the aforestated regard for immanence is symbolically and suggestively marked by the fact that both perspectives make a significant use of the image of the relationship between the ocean and its waves, as a representation of the relationship between the Ultimate and the non-Ultimate, or the Absolute and the relative. In Abhivagupta’s metaphysical account, the Supreme Self is equated to the ocean of consciousness (sindhu, ambhonidhi, samdudra), the waves (?rmi) of which are the vibrations (spanda) of consciousness that constitute finite reality. Describing the latter, Abhinavagupta writes: For that vibration, which is a slight motion of a special kind, a unique vibrating light, is the wave of the ocean of consciousness, without which there is no consciousness at all. For the character of the ocean is that it is sometimes filled with waves and sometimes waveless. This consciousness is the essence of all. 42 41 ?Abd al-Kar?m al-J?l?, Universal Man, extracts translated with commentary by Titus Burckhardt, Roxburgh, Scotland: Beshara Publications, 1983, 57. 42 Tantr?loka, 4.184-186a, in Paul-Eduardo Muller-Ortega, The Triadic Heart of ?iva, Albany : State University of New York Press, 1989, 146. “It is the powers of the Self (svasakti) that, emerging from the ocean of consciousness and uniting together in various and sundry ways, create the finite realities.” 19 The ocean is a direct symbol of the infinite consciousness, which is none other than ?iva. As intimated above, the symbol is, moreover, apt to connote the dimension of energy, motion and vibration that characterizes consciousness in ?aivism. Similarly, the symbol of the ocean is used in Sufism as a suggestive pointer to the Divine Essence in its limitlessness. Thus, Ibn ‘Arab?’s prayer “Enter me, O Lord, into the deep of the Ocean of Thine Infinite Oneness!” is, as Martin Lings has indicated, one among many instances of a reference to the ocean which is “mentioned again and again” in the treatises of the Sufis. 43 For Ibn ‘Arab?, the knowledge of God, like the knowledge of self with which it is intimately connected, is identified as “an ocean without shore” since “there is no end to knowledge of God” who is infinite reality. 44 As for R?m?, in conformity with his approach of the Divine as Love, he identifies the latter with “an ocean whose depths cannot be plumbed.” 45 It is quite clear that the choice of this symbol is already indicative of perspectives that are particularly attuned to a focus on the boundless and creative infinity of the Ultimate on the one hand, and on the “participation” of the waves into this divine “ocean” on the other hand, thereby suggesting the “not unreal” aspect of the former. Reality as Creative Freedom. It has been repeatedly asserted by scholars that Kashmiri ?aivite metaphysics and mysticism, by contrast with Advaita Ved?nta, is primarily focused on the dynamic and active dimensions of Absolute Consciousness, i.e. Will, or icch?, and Action, or kriy?. These characters of the Absolute derive from ?iva’s primary understanding as utter freedom. The ?iva S?tras identify absolute freedom as the nature of ?iva par excellence: Though Highest ?iva has infinite number of other attributes, such as eternity, all-pervasiveness, formlessness etc., yet because eternity etc. are possible elsewhere also, here it is intended to show the predominance of absolute freedom which is not possible in any other being. 46 43 Martin Lings, What is Sufism? University of California Press, 1975, 11. 44 Fut?h?t al-makkiyya, II. 121-25, in William Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, Albany : State University of New York Press, 1989, 345. 45 Mathnawi, V 2731-32, in William Chittick, The Sufi Path of Love, State University of New York Press, 1983, 195. 46 ?iva S?tras – The Yoga of Supreme Identity, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1979, 7. 20 In other words, the Supreme Liberty of the Absolute Consciousness is the essence of this Consciousness. 47 In this metaphysical context, freedom involves two main aspects, which are lack of constraint on the one hand, and infinite creativity on the other hand. The first character implies that there is nothing external to ?iva that could either limit, compel or contain Him in any way, which ultimately means that everything is ?iva.48 This is the doctrine known in India as ?bh?sav?da, or the thesis of “limited manifestation,” following which limited entities themselves are delimitations of the limitless consciousness of ?iva. The second aspect, which is in fact intimately connected to the first, points to the dynamic and productive nature of the Absolute that ?aivism always envisages as ever flowing in an unending multiplicity of new forms. This is the doctrine of sv?tantryav?da, the thesis of self- dependency, according to which the intrinsic power of the Ultimate is the utterly free energy of conscious manifestation. Manifestation is in the nature of Supreme Consciousness, and this principle, when fully understood, should silence any question as to the why of existence and its myriad of forms and contents. 49 This is so because, in essence, the realm of finite reality is none other than ?iva himself, the Supreme Consciousness, that both manifests and binds itself through its ?aktic vibration and projections. In the ?aivite perspective, everything is pure Consciousness or Cit. There is not an ounce of existence, on whatever level of being, which is not ?iva’s consciousness. Everything is consciousness, and therefore everything is. Relative beings are, and they are as limitations of the Supreme 47 “(The Absolute) is called Mahe?vara because of its absolute sovereignty of Will, sva-tantrat? or sv?tantrya. This absolute Sovereignty or Free Will is not a blind force but the svabh?va (own being) of the Universal Consciousness (Cit).” Pratyabhijñ?hrdayam-The Secret of Self-Recognition, Jaideva Singh, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2003, 16. 48 “Just as every drop of water comes to rest in the ocean, so all acts and cognitions [come to rest] in the Great Lord, the ocean of consciousness. Even a little water on the ground drunk by the sun?s rays goes, as rain, to the great ocean. Similarly all knowledge and action in the universe merge in the ocean of ?iva either spontaneously and evidently (sphutam), by itself or [indirectly] through a series of other [processes].” Abhinavagupta, Malini, in Mark S.G. Dyczkowski, The Doctrine of Vibration. An Analysis of the Doctrines and Practices of Kashmir Shaivism, Albany: State University of New York, 1987, 71. 49 “Here it may be asked „Why does the Self manifest these ?bh?sas [limited manifestations]? Abhinava answers this question by saying that the nature of a thing cannot be questioned. It is absurd to ask why fire burns. To burn is the very nature of fire and so to manifest without what lies within is the very nature of the Self. It is natural for consciousness to assume a variety of forms.” Kanti Chandra Pandey, Abhinavagupta- An Historical and Philosophical Study, Varanasi: Chaukhamba Amarabharati Prakashan, Fourth Edition, 2006, 335. 21 Consciousness. In this sense, ?iva is both absolute and relative, and He, in fact, transcends the two categories of absoluteness and relativity. It is clear that the ?aivite emphasis lies on the “not unreal ” dimension of the relative realm inasmuch as it is none other than the unbound, infinite domain of Consciousness and, as such, gives potential access to the latter. This dynamic and creative process through which the Absolute Consciousness outpours into multiplicity is highlighted in the central teaching of the intrinsic union of ?iva and ?akti. While ?iva is pure Consciousness (citi) and Light (prak??a), ?akti can be characterized as the intrinsic and efficient power of Self- revelation of ?iva through which he manifests, supports and reabsorbs the realm of manifestation. In this sense, ?akti is none other than Sv?tantrya, or the intrinsic energy of ?iva.50 By contrast with any dualistic understanding of ?akti, such as in the Ny?ya, ?aivism emphasizes the intrinsic unity of being and its power, the relationship between the two being akin to the indissociable unity between fire and its power to burn.51 As such ?akti is the inner, dynamic reality of ?iva, and their intimate unity is more powerfully asserted as we consider the essence of the Ultimate, while their latent duality, although more and more perceptible as we descend the stages of the limitations of Consciousness by and through manifestation, is nevertheless ever transcended by ?iva’s sovereign Infinity and unending ability to affirm Himself in and through the negations of Himself. As Paul Eduardo Muller-Ortega puts it, “(?iva) is always the ‘third’ element that transcends, undercuts, and in the end, unifies all possible oppositions.” 52 To this could be added that He is the third because He is the first and because He is essentially none other than the second. In other words, ?iva always reconciles all oppositions because He is, with and through ?akti, the very productive source from which they emerge and into which they flow. 50 “For non-dualist Kashmir ?aivites (...), the higher Brahman is already full of inner potencies and powers (?akti ) and is evolving into the multitude of the created universe through a series of self-transformations (parin?ma).” Natalia Isaeyeva, From Early Vedanta to Kashmir Shaivism, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995, 134-5. 51 “”(...) The distinction between the power and its possessor is as imaginary as between the fire and its power to burn.” K.C. Pandey, Introduction, Doctrine of Divine Recognition of Abhinavagupta, volume II, 1986, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1986, x. 52 The Triadic Heart of ?iva, 94. 22 In Kashmiri ?aivism, ?akti is the principle of universal relativity, since it is through Her that everything is brought into existence. By contrast with the Advaitin M?y?, ?akti is not ontologically ambiguous nor deficient –although She manifests on a variety of degrees, but rather powerfully and creatively productive. As such she is less a “negation” of ?iva, as M?y? would be one of ?tman, than a sort of inner dimension of ?iva that actualizes and exteriorizes His freedom to be all that He can be, that is everything. This being said, while being eminently affirmative and dynamic, there is somehow a vantage point from which ?akti could be considered as a kind of “negation” of ?iva. This somewhat negative aspect of ?akti appears inasmuch as ?iva being infinite and undivided Reality, she cannot but appear in some respects and on some levels as the principle that brings out the finite and discrete realities that delimit and “divide” the ?ivaic plenitude. In that sense ?akti is within ?iva the seed of the principle of negation, limitation and division that allows for the unfolding or outpouring of ?iva’s infinite nature on the level of finite realities. However, ?aivism is not intent on attributing this “negativity” to ?akti herself, but rather to the lower ranges of the process she triggers. Thus, ?akti is first and foremost the principle through which the nature of ?iva as infinite reality and sovereign power is affirmed. In fact, when ?iva is approached as Emptiness, ?akti will be deemed to express Divine Fullness. 53 On that account, ?iva being characterized as ??nyat?, like an empty sky in which the colors of the dawn are shimmering, ?akti will be the fullness of these colors: The [dawn] sky, though one, appears radiant white, red and blue, and the clouds accordingly seem various; so pure, free consciousness shines brilliantly with its countless forms, though they are nothing at all.54 Here, Emptiness is like the reverse side of Fullness, if one may say so, or the silvering void of the mirror in which Fullness manifests its wealth of reality: it is the 53 “?akti represents the all-encompassing fullness (p?rnat?) of the absolute, the ever-shifting power of awareness actively manifesting as the Circle of Totality (vi?vacakra). ?iva is the Void (??nyat?) of absolute consciousness –its supportless (nir?lamba) and thought-free (nirvikalpa) nature. Integral and free, ?iva, the abode of the Void, dissolves everything into Himself and brings all things nto being.” Mark S.G. Dyczkowski, The Doctrine of Vibration – An Analysis of the Doctrines a nd Practices of Kashmir Shaivism, Albany: State University of New York, 1987, 119. 54 M?lin?vijayav?rtika, 1/949 in The Doctrine of Vibration, 119. 23 metaphysical “ambience” of universal exteriorization. It stands “under” Fullness as an infinite Sub-stance that ever transcends the flow of delimitations. As principle of projection and manifestation, ?akti needs be considered on a plurality of levels. Indeed, as we will further suggest, the capacity to consider the projection of Consciousness on a multiplicity of degrees can be deemed to be one of the hallmarks of metaphysical perspectives that emphasize the “not unreal” character of relative phenomena, among which ?aivism and the Sufi doctrine of Unity rank eminently. Thus, Abhinavagupta’s foremost disciple, Ksemar?ja, distinguishes three levels of ?akti, which are Par??akti, Par?par??akti and Apar??akti, or Supreme, Intermediate and Inferior ?akti. These three levels subsume no less than thirty-four degrees of projection of Consciousness, or tattvas, from ?iva Himself as pure “I” to prthiv?, or earth, the utmost limit of condensation and materialization of consciousness. The Supreme ?akti, Par??akti, while pertaining to abheda or “non-difference,” also refers to the level of Pure Consciousness that is already the seed of the process of pr
- [Bardo Prayer (The Precious Garland)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/bardo-prayer-the-precious-garland) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection “The Precious Garland” is part of the Tibetan Bardo Thodol, recited for the dying and the dead as guidance for the souls new to the posthumous realities. Thus in the moment of death, When we travel all alone beyond this world, Though surrounded by dear family and
- [<em>Ise sankei mandara</em> and the Image of the Pure Land](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/ise-sankei-mandara) - Peter Knecht The natural features of the Ise sanctuaries emerge as the physical representation of a non-physical world, for at certain points the spiritual can be intensely experienced in the environment. The mandala guides the prospective pilgrims through the physical world while reminding them that the pilgrimage is actually an image of the pilgrims’ own
- [The Hoopoe on the Pulpit](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-hoopoe-on-the-pulpit) - Austin O’Malley In response to a question about the route to the Simorgh, the hoopoe explains that they will have to pass through seven valleys: desirous seeking (talab), love (‘eshq), gnosis (ma‘refat), detachment (esteghna), unification (towhid), bewilderment (hayrat) and, finally, spiritual poverty and effacement (faqr o fana’). For each valley, the hoopoe delivers an introductory
- [Sonorous Desert](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/sonorous-desert) - Kim Haines-Eitzen The desert was a place of profound paradox that sparked the imagination: a place hot and cold, deathly dry but also home to violent floods, dangerous and yet potent with revelation and salvation, seemingly empty but with abundant evidence of humans and other animals, and surprisingly noisy and silent. It is in these
- [Alan Chadwick: Man and the Totality of Nature](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/chadwick-covelo-interview) - A video interview given at Covelo, California, in 1978, by the man once called “the greatest horticulturist of the 20th century”. …his consummate skills as an artist made his gardens works of art in themselves. They were embodiments of beauty so powerful as to shake the world view of those who entered into them. You
- [The Gospel in Brief](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-gospel-in-brief) - Leo Tolstoy • Temporal life is food for the true life. • Therefore the true life is independent of time: it is in the present. • Time is an illusion of life; life in the past and in the future conceals from men the true life of the present. • Therefore man should strive to
- [Guénon and the Kali-yuga](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/guenon-and-the-kali-yuga) - Dominique Wohlschlag The Kali-yuga is therefore an “invention” of the Mahabharata and there is no evidence to suppose that anyone in India was previously aware of living in such a well-defined phase of degeneration, even though this age was supposed to have lasted for a long time. Click here to read the article.
- [Ratnakuta Sutra](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/ratnakuta-sutra) - The Sutra of the Heap of Jewels, Ratnakuta Sutra, is a major ancient collection of Indian Mahayana Buddhist teachings. It contains forty-nine texts of varying length, traditionally called “assemblies”, and it is divided into 120 fascicles in the Chinese translation. The wilderness monk who dwells in the wilderness shall intensely cultivate the notion of the
- [Religion, Nature, and Life in the Sundarbans](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/religion-nature-and-life-in-the-sundarbans) - Sufia M. Uddin The life of the people in the Sundarbans is filled with constant connection to Bonbibi. It is through this relationship with her that the forest continues to be the source of livelihood for so many people of the region. There is a direct correlation between the level of dependency on the forest
- [A Single Unified Science](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/a-single-unified-science) - Philip Sherrard The divorce between the spiritual and the material means that material forms are regarded as totally non-spiritual, and thus either as illusion or as only to be known through identifying their reality with their purely material aspects. Such a debasement of the physical dimension of things is tantamount not only to denying the
- [Satpanthi Ismaili Songs to Hazrat Ali](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/satpanthi-songs) - Ali S. Asani Gits represent a vibrant tradition of literature among Nizari Ismaili communities of South Asian origin. They are the principal literary form through which the individual believer can express religious devotion in a personal voice. O king bird, do tell us the tale of the heavens: How is the celebration up there? Is
- [Ibn Arabi on the Alchemy of Happiness](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/ibnarabi-alchemy-of-happiness) - Muhyiddin ibn ‘Arabi translated by Stephen Hirtenstein Just as metallic bodies are graded in degrees because of the defects that befall them while they are being formed, and yet they [all] seek the rank of completion, for which their realities became manifest, likewise, the human being is created for perfection. Nothing can divert him from
- [Symbolic Colours](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/symbolic-colours) - Frédéric Portal, translated by W.S. Inman The sun, gold, and yellow, were the symbols of the human understanding enlightened or illuminated by divine revelation. It is in this sense that the prophet Daniel says, that those who are wise shall be shining with light, and that those who shall influence others to do justly shall
- [The Life of Abba Bishoi](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-life-of-abba-bishoi) - Abba Bishoi, translated by Rowan A. Greer, Robert A. Kitchen, and Maged S.A. Mikhail Then it happened when he was walking in the desert that a light poured out on his eyes, and he saw the desert filled with angels. In great amazement he said, “What is this?” An angel answered and said to him,
- [The Way of Heaven](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-way-of-heaven) - An Introduction to the Confucian Religious Life by Rodney L. Taylor It is most important simply to realize the degree to which self-cultivation for the Confucian is virtually ever-present as an intention. And it is through the constant attentiveness to self-cultivation that, from the Confucian perspective, the self slowly treads the sagely path. Thus one
- [Shanti Mantras: Sahana Vavatu](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/shanti-mantras-sahana-vavatu) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection Found in the Taittiriya and Katha Upanishads, this mantra is traditionally recited at the beginning of study and spiritual exercises. Sahana vavatu Right-click here to download – 0:24 (0.3MB) From Shlokam.org, republished here with thanks. Om! May God protect us both together; May God nourish us both together;
- [Entangling Vines—Zen Koans](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/entangling-vines-zen-koans) - Translated and annotated by Thomas Yuho Kirchner Huike, the Second Patriarch, said to Bodhidharma, “My mind is not yet at rest. Master, I implore you, set my mind to rest.” The master replied, “Bring your mind here and I’ll set it to rest for you.” Huike said, “I’ve searched for my mind, but am unable
- [Mary, Star of the Multi-confessional Mediterranean](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/mary-star-mediterranean) - Amy G. Remensnyder “These waters are hers”—this declaration by the Cantigas de Santa María in its account of Mary’s miraculous protection of the Muslim merchants coming to El Puerto de Santa María could well be extended to the whole of the Mediterranean. Ringed by her shrines, navigated by her wonder-working icons and statues, and traversed
- [The Definitions of Hermes to Asclepius](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/definitions-of-hermes) - Translation by Jean-Pierre Mahe Nothing is uninhabited by God, for where heaven is, God is too, and where the world is heaven is too. I think that God is in heaven, and heaven in the world. Click here to read the text. Originally published as “The Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius”, in The Way
- [The Life of Shaykh Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-life-of-shaykh-abd-al-qadir-al-jilani) - Hamza Malik it would seem that it was not the words that Jilani spoke which had such an effect on the people, but rather something inherent in his being or personality. Jilani himself said that he would receive orders and prohibitions and what was to be said, in sleep and while awake, until he could
- [Xuanzang: The Pilgrim and the Emperor](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/xuanzang-the-pilgrim-and-the-emperor) - Sally Wriggins Xuanzang accomplished his religious mission and returned safely with a large collection of Buddhist scriptures. He had seen “traces not seen before, heard sacred words not heard before, witnessed spiritual prodigies exceeding those of nature.” Click here to read the PDF. Originally published as a chapter of Xuanzang, A Buddhist Pilgrim on the
- [Dreaming in the Practice of African Marabouts in Paris](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/dreaming-marabouts-in-paris) - Liliane Kuczynski Islamic teachings themselves consider that the interpretation of dreams is never strictly codified or predetermined, and that it cannot entirely rely on the meaning of a symbol. Many other features have to be taken into account, such as the dreamer’s general context, their feelings, the personal, social and psychological problems they face. Click
- [The Seven Deadly Sins](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-seven-deadly-sins) - Martin Lings The sin of anger presupposes as much lack of sense of proportion as avarice does, though in an altogether different mode: either could be described as the “absolute” effect of a relative cause. But avarice is the deification of a material object, whereas anger, like the sins of envy and pride, implies a
- [Divine Love, a Foreword](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/divine-love-a-foreword) - Seyyed Hossein Nasr One of the greatest expositors in Islam of the meaning of love, Ahmad Ghazali, writes in his Sawanih that the greatest distinction of human beings is that God loved them before they could love Him, according to the well-known Qur’anic verse yuhibbuhum wa yuhibbunah, “He loves them and therefore they love Him.”
- [Will the Stars Sing on the Last Day? Cosmology and Eschatology](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/will-the-stars-sing-on-the-last-day-cosmology-and-eschatology) - Michael Root The material universe will still have an eschatological role to play as a physical witness to the glory of God, even for the blessed who see God face to face, though for material things to play this role they will need ‘to receive a greater influx from the divine goodness, not so as
- [The Stages of the Soul Through the Path of Perfection](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-stages-of-the-soul-through-the-path-of-perfection) - The Journey of the Servants to the Place of Return (Seyr al-‘Ibad ila al-Ma‘ad) Mahnia Nematollahi Mahani The journey of the soul starts from the moment of his awareness of his highest destination. The reason for the beginning of the journey is the desire for self-understanding, and the first step for such a journey is
- [Getting Away from ‘Religion’ in Medieval Japan](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/getting-away-from-religion) - Philip Garrett The great temple shrine complexes of the medieval period were centres of organisation, authority, and legitimacy, which are best understood not as ‘religious’ complexes which were also ‘economic’ and ‘political’ powers, but as institutions whose authority cannot be separated out into separate (modern) categories of ‘economic’, ‘judicial’, or ‘religious’ authority. Such distinctions cut
- [Introduction to Yinyang Cosmology](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/yinyang-cosmology) - Robin R.Wang Existing as one in many, Dao can explain identity in difference and unity in plurality. It entails a sense or vision of Dao as the single unifying force within phenomenal reality, while seeing this reality in all its complexity. In particular, along with constant change there is an underlying stability both in things
- [The Message of Islamic Art](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-message-of-islamic-art) - Jean-Louis Michon Recitation, the art which manifests the sound and modulations in Arabic of the verses of the Koran in time; calligraphy, the art which transcribes visually the vocables and fixes them in space… with these two modes of expression we find ourselves at the very source of the art of the Muslims, the source
- [The Statue of Kannon as a Boy](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-statue-of-kannon-as-a-boy) - A Japanese medieval tale, translated by Paul S. Atkins. When birds are about to die, they chirp softly; when humans part ways, their words touch the heart. Realizing that these words are the last someone will ever say, one pleads with the dying one about the past and the future, and it is all the
- [A Meditation on Friendship](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/a-meditation-on-friendship) - Brian Lundberg When Confucius asks what he means by sitting and forgetting, Yanhui replies “I drop off my limbs, drive out perception and understanding, distance myself from my physical form, get rid of knowledge, and thereby become identical with the great thoroughfare… Awareness is not a matter of filling our heads with more analytical knowledge,
- [The Emerald Tablet (<em>Tabula smaragdina/al-Lawh al-zumurrudh</em>)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/emerald-tablet-tabula) - Hermes Trismegistos The whole contents of the Emerald Tablet are like an explanation of the Seal of Solomon, whose two triangles respectively represent essence and substance, forma and materia, spirit and soul, Sulphur and Quicksilver, the volatile and the stable, or spiritual power and bodily existence. Click here to read a Latin and English version.
- [The Poetics of Grammar and the Metaphysics of Sound and Sign](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/poetics-of-grammar) - S. La Porta and D. Shulman This is the introduction to a remarkable collective volume, see link below. God has already once exclaimed “Let there be light”, to which the angels now respond. Although the world has come into existence by means of God’s initial exclamation, He withholds its full actualization until the angelic host
- [Yakshas](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/yakshas) - Ananda K. Coomaraswamy A key reference article by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy on the yakshas, the tutelary deities or patron-saints of nature in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain lore. Foremost among them is Kubera, Regent of the North, and they indicate the intimate connection between spirits and trees and other forces of nature. Yakshas are worshipped with
- [Gadamer’s Fusion of Horizons & al-Biruni](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/gadamer-al-biruni) - Kemal Ataman In studying an alien culture, therefore, it is not enough for the student of religion merely to read that tradition’s sources; he or she has the ethical obligation of trying to read and understand them from that tradition’s own epistemological point of view as well. For as indicated in W.C. Smith’s well known
- [Harmonizing Yin and Yang](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/harmonizing-yin-and-yang) - Eva Wong The true lead was there before sky and earth were born. It is the father who created all things and the mother who nourished them. Therefore it is called the mother and father of all minerals. The Tsan-tung-chi says, “It is the mother and father of al the hexagrams.” It is the secret
- [Can Creatures ‘adorn themselves’ with the Names of God?](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/can-creatures-adorn-themselves) - To introduce us to the genre proper to his celebrated commentary on the ‘Ninety-nine Beautiful Names of God’, al-Ghaz?l? opens by offering readers the goal of ‘adorning themselves’ with these names.1 For this is not a mere speculative adventure into ‘naming God’, but an exercise meant to effect something in readers who will undertake the disciplines indicated with each name in the form of ‘admonitions’. Now any Muslim who dares to speak of love, charity, or compassion will be reminded immediately of God’s own names, for these English terms already suggest a number of them (with Qur’anic references). Besides the ubiquitous Al-Rahman, al-Rahim [the Infinitely Good, the Merciful], consider Al-Wahh?b [The Bestower] (3:8, 38:9, 38:35), Ar-Razz?q [The EverProviding] (51:58), Al-Kar?m [The Bountiful, The Generous] 27:40, 82:6), Al-Wak?l [The Trustee, The Dependable] (3:173, 4:171, 28:28, 73:9), Al-Afuww [The Pardoner, The Effacer of Sins] (4:99, 4:149, 22:60), Ar-Ra’?f [The Compassionate, The All Pitying[ (3:30, 9:117, 57:9, 59:10), Now inspired by the Muslim convention that whoever intends to name a child with one of these names must prefix it by ‘abdul-‘, as in ‘Abdul-Khadr’, we might well ask whether we can ever ‘adorn ourselves’ with any of these names. And pursuing that query will open a rich vein of comparative reflection for Christians and Muslims. To take a name paradigmatic for the exercise of love, charity, or compassion, we may ponder ‘al-Ghaffar’, where the intensive fifth form of the Arabic verb suggests a rendering like ‘One who never ceases to forgive’ or ‘One whose forgiving continues to forgive’ (Qur’an 20:82, 38:66, 39:5, 40:42, 71:10, 13:16, 14:48, 38:65, 39:4, 40:16). Christians would be reminded of Jesus’ way of responding to the query of Peter: ‘Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? As many as seven times’? As if to dispense with any such accounting, Jesus turns the number offered into a multiplier carrying us beyond calculation: ‘I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven’ (Mt 18:21)! Might this maneuver suggest how al-Ghaffar stands ready to forgive us? Indeed, I would propose there can be no other reading of Jesus’ response. For he can hardly be suggesting that any of us would be capable of repeating the act of forgiving that many times! Indeed, were it necessary to do so, we would have to wonder whether the act could ever be efficacious? Yet that wonderment might well prove to be the thread we need. For Christians speak readily of loving and of forgiving, yet closer scrutiny of the lives of exemplary Christians, in the light of scriptures offering them access to the One who animates their lives, suggests that truly loving or forgiving lies quite beyond their power to effect. Let us begin with the admonition attached to the shema, ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord’ (Deuteronomy 6:4-5), which Jesus cites in answer to an ostensibly academic question; ‘which is the greatest commandment of the law’? ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might’ (Mt 22:3638). But this admonition puts the grammar of ‘commandment’ to a severe test, for we would have no way of ascertain- ing whether we had fulfilled it: who of us could ever be sure of loving with our whole heart, or all of our soul or strength? And might we not surmise that to be Jesus’ very point: reminding the ‘lawyer who asked him a question to test him’, as Matthew puts it, to seek the answer in his own scripture. Following directly upon the foundational shema, the pride of place is given to a command which defies execution! Moreover, the first of the letters of John explains why that must be the case. After a convoluted lead regarding a commandment at once new and old, John focuses on ‘the message you have heard from the beginning, that you should love one another’ (1 John 3:11). Yet to remind us that we are unable to fulfill that injunction, he goes on to exhort: Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us (1 John 4:7-10). What distinguishes this form of knowing is that it follows upon doing--‘he who does not love does not know God’, much as Al-Ghaz?l? offers an exercise to follow if we are have any inkling of the import of a divine name. And for John that exercise recapitulates the way Jesus completes his answer to the lawyer: ‘this is the great and first commandment. And the second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself’ (Leviticus 19:18, Mt 22:38-39). As John elaborates it: Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has 77 ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected n us (4:11-12). John’s form of address offers the decisive clue: he is addressing those already ‘beloved’ by God, so can expect them to understand the import of what he is saying: brother or sister from your heart’ (18:3435). But how can Jesus be so unequivocal if, as I have been intimating, forgiving itself is an impossible undertaking for us? For the very reason that John gives: though we cannot hope to fulfill these commandments ourselves, we are never alone, we who are ‘beloved of God’. And here we find the hidden key to Jesus parable of the ungrateful servant. The force of the parable turns on the apparent contradiction: one who has been forgiven fails to forgive; yet the servant could never have acted as he did had he truly accepted forgiveness. In fact, the contradiction is only apparent. The original servant never received forgiveness for he never acknowledged his fault; he simply breathed a sigh of relief at having been reprieved. Yet failing to acknowledge any fault kept him outside the kingdom of God, for only those able to admit sinfulness are able to ask for and receive forgiveness, and so be admitted to the kingdom. For it is only in receiving God’s forgiveness that we can forgive others, yet to receive we must ask, and to ask we must acknowledge our need. Resting on our own laurels, we can never forgive, for we will always be busy ‘editing and re-editing a yet more elegant version of ourselves’ (Kierkegaard). Such is the dynamic of the invitation to love, charity, or compassion issued by the Christian scriptures and the Qur’an. It quickly becomes an invitation to seek the presence of the God who commands, so that we may be released from our own preoccupations enough to hear those commands and be empowered to fulfill them. Parallel Muslim Testimony So far our focus has been on forgiving, as the acid test of love, charity, and compassion, and as a way of showing how we can only connect with the reality intimated is by this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his own Spirit. ... So we know and believe the love God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in loves abides in God, and God abides in him (4:1316). Moreover, the source of this knowledge the anointing you have received from him [which] abides in you, [so] you have no need that anyone should teach you; as his anointing teaches you about everything, and is true (2:26-7). John even finds it superfluous to issue this original commandment to ‘beloved’ already anointed, as if to emphasize what a strange form of command it is: evoking the active presence of God to remind us that we ought not take these commands to be exhortations to fulfill, as though we could carry them out ourselves. Yet to return to Jesus’ admonition to forgive ‘seventy times seven’ times, he confirms his point with a story of a servant whose master forgave a huge debt when he implored him to do so, only then to turn around himself to throttle a fellow servant who owed him far less (Mt 18:23-33). And Jesus endorses the master’s punishment— ‘to deliver him to the jailer till he should pay all his [original] debt’—by insisting: ‘so also my heavenly father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your 78 by the ‘divine names’ via that reality itself. As the first letter of John puts it: ‘not that we loved God but that he loved us’. Reza Shah-Kazemi elucidates the more metaphysical aspects of divine love in Muslim tradition, stemming from the had?th quds?: ‘I was a hidden treasure, and I loved to be known, so I created the creation in order to be known’.2 [this] knowledge ... is not abstract but concrete, not just posited discursively but ‘realized’ spiritually, that is, made ‘real’; since ultimate reality is at one with love, ‘realized’ knowledge must be a perfect synthesis between the two principles, just as it must integrate knowledge within being. Without the dimension of love, knowledge remains abstract; realized knowledge is thus overflowing with love, and the consummation of love is beatific union with the Beloved, thus, tawh?d in its deepest spiritual significance of ‘making one’. Just as, according to the had?th quds?, love for being known initiates creation, so it is knowledge of God that brings about a love which consummates creation. In other words, it is consciousness of God that attracts the love of God, and this love reveals the ultimate meaning of the first testimony of Islam, ‘No God but God’. It is this dimension of tawh?d as union that the saints or the ‘friends of God’ (awliy?h All?h, sing. wal? All?h) have realized. Such knowledge results in the ‘state of the ‘friend of God’,’ the ‘slave’ who has ‘drawn near’ to God, to the point where God loves him’, as another had?th quds?, expresses it: ‘My slave never ceases to draw near to Me through supererogatory acts until I love him. And when I love him, I am his hearing by which he hears, his sight by which he sees, his hand by which he grasps, and his foot by which he walks’.3 Here Reza ShahKazemi invites us beyond the obvious import of this saying, to see the way in which al-Ghazz?l? interprets this saying, one of the most oft-quoted in the works of the Sufis. Book six of volume four of his Ihy?’ is entitled ‘The Book of Love (mahabba) and longing and intimacy and contentment’. In his discussion on the love of God for man, he writes, in theological mode, that whereas one can legitimately apply the same word, love, both to man and to God, the meaning of the word changes depending on the agent of love. Human love is an inclination (mayl) of the soul towards that which is in harmony with it, beauty both outward and inward, seeking from another the consummation of love, for its perfection cannot be achieved within itself—and such love cannot be ascribed to God, in whom all perfections are infinitely and absolutely realized. However, at this point al-Ghazz?l? shifts into a completely different mode of discourse, and asserts that God’s love is absolutely real, and that His love is not for another—such is inconceivable— but rather is for Himself: for His own Essence, qualities and acts: for ‘there is nothing in being except His Essence and His acts’. Hence, when the Qur’?n asserts that ‘He loves them’ (5:54), this means that ‘God does indeed love them [people], but in reality He loves nothing other than Himself, in the sense that He is the totality [of being], and there is nothing in being apart from Him.’ Al-Ghazz?l? proceeds to show how this love of God for Himself ... most clearly manifests itself, and this he does by reference to the saying: ‘God is the hearing, sight, hand and foot of the one He loves, and the one He loves is the one who draws close to Him through supererogatory prayer.’ Finally, and most significantly for our inquiry: This capacity to attain this degree of ‘nearness’ is itself an expression of the eternally real love of God. According to al-Ghazz?l?, this perfect and eternal love of God creates the human being in a disposition which seeks proximity to Him, and furnishes him with access to the pathways leading to the removal of the veils separating him from God, such that he comes to ‘see’ God by means of God Himself. ‘And all this’, says al-Ghazz?l?, ‘is the act of God, and a grace bestowed upon him [God’s creature]: and such is what is meant by God’s love of him.’ This enlightening grace of God towards His creatures is constitutive of His love for them, a love which in reality is nothing other than His love for Himself; and there is a clear link between this divine love of God for Himself and the highest realization of mystical tawh?d. Although on the surface the saying appears to make God’s love the result of contingent actions—the voluntary performance of religious acts of devotion— divine love is the eternally pre-existent reality, for God is not subject to change: all that can change is the perception of the soul, which, mysteriously, comes to see its own illusory nature and the unique reality proper to God; evidently, only God can ‘see’ this reality, whence the saying: God becomes the ‘eye’ by which the saint sees, and the saint ‘sees’ both his own nothingness and the sole reality of God. In other words, it is only possible to assert that God loves Himself as and through His creatures, from the point of view of one who has gained this ‘proximity’ to God and thus comes to a realization that it is indeed God and not himself who ‘sees’ through him, ‘hears’ through him, and so on. Such a knowledge is only granted, according to al-Ghazz?l? in another treatise, to those who have seen through the illusory nature of their own existence, and this can only occur as a consequence of realizing the state of fan?’, extinction, annihilation, in God. It is this that the highest category of knowers of God undergo, it is this self-dénouement that provides them with the ultimate realization of the principle of tawh?d: The love of God for Himself through His creation assumes an altogether transfor- mative power from the point of view of wal?ya, that sanctity which is the fruit of the purest tawh?d, which in turn is predicated upon the complete effacement of all that is other than God—only then can one speak about God’s love for Himself through His creatures. .... To see a saint is thus to witness something of the divine reality which he has rendered transparent by his very effacement in that reality. Christian Testimony of John of the Cross We may readily compare this unitary view of creator and creature with John of the Cross’s presentation of the inner dynamics of a life of faith.4 John is disarmingly forthright in identifying the goal of that journey: ‘the union and transformation of the [person] in God’ (Ascent of Mount Carmel 2.5.3); as well as the means: ‘faith alone, which is the only proximate and proportionate means to union with God’ (2.9.1). He is at pains to distinguish this intentional union from the ‘union between God and creatures [which] always exists [by which] God sustains every soul and dwells in it substantially. ... By it He conserves their being so that if the union would end they would immediately be annihilated and cease to exist’ (2.5.3). So John will presume the unique metaphysical relation of all creatures to their source which Meister Eckhart elaborated from Aquinas’ ‘distinction’, and does not hesitate it to call it a union--indeed, an ‘essential or substantial union’.5 This grounding fact attends all creatures, hence it is natural and found in everything (though displayed differently in animate from inanimate, and in animate, differs from animals to humans, though among humans it can still be found in ‘the greatest sinner in the world’), while the intentional union is supernatural and can only be found ‘where there is a likeness of love’ [such that] God’s will and the [person’s] are in conformity’ (2.5.3). In her study of Shankara, Sara Grant shows how the ‘non-reciprocal relation of dependence’ which attends all creatures of a free creator eliminates any prospect of ‘heteronomy’ between those two wills, but let us attend first to the internal connection between faith and union which John confidently asserts.6 What makes this sound so startling is our propensity to confine such talk to ‘mystics’ as we tend to reduce faith to belief: holding certain propositions to be true. This long and complex debate in Christian theology cuts oddly across confessional lines, so the best we can do here is to remind ourselves that John of the Cross could well have been responding from the Iberian peninsula to sixteenth-century winds from northern Europe. He does so by elaborating key assertions of Aquinas to defuse debates polarizing intellect and will in the act of faith. For Aquinas, ‘faith is a sort of knowledge [cognitio quaedam] in that it makes the mind assent to something. The assent is not due to what is seen by the believer but to what is seen by him who is believed’.7 The one who is believed is, of course, the incarnate Word of God, Jesus, as mediated through the scriptures, so this peculiar ‘sort of knowledge’ is rooted in an interpersonal relation of the believer with Jesus. It is that relation at the root of faith which John of the Cross sets out to explore, quite aware that what results from it will ‘fall short of the mode of knowing [cognitio] which is properly called “knowledge” [scientia], for such knowledge causes the mind to assent through what is seen and through an understanding of first principles’ (Ibid.). More positively, Aquinas will characterize faith as ‘an act of mental assent commanded by the will, [so] to believe perfectly our mind must tend unfailingly towards the perfection of truth, in unfailing service of that ultimate goal for the sake of which our will is commanding our mind’s assent’.8 Unlike ordinary belief, then, faith must be an act of the whole person, involving a personal and critical quest for a truth which outreaches our proper expression. John assesses our concepts sharply: ‘nothing which could possibly be imagined or comprehended in this life can be a proximate means of union with God’ (Ascent of Mount Carmel 2.8.4), since ‘nothing created or imagined can serve the intellect as a proper means for union with God; [rather], all that can be grasped by the intellect would serve as an obstacle rather than a means, if a person were to become attached to it’ (2.8.1). Culminating in Al-Ghazz?l? on trust in God The operative alternative to conceptual knowing in Islam is trust, the epitome of which is found in the state of tawakkul, elaborated by Al-Ghazz?l? in the central book of his Ihy?’ ‘Ul?m al-d?n as the complement to tawh?d, which culminates in the believer’s profound conviction ‘of the unalterable justice and excellence of things as they are ..., of the `perfect rightness of the actual’.9 Eric Ormsby sees this conviction as the upshot of the ten years of seclusion and prayer following Al-Ghazz?l?’s spiritual crisis. By ‘the actual’ he means what God has decreed, itself the product and reflection of divine wisdom. And in asserting the primacy of the actual over the possible, Al-Ghazz?l? shows himself a true theologian. For philosophers, contingency tends to bespeak the logical fact that ‘whatever exists could always be other than it is’. Yet while it may be ‘logically correct and permissible to affirm that our world could be different than it is, it is not theologically correct and permissible--indeed, it is 82 impious--to assert that our world could be better than it is. The world in all its circumstances remains unimpeachably right and just, and it is unsurpassably excellent’.10 Yet the excellence in question is not one which we can assess independently of the fact that it is the product of divine wisdom, so Al-Ghazz?l? directs us to the second part where practice will allow us to traverse domains which speculative reason cannot otherwise map. What sort of a practice is tawakkul: trust in divine providence? It entails accepting whatever happens as part of the inscrutable decree of a just and merciful God. Yet such an action cannot be reduced to mere resignation, to be caricatured as ‘Islamic fatalism.’ It rather entails aligning oneself with things as they really are: in Ghazali’s sense, with the truth that there is no agent but God Most High. This requires surrender since we cannot formulate the relationship between this single divine agent and the other agents which we know, and also because our ordinary perspective on things is not a true one: human society lives under the sign of j?hiliyya or pervasive ignorance. Nor can this resignation be solely intellectual, as though I could learn ‘the truth’ so as to align myself with it in the way speculative reason is supposed to illuminate practical judgment. For this all-important relationship resists formulation. Nevertheless, by trying our best to act according to the conviction that the divine decree expresses the truth in events as they unfold, we will allow ourselves to be shown how things truly lie. So faith [tawh?d] and practice [tawakkul] are reciprocal; neither is foundational. The understanding given us is that of one journeying in faith, a salik, the name which Sufis characteristically appropriated for themselves. There are stages of trust in divine providence, to be sure, which Ghazz?l? catalogues as (1) the heart’s relying on the trustworthy One [wakil] alone, (2) a trust like that of a child in its mother, where the focus is less on the trust involved than on the person’s orientation to the one in whom they trust; and (3) the notorious likeness of a corpse in the hands of its washers, where the relevant point is that such trust moves one quite beyond petition of any sort. Yet the operative factor is present already in the initial stage, which is not surpassed but only deepened by subsequent stages: trusting in the One alone. The formula for faith here is the hadith: ‘There is no might and power but in God’, which Ghazz?l? takes to be equivalent to the Qur’anic shah?dah: There is no god but God, thereby reminding us that the hadith does not enjoin us to trust in power or might, as attributes distinct from God, but in God alone. It is in this context that he selects stories of Sufi sheikhs, offering them as examples to help point us towards developing specific skills of trusting: habits of responding to different situations in such a way that one learns by acting how things are truly ordered, the truth of the decree. The principle operative throughout is that a policy of complete renunciation of reliance on customary means [asbab] is contrary to divine wisdom, the Sunnah All?h, but those who journey in faith will learn that means are of different kinds, hidden as well as manifest. So there is a school whereby we learn how to respond to what happens in such a way that we are shown how things are truly ordered. This school will involve learning from others who are more practiced in responding rightly; Al-Ghazz?l?’s judicious use of stories is intended to intimate the Sufi practice of master / disciple wherein the novice is offered way of discerning how to act. Philosophy no longer pretends to be a higher wisdom; speculative reason is wholly subject to practical reason; the inevitable implication of replacing the emanation scheme with an intentional creator, evidenced also in Maimonides. So the challenge of understanding the relation of the free creator to the universe becomes the task of rightly responding to events as they happen, in such a way that the true ordering of things, the divine decree, can be made manifest in one’s actions-as-responses. Al-Ghazz?l? expresses this relationship between speculative and practical reason by noting that we need to call upon both knowledge and state [of being] in guiding our actions according to a wholehearted trust in God. What he wishes to convey by those terms in tandem is an awareness of the very structure of the book itself: the knowledge which faith in divine unity brings is only gained through practice, leading one to an habitual capacity to align one’s otherwise errant responses to situation after situation according to the guidance that faith offers. These reflections have shown how the faith of these diverse communities in a free creator converges to challenge us to find ways to articulate the ensuing relationship between creatures and creator, and notably free creatures, so as to give due homage and gratitude to divine wisdom in creating. Notes 1 Al-Ghaz?l? on the Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God, translated by David Burrell and Nazih Daher (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1992; Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 1998) 2 See Reza Shah-Kazemi, ‘God ‘the Loving’, in Miroslav Volf, Ghazi bin Muhammad, and Melissa Yarrington, eds., Common Word: Muslims and Christians on Loving God and Neighbor (Grand rapids MI / Cambridge UK: Eerdmans, 2010) 88-109. These quotations, however, are taken from a portion of his contribution which was omitted form the printed version, which we are indebted to the author for supplying. 3 Sah?h al-Bukh?r?, Kit?b al-riq?q, no.2117, p.992. 4 John of the Cross, The Spiritual Canticle, The Living Flame of Love in Collected Works of St. John of the Cross (Washington DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1991). 5 See Robert Dobie: Logos and Revelation: Ibn ‘Arabi, Meister Eckhart, and Mystical Hermeneutics (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010), and Reza Shah-Kazemi: Paths to Transcendence according to Shankara, Ibn Arabi and Meister Eckhart (Bloomington IN: World Wisdom Books, 2006); French trans. Shankara, Ibn ‘Arabi et Maître Eckhart : La Voie de la Transcendance (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010) 6 Sara Grant, Towards an Alternative Theology (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002). 7 Summa Theologiae 1.12.13.3. 8 Summa Theologiae 2-2.4.5. 9 Al-Ghaz?l? on Faith in Divine Unity and Trust in Divine Providence, tr. David Burrell (Louisville KY: Fons Vitae, 2002). 10 Bernard McGinn and David Burrell, eds., God and Creation (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990) 257.
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- [Climbing Mount Purgatorio: Reflections from the Seventh Cornice](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/climbing-mount-purgatorio) - Climbing Mount Purgatorio: Reflections from the Seventh Cornice Hamza Yusuf Director, Zaytuna College But virtue, as it never will be moved Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven; So lust, though to a radiant angel linked Will sate itself in a celestial bed And prey on garbage - William Shakespeare Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, As to be hated needs but to be seen; Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace. – Alexander Pope I love the forest. It is bad to live in the cities: too many are in heat there.... And behold these men: their eyes say it—they know nothing better on earth than to lie with a woman. Mud is at the bottom of their souls; and woe if their mud also has spirit! Would that you were as perfect as animals at least! But animals have innocence. Do I counsel you to slay your senses? I counsel the innocence of the senses. – Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche 1 What is desire? In Plato’s dialogue, Philebus, Socrates provides one answer, stating that hunger, thirst, and such appetites fall under the realm of desire: Socrates: We commonly talk, do we not, of a man “having thirst”? Meaning that he is becoming empty.... Then is his thirst a desire? Protarchus: Yes, a desire for drink. Socrates: For drink, or for replenishment with drink? Protarchus: For replenishment with drink, I should think. Socrates: When one becomes empty then, apparently he desires the opposite of what he is experiencing; being emptied, he longs to be filled. From this perspective, desire is an attempt at filling emptiness or a void within us. The desire may be profound, such as a desire to know why we are here when we confront a void without that knowledge. The desire may also be less than profound, such as the desire to own objects that preoccupy and entertain us so we do not have to confront those voids. In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates tells us that when a man who is strong desires to be strong, or one who is swift wishes to be swift, what he really desires is to remain strong or swift. Since we cannot guarantee the continuance of such traits, Socrates concludes that what man really desires is in the future and not in the present; in others words, it is “that of which he is in want.” Another perspective on desire worth contemplating comes from the 13th century poet, jurist and theologian Rumi, who begins his Mathnawi by describing the sounds of the reed flute as mournful because they are cut off from the source; Rumi explains that being severed from his source, man enters a mournful state, and his hollowness and emptiness sets him on his goal to find his heart’s desire. The English word “desire” hints at this celestial meaning of humanity’s need to reconnect with its source. “Desire” is derived from the Latin word, “desiderare,” meaning “to long for, wish for” but originally meant “to await what the heavens would bring” from the prepositional phrase, “de sidere” (“de” meaning “from,” and “sidere” meaning “heavenly body, star, constellation”). “We are stardust / We are golden / And we’ve got to get ourselves / Back to the garden,” sings Joni Mitchell. This essential desire to get our selves back to the Garden of Eden, or to break the chain of Samsara and enter into Nirvana (annihilation of the self) is a sacred perspective of desire. However, the world by its nature is dazzling. Its myriad forms entice men and women who are seduced by its resplendent ornaments, and their pursuits and desires fragment. Some seek power, some wealth, some love, and some set their sights no higher than seeking physical pleasure. Each of these pursuits, however, is rooted in desire, in our craving directed at the ephemeral, which can become insatiable and destructive. Humans have both animal desires, which we call appetites, and rational desires, which Spinoza in his posthumous Ethics refers to as “will.” Can desires be considered right or wrong? From a modern perspective, few desires would be categorized as wrong per se. In 2 our individualistic Western societies, people are encouraged to pursue their “heart’s desire,” as long as it does not exploit or hurt others. Both rational ethics and religious ethics, however, distinguish quite clearly between right and wrong desires, and posit that wrong desires may result in damaging and destructive pursuits that shatter one’s psychological well-being and wreak havoc on human relationships. Desires are essential for human survival and happiness, but become destructive when they are perverted, excessive, or deficient. All wrong desires share the misperception of the true nature of the desire for one of three reasons: what is desired is a partial good, yet it is desired excessively as a sole good; it is a means to a good, but is taken as an end in itself; finally, it is something that appears to be a good but is only an illusive good. This last reason is most pernicious and particularly pronounced in carnal desire. Perhaps better than any other writer in the English language, Shakespeare describes the state of one under the influence of illusive destructive desire in Sonnet 129: The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action; and, till action, lust Is perjur’d, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame, Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust; Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight; Past reason hunted, and no sooner had, Past reason hated as a swallowed bait On purpose laid to make the taker mad; Mad in pursuit, and in possession so; Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme; A bliss in proof, and proved a very woe, Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream. All this the world well knows, yet none know well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell. While here Shakespeare refers to sensual lust, his words hold true for other types of lust - - for blood, power, and wealth. For once lustful craving takes hold of one’s heart, one indeed becomes “mad in pursuit and in possession so.” The depths of human depravity are startling, and once we lose our balance, the fall can be long and hard, causing pain for those who witness it, and despair -- even death -- for the one falling. *** *** *** In the Islamic tradition, the root of such destructive tendencies in the pursuit of desire is the nafs, an Arabic word which can loosely be defined as the ego, but more appropriately is the tainted soul. This tainted soul resembles a wild animal. In Islam, the untamed nafs is both the single most destructive force in our world, and also the source of our special nature and distinction among other creatures; when refined and tempered, it can soar with 3 the angels. According to the Qur’an, the nafs has three phases, and the first is known as the compulsive or commanding soul (nafs al-ammaarah). This is the infantile self that demands and compels one to act in pursuit of the self’s desires. This lowest aspect of the self is aided by three other destructive elements: the passions (ahwa, plural of hawaa), the illusory nature of the world (dunya), and an obsessive and compulsive force referred to as Satan (Shaytaan), which according to the Prophet Muhammad, flows in the very arteries of men and women. In Islamic theology, all of these poisons can be controlled and overcome by sincere human struggle that is easier done when aided by divine grace, but which can be achieved by anyone who engages in that struggle, regardless of faith or belief. The most stereotypical pursuits of the nafs involve pleasure, wealth, fame and power. It is the quest of pleasure that preoccupies most of us. The most base of these are sensual pleasures, including eating, drinking, resting, and recreation, but which culminate for most people in the greatest of bodily pleasures: sex. Both moral philosophy and religion recognize the dangers of the wanton pursuit of pleasure, and both prescribe temperance as the key virtue that can contain pleasure so it remains a beneficial good and not a cause for destructive behavior. Moral philosophers, working within the ethos of the secular, have recognized that man without virtue is worse than a brute. In Politics, Aristotle writes: “If he have not virtue, man is the most unholy and the most savage of all animals, and the most full of lust and gluttony.” Virtue, for Aristotle, was not predicated upon a belief in some divine order but rather in the compelling argument that reason presents to the reflective person of how one should order one’s life. Religious tradition, however, is not merely concerned with a person’s psychological or rational well-being, but more importantly, with the supernatural element of man, otherwise known as the soul. In the Catholic tradition, it is the soul that is at risk when a person commits a sin. Deadly sins are those that “kill the life of the soul leaving the sinner without sanctifying grace.”1 Interestingly, in the Catholic formation, the seven deadly or mortal sins are states, not actions. They relate to the will of a human and not to any one act. In the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, souls not sanctified in this world must be purged of their wrongs before entering Paradise; the souls are not purged of the act of sin but rather of the stain of sin. The seven deadly sins are understood to be the matrices from which all individual acts of sin emanate. The sins themselves are distortions of the human being’s desire, perversions of the direction of one’s love and its ultimate object. Thus, paradoxical as it may seem, love is at the root of sinfulness. *** *** *** 1 Modern Catholic Encyclopedia, Edited by Michael Glazier and Monika K. Hellwig (Collegeville Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2004), 779. 4 In Dante’s Purgatorio, there are seven cornices on Mount Purgatory, corresponding to the seven sins. The lower purgatory consists of the cornices wherein the sins of love perverted are purged: pride (superbia), which is a perversion of self-love resulting in contempt for others as opposed to love for them; envy (invidia), which entails a perverted love of one’s own goods or the desire of goods that one does not have which leads to one’s hope that another will be deprived of his goods; and wrath (ira), which is the perversion of justice that results in revenge or spite. In the middle cornice of Mount Purgatory, we find the sin of love defective, which is sloth (acedia). Unlike the modern sense of sloth, acedia was understood as a lack of spiritual desire, a neglect of one’s duty to engage in spiritual struggle with the self. It is the failure of one to love the totum bonum, the real goods in proper measure needed for a happy life, and the summum bonum, the highest good, with all one’s heart. Finally, upper purgatory involves the sins of excess. In it we find avarice (avaritia), which is excessive love of the mineral kingdom embodied in gold and silver; gluttony (gluta), excessive love of the vegetable kingdom embodied in food; and lust (luxuria), excessive love of the animal kingdom as embodied in carnality. Mount Purgatory has at its base pride, which is the deadliest of the seven sins, and as one moves beyond the “cold sins” into the “hot sins,” it is on the seventh cornice that we confront lust. In Dante’s schema, this is the last sin to be purged before one can enter the earthly paradise, symbolizing the tenacious hold that lust has on the individual. In his Inferno, sins are in three categories, and the one concerning lust is that of incontinence, which also includes gluttony. Lust, interestingly, is the least of these sins punished in Dante’s hell. We find those lost souls who are condemned to the second circle as a result of their lust described as being blown about by a violent gust of wind that symbolizes the violent force of the desires that caused them to go astray. The Arabic word for passionate desire, hawaa, is a direct cognate of the word for wind, hawa’, the root word meaning “to fall down.” These are souls that were unable to withstand the power and force of their urges, and were blown over by their passions and fell into the state of incontinence. In the Purgatorio, however, on the seventh and final cornice, the lustful sinners are found marching through a wall of flame to purge them of the fires of their misdirected passions. To understand the sin of lust, one must first understand the concept of sin in the Abrahamic faiths. The word “sin,” which, outside of the religious circle, has fallen out of favor in the modern world, is possibly related to a Saxon word that meant “to wander.” Sin is an English translation of the Hebrew term “het,” which like both its Arabic and Greek counterparts -- khati’ah in Arabic and hamartia in the New Testament -- is originally an archery term that meant “to miss the mark.” Sin was also used in archaic English as an archery term for a miss. The idea being that sin, in a metaphysical sense, originates in a sound attempt at achieving a good but “misses the mark” by mistaking an apparent good for a real one. Repentance is, in essence, redressing the miss and realigning one’s spiritual sights for the next attempt. 5 The goods to which humans and men in particular, aim are referred to in the Qur’an as pleasure, wealth and power. “Made to seem pleasing to humanity is love of desires for mates [pleasure] and children [power], and heaps and hoards of gold and silver [wealth], domesticated horses, and cattle, and fields [wealth and power]. Those are the conveniences and enjoyments for the life of the world, while the finest resort is the presence of God” (3:14). Pleasure, wealth, and power are means, not ends. The true end is ultimate concern. The pursuit of these attractive goods as ends can lead to despair for those who attempt to create meaning out of their pursuit once they are revealed to be baseless. Shakespeare’s Macbeth, whose blind pursuit of power leads him to the abyss of despair, ends his life concluding that he is a mere shadow, without substance trapped in a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Like Macbeth’s pursuit of power, revealed to him in the end as empty, the lust-driven pursuit of bodily pleasures is another attempt at sustaining one’s meaning for the time being. Lust was referred to as the sin of “luxuria” in Latin. From it, comes our English word, “luxury”; the Latin meaning, however, was closer to exuberance, or superfluous abundance. Lust is only possible with animal spirits and with vitality, and the excessiveness of it was a luxury, hence the name. In her essay on the deadly sins, Dorothy Sayers identifies two main reasons people are susceptible to the sin of luxuria: It may be through sheer exuberance of animal spirits: in which case a sharp application of the curb may be all that is needed to bring the body into subjection and remind it of its proper place in the scheme of man’s twofold nature. Or—and this commonly happens in periods of disillusionment like our own, when philosophies are bankrupt and life appears without hope—men and women may turn to lust in sheer boredom and discontent, trying to find in it some stimulus which is not provided by the drab discomfort of their mental and physical surroundings. When that is the case, stern rebukes and restrictions are worse than useless. It is as though one were to endeavor to cure anemia by bleeding; it only reduces further an already impoverished vitality. The mournful and medical aspect of twentieth century pornography and promiscuity strongly suggests that we have reached one of these periods of spiritual depression, where people go to bed because they have nothing better to do. In other words, the “regrettable moral laxity” of which respectable people complain may have its root cause not in Luxoria at all, but in some other of the sins of society, and may automatically begin to cure itself when that root cause is removed.2 Is the “root cause” not lust, but simply boredom? Kierkegaard believed that man’s inability to find any real meaning in life resulted in an indifference, cynicism, and boredom with it. The aesthete, who believes he is leading a life in pursuit of pleasure, exemplifies the nihilistic malaise of the modern age. The aesthete’s hedonistic life is 2 Dorothy L. Sayers, Creed or Chaos (New Hampshire, Manchester: Sophia Institute Press, 1949), 121-122. 6 rooted in his boredom. The irony is that the things that he finds to entertain and distract him from his boredom soon become the very sources of boredom: “The boredom that comes later is usually the fruit of a misguided diversion. It seems doubtful that a remedy against boredom can give rise to boredom, but it can give rise to boredom only insofar as it is used incorrectly.”3 In Pornified, an excellent study on the insidiousness of pornography, Pamela Paul arrives at a similar conclusion about the road to boredom: So many women and all so easy; a man tends to gorge. And once he’s seen a thousand bare bottoms—no matter the variety of form and function— they start to look the same. Men pummel through woman after woman, plunging into an inevitable cycle of diminishing returns. In one study by James L. Howard, Myron B. Reifler, and Clifford B. Liptzin, cited in the 1970 federal report on pornography, men who were shown pornographic films for ninety minutes a day, five days a week experienced less sexual arousal and interest in similar materials with the passage of time. What initially thrills eventually titillates, what excites eventually pleases, what pleases eventually satisfies. And satisfaction sooner or later yields to boredom.4 This is the inevitable state of the aesthete who lives for pleasure. He seeks pleasure to remedy his boredom, yet the very thing he seeks as a remedy becomes a source of his spiritual ailment once again. Consciously or not, the hot sins of gula, luxuria, and avaritia are rooted in attempts to address one’s spiritual vacuum. Each begins with the pursuit of real goods, but not correctly as the means to real happiness that comes from an integrated ethical life rooted in virtue and responsibility. Rather, they are an end in themselves, the pursuit of pleasure for pleasure’s sake. Eating not to live, but living to eat; loving not to give, but lusting to take; accumulating wealth not to support, but to create a false sense of security. In short, they are sins driven by emptiness within, mere distractions to avoid confronting a lack of knowledge about life’s purpose and relevance. *** *** *** Ibn Hazm (d. 1064), the great Spanish ethicist and theologian of Muslim Andalusia, believed that at the core of the human being was dread, that every action that motivated man was an attempt to ward off an underlying anxiety (tard hamm): “Thus the seeker of wealth in fact seeks to repel through it the anxiety of poverty; the seeker of fame is primarily concerned to repel the anxiety of subordination or subservience; the seeker of 3 Ibid., 55. 4 Pamela Paul, Pornified: How Pornography is Damaging Our Lives (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2005), 83. 7 pleasure simply wishes to repel the anxiety of missing its enjoyment.”5 Eight centuries later, we hear an echo in Kierkegaard’s observation that the seeker of pleasure is attempting to repel boredom, an idea consonant with Ibn Hazm’s notion of repelling anxiety because boredom’s real threat is that in a state of ennui, we are facing a terrifying confrontation with our mortality and irrelevance. Kierkegaard rightly and insightfully reminds us that to seek pleasure and avoid pain is a quality we share with all sentient creatures. It is not a choice in reality to seek pleasure but rather a capitulation of choice. “Choosing” the hedonistic life of an aesthete is not a choice, but an abstention of choice. This is profoundly consistent with Islam’s doctrine of freewill, a doctrine embedded in the Arabic language itself. “To choose” in Arabic is “akhtaara,” and “choice” is “ikhtiyaar.” The tri-radical source of the word is “khayr,” which means “good.” The verbal form “ikhtaara” literally means “to choose good for oneself.” Hence, from this perspective, choice is the act of choosing what is good. Sayyid Naquib al-Attas, the contemporary Malay philosopher, persuasively connects the notion of choice to the idea of freedom: The choice that is meant in ikhtiyaar is the choice of what is good, better, or best between the two alternatives. This point is most important as it is aligned to the philosophical question of freedom. A choice of what is bad of two alternatives is therefore not a choice that can be called ikhtiyaar; in fact it is not a choice, rather it is an act of injustice done to oneself. Freedom is to act as one’s real and true nature demands—that is one’s haqq [truth] and one’s fitrah [original nature] demands—and so only the exercise of that choice which is of what is good can properly be called a “free choice.” A choice for the better is therefore an act of freedom, and it is also an act of justice done to oneself. It presupposes a knowledge of good and evil, of virtues and vices; whereas a choice for the worse is not a choice as it is grounded upon ignorance urged on by the instigation of the soul that inclines toward the blameworthy aspects of the animal powers; it is then also not an exercise of freedom because freedom means precisely being free of domination by the powers of the soul that incites to evil.6 This enslavement to the inciting soul (nafs al-ammaarah) is entirely ignored in our public discussions about freedom. Moral freedom, the freedom to act prudently and virtuously, is dismissed in any discussion of freedom in the modern context of political and circumstantial freedom. Destructive moral dissolution, which was once rightly termed licentiousness, is now considered a type of freedom. According to the Qur’an, these destructive tendencies are a result of the dominance of the commanding self (nafs al- ammaarah), infantile and domineering, in its unrestrained state. 5 Majid Fakhry, Ethical Theories in Islam (New York: Leiden, 1991), 170. 6 Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas, Prolegomena to the Metaphysics of Islam: An Exposition of the Fundamental Worldview of Islam (Kaula Lumpur, Malaysia: ISTAC, 1995), 33. 8 That “unrestrained” submission to one’s appetites was seen by the 20th century American philosopher, Mortimer Adler, as a reversion to childlike behavior: To give vent to all the promptings of desire, without regard to the demands of society or reality is to revert to infancy—a state characterized, according to Freud, by “the irreconcilability of its wishes with reality.” Because children “live at the beck and call of appetite, and it is in them that the desire for what is pleasant is strongest,” Aristotle thinks it fitting that we should speak of self-indulgence when it occurs in an adult as a “childish fault.”7 Similarly, the 14th century Egyptian poet, Imam al-Busiri, in his section on the caprices of the soul, cautions against letting desire take charge of one’s self: Do not attempt to break its appetites through wanton indulgence Notice how food only strengthens the glutton’s craving The self is like an infant – if you leave it, it will grow up loving to suckle, But if you wean it, soon it will lose its desire for the breast. Divert the self’s desires and avoid empowering it – Whenever desire takes charge, it either destroys or defiles. Shepherd over it as it grazes freely in the field of actions, But should it find the pasturage sweet, restrain its casual roaming. How often it has found some deadly pleasure delightful Not knowing that poison lies hidden in cream! Be on guard against its traps of hunger and satiety – 8 An empty stomach can be worse than a full one. The wantonness and self-centered nature of the aesthete prevents him from any mature relationships; others are merely toys in his pursuit of infantile self-gratification and he is quite literally a “playboy.” Kierkegaard wisely identified the aesthete as being on a continuum of pleasure -- from the crude plebian pleasures of the brutish class to the rarified genteel pursuits of the elite. In other words, whether it is Oprah or opera, the sundry indulgences of humanity find the matrix of their pursuits in the same loci—the center of the self and its desires. 7 Mortimer Adler, The Great Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought (New York: Macmillan,1992), 151. 8 The Burda of Al-Busiri. Trans. by Hamza Yusuf (Essex: Sandala Ltd., 2002), 6. 9 Kierkegaard believed that each of us is confronted with a choice—an “Either/Or” choice. It is either to renounce our freewill and to choose not to choose in our pursuit of pleasure, or to embrace our true self and pursue not pleasure but the ethical life of virtue, which is rooted in commitment to others. He wrote: What, then, is it that I separate in my Either/Or? Is it good and evil? No, I only want to bring you to the point where this choice truly has meaning for you. It is on this that everything turns. As soon as a person can be brought to stand at the crossroads in such a way that there is no way out for him except to choose, he will choose the right thing... Consequently, either a person has to live esthetically or he has to live ethically.9 Profoundly important to this challenge is the understanding that in choosing the ethical life, one does not renounce pleasure. It simply becomes meaningful in ways unimaginable to the aesthete. Kierkegaard writes, “I am no ethical rigorist, enthusiastic about a formal, abstract freedom. If only the choice is posited, all the esthetic returns, and you will see that only thereby does existence become beautiful and that this is the only way a person can save his soul and win the whole world, can use the world without misusing it.”10 The pleasure monger can only misuse the world because he takes as means other people who should be seen as ends unto themselves. He exploits them for his pleasure or participates in their exploitation by feeding the machine that is exploiting them. The ethical person, on the other hand, is transparent to himself and hence to others. Kierkegaard states, “The person who lives ethically has seen himself, knows himself, penetrates his whole concretion with his consciousness, does not allow vague thoughts to rustle around inside him or let tempting possibilities distract him with their juggling; he is not like a magic picture that shifts from one thing to another, all depending on how one shifts and turns it.”11 He can now develop in his life “the personal, the civic, the religious virtues, and his life advances through his continually translating himself from one stage to another.”12 *** *** *** This ethical life is the life of the second stage of the soul known in the Qur’an as the reproachful self (nafs al-lawwaamah). It is an introspective self that does not commit wrongs willfully but always strives to do what is right, and if the self gets the better of a person in this stage, he or she feels remorse and redresses the wrong. The ethical person may lust but will struggle against that impulse and, more importantly, will not “love to lust.” Commenting on the Qur’anic verse, “Made to appear good to humanity is love of pleasure from spouses, children ...” (3:14), Fakhr al-Deen al-Raazi writes: 9 Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, The Essential Kierkegaard, 74. 10 Ibid., 76. 11 Ibid., 81. 12 Ibid., 82 10 Desire falls into two categories: physical and metaphysical. The physical desires are found in everyone immediately, but spiritual desires are revealed only after the physical ones are experienced by the self except in that rare individual. Thus, one’s desire for bodily pleasures is something the self is naturally inclined toward and is a fixed faculty of the human, whereas his inclinations to spiritual delights come as a result of short-lived epiphanies that dissipate with the least of causes. Hence, it is of no surprise that the majority of people have extreme predilections toward bodily pleasures. As for spiritual predilections that only occurs among unusual people and only for periods that are limited in their duration. For this reason, God said, “Made to appear good to humanity is love of pleasure.”13 While these pleasures are not intrinsically negative, they become so with immoderate indulgence. Moderation is the route to an ethical life that results in happiness. Extremes on either side of the golden mean are physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually harmful. Both moral philosophy and religion warn of the dangers of intemperance, as expressed in gluttony, drug abuse, sexuality and other wanton behavior. Sidi Ahmad Zarruq, the fifteenth century scholar and Sufi master, said, “The self by its nature is inclined toward extremism in both guidance and deviance.” Religion has too often been sexually repressive, such as the “religulous” categorization of masturbation as a mortal sin jeopardizing the eternal soul, which, in the light of social science’s discovery of its ubiquitous nature, does not leave much room in hell for sinners. Moreover, shame-based societal efforts that use religion as a means of restraining licentious behavior end up failing if the behavior can be hidden from public view. The anonymity and privacy afforded by modern technology enables people to pursue their pleasures without fear of exposure and subsequent shame. Both religion, and a commitment to an ethical life outside of religion, can effectively address the problem for many individuals struggling to keep their lust in check. From an ethical perspective, commitment is the ground of ethics. No man can respond virtuously without commitment. W. H. Auden alludes to this in his poem entitled “September 1, 1939”: From the conservative dark Into the ethical life The dense commuters come, Repeating their morning vow; “I will be true to the wife, I’ll concentrate more on my work.” It is a daily struggle to be committed, to not succumb to solipsistic egoism. Chastity, which is too often conflated with prudery, is not abstinence from sex but the ethical 13 Fakhr al-Deen al-Raazi, al-Tafsir al-Kabir (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyyah, 1990), 7-8: 170. Author’s translation. 11 regulation of it. As Saint Thomas Aquinas stated: “It belongs to chastity that man may make a moderate use of bodily members in accordance with the judgment of his reason and the choice of his will.”14 Of profound importance for the well-being of men and women is the move beyond lust into the realm of love, which binds one person to another, as he or she is bound to oneself. Love is the gravitational force that holds families together and sustains even the common weal, for without some love of our fellow men and women, the common weal is without true defenders. Lust, on the other hand, is merely self-gratification. It is devoid of ethical responsibilities or a commitment to another. Dante, in his experience on the seventh cornice of lust, finds the penitents recalling the great acts of lust past: “Sodom and Gomorrah,” the new souls cry. And the others: “Pasiphae enters the cow to call the young bull to her lechery.” The reference to Pasiphae comes from Greek mythology in which Apollo and the nymph Perseis conceive Pasiphae. She becomes the wife of King Minos of Crete and the god Poseidon sends Minos a bull as a gift for sacrifice. Instead, Minos adds it to his herd of bulls. In revenge, Poseidon makes Pasiphae fall in love with the bull. She then commissions Daedalus to make an effigy of a cow with wicker and cover it with a hide so she can conceal herself inside and have the bull mount her. The result is the Minotaur, half bull, half human. The clear message is that lust gives birth to monsters.15 True love -- not the bestial “love” of lust -- is the desire to give pleasure to the other as well as receive it, the former being generally the stronger desire. But acts of betrayal can destroy love; it is chastity that enables one to ethically commit to another without the destructive element of betrayal. Marriage has been the foundation of not just advanced civilizations but aboriginal communities as well. It is intriguing that while many traditional cultures are seen as patriarchal in which marital taboos have maintained male dominance over the females, the reality is quite the opposite -- curtailing men’s lust by commitment to the marriage bed is the victory of distinctly female virtue over male nature. In their book titled Brain Sex, Anne Moir and David Jessel address gender differences, albeit with some broad generalizations: While men are turned on by glossily reproduced pubic regions of impersonal pin-up, women achieve moderate erotic stimulation from something very different—the imagination of a sexual relationship. Just as they are more likely to be aroused by the pornographic depiction of a couple coupling, they find gratification in the bodice-ripping romances of popular fiction, which have an overwhelmingly female readership.... Men 14 Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, Question 151, Art. 1. 15 From John Ciardi’s commentary on the Purgatorio of Dante (New York: The Modern Library, 1996), 279, 284. 12 want sex, and women want relationships. Men want flesh and women want love. Just as the boys wanted the balloons, toys and carburetors, the girls have always wanted contact, and communion, and company.16 This assessment, though hyperbolic, is generally supported by what neuroscience is revealing to us about the way men’s brains are wired as opposed to women’s brains. And while there have been many positive outcomes in the past forty years and undeniable ground covered concerning the necessary rights of women leading to a more just society as a result of the women’s movement, there has also been a concomitant downside. The sexual freedom that has accompanied the new found rights has had a tragic side effect that victimizes women. The predominately male characteristics of sex without love, pleasure without commitment, and desire for women without inhibitions have overturned the more communitarian female virtues of loving commitment, meaningful sex and modest social proprieties that engender respect of the opposite sex. Chastity, while far too often perceived as an antiquated “woman’s virtue,” has been a steadfast guardian of human well-being and an effective restraint from falling into the potentially bottomless pit of lust and wantonness. But human beings ultimately find more satisfaction from ethical, intellectual and spiritual awakenings than they do from sensual awakenings, especially when they are experienced within the nexus of moderation, virtue, and love. We often associate appetites with base instincts and neglect the very real rational and spiritual appetites of human beings. Mortimer Adler writes: Those psychologists who find in man two distinct faculties of knowledge—the senses and the reason or intellect -- also find in him two distinct faculties of appetite or desire. The distinction is perhaps most sharply made by Aristotle and Aquinas, who claim that “there must be one appetite tending towards the universal good, which belongs to reason, and another with a tendency towards the particular good, which appetite belongs to sense.17 When pure lust is sought after, the venues for intellectual and spiritual pleasure are often blocked. It is chastity which regulates one’s sexual desire, enabling an exploration of the other necessary aspects of life that afford one a fully human experience. Chastity (’iffah) in the Islamic tradition was, as in the Hellenistic and Christian tradition, seen as one of the four cardinal virtues, and one that protected the individual from his own destructive inclinations as well as the community from moral disintegration caused by licentiousness. And while Muslim society was notably far more sensual than European Christian culture in its respective history, the religious elite was constantly lashing out at 16 Anne Moir, Ph.D. and David Jessel, Brain Sex: The Real Difference Between Men and Women (New York: Delta, 1991), 107. 17 Mortimer Adler, The Great Ideas, pg. 150. 13 the loose morals of many of the Muslim societies throughout their fourteen hundred years. Imam al-Ghazzaali, an influence on Aquinas and perhaps the single greatest Muslim religious thinker, says: The virtue of chastity concerns the control of one’s bodily appetites and sexual desires. It is in order to insure the self’s subordination to its rational component so that its enjoyment or restraint is in accordance with one’s intelligence. It is a moderate position between licentiousness and lack of desire. Wantonness is excessive sexual appetite and extreme pursuits of pleasure that the rational component rejects and forbids.... Thus, it is necessary that a man is vigilant about his appetites, as the majority of men err on the side of excessiveness, especially when it comes to the genitals and the stomach, not to mention money, power, and fame. Excess and deficiency are both blameworthy in regards to chastity.... The desire for sexual intercourse is natural in order that the species is compelled to procreate and to ensure the survival of the species. Hence it is sought after for two reasons—to have children and to remain chaste in the marital bond—and not simply for pastime and pleasure. And when one does seek enjoyment and sensual pleasure from the act, it is in order to ensure the maintenance of mutual love and affection to keep the bond of marriage strong through sexual pleasure. Al-Ghazzali goes on to explain that the inculcation of modesty is essential to a chaste society. Modesty is not the same as excessive shyness or prudery that prevents people from fully participating in life; rather it is a sense of shame in relation to blameworthy traits that are rationally discernable and not simply societal norms that pass themselves off as universal morality. Modesty concerning sexual matters is deeply natural to the human being, but it can be stripped off a person, and films and visual media are unprecedented means to that end. In Plato’s Philebus, Protarchus states: When we see someone, no matter whom, experiencing pleasures—and I think this is true especially of the greatest pleasure—we detect in them an element either of the ridiculous or of extreme ugliness, so that we ourselves feel ashamed, and do our best to cover it up and hide it away, and we leave that sort of thing to the hours of darkness, feeling that it should not be exposed to the light of day. The idea that sexuality is something best performed in the dark or behind closed doors is universal and found in other species; it is not limited to prudish puritans or priggish busybodies who, like “Old lady judges watch people in pairs / Limited in sex they dare / 18 Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, Mizaan al-‘Amal (Egypt: Dar al-Ma’arif, n.d.), 269-270. 19 Plato: The Collected Dialogues, pg. 1148. 14 To push fake morals, insult and stare,”20 but concerns decent people who recognize the threat that a sexualized culture presents to both children and people committed to marriage. The notion that viewing people in heightened states of pleasure is natural is a view pushed by pornographers and their victims. In reality, it is quite alien to most people around the world, and until recently, was limited to the dark recesses of the peep show or the windowless sex shops found in the sleaziest parts of a city. Voyeurism is a pejorative concept in English and yet pornography is essentially just that. As Pamela Paul states, pornography is “anti-sex and anti-freedom.” She continues: “[Pornographers] have sold America on the idea of fantasy while inciting us to ignore reality. Those who have been silenced have only served to further legitimize pornography with their lack of censure.”21 It is only by sincerely examining the pernicious effects of pornography in the last thirty years, during which time it has been normalized, and by freeing ourselves from the prejudices of any one religious perspective, that we can come together and examine the social costs of lust-gone-wild and its impact on the most vulnerable segment of our culture: our youth. *** *** *** It is now worth examining a mystical perspective to this argument that celebrates Kierkegaard’s third and most celestial life, the religious life. This life represents, in the Islamic tradition, the third and final stage of a human’s spiritual development designated in the Qur’an as the soul at peace (nafs al-mutma’innah). Both Christianity and Islam share the concept of the Beatific Vision: “Blessed are the pure at heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). Maintaining the heart’s purity is a particular focus of the Abrahamic faiths. The Qur’an says, “On the Day of Judgment, nothing will avail a person, neither wealth nor children, only a pure heart” (26: 88-89). Purity of heart is a birthright. The innocence of children is celebrated everywhere and that is precisely why, of all the heinous and dark crimes of men, none elicits more revulsion than pedophilia, which is the defilement of a child’s innocence. We know that children must lose their sexual innocence eventually, but every decent parent’s desire is that it takes place in adulthood with mutual love and respect. Lust is a manifestation of the Eros impulse that Sigmund Freud rightly identified as the great force of life that opposes our death instinct. When channeled into the pure love of another, it becomes life-affirming, enabling us to experience that person at the deepest and most intimate level with absolute presence in the moment. Simone Weil wrote: Every desire for enjoyment belongs to the future and the world of illusion, whereas if we desire only that a being should exist, he exists: what more is there to desire? The beloved being is then naked and real, not veiled by an 20 Bob Dylan, “It’s Alright, Ma.” 21 Pamela Paul, Pornified, 276. 15 imaginary future.... Thus in love there is chastity or lack of chastity 22 according to whether the desire is or is not directed towards the future. It is in the present that we can love and experience the divine in that love. The purity of that love is sustained by presence and destroyed by desiring something else at the time, whether it be another lover or simply the onanistic self-pleasure provided by an objectified human. According to Islamic and Christian tradition, the single most corrupting inroad into the heart is through the “concupiscence of the eye.” Not for nothing does the Holy Scripture name “concupiscence of the eyes” among the three powers which constitute the world that “lieth in the power of evil” (1 John 2, 16; 5, 19). It reaches the extremes of its destructive and eradicating power when it builds itself a world according to its own image and likeness—when it surrounds itself with the restlessness of a perpetual moving picture of meaningless shows, and with the literally deafening noise of impressions and sensations breathlessly rushing past the windows of the senses. Behind the flimsy pomp of its façade dwells absolute nothingness; it is a world of, at most, ephemeral creations, which often within less than a quarter hour become stale and discarded, like a newspaper or magazine swiftly scanned or merely perused; a world, which, to the piercing eye of the healthy mind untouched by its contagion, appears like the amusement quarter of a big city in the hard brightness of a winter morning: desperately bare, disconsolate, and ghostly. The destructiveness of this disorder, which originates from and grows upon obsessive addiction, lies in the fact that it stifles man’s primitive power of perceiving reality; it makes man incapable not only of coming to himself but also of reaching reality and truth. If such an illusory world threatens to overgrow and smother the world of real things, then to restrain the natural wish to see takes on the character of a measure of self-protection and self-defense.23 We live in a visual culture; never before has humanity been threatened by the devastating effects of concupiscence of the eyes. It is an appetite that desires not to perceive, but simply to be excited. “What this seeing strives for is not to attain knowledge and to become cognizant of the truth, but for possibilities of relinquishing oneself to the world,” writes Martin Heidegger in Being and Time. Chastity of the eyes concerning its lust is the single most difficult form. Far easier is it for a man to abstain from an illicit physical encounter with a woman than to lower his gaze from an exposed cleavage. Yet according to the teaching of the Prophets, this too is adultery of the heart; its perniciousness is 22 Andre Comte-Sponville, Small Treatise on the Great Virtues (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001), 180. 23 Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1966), 201-202. 16 perhaps of a lesser degree, but its effects on the soul are, over time, potentially devastating. Add to natural desire the artificial exposure to pixilated images of naked forms on the computer and semi-clad pictures of men and women that bombard us from billboards and magazine covers on checkout-line shelves; such stimuli are so overwhelming that our culture’s capacity to continue to generate real meaning is threatened. After reflecting upon the Mosaic injunction -- “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth” – Neil Postman observed: It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture.... People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on this Mosaic injunction.24 What is so incredibly troubling about our conversion to a print culture is that so much of it involves sexualized and sanitized images of the female body. Divorced from their humanity, airbrushed and presented in false and unnatural postures, with bee-stung lips, enhanced breasts and thighs acquired through punishing diets and grueling exercise, such pictures and films depicting the exploited model or porn star are a serious threat to every man’s realistic expectations of a wife, mate, sister or mother, and women in general. Society’s eyes are under assault, and that means our hearts are as well. The Qur’an advises men and women to lower their gaze when exposed to the opposite sex and attraction is felt: “Tell the believing men to lower their gaze and guard their chastity; that is purer for their hearts, and God is aware of what they do. And say to the believing women that they too should lower their gaze and guard their modesty; they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what ordinarily appears.” (24:30). Imam al- Ghazali says: [Lust]25 is nothing but a wellspring of excessive sexual desire, and is the disease of an empty and unconcerned heart. One should be on one’s guard against its preliminaries by abstaining from repeated glances and thoughts. Otherwise it will take firm hold of one and be difficult to shake off.26 We must keep in mind that the “repeated glances” al-Ghazali speaks of were in 11th century Iraq, a society extremely conservative in dress and behavior. The current crisis of image overload is something that far more easily corrodes the spiritual potential of a 24 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: New Penguin Books, 1986), 9. 25 Although Dr. Timothy Winter’s translation is “amorous passion,” the Arabic text says “‘ishq,” and I prefer to use the word “lust,” as that is clearly what al-Ghazzaali is referring to in this particular passage. 26 Imam al-Ghazali, Disciplining the Soul and Breaking the Two Desires. Translated by Dr. Timothy Winter (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1995), 169. 17 person. Any serious attempts at meditation, prayer, or even leisurely reading are affected by the images that have been allowed into the heart through the inroad of the eyes. The Arabic word for “eye” is “‘ayn,” which also means “wellspring” and “essence.” The word for pupil is “insaan,” which also means “human being.” Hence, the eye is reflective of the essence of the human being, and its center is the pupil, created to witness the beauty of this world and gaze upon the beatific vision of the next. We are creatures designed to witness and reflect. The pupil constricts with worldly light and dilates in darkness and when stimulated by pleasure. Moulay al-Arabi al-Darqawi, the famous North African saint of the eighteenth century, wrote: Oppose your passion and whims. If you do that you will see wonders. Good character [virtue] is Sufism with the Sufis and religion with the people of religion. You should always flee from the sensory as well since it is the opposite of the meanings. Two opposites are not joined together. Whenever you strengthen the senses, you weaken the meanings, and whenever you strengthen the meanings, you weaken the senses.... Each person has inner meanings just as the seas have waves. Had people known this, sensory things would not have distracted them from meanings. Had they known this, they would have found that inside themselves are oceans without a shore. God is the authority for what I say.27 Al-Darqawi is, in essence, referring to pleasure, which Socrates has argued in the Philebus is important -- but only after truth, measure, reason, and right opinion. All of them relate to meaning. The meanings that lie hidden in the sexual experience are like waves of the ocean. However, they can only be revealed through an ethical commitment to love. In Islamic tradition, women have always been associated with the divine. Women are an apotheosis of divine mercy in the world, particularly embodied in the mother. The Prophet Muhammad said, “No one degrades women except vile and contemptible men.” Rumi says in his Mathnawi: Made attractive to men is love of desires ... God has made [woman] attractive, so how can men escape from her? Even if a man is Rustam and greater than Hamzah, still he is captive to his old woman’s command. The Prophet, to whose speech the whole world Was enslaved, used to say, “Speak to me, oh ‘Aishah!...” The Prophet said that women totally dominate men of intellect and possessors of heart, But ignorant men dominate women, for they are shackled by the ferocity of animals. They have no kindness, gentleness, or love, Since animality dominates their nature. 27 Mawlay al-Arabi ad-Darqawy, The Darqawi Way: Letters of Mawlay al-Arabi ad- Darqawi (Norwich: Diwan Press, 1979), 36. 18 Love and kindness are human attributes, anger and sensuality belong to the animals. She is the radiance of God, she is not your beloved. She is the Creator – you could say she is not created.”28 The 13th century Spanish scholar, philosopher, and mystic, Ibn Arabi, considered the most perfect contemplation of the divine in the world to be women. He writes: In relation to the Prophet, women are as the Universal Nature is to God in which He revealed the forms of the Cosmos by directing toward it the divine will and command, which, at the level of elemental forms, is symbolized by copulation.... Whoever loves a woman in this way loves with divine love, while he whose love for them is limited to natural lust lacks all true knowledge of that desire. For such a one she is mere form, devoid of spirit, and even though that form is indeed imbued with spirit, it is absent for one who approaches his wife or some other woman solely to have his pleasure with her, without realizing whose the pleasure really is. Thus he does not know himself truly, just as a stranger is not known until he reveals his identity. As they say: They are right in supposing that I am in love Only they know not with whom I am in love. Such a man is really in love with pleasure itself and, in consequence, loves its repository in women, the real truth and meaning of the act being lost on him. If he knew the truth, he would know whom it is he is enjoying and who it is who is the enjoyer; then would he be perfected.29 In our Western tradition, William Blake wonderfully expresses a glimpse of this same meaning: The pride of the peacock is the glory of God The lust of the goat is the bounty of God The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God The nakedness of woman is the work of God. Chastity and purity have always been the great virtues that come naturally to women but which men must learn. The Qur’an uses Mary, the mother of Christ, as the great paragon of chastity and purity of the heart and describes her as an ideal. “And God has made an example for those who believe of Mary who guarded her chastity, so We breathed some of Our spirit into her, and she confirmed the pronouncements and the scriptures of her Lord, and she was among the devout. (66/11-12).” 28 William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Love: the Spiritual Teachings of Rumi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 169. 29 Ibn ‘Arabi, The Bezels of Wisdom. Translated by Ralph W. J. Austin. (Lahore: Suhail Academy, 1999), 275-278. I altered some wording based upon my Arabic edition of Fusus al-Hikam, Ibn Arabi. Dar al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyyah:Beirut. 2004. Pg. 515-18. 19 It is from women then, that men learn chastity and purity, which in turn protect the sacred nature of women, alluded to in the Arabic word for woman, hurmah, which means “what is sacred.” Now, the failure of men in imitating women in their natural virtue has resulted in women rejecting the double standard and imitating men in their natural vice. The spiritual power of women is great, but so too is the power of their physical attraction to men. It is this power that causes vile men to want to dominate women, and virtuous men to honor and protect them. But that physical power of the female form over men is a sensory power that veils men from her metaphysical meaning. Her sensual form prevents the man lost in carnality from knowing her spiritual reality, that she is the source of mercy in the world. The Arabic and Hebrew word for womb (rahm) is derived from the word for mercy (rahma) and an expression of the creative power of God in man. In degrading woman, we degrade the highest qualities of our human nature; in elevating her, we elevate our highest nature. When her natural virtues—compassion, kindness, caring, selflessness, and love—predominate in men, men are able to overcome their natural vices and realize their full humanity. When, however, those virtues are absent, men descend to the lowest of the low and are worse than beasts. In unveiling the outward beauty of a woman, we become veiled from her inward beauty. As a poet from the distant past wrote: I said to my rose-cheeked lovely, “O you with bud-like mouth, Why keep hiding your face, like flirting girls?” She laughed and said, “Unlike the beauties of your world, In the veil I’m seen, but without it I’m hidden.30 30 William C. Chittick, Sufism: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Oneworld, 2003), 136.
- [The Indian Craftsman](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-indian-craftsman) - Ananda K. Coomaraswamy The Indian craftsman conceives of his art, not as the accumulated skill of ages, but as originating in the divine skill of Visvakarma, and revealed by him. Beauty, rhythm, proportion, idea have an absolute existence on an ideal plane, where all who seek may find. The reality of things exists in the
- [Jawanmardi: Treatise of Hatim](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/jawanmardi-treatise-of-hatim) - Husayn Wa’iz Kashifi transl. by Lloyd Ridgeon Open the door of kindness if you dare! From the unseen realm your dreams arrive there. Provide for others’ wishes if you can And they’ll provide for you, one to a man. Click here to read the treatise. Originally published as part of Jawanmardi: A Sufi Code of
- [Buddha as a Musician: An Illustration of a Jataka Story](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/buddha-as-musician) - Bo Lawergren During the development of the Buddhist dogma of the Theravadins, music was viewed as the epitome of sin, but the subsequent popularity of Mahayana doctrines in the Far East brought along a more appreciative view. Music became synonymous with the highest joys of Paradise. Click here to read the article. Originally published in
- [Mithila and Madhubani Indian Painting: Forest of Honey](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/mithila-madhubani) - Traditionally painted by women, every element in Mithila designs has a deep-rooted symbolism. The central tenet of the Maithilis’ religion is its unique concept of man’s unity with nature. The Maithilis believe in a oneness of life manifested in all things. Their paintings can be broadly divided into two categories, floor drawings or aripana and
- [The View from Above and the Vision of the Heart](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-view-from-above-and-the-vision-of-the-heart) - Jason M. Baxter …an act of gazing downward and taking in the whole of the cosmos (what William of Conches called “comprehensio”) results in a greater “burning” and a more joyful “heart”… Click here to read the PDF. The music created by the spheres, to which we have become deaf, can be regained through study
- [The Boat and the Helmsman](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-boat-and-the-helmsman) - Michael Negus Exoterically, the boat is an orthodox religion. Esoterically, the boat is an intact and genuine initiatory organization; the helmsman being the spiritual master. In the second case the various parts of the boat are seen as ‘projections’ of the nature and faculties of the individual. Click here to read the PDF, or click
- [Conversations with My Own Heart](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/conversations-with-my-own-heart) - Metropolitan Anastasy (Gribanovsky) If these fragmentary jottings reveal even a grain of truth, which we are obliged to confess and preach with our actions, our words, and our writings, and if only a few people nurture these grains of truth in their souls, adding to the paucity of my words with their own wisdom, this
- [From Goddess to Dragon: Benzaiten](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/from-goddess-to-dragon-benzaiten) - Bernard Faure The Island Shrine of Itsukushima (founded around 811 CE) lies just a short ferry ride from mainland Hiroshima, on the island of Miyajima, famous worldwide as Japan’s Shrine Island, and known by its famous red torii (Shinto gate) standing in the sea. The shrine is dedicated to Benzaiten, the complex and very distinctly
- [On Light (De Luce)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/on-light-de-luce) - Robert Grosseteste Translated from the Latin by Clare C. Riedl. The form (species) and perfection of all bodies is light, but in the higher bodies it is more spiritual and simple, whereas in the lower bodies it is more corporeal and multiplied. Click here to read the text. And click here to read the original
- [Knowledge and Love](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/knowledge-and-love) - Frithjof Schuon a section from Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts. The Intellect is not cerebral nor is it specifically human or angelic; all beings “possess” it. If gold is not lead, this is because it “knows” the Divine better; its “knowledge” is in its very form, and this amounts to saying that the form does
- [Yijing Hexagrams: 1. Heaven (<em>qian</em>)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/yijing-hexagrams-1-heaven-qian) - The Classic of Change (Yijing, or I Ching), also known as The Changes of Zhou (Zhou Yi) has been considered a book of fundamental principles by contemplatives and people of action alike. Replete with cosmological symbolism and deeply humane insights, it has been used since time immemorial as a guide to the good life, be
- [Prayer: An Adventure in Living](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/prayer-an-adventure) - B.C. Butler The great need of Western Man at the present day is for a recovery of the tradition and the widespread practice of prayer. My mind’s ear is always ringing with the Roman poet’s criticism of those who, for the sake of living, surrender all that makes life worth while. Ringing, too, with the
- [‘Watching myself in the mirror, I saw ‘Ali in my eyes’](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/watching-myself-in-the-mirror-i-saw-ali-in-my-eyes) - On Sufi Visual and Material Practice in the Balkans Sara Kuehn During the ritual evocations and bodily manifestations of dhikr, the melodic nature of the recitation of special prayers (wird) and of the Quran is gradually amplified to increase and intensify the emotional impact and the transformative effects and implications of the performance. Immersed within
- [The Spirituality of Work and the Body Social](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-spirituality-of-work-and-the-body-social) - Jean Hani A chapter from Divine Craftsmanship: Preliminaries to a Spirituality of Work The fundamental guiding principle in our reflections implies that our daily work is a continuation of creation and consequently has its archetype in God, in Divine Activity. It is therefore legitimate to relate the different skills to God, and this is even
- [Pu’an Mantra / Stanzas of Siddham (Pu’an Zhou/Shitan Zhang)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/puan-mantra) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection What is today called “Pu'an Zhou” seems to have originated as a liturgical chant attributed to the Buddhist monk Pu’an (1115–69). It can still be heard in villages in north China, and it is also recited in Buddhist temples. Instrumental versions of this chant or melody, or
- [Sacred Audio: Far East](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/sacred-audio-far-east) - Although some of the recordings in this section belong to Buddhist schools, their related practices are always inscribed within the sphere of influence of the “Three Teachings” (the idea of San Jiao in China, Shinjubutsu Ichi in Japan), i.e. Confucianism and Buddhism amalgamated with indigenous traditions such as Taoism in China, Shinto in Japan or
- [The Eternal Feminine in Sufism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/geoffroy-eternal-feminine) - Readings of Ibn ‘Arabi and Emir Abd el-Kader Eric Geoffroy “Whoever values women by their true worth and knows their intimate secret,” writes Ibn ‘Arabi, “does not disdain to love them, unlike the ascetics. Rather, such love is an integral part of the gnostic’s perfection, for it is a prophetic heritage and a love from
- [Talismanic Seeing: The Induction of Power in Indonesian Zoomorphic Art](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/talismanic-seeing) - James Bennett The Shattariyya name Earthly Angel suggests the imprint of Gana’s earlier role in Hindu yoga practices, where the elephant-headed god corresponds with the earth element. Indian tantric texts assign Ganesha to the lowest chakra of the body’s six centres of psychic energy and equate him with the kundalini energy, the awakening of which
- [Secrets on Cultivating the Mind](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/secrets-on-cultivating-the-mind) - Chinul (13th century) An important basic text by one of the greates masters of Korean Buddhism. The triple world is blazing in defilement as if it were a house on fire. How can you bear to tarry here and complacently undergo such long suffering? If you wish to avoid wandering in samsara there is no
- [Dream Conversations on Buddhism and Zen](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/dream-conversations-on-buddhism-and-zen) - Muso Kokushi Greed—Just as greed for worldly things is inhibiting and self defeating, so also craving for otherworldly things prevents the opening of the mind. Answer to Prayer—The withholding of divine aid from those who would become presumptuous, more attached, more indulgent, and more shameless if their wishes were fulfilled is itself divine aid to
- [In the Cemetery](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/in-the-cemetery-swallows) - Mario Satz When there is no master to guide the way, birds know only a tiny parcel of heaven and earth. But if they have a guide, even by night they can read the maps of the stars, and far in the distance they can catch sight of the eaves under which their fledglings will
- [Nature Can Overcome Nature](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/burckhardt-nature) - Titus Burckhardt The use of a serpent or dragon as the image of a cosmic power is to be found in all parts of the world. It is especially characteristic of those traditional arts, such as alchemy, which are concerned with the subtle world. A reptile moves without legs and by means of an uninterrupted
- [Growing a Kingdom: The Goddess of Depth in Vizianagaram](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/growing-a-kingdom-telugu-goddess) - Don Handelman, M. V. Krishnayya and David Shulman The denizens of wilderness often differ from those of civilization and kingdom. People of the wilderness enter into and are specialists in the flowing, recursive depths of cosmos. They are fishermen who plumb the currents and depths of water, like those who aid in the creation of
- [The Five Dreams of the Buddha](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-five-dreams-of-the-buddha) - Claudine Bautze-Picron What five ? While he was still only an unenlightened Bodhisatta, the great earth was his couch; Himalaya, king of mountains, was his pillow; his left hand lay in the Eastern Ocean, his right hand lay in the Western Ocean, his feet lay in the Southern Ocean. That was the first dream… While
- [Hayy ibn Yaqzan—An Allegorical Tale](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/hayy-ibn-yaqzan-an-allegorical-tale) - Ibn Tufayl / Lenn Evan Goodmann Hayy ibn Yaqzan, and Arabic title meaning literally “Alive, Son of Awake”, is a an allegorical novel by the 12th-century Spanish philosopher Ibn Tufayl. I have not left the secrets set down in these few pages entirely without a veil—a sheer one, easily pierced by those fit to do
- [The Dreaming](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-dreaming) - W.E.H. Stanner The Dreaming is a proof that the blackfellow shares with us two abilities which have largely made human history what it is. The first of these we might call ‘the metaphysical gift’. I mean the ability to transcend oneself, to make acts of imagination so that one can stand ‘outside’ or ‘away from’
- [Powerful Words and Eloquent Images from Mesoamerica](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/powerful-words-and-eloquent-images-from-mesoamerica) - Diana Magaloni Kerpel The Nahua contributors to the Florentine Codex refer to the same ideas about the supernatural origins of art and song, whereby the “good artist,” the toltecatl, is described as someone who knows how to dialogue with his own heart (where the book of knowledge is kept), who has the presence of the
- [The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-seven-sleepers-of-ephesus) - First of all, here is an English translation of the best known version of the narrative of the Seven Sleepers, or “Companions of the Cave” (ashab al-Kahf, as they are known in Islamic writings). You can click here for the original Latin text. And here is an article by Pieter W. van der Horst with
- [Semiology of the Dharma; or, The Somaticity of the Text](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/semiology-of-the-dharma-or-the-somaticity-of-the-text) - Ryuichi Abe Chapter 7 of The Weaving of Mantra. At this play of mimesis, the practitioners’ cultivation of samadhi through their recitation of mantra, the materiality of mantra becomes the very somaticity of the practitioners. The letters are now the physical constituents of the prac­titioners. That is, the practitioners realize that they, too, are signs
- [On the Eastern Tradition of the Arrow Prayer](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/arrow-prayer) - A section from a PhD dissertation by Fr. Anthony St. Shenouda The demons once appeared to an elder named Youanis, saying: “stop, stop fighting me! I will not bother you again!” Abba Youanis continued: I said to him: ‘And what are these on your body?’ He said: ‘These are arrows.’ I said to him: ‘Who
- [Korean Buddhism: Two Prefaces by Master Wonhyo](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/wonhyo-prefaces) - Bhiksu Wonhyo Now, as paths are concerned, the Buddha-path is deep and profoundly mysterious—mysterious in its absence of gap. It is expansive and vast, extending far without limit. Herein, the conditioned and the unconditioned are like illusions—they are not two things. Since the Buddha-path is unarisen and without marks, one wraps up both inner and
- [The Rabbi and the Sheikh](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/zohar-rabbi-and-sheikh) - Zvi Zohar “An Awesome Tale that Took Place in the City of Damascus in the Time of Rabbi Moshe Galante of Blessed Memory” Rabbi Galante was a righteous and completely pious man, wise in all the Seven Wisdoms, and there was in his generation no one comparable to him —except for one Muslim gentile who
- [The Heart of Knowing](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-heart-of-knowing) - John Carey Answers can be sought, and much achieved, in writing, in lecturing, in attempts to reform educational systems. But the final answer must lie, as it has always done, in each of us individually. We must each learn to recognise a distinction between two kinds of knowledge: one pertaining to the outer world and
- [Mythologies of Memory and Forgetting](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/mythologies-of-memory) - Mircea Eliade The Muses sing, beginning with the beginning (ex arkhes) the first appearance of the world, the genesis of the gods, the birth of humanity. The past thus revealed is much more than the antecedent of the present; it is its source. In going back to it, recollection does not seek to situate events
- [Recollection, Indian and Platonic](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/coomaraswamy-recollection) - Ananda K. Coomaraswamy That which remembers, or rather which is always aware of all things, must be a principle always present to (anubhu) all things, and therefore itself unaffected by the duration in which these events succeed one another. We are thus reduced to a Providence (prajna, pronoia) or Providential Self or Spirit as the
- [Nature and Function of the Spiritual Master](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/schuon-nature-and-function) - Frithjof Schuon The master represents and transmits, firstly a reality of being (Sat), secondly a reality of intelligence or truth (Chit), and thirdly a reality of love, union, or happiness (Ananda). The element “being” which the master represents and transmits, and without which he would be as if deprived of reality and existence, is the
- [Tzedek: Justice and Compassion](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/tzedek-justice-and-compassion) - Rabbi Jonathan Sacks If a man is poor, you may not go to sleep holding his security. Return it to him at sun-down, so that he will be able to sleep in his garment and bless you. To you it will be reckoned as tzedakah before the Lord your God (Deut. 24:12-13). Tzedakah cannot mean legal justice
- [Rabbinism versus Kabbalism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/rabbinism-versus-kabbalism) - Prof. Gershom Scholem was universally recognized as the greatest contemporary scholar of Jewish mysticism. On the one hand, his tremendous achievements in this field enabled him to transcend limitations characteristic of even major scholars who master a specific and limited field of Judaism; on the other, his vast knowledge permitted him to offer large-scale analyses of the whole range of Jewish religious phenomena. By his virtuoso mastery of the neglected areas of Jewish mysticism, Scholem was able to suggest more complex descriptions of Judaism than previously existed. Through his studies (especially those written since 1949) the phenomenology of this religion made its first substantial steps. Scholem's revalorization of Jewish mysticism, not only added another area of Jewish creativity to the scrutiny of scholarship; it changed, in a dramatic way, the relationship between the various fields of this religion. The questions of the status of Jewish philosophy versus Halakhah, of Kabbalah versus philosophy, of Halakhah versus Kabbalah etc., were addressed in an authoritative way, and answers were provided for the last two generations of scholars in Judaica. Like a powerful magnet which penetrated a static field, immediately changing its entire infrastructure, the bold introduction of Jewish mysticism in the field of Judaica dramatically restructured this academic domain. Since this meteoric invasion of mysticism in the late twenties and early thirties, the field of Judaica has again become "stabilized", with its structures remaining basically static despite the tremendous number of studies produced in the last two generations. Remarkably, the abrupt ascent of the status of Jewish mysticism, had raised very few questions as to the appropriateness of the new and decisive role now assigned to Jewish mysticism in comparison to other major forms of Judaism: Halakhah, Midrash or philosophy. By and large, the problems related to the history of Jewish mysticism became the "real" history of Judaism. Even the research of Jewish history adopted itself comfortably to the new set of questions raised by Jewish mysticism. As a result a new harmony in Judaica was achieved as a result of the consensus of scholars that not only the right questions, but also the right answers are on the agenda of modern scholarship. Just like a magnet which restructures a magnetic field it enters charging, at the same time, the constituting entities with its own valency, so did Scholem bestow modern Judaica scholars with valences of his own. However, with the discovery of new Kabbalistic material and the disappearance of the magnetic power of Scholem's personality, it now seems that the field of Judaica in general and that of Jewish mysticism in particular is more prepared for a complex restructuring. In my opinion, the real legacy of Scholem is to be best conceived in terms of an essential need to rethink the existing theories on the basis of new material and approaches. A personality inclined to dialectics, Scholem could barely endure the expanded repetitions of his thoughts. Paradoxically, the Scholemian revolution in the modern understanding of Judaism was so successful that it became, in the lifetime of its initiator, a conservative movement. Scholem, who in his youth indulged in anarchic and nihilistic reveries, became in his older years the very revered symbol of an authoritative academic establishment. The source of the problems posited by Scholem was a question which remained marginal in scholarship. It was assumed obvious, mostly in the circle of his followers, that the "material", namely the Jewish mystical texts, generated both the questions dealt with by the master, and the answers as well. Despite some late protests, Scholem's disciples continued to follow the "right" path conveniently opened for them by their master. The present discussions will be focused upon the question of Scholem's understanding of the radical divergences between two major versions of Jewish religiosity: Rabbinism and Kabbalism. The centrality of the juxtaposition between these different forms of Jewish religion in Scholem's phenomenology of Judaism is obvious, and invites a critical examination which, I believe, will elucidate important aspects of Scholem's religious thought. Two major studies of this scholar will be scrutinized: "Kabbalah and Myth" and "Tradition and New Creation in the Ritual of the Kabbalists".' In general, I am sceptical with regard to attempts to present Scholem's view as a whole-given the long period of his scholarly creativity and its vast corpus. However, in this case, both articles were written in the same period, 1949-1950, and presented before the same au?dience, the Eranos meeting at Ascona. Moreover, Scholem himself has pointed out the affinities between the topics dealt with in these two essays. Scholem's other references to myth and ritual, will be mentioned in passing, but will remain peripherical for our present discussion. Aware as I am that there are also other discussions by Scholem on issues dealt here, both before and after the writing of these two studies, where Scholem has expressed also different opinions than those discussed here, they represent only tangential treatments of subjects whose ample analysis was offered in these two articles. My choice of these studies as the basis of the following treatment is conditioned by my understanding that these analyses are truly representative of Scholem's ideas. Moreover, as it is my view that a totally coherent theory on the relationship between Rabbinism and Kabbalism cannot be extracted from Scholem's writings I resort to the most complete discussions on this issue. II The cornerstone of Scholem's understanding of the emergence of Kabbalah is his postulate that this lore represents an irruption in classical Judaism of several mythologoumena conceived of as being of Gnostic extraction. Judaism was conceived of as previously capable to eliminate myth as a living factor. So, for example, Scholem ends his discussion of Biblical Judaism thus: "the tendency of the classical Jewish tradition to liquidate myth as a central spiritual power is not diminished by such quasi-mythical vestiges transformed into metaphors."4 This understanding of classical Judaism is, in my opinion, the result of Scholem's acceptance of the late 19th and early 20th century views of Judaism as formulated by Hermann Cohen for example, and which reverberates in the monumental study of biblical Judaism of Yehezqel Kaufmann.5 However, this is by no means the only possible understanding of the nature of biblical thought. Let me quote, for example, the opening sentence of a recent study, one of the many contemporary contributions to the analysis of Biblical myth, written by a scholar of Biblical thought, who is well-acquainted with the intellectual entourage of Scholem's oeuvre: It is the central contention of this study —writes the author —that the essential factor molding the spiritual world of the Bible, the Apocrypha, Rabbinic literature, and emergent Christianity, was mythical thought and expression. ? ?There can be, and indeed there are, profound disagreements as to the meaning of myth; In our case, one can ask whether the biblical monotheistic myth-is mythical in the sense the pagan polytheistic myths are. Nevertheless, it seems that modern scholarship is nowadays more inclined to accept the mythical essence of some aspects of biblical theology than it was two or three generations ago.7 In any case, the working definition of myth I adopt for the following discussion is that proposed by Paul Ricoeur: Myth will here be taken to mean what the history of religion now finds in it: not a false explanation by means of images and fables, but a traditional narration which relates to events that happened at the beginning of time and which has the purpose of providing grounds for the ritual actions of men of today and, in a general manner, establishing all the forms of action and thought by which man understands himself in the world. It is the last part of the passage that constitutes, in my opinion, a most contingent starting point for a fruitful discussion of myth in general. When Scholem assumes that the biblical thought is amythical, not to say anti-mythical, he probably understood it in comparison to the pagan mythology of the Near East. However, one of the issues when comparing the "amythical" Bible to the mythical Kabbalism is whether the latter consists in myths that are not found in earlier strata of Judaism, including the Biblical one. From this perspective, the crucial question is whether or not Kabbalah presents myths that have roots in the earlier Jewish thought. In other words, has the Kabbalistic mythologoumena nothing to do with the concerns and practices of previous forms of Judaism?9 A similar incompatibility with myth is postulated by Scholem also in regard to another major stratum of "classical"Judaism. In Rabbinism, he writes, the performance of sacred actions,of ritual,is largely divorced from the substrate that has always been the mother of the ritual, that is, from the myths that are represented in the mime or drama of ritual. Postulating an amythical nature as regards the two major stages ofJudaism which preceded the historical manifestations of Kabbalism, Scholem created a profound gap between these two earlier phases of this religion, with which Kabbalah was well acquainted, and even conceived of itself as their legitimate continuator, and Kabbalah. Indeed this "essential" gap between the different layers of Jewish religiosity opened the way to a new dynamics which will explain the transformation of the anti-mythical Judaism into a profoundly mythical one. Scholem set as the major efforts of his scholarly enterprise, the task of explaining the tremendous metamorphosis of the earlier strata of Judaism. In the following, my discussion will be focused on the relationship between Rabbinism, as Scholem puts it, and Kabbalism,"1the relations between Biblical Judaism and Kabbalah, interesting and crucial as they may be shall not be considered here. III In his article on the Kabbalistic ritual, Gershom Scholem remarked that the Rabbinic system was a hypertrophy of ritual, which became all-pervading... accompanied by no magical action. The rites of remembrance produce no effect ... and what they conjure up without the slightest gesture of conjuration is the memory, the community of generations,and the identification of the pious with the experience of the founding generation which received the Revelation.The ritual of Rabbinical Judaism makes nothing happen and transforms nothing... there is something strangely sober and dry about the rites of remembrance with which the Jew calls to mind his unique historical identity.' According to this passage, the ritual of Rabbinic Judaism is totally divorced from a mythical substrate, notwithstanding its early connection to the soil, at least in the first halakhic formulations in the Mishnah and Talmud. The development of Rabbinism is portrayed by Scholem as a "hypertrophy of ritual" probably because of the gradual loss of contact with nature which caused, inter alia, the replacement of the natural year by the historical year; Rabbinism is, according to this scholar, the very embodiment of legalism. Let me analyze the single example adduced by Scholem which demonstrates the hypertrophy of ritual. It is a discussion found in BT, 'Eruvin, fol. 21b: there, Kneset Israel says to God: 'Lord of the World, far more ordinances than Thou hast imposed on me have I imposed on myself, and I have kept them'. However, it is possible to emphasize very different aspects of this passage, which would drastically change the impression Scholem would like us to have about it. He was interested to illustrate the Rabbinic tendency to multiply ordinances. The context of Scholem's analysis seems to point out that he was convinced that the only emotional roots of the Rabbinic ritual are in history, but not in the life and death of nature. This dichotomy of history versus nature is indeed an interesting one, but it does not exhaust the possibilities confronted by the Rabbinic masters. For example, the fuller context of the passage in 'Eruvin may supply such an emotional root that has nothing to do with either history or nature. It is possible to read the passage in another way, or ways. For example, the mythical figure of Kneset Israel, a feminine entity which represents the people of Israel, can be envisioned as standing in an erotic relationship to God. Important segments of the Jewish ancient ritual were rooted neither in nature nor in history but in God. It is this ostensible attempt to relate ritual to the divine world which shaped the inner structure of Jewish Rabbinic thought. Just before the above mentioned text, a verse from the Song of Songs [7, 14] is quoted: "The mandrakes give a fragrance, and at our gates are all manner of choice fruit, old and new, which I have laid up for thee, O my Beloved." Obviously, the Rabbinic sages envisioned the old and new fruits as the ordinances, intended to attract God to Kneset Israel. The old ordinances stand, according to the context in the Talmud, for the halakhic interdictions related to menstrual periods as imposed by the Bible namely God. The new ordinances are the strictures related to the menstrual interdictions, imposed by the Rabbinic authority. The obedience to the former ordinances reflects the passive attitude of comforming to the formal requirements. The later strictures point, however, to a more active approach: a careful observance of the sexual interdictions. However, as the understanding of the biblical verse implies, the strictures are intended to express a special devotion to the beloved: the strictures were laid up for him. The bride purifies herself by observing the strictures for the sake of the beloved. It is an act of devotion which ensures a perfect sexual relationship. Thus, the ordinances do not stand in a vacuum; they structure an experience. The fact that the verse from the Song of Songs serves as a prooftext is, in my opinion, not a matter of accident; this book was understood by the Rabbinical authorities as expressing, allegorically, the relationship between God and the people of Israel. I believe that the Rabbinic ritual as expressed in the above discussion fits the understanding of worship proposed by Evelyn Underhill: Man, incited by God, dimly and sharply conscious of the obscure pressure of God, responds to him best not by a simple movement of the mind; but by a rich and complex action, in which his whole nature is concerned.'3 The rich and complex action which is understood as the characteristic of worship is quite difficult to define. In the case of Rabbinism it is indeed a very elaborate system of deeds. However, what seems to be crucial is not so much the very multiplication of the actions or their complexity, but the mental attitude which generates them. At least in the way I understand the Talmudic text, it is a response ? ? 287 of love which motivates the Halakhah. The passage from the Talmud can be envisioned, as Scholem did, as legalism per se, which multiplies ordinances to the extent of hypertrophy. However, it may reflect an erotic type of spirituality. Let me compare the above-mentioned Talmudic text to another Rabbinic discussion. In a Midrashic passage, the function of the commandments is described as follows: Israel is beloved! The Bible surrounds them with mitzvot: Tefillin on the head and arm, a mezuzah on the door, zizit on their clothes . . . This may be compared to a king of flesh-and-blood who said to his wife "Adorn yourself with all your jewelry so that you will be desirable to me". So the Blessed Holy One said to Israel: "My children,distinguish yourself with mitzvot so that you will be desirable to Me."' In both passages, the significance of the commandments is grounded in the intimate marital relationship which is the basic factor for their multiplication. Indeed someone may argue that what we face here is no more than a rhetoric of love, mere metaphors of marital relationship devoid of any emotional roots. However, such an argument is doubtful as it anticipates the conclusion by positing a preconception as to the dry and sober ritual which cannot express a more deep relationship. On the basis of these Rabbinic texts, it is quite possible that some ancient Rabbis envisioned the wealth of commandments as a treasure, to be performed with a highly emotional intention, whereas other Rabbis would adopt a more legalistic stand. In any case, the above text is open to a much more mythical understanding than that proposed by Scholem. Moreover, I am not so sure whether it would be more congruent to assume that Kneset Israel is merely a metaphor for the whole people of Israel, or rather a supernal hypostasis whose erotic relationship to God represents, according to the Rabbinic reading of the Song of Songs, the real message of this book. I cannot fully explain here why I propose an hypostatic reading of this passage.'5 In any case, it is rather strange that this Talmudic passage would be used to prove the unqualified hypertrophic nature of the Rabbinic ritual. My reading of the ordinances as expressions related to pure marital relationship seems to be as good as the more sober one offered by Scholem. I wonder why it was necessary to dispense with the biblical prooftext from the Song of Songs in order to leave the impression that the hypertrophy of the ordinances stands in itself, without any specific motivation. In my opinion, Kneset Israel in the above text indeed betrays a rather mythical entity, more than a metaphor for the community of Israel here below. In lieu of the divine consort of the archaic mythology, the God of Israel has chosen as his feminine counterpart a whole people, the people of Israel. This is already alluded to in several prophetic descriptions of the relationship between the people of Israel and God. The feminine genre of the phrase Kneset Israel seems to accentuate the role of the hypostasis which represents the people of Israel. It indicates that Rabbinic thought was more open to the feminine entities than Biblical thought, as the parallel emergence of the term Shekhinah demonstrates. Thus, an ethnic monotheistic myth has substituted the classical cosmic myths characteristic of the ancient Near East. The addition of the feminine entity as a mediator between the actual people of Israel and the remote Deity rather bridged the gap between the two extremes. In any case, the early occurrence of the concepts of an hypostatical Kneset Israel and the Shekhinah,renders Hegel's view of Judaism, as the classical example of a religion of transcendence (which was apparently applied by Scholem to Rabbinism) as an inadequate conception. If the "symbolic function" of myth can be described, in Ricoeur's words, as "its power of discovering and revealing the bond between man and what he considers sacred" then I believe that the above Rabbinic texts reflect a mythical understanding of Jewish ritual.17 However, it will be a misunderstanding to conceive the Rabbinic ethnic and ethic myths as totally devoid of any cosmic dimension. The Torah, which regulates the relationship between God and His people was conceived to have conspicuous cosmic characteristics, which are obvious in a long series of Aggadic discussions. Although it may be possible to adduce better examples than those offered by Scholem in order to make his point regarding hypertrophy, I remain sceptical as to the viability of the "myth of the sobriety" created by Scholem. Instead, I would prefer the description of the spirituality of legalism proposed by R. Goldenberg: To live a life of Torah was not only to submit joyfully and lovingly to the "yoke"of a sacred covenant-this too maybe said of anyone, or at least of all Israel-it was also to continue the shaping of that covenant, its application to unforeseen circumstances and its extension to new areas of human existence. There is a kind of grateful humility here, but a remarkable assertiveness as well. The innermost heart of the rabbinic religion is the place where these two emotions finally merge into one.18 Against this "background" of the "dry" and "sober" Rabbinic ritual, Scholem emphasizes the attempts of the first Kabbalists to "anchor the ritual of Rabbinic Judaism in myth by means of a mystical practice."19"Mystical"presumably stands in Scholem for either the theurgical interpretation of the Talmudic requirement to perform the commandments with Kavvanah or intention, or for the communitive significance of the commandments, namely the transformation of the mitzvot into a means for attaining mystical experience. A basic question which Scholem did not address in his above mentioned essay is how the mystical and mythical understandings of the ritual emerge out of a "dry and sober" Rabbinic mentality. Scholem did not entirely ignore the problem. As we shall see below, he has given a detailed answer for it. Nevertheless, when dealing phenomenologically with generic descriptions of Kabbalism versus Rabbinism in the two articles under scrutiny here, he seems to evade this problem. IV The sharp antagonism between a Kabbalistic mode of thought motivated by a mythical universe, and the "history-saturated" consciousness of the Rabbinic mind, as Scholem called this type of mentality, is an oversimplification that does not do justice either to the Rabbinic or to the Kabbalistic concepts of myth, ritual, time or history. The dichotomy Scholem proposed is particularly unlikely insofar as it refers to voluminous bodies of literature written over very lengthy periods of time which are described generically. According to this phenomenology, the emergence of Kabbalah constitutes an instant and profound restructuring of Judaism. Theoretically, such a transformation is not impossible; but it is strange that no massive opposition to the allegedly novel form of Judaism is known among Rabbinic authorities. Exactly at the same time, the innovations of Maimonides were bitterly attacked whereas the emergence of the Kabbalah encountered only marginal opposition. In lieu of assuming such a profound contrast between two types of religiosity, (which were often cultivated by one and the same person) it would be better to make use of a more moderate description. Rabbinism was not an homogeneous religiosity; it incorporates diverging views on many issues, including the preference, or the rejection of mythical types of expression. It is therefore quite strange that Scholem implicitly identified Rabbinism exclusively with Halakhah, whereas the 'Aggadah was not included as part of the discussion of the dichotomy RabbinismKabbalism. As he himself has several times remarked, the continuity between the Kabbalistic and the 'Aggadic literature seems to be obvious; indeed, according to Scholem himself, the 'Aggadic literature consists of some mythological elements. However, as far as I can determine, Scholem never quoted the scholarship which explicitly related 'Aggadah to specific mythological material.22It may be mentioned, that there are but few scholars, indeed only very few, who would envision an organic link between 'Aggadah and Halakhah on one side, and a natural link between them and the later medieval mystical-mythical interpretations on the other.23Hence Scholem's reduction of Rabbinism to Halakhah in those studies we are concerned with here is not only a simplification of Rabbinism, but also an one-sided view of Halakhah as devoid of any mystical and mythical implications. On the other hand it should be noted that alongside the mythical types of Kabbalah there were also anti-mythical, or at least non-mythical forms as well-viz. the ecstatic and the philosophical modes. It seems that the generic, or perhaps, hypostatic attitude to the terms used in the academic inquiry, like Rabbinism, Kabbalism, Gnosticism, myth, Messianism are one of the major stumbling blocks to a more nuanced understanding of the processes which generated the emergence of the various Kabbalistic phenomena. However, what apparently spoils Scholem's typology is not only simplistic descriptions of two basic layers ofJudaism as totally different phenomenological types, but also the fact that the same figures that played an important role in the history of Kabbalah, e.g., R. Abraham ben David, [Rabad], Nahmanides, R. Shelomo ben Abraham ibn Adret, among others, were at the same time also among the greatest representatives of the "historically saturated" Rabbinism. The assumption that Kabbalism and Rabbinism differ so deeply in their understanding of such a crucial issue as the meaning of the ritual is not substantiated by the existence of inner tensions in the writings of the above mentioned authors. Thus, I would opt for a more nuanced description of both Rabbinism and Kabbalism. This would hold both for the continuity of the basic concepts of ritual, myth, time and history in these two basic forms of Judaism, and for the religious and intellectual integrity of some of its major representatives. In my opinion, such a task is one of the most important desiderata for the study of Kabbalah. Such an organic explanation would more easily explain why Kabbalah emerged on the historical scene exactly in the most important center of Rabbinic learning and not in a marginal area of Jewish culture. Basically, the above analysis of Scholem's phenomenology of Judaism can be summarized as follows: The deep reticence regarding the spiritual potentialities of Rabbinism, shared by generations of Christians and some modern Jewish scholars, induced Scholem to see Gnosticism as the means which has restored the lost Jewish religious creativity. Devoid of an intimate relation to those Jewish classical sources that informed most of the Jewish mystics, Scholem found the solution for his quandary as to the causes which contributed to the survival of Judaism in religious material en vogue during his early readings on Kabbalah, viz. Molitor, and in his intellectual milieu. The more this material was different from, and even antagonistic to Rabbinism, the easier it was to explain how it could fertilize the allegedly sterile Rabbinism. Or, to use the formulation of Scholem himself Foreign mythical worlds are at work in the great archetypal images of the Kabbalists... Without this mythical contribution, the impulses of the Kabbalists would not have taken form. Gnosis,one of the last great manifestations of myth in religious thinking. . . gave the Jewish mystics their language. "Foreign mythical worlds are at work in the great archetypal images of" Scholem. It is still an unproven assertion that this was the case also with the Kabbalists themselves. I believe that this crucial resort to alien sources as a key to Jewish spirituality, even to the most antiJewish type of thought, betrays Scholem's basic uncertainty, not to say scepticism, as to the spiritual forces inherent in the classical forms of Judaism, beginning with the Bible. Theoretically, such a resort to Gnosticism can prove a correct approach; when comparing Kabbalah to the medieval Jewish philosophy, someone can easily extrapolate from the deep influence of the foreign philosophical elements, the possible influence of alien religious elements, stemming in this case not from Greek philosophy but from Gnostic religion. However, whereas it is relatively easy to find out the precise sources for the speculations of the medieval Jewish thinkers in the Greek and Islamic material, Kabbalah only very rarely allows such a simple detection of its sources. However, it would be methodologically more reasonable to check first the claims of the Kabbalists themselves. Their affirmations as to the normative nature of Kabbalah and its sources in ancient Judaism must be seriously scrutinized before concluding that they are unfounded and only when such a dead end will become obvious, the resort to Gnosticism, or any other alternative, may be used in order to open a more fruitful approach. For the time being, the massive reliance on "the Gnostic thesis" has inflicted a major injury to the historical research of Jewish mysticism, for it has implicitly divorced the medieval Kabbalah from its organic sources in ancient Jewish traditions. It is by systematically ignoring the recurrent indications of the Kabbalists and by adopting a pseudo-critical attitude to classical Judaism that the modern scholarship of Kabbalah has been brought to a dead end regarding the origins of the Kabbalah is concerned. The hidden history of Kabbalah is, according to Scholem's historiosophy, a prolonged contest between mythical elements repressed by ancient Judaism and possessing a tendency to destroy the law (as Scholem put it) and the Rabbinic crystalization of this religion. The return of the repressed, the understanding that they are the main factors on the Jewish scene and finally the assumption regarding their triumph or vengeance in Sabbatianism constitute the real evolution of Jewish mysticism since the early Middle Ages. Whereas Rabbinism remained static, hypertrophically elaborating upon the same old topics, Jewish mysticism was able to infuse new blood in this ritualistic version of Judaism. This infusion consisted, however, of spiritual ingredients which subsequently created a variegated series of tensions. Gnostic, antinomian, mythical, or Messianic are the elements conceived as dominant and active in the Kabbalistic versions of Judaism based, according to Scholem, on paradoxes. Let me, in conclusion, address the peculiar process of the mythization of the Kabbalah. If the assumption of Scholem was that the Rabbinic ritual could not itself produce its mythical component, then the assumption is that some myths, or "narrative philosophies" as Scholem defined them following Schelling, were introduced into the ritual. I would rather like to contend that the theosophical element, related to the narrative philosophy, was the major technique for anchoring ritual in myth. I would say that it was a deepening of the significance of the ritual, through the attempt to determine the rationales of the commandments that generated the ritual myths. In other words, it can be assumed that the elaboration on some myths was, primarily, not the result of a mythopoeic drive to build up a certain mythical philosophy, but the result of the elaboration on the mythologoumena already in existence in Judaism, which were organized, or re-organized in order to account for the meaning of the commandments. In other words, I contend that a theosophy was not introduced to Judaism from outside, nor was it subsequently, and artificially connected with the commandments, but that an inner process was responsible for the emergence of stronger ritual myths. The effort to elucidate the metaphysical basis for the influence of the performance of the commandments on the divine level was, in my opinion, the main move of the theosophical-theurgical Kabbalah. To put it differently, Scholem maintains that it was basically Gnostic material that informed Jewish mystics in regard to the Kabbalistic myth which is the quintessence of Kabbalistic theosophy. I would rather propose that a specific type of Jewish theurgy, that sought a supernal domain or a superstructure, is essential to explain the daily ritual here. Whereas Scholem minimized the mythical elements in Rabbinism and overemphasized the mythical nature of Kabbalism, I would suggest the possibility that Rabbinism was more mythical than Scholem and his followers would conceive26, and that some parts of the Kabbalah, the ecstatic and the philosophical types, were much less mythical than Scholem's generalization implies. The restriction of Rabbinism to dry ritual and the restriction of the Kabbalah to its theosophical theurgical form, permitted the construction of an antagonism which enabled the acceptance of the Hegelian conception of Judaism transposed by Scholem to Rabbinism, while trying to show that the genuine religion, (a la Mircea Eliade) exists in Judaism in the form of Kabbalism.
- [Transfiguring Voluptuous Choice](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/transfiguring-voluptuous-choice) - Stephen Muse The body and desire are not the enemy. Selfish misuse of them is. The doxological vision of St. Symeon the New Theologian graphically emphasizes the potential for sanctification of the body and of desire in Christ when he describes how his spiritual father, Symeon the Pious, was not ashamed in the presence of
- [Happiness as a Skill](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/bhikkhu-happiness-skill) - Thanissaro Bhikkhu A chapter from the collection of essays Along the Way, 2022. The practice of Dhamma as a whole, from the act of giving a gift to the attainment of unbinding (nibbana), is the pursuit of happiness as an objective skill. Click here to view the PDF. With warm thanks to dhammatalks and Metta
- [Macarius: The Fire in the Heart](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/macarius-the-fire-in-the-heart) - Pseudo-Macarius As near as the body is to the soul in intimate interrelationship, so much nearer is God who is present to come and open the locked doors of our heart and to fill us with heavenly riches. Click here to read the PDF. From The Fifty Spiritual Homilies and The Great Letter, edited and
- [The Symbolism of Weaving](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/guenon-symbolism-of-weaving) - René Guénon It may be said that the manifestation of a being in a certain state of existence, like any other event, is determined by the meeting of a thread of the warp with a thread of the weft. Each thread of the warp is then a being envisaged in its essential nature, which insofar
- [Foreword to <em>Language of the Self</em>](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/foreword-to-language) - The “Foreword” to Language of the Self by V. Raghavan Source: Language of the Self by Frithjof Schuon (World Wisdom, 1999, second edition) “Internally” every religion is the doctrine of the one Self and its earthly manifestation, as also the way leading to the abolition of the false self or the way of the mysterious reintegration of our “personality” in the celestial Prototype. (p. 234) It is a matter of singular satisfaction to the present writer to be associated with this book, the first publication in India of a class of writings which, if not so well known in this country, has nevertheless contributed in a unique way to the true understanding of Hinduism in the West. This is a class of writings different from the more widely known one of the ‘Orientalists’, but may be considered the consummation of the work which these ‘Orientalists’ had done since their discovery of Sanskrit or the East by editing and translating Eastern classics and tracing the development of the different branches of Oriental thought. To adopt the language of the Mundaka, all that they have done may be called the apar? vidy?, while the class of writings dealt with here may be deemed the para vidy?. An eminent figure who easily passed from the former to the latter1 and who is not only well known in this country but widely adored, is Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. Another name that comes in this line is that of the French savant René Guénon, the quintessence of whose teachings Coomaraswamy himself brings together in his essay, “Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge”. Guénon’s Introduction to the Study of Hindu Doctrines and Man and his Becoming according to the Ved?nta are now much-marked books in Indian libraries. More recently Huxley, Isherwood and Heard, of another eminent group, have, with their writings on the Ved?nta and Philosophia Perennis, captured, so to say, the imagination 1 Like Truth, the same s?dhaka may have modes and levels; and one can pass from one kind of study to the other without looking down upon the other, or fearing the loss of caste by mixing with those of another school, or being accused of having as if two distinct brains. of Indians. To this elite of authentic exponents in the West of Eastern wisdom belongs Frithjof Schuon whom it is the privilege of the present writer to introduce to our readers here. Schuon, who had associations with Guénon, is German by birth, French by upbringing and Swiss by residence. His writings, which are in French, have appeared, comparatively recently, in English—Transcendent Unity of Religions (Faber and Faber, 1953), Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts (Faber and Faber, 1954), Gnosis—Divine Wisdom (John Murray, 1959). The present collection of his essays has been translated by two close associates of his, who have, like him, received initiation in Oriental traditions, Marco Pallis, author of Peaks and Lamas, and Macleod Matheson, translator of Schuon’s Spiritual Perspectives. This is the first time that a collection of Schuon’s essays is published in this country in whose heritage of wisdom he is immersed and in the interpretation (manana) of which he has ever been engaged. It is but appropriate that Ganesh & Co—who have published the expositions by another foreign savant and s?dhaka, Arthur Avalon, of another aspect of Indian traditional up?sana?, the ??kta—are bringing out this volume. Nothing is perhaps more significant or has climaxed this effort in a more befitting manner than the fact that His Holiness ?r? ?ankar?c?rya, Jagadguru on the Kñ?c? K?makoti P?tha, has been pleased to accept the dedication of this book to him; the orthodoxy and authenticity of Schuon’s exposition stand in need of no further testimony. In the foregoing lines the words Tradition and Orthodoxy—quite unfashionable these days—have been used. At the outset a certain distinctiveness and distinction were also claimed for the class of writings to which those presented here belong. What are the chief features of their approach? Firstly, these writings bring out the fact that underlying the different religions of the world there is a common tradition and a basic unity. To quote Schuon, ‘explicitly to practise one religion is implicitly to practise them all’ (Gnosis, p. 33). This common tradition is the ‘gnosis or the philosophia perennis which is the connecting link between the different religious languages’ (ibid., p. 27). Secondly, while Truth is one, Revelation or Tradition or Form is naturally diverse, thanks to the infinity of divine possibility (ibid., p. 29). While orthodoxy which represents divine necessity is the conforming to this basic gnosis, originality, which represents divine freedom2 comprehends the different forms this gnosis puts forth at different times or in different parts of the world. ‘...The diverse revelations do not really contradict one another, since they do not apply to the same receptacle and since God never addresses the same message to two or more receptacles...’ (Gnosis, pp. 29-30). In the words of Guénon (Introduction, p. 201), ‘differences in doctrines, in order to be legitimate, can only be a mere matter of adaptation, modifying the more or less external forms of expression but in no wise touching the principles themselves’;3 ‘...according to men’s varying capacity’, God ‘taught them at one time one thing and at another 2 p. 100. 3 Cf. Schuon, Transcendent Unity, p. 124: ‘Every tradition is necessarily an adaptation...’ 2 time another, as circumstances required’.4 ‘... Every traditional form is superior5 to the others in a particular respect and it is this characteristic which in fact indicates the sufficient reason for., the existence of that form.’ Thirdly, while a search in the writings of the different religions of the world has shown that this gnosis or knowledge of the Self forms the core of all the religions, it is in Hinduism that it is found in a most pronounced form and has never been forgotten. Also, the Hindu heritage is precious for another reason: it is not only ‘the most ancient of the living traditional forms’ but ‘it possesses a certain superiority or centrality with respect to later forms’ (Transcendent Unity, p. 51).6 ‘Hinduism has the faculty of combining all the perspectives which elsewhere are mutually exclusive.’ While combining through the doctrine of adhik?ra-bheda and ruci (spiritual temperament) the different perspectives (dar?anas), ‘Hinduism does not lose sight of unity; it has a tendency to see unity in diversity and in each element of this diversity.’ (Spiritual Perspectives, pp. 66, 68). Fourthly, the highest of these perspectives is Gnosis, the metaphysic of the Self, the Ved?nta. ‘That the way of Knowledge, if jñana-marga, is among spiritual ways the highest, and in a still more ultimate sense, that it is the spiritual way as such, the one in which all other ways finally must merge, is a fundamental truth to which all traditional teachings bear witness either openly or else by implication.’ Of ‘those doctrines and methods that keep closest to true knowledge as the “ highest” ways open to man’, ‘the Hindu Vedanta provides an example that conforms in its presentation, as near as conceivably possible, to the goal it sets itself, which is Deliverance total and unqualified.’7 As to Shankara and the Sufis, to these writers too, knowledge alone delivers. The doctrine of Bhakti, Hindu or Christian, does not contradict that of Jñ?na, for ‘the conceptions of Ramanuja are contained in those of Shankara and are transcended by them’. ‘R?m?nuja affirms against ?ankar?c?rya truths which the latter never denied on their own level.’ (p. 24). Like faith,8 devotion is a pre-condition of knowledge; there have been no greater hymnists in India than Shankara; for, to one who has realised the Self, it is more natural than not, as the Bh?gavata says, to be singing of the Lord.9 Not only Ramakrishna, but many a forebear of 4 p. 101. 5 Transcendent Unity, p. 50. To be more precise one should rather say that every traditional form specialises in a particular aspect. Cf. p. 68: ‘That one enunciation may be less direct in its form than another is no proof whatever of a lesser wisdom but solely of a lesser receptivity on the part of the particular environment.’ 6 Op. cit., p. 107, fn., ‘...Hinduism represents the Primordial Tradition...’ 7 p. 46. 8 ?raddh?v?n labhate jñ?nam, Git? IV. 39. Cf. ‘It is for certain men who have been allowed to pass from faith to gnosis ...’ (Clement of Alexandria). 9 See Ch. XLII ‘From Bhakti to Jñana and Back’ in the Call of the Jagadguru, lecture by the present 3 his has been this bhaktajñ?nin. Also, when the Upanisad says of the Supreme Self ‘yam evaisa vrnute tena labhyah tasyaisa ?tm? vrnute tan?m sv?m’, there is, as it were, a synthesis of Jñ?na and Bhakti. It is in this light that statements such as that of St. Macarius of Egypt, ‘Love is inseparable from knowledge’, are to be understood. Between different approaches, e.g., Bhakti and Jñ?na, it is, therefore, not a question of error and truth, but one of lesser truth and greater truth or of different gradations of the universal reality (Transcendent Unity, p. 38).11 Fifthly, between the subject to be realised which is Sat; Cit and Ananda and the objective world superimposed on it, ‘there is interposed a direct objectivation of the subject’ which mediates in the re-integration, the trinity of the avat?ra, the guru and the revelation or mantra12. ‘The Absolute reveals itself also, to the same sage, in an objective manner, by springing up suddenly in the mind in the form of sacred words; and the Absolute reveals itself also in the giving of inspired Texts which are to be the support of life and of spiritual realisation to an entire civilisation; in such a case the Absolute never reveals itself in subjective mode, except in the case of certain Avat?ras whose body and mind manifest the self in a manner eminently more direct than with the ordinary sage...’ (p. 57). Sixthly, the East and Hinduism in particular are note-worthy for preserving not only this tradition of gnosis, but what is very important today, the ‘techniques of realisation’ (p. 229). For ‘knowledge is not merely a matter of right theory ... but is something to be “actualized” with the help of a method running parallel to the doctrine ...’ (p. 48). Foremost among these techniques is Yoga—to which Schuon devotes a chapter in this book—which as described by Patanjali includes the virtues and that unique mode called japa, which runs like a golden thread through Karma, Bhakti and Jñana, and assimilates the former two to the last. Lastly, ‘as the “spiritual technique” is essentially the art of concentration’ (p: 89), the traditional ideology favours art, which in origin was the imitation of divine act or the analogy used by revelation for exegesis, ‘as a direct aid to spirituality’ (p. 108); ‘the spiritual efficacy of aesthetic supports is in the very nature of things’, for ‘apart from the intrinsic value of beauty’ ‘the efficacy of art is to be found in the unifying power of aesthetic experience’.13 As he says in his Spiritual Perspectives: ‘There is something in our intelligence which wants to live at rest, ?ankar?c?rya of K?ñc?, Ganesh & Co. 10 p. 6. 11‘Reality affirms itself by degrees, but without ceasing to be “one”, the inferior degrees of this “affirmation” being absorbed, by metaphysical integration or synthesis, into the superior degrees... Furthermore Being Itself, which is none other than the “Personal God”, is in its turn surpassed by the “Impersonal”...’ (Transcendent Unity, p. 53). 12 p. 18. 13 Cf. N?da-yoga, pp. 36-55, Introduction to the Spiritual Heritage of Ty?gar?ja, Ramakrishna Mission Students’ Home, Madras. 4 something in which the conscious and unconscious meet in a kind of passive activity, and it is this element to which the lofty and easy language of art speaks. The language is lofty because of the spiritual symbolism of its form and the nobility of its style; it is easy because of the aesthetic mode of assimilation.’ (p. 29) Guénon, who was the pioneer to expound these ideas, expressed himself forcefully and decisively; at the same time his style was clear, straight and succinct. In Schuon, his follower, we have his commentator, his bh?sya-k?ra, if we may say so, who delights more in analysis, dialectics and aphoristic enunciations.14 He develops further the topics—orthodoxy and heterodoxy, metaphysic and intellectuality, esoterism and exoterism, East and West, etc.—which Guénon had dealt with earlier. Naturally while examining these concepts more intensely, Schuon has to go into many a detail. For example, while on the question of the value of traditions, one would naturally expect the question of accretions and decay to be tackled. The explanations which the author seeks may not all be satisfactory, e.g., on the spread of Buddhism or Islam in India (Transcendent Unity, pp. 107-110).15 But in these and other similar discussions, the author’s critical acumen shows that the doctrine of traditionalism does not mean credulousness nor turning a blind eye to certain defects caused by the historical conditions,16 time-cycle, and purusa-dosa (defects which human nature is always prone to)17 that might overlay and obscure or lead to some aberrations in a tradition. While in discussions on such questions, which cannot be carried on without getting involved in the historical method, differences of opinion are inevitable, on the timeless aspects of Tradition and Knowledge one would find in these pages interpretation which is illuminating and, with reference to the Hindu doctrines of Ved?nta, Toga, etc., perfectly authentic. Chapter VI here, read along with the corresponding chapters in Schuon’s two other books, forms an important contribution which adds to Coomaraswamy’s exposition of sacred art and traditional aesthetic; particularly noteworthy is the author’s effort here to emancipate art from evaluation based on period, environment and movement and from the obsession of originality and the notion that for a genius to flower forth, it is necessary to make innovations. While the long chapter on the principle of distinction in social order puts forth a reasoned explanation of Caste 14 While the present volume of his essays has many examples of this last mentioned category, his Spiritual Perspectives is almost fully in the form. 15 What is said on p. 110 here is hardly correct; it is not as if Hinduism or ?ankara did away with Buddhism in India; it was Muslim expansion which dealt the death blow by destroying in India, as outside also, the Buddhistic monasteries. 16 Cf. Ch. VIII, “The Meaning of Race”, p. 199, on the tendency of the traditional worlds to exaggeration, illogicality and facile prejudices. See also his Transcendent Unity, p. 38 on traditions which outlive their usefulness. 17 Cf. Spiritual Perspectives, p. 20, ‘Abuses are in human nature and especially so, when human nature is expressed in a collectivity.’ 5 so far as the Hindu tradition is concerned, the next on the meaning of Race underlines the leading endowments and originality, with special reference to spiritual inheritance, of the different peoples of the world, and evaluates them on the basis of the three gunas—Sattva, Rajas and Tamas. “The Sacred Pipe of the Red Indians” (Ch. IX) exposes ideas which show the universality of the traditional wisdom and would be of special interest to Hindus for their parallels in the Veda and Upanisad.18 Perhaps the greatest gain from this study of world religions is the discovery of their underlying unity19 and of the fact that they are but diverse ‘paths that lead to the same summit’. It is also clear that this unity could lie only in the doctrine of gnosis, for it is knowledge that has no history. The realisation of this truth would obviate the evangelical obsession of certain faiths, which by admixture of violence, exploitation or corruption of one kind or another or by dilution of the teaching, carry out their expansionism. As Aldous Huxley says: ‘Like any other form of imperialism, theological imperialism is a menace to permanent world peace. The reign of violence will never come to an end until, first, most human beings accept the same true philosophy of life; until, second, this perennial philosophy is recognised as the highest factor common to all the world religions; until, third, the adherents of every religion renounce the idolatrous time-philosophies, with which, in their own particular faith, the perennial philosophy of eternity has been overlaid...’20 This does not mean a watering down of faith or the growth of a religious indifference; it is only a curative of sectarianism. Every religion is unique and the aspirant devoted to it should essay in it with that faith but when he has reached the goal, he no longer sees any diversity. This has been affirmed so far as the manifold perspectives within the Indian tradition are concerned continuously by the Veda, the Upanisad, the Git?, and the hymns of saints and devotees, but it was left to Ramakrishna in modern times to demonstrate this in respect of the non-Indian religious traditions too, Christianity and Islam.21 In 1926, a European student of Ved?nta met His Holiness Sri Sankar?c?rya of ?rngeri and at the end of the conversation wanted to know if Hinduism took converts. ‘No, rather it is needless for Hinduism to take converts,’ so saying, His Holiness explained why Hinduism was called Santana Dharma, the Eternal Law. The European said that he had no idea when he came that he would be going 18 See especially pp. 202, 205, 208. 19 See also ‘How Can Christian and Non-Christian Religions Co-operate?’ by F. Heiler, Marburg, Hibbert Journal, LLI, January, 1954. 20 The Perennial Philosophy, p. 229 21 See ‘Sri Ramakrishna: The Proof of the Validity and Vitality of Hinduism’, Ved?nta Kesari, Madras, April, 1941. For a correct estimate of Ramakrishna, the following from Schuon cannot possibly be excelled, (p. 37): ‘In Ramakrishna there is something which seems to defy every category; he was like the living symbol of the inner unity of religions; he was, in fact, the first Saint deliberately wishing to penetrate “foreign” spiritual forms... In the present time of confusion, disarray and doubt, he was the Saint called to “verify” forms and “reveal,” if one can so express it, their single truth.’ 6 away from His Holiness with a desire to be a better Christian. His Holiness observed in conclusion that an artist howsoever capable required a stable background of canvas for his painting. ‘Apply your God-given gifts on the stable background of your own God-chosen faith, Christianity. When the painting is over and you are contemplating the beauty of the picture, the background may fade away from your view of its own accord...’ Further there is this inherent contradiction in conversion. People in different areas of the earth, brought up in different social, historical and cultural background, when they are converted, really effect a conversion in the Faith imposed on or induced in them; and while different forms of a Faith thus arise in different regions, in some cases, the strong character of an eminent convert or the well-settled nature of a converted community really alters or introduces new elements in the doctrines or practices; the result is the original uniqueness of a tradition is lost or blurred. The service that this group of writers in the West have done is both to the East and the West. The integration they have achieved on the basis of a traditional and spiritual outlook is not exactly Oriental, for as they have shown, this outlook is common to the mediaeval and scholastic West. ‘What we have in mind for the Christian,’ says Schuon (p. 229), ‘is a return to his own sources and not an orientalisation of the West.’ ‘If Guénon wants the West to turn to Eastern metaphysics, it is not because they are Eastern, but because this is metaphysics... It is only because this metaphysics still survives as a living power in Eastern societies, in so far as they have not been corrupted by the withering touch of Western, or rather modern, civilisation,... and not to orientalise the West, but to bring back the West to a consciousness of the roots of her own life and values... that Guénon asks us to turn to the East.’22 The message of these writers is not less needed, nor ever more opportune than today, for the East, which under the impact of different forces from the modern West is either ‘sleeping over its truths’, or indulging in a ‘spiritual demagogy’ busy preparing versions of its teachings acceptable to the modern West, or ‘committing suicide’ by working itself up into a frenzy that it had been terribly mistaken down the centuries and that, cutting itself completely from its hoary moorings, it should now set itself, in the wake of the modern West, to work for the Utopia of increased production, improved standard of living and an equality instead of quality. That India and the greater part of the East are now free from Western colonialism is no guarantee that their traditions would be conserved. As Gai Eaton observes:23 ‘It is far too early to tell how profoundly Western ideas may have penetrated the basic structures of life in India, but it is clear that the process of penetration has by no means ceased with the abdication of the British Raj; the country, now regarded as ‘politically mature’ because its traditional forms have been more or 22 Coomaraswamy, Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge. 23 The Richest Vein: Eastern Tradition and Modern Thought, p. 17. Faber and Faber. See also Language of the Self, p. 198. 7 less undermined, has been left to the tender mercies of Westernised Indians who are unlikely to show such moderation as we did in tampering with the old way of life.’ Both Guénon and Schuon have taken special pains to criticise modern Indian scholars or teachers who have had to ‘present’, so to say, the orthodox tradition of India for Western acceptance.24 But one may not consider this the chief sin of modern India when one reflects on the long history of Hindu thought, during almost the whole course of which it had been submitted to the impact of forces both internal and external, and finds that, without sacrificing its fundamentals, Hindu tradition had always put forth adaptations of forms, and that indeed it is these diversified forms which justify the claim of this culture to ‘formal amplitude’. On the other hand, the real danger is from that total Westernisation in which the East is fast, thoughtlessly, throwing away its precious heritage. In their denunciation of modern Western civilisation and in the way to regeneration that they have pointed out through the recovery of the traditional spirit, it is the East that these savants have shown as supplying the key to that treasure of spiritual wisdom. To many modern Indians and their leaders who are intensely allergic to the words Tradition and Orthodoxy, this growing school of Western thinkers should act as a shock-absorber. Their re-affirmation of the value of this ancient, in fact timeless, wisdom should lead to a reawakening in the East, and to an arrest of the spreading decay of its tradition. Let not that contingency arise in which, for this ancient wisdom, as for our antique artware, we would one day have to go to the West where it has been taken and treasured by a band of vivekins! And for awakening us with their true and revealing exposition of this knowledge, these vivekins of the West are entitled to our gratitude and respect,—rsivat te’pi p?jy?s syuh, as Garga of yore said of the ??stra-jñas of the West. ?r?vana Eula P?rnim? Veda-up?karma 18th August 1959 V. RAGHAVAN University of Madras The above “Foreword” by Venkataraman Raghavan appeared in the book Language of the Self by Frithjof Schuon, © 1999 World Wisdom. All Rights Reserved. For Personal Usage Only. www.worldwisdom.com 24 To many here the criticism in this connection of Vivekananda by both Guénon and Schuon may appear somewhat excessive, but it may be pointed out that Schuon himself (p. 43), indicates the lines on which the inevitable emergence and role of Vivekananda or Gandhi might be fruitfully examined and understood.
- [Black Elk Speaks—Excerpt](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/black-elk-speaks-excerpt) - Black Elk John G. Neihardt My friend, I am going to tell you the story of my life, as you wish; and if it were only the story of my life I think I would not tell it; for what is one man that he should make much of his winters, even when they bend
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- [The Desacralization of Work](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-desacralization-of-work) - Roger Sworder To think of untouched nature as perfect is, from the traditional point of view, as mistaken as to think of it as an expendable resource. Nature is neither a goddess to be worshiped from a distance, nor a whore to be used up and dismissed. Nature is the wife of the human genius:
- [The Buddhist Jhanas and Mystical Prayer and its Degrees](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-buddhist-jhanas-and-mystical-prayer-and-its-degrees) - Daniel Millet Gil The jhanas and mystical union are significant experiences in their own traditions. But, none of them is liberating by itself, as they are solely means to achieving the purpose of their respective systems. Both traditions caution against confusing these states with final liberation or salvation. Click here to view the PDF. What
- [Luminaries: Twenty Lives that Illuminate the Christian Way, by Rowan Williams](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/luminaries-twenty-lives-that-illuminate-the-christian-way-by-rowan-williams) - Reviewed by Harry Oldmeadow The key to the Christian way, a perpetual journey rather than a destination, is love. But this love, far from being simply an emotional disposition, a certain arrangement, as it were, of one’s feelings, stems from an awareness of Divine Love which in turn informs and governs our dealings with the
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- [The Rule of St Columbanus](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-rule-of-st-columbanus) - St Columbanus (d. 615) We must proportion our vigils to our strength, especially since we are commanded by the author of our salvation to watch and “pray at all times” [Luke 21:36]. And Paul orders us to “pray ceaselessly” [1 Thess 5:17]. Click here to view the PDF, and click here to view the Latin
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- [Itz’aat and Tlamatini: The “Wise Man” as Keeper of Maya and Nahua Collective Memory](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/itzaat-and-tlamatini) - Daniel Graña-Behrens The tlamatini is related to four diferent religious and artistic activities. One is the priestly function…. The role as calendar priest included not only supervising the 260-day count but also performing prophesies based on that calendar and on other knowledge, such as astronomy, and serving as a teacher. Also within this role was
- [Ornament](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/ornament) - Ananda K. Coomaraswamy We should distinguish between the beautiful on the one hand and the lovely, i.e., loveable or likeable, on the other, bearing in mind that “the beautiful is not just what we like, for there are some who like deformities.” Click here to view the PDF. Originally published in The Art Bulletin, Vol.
- [Ananda K. Coomaraswamy](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/ananda-k-coomaraswamy) - Harry Oldmeadow Traditional art, in Coomaraswamy’s view, was always directed towards a twin purpose: a daily utility, towards what he was fond of calling “the satisfaction of present needs”, and towards the preservation and transmission of moral values and spiritual teachings derived from the tradition in which it appeared. Click here to view the PDF.
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- [Heavenly Seclusion (Tianyinzi—Taoist Meditation)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/heavenly-seclusion) - translated by Livia Kohn The Yijing says: “The way of Heaven and Earth is simple.” What does this mean? The Master of Heavenly Seclusion says: “Heaven and Earth are above my head and beneath my feet. When I open my eyes I can see them. I can speak of them without complex devices. Thus I
- [Shuo Gua (Explanation of the Diagrams)—Yijing](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/shuo-gua-yijing) - From the Classic of Changes, the Yijing (I Ching or Zhou Yi), we present two translations of a fundamental section on the mythical and metaphysical origins of the eight trigrams and the sixty-four hexagrams. Click here to view the PDF. In ancient times the holy sages made the Book of Changes thus: Their purpose was
- [What is Symbolism?](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/what-is-symbolism) - Martin Lings A rite is as a life-line thrown down from Heaven: it is for the worshipper to cling to the life-line; the rest is in the hands of the Thrower. Since a rite is always performed with a view to God, it amounts to a re-enactment of the connection between the symbol (in this
- [Revelation as Concealment: The Theology of the Icon Screen](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/revelation-as-concealment) - Maximos Constas Byzantine thinking about the nature of revelation had to contend with the appearance of the uncreated God in the concrete forms of the created world. That the Absolute could enter and be personally active in the relative conditions of time and space were beliefs derived, not from the schools of ancient philosophy, but
- [On Earth as It Is in Heaven](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/on-earth-as-it-is-in-heaven) - On Earth as It Is in Heaven © 2007 James S. Cutsinger Published in Sacred Web: A Journal of Tradition and Modernity, 1:1 (1998); Reprinted in Science and the Myth of Progress, ed. Mehrdad M. Zarandi (Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom, 2003) “It is the Spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing.” John 6:63 “The forces do not work upward from below, but downward from above.” Hermes It is often supposed that emanation, creation, and evolution cannot be reconciled. Either the world proceeds of necessity out of God Himself, or God freely chooses to make the world from nothing, or the world contains its cause within itself; its source is either transpersonal, personal, or infrapersonal. The following considerations (1) are designed to show that a reconciliation of these points of view is permissible if it is understood that the cosmogonies in question reflect various angles of approach. This is not to say, however, that each of these perspectives is equally adequate. If the “infrapersonal” explanations of physical science are to have any worth, their dependence upon the “personal” account of theology must be fully acknowledged, even as the personal must in turn admit the priority of the “transpersonal” truths of pure metaphysics. Whatever value there may be in the idea of evolution becomes apparent only in light of creation, and then only to the measure that the doctrine of creation is itself illumined by emanation. The primary aim of this article is to present an account of an evolving world per ascensum fully consistent with the principles presupposed per descensum by metaphysics and theology. Not all Platonists have been Christians, of course, nor have all Christians been Platonists, but there is such a thing as Christian Platonism. This should be sufficient to show that doctrinal positions which include creation within the perspective of emanation, whether widely persuasive or not, are already a matter of record, and that it is therefore not illegitimate to speak of the metaphysician and theologian as sharing certain common “principles”. The question remains, however, whether these principles might serve to inform an evolutionary understanding of the physical world. In its transformist or Darwinian versions, the theory of biological evolution has been for good reason thoroughly rejected, not only by orthodox theologians, but more importantly by those among our contemporaries who have most forcefully propounded an integral metaphysics, and who have done the most to promote in that light an esoteric interpretation of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. (2) It is therefore essential that the reasons for this rejection be carefully considered before presenting a truly principial theory of evolution, one which is fully consistent with the “degrees of Reality” and which acknowledges the prerogatives of a scientia sacra. We aim in this way to avoid the absurdities which usually accompany modern scientific cosmogonies while at the same time “saving the appearances” in the sequence of certain natural forms. But before proceeding to an evolutionary explanation of things, we would do well to be reminded first of the distinguishing features of a fully metaphysical theology and of the account of the cosmos provided by an “emanational creation”. *** Either the world proceeds of necessity out of God Himself, it was said, or God freely chooses to make that world from nothing: Tertium non datur. Or so at least it has seemed to those whose eagerness to protect the freedom, and hence the sovereignty, of God has caused them to neglect not only the meaning of “nothing” in the crucial phrase ex nihilo, but also the absoluteness and infinity of God Himself. “Nothing” must here signify either one of two things: that the world is fashioned from no “thing”, from no already determinate entity or entities, and of course it is not, for to speak of a cosmos is to speak of limitation, and the origin of limited “things” must of necessity be unlimited; or that the world is made ex nihilo praeter Deum, from nothing other than God, for the Source of the being by which existing things are is quite evidently not an absolute vacuum, nor is such a conception even possible: Ex nihilo nihil fit. But if when one says that the world is created from nothing, it is accordingly meant that the source of the world is supraformal and Divine, then the expression is clearly not a negation, but simply the transposition into theological terms, of emanation. The conception of “nothing” is far from a luxury, of course. It serves to remind us of the impotence and contingency of creatures, of their distance from the God whence they come, and of the “presence of absence” in their make-up; and it can provide in this way a useful corrective for metaphysical expositions in which the discontinuous character of emanation has not been sufficiently stressed, and which therefore risk the error of pantheism. But this error is by no means an inevitable feature of every transpersonal cosmogony. Nor apart from the transpersonal and metaphysical is the personal or creationist perspective free from certain risks of its own, for it tends not to consider with due care the implications, and even more so the limits, of the Divine Qualities or Names, of which freedom is only one. Theologians who mistrust metaphysicians for fear that the necessity of manifestation, unlike the gift of creation, will compromise the absoluteness of God, and thus His freedom from determination, seem not to have recognized that absoluteness imposes its own limits, not extrinsic to be sure, but intrinsic and proceeding from the essence of the Divine Reality Itself. To call God omnipotent is not to say that He can do anything, lest the goodness of sovereignty be marred by a purely arbitrary deployment. It is to say instead that He cannot be constrained “from the outside in”. But God may, and indeed must, be constrained by His essence, which He cannot negate, any more than a man can lift himself off the ground. Obviously God cannot lie, because He is the truth, and to lie would be to undo the truth of His Word—that Word which He not only speaks, but which, “being of one substance with the Father”, He himself is. Though perhaps somewhat less obvious, it is equally certain that God cannot but manifest Himself, whether we call the result of this Self-expression an emanation or a creation. Again the necessity flows from the essence. If absolute, God is “loosened” or freed from all limits; He is unbounded and infinite. But having no bounds, nothing being able to contain or enclose Him, God cannot but pass “outside” of Himself and into the nothing, from which, as it were by displacement, He makes His creatures come into being. “None is good but God”, and it is the very nature of the only Good to “communicate Itself” (St Augustine). Although we are using a “personal” language in order to show that the emanational perspective need not be opposed to theological considerations of God and “His” Essence or “His” creatures, it should be clear that if the theologian took Divine Sovereignty with complete seriousness, as he claims to be doing in rejecting the idea of cosmic necessity, he would be obliged to admit the priority of the transpersonal, and hence the legitimacy (to say the least) of metaphysics. For a Reality truly sovereign and truly free is not precisely a being at all, let alone a person, for these, like all categories, must impose their own determinations. Freedom and necessity are thus seen to be one, and their apparent opposition may be resolved. The world is able to proceed of necessity from out of the Divine so as to serve as a manifestation of its Source precisely because God is free from all the constraints that might otherwise condition His nature and interfere with His being true to Himself, or with His wish to express Himself through his Word. The inevitability of the world is in this sense intended. (3) A few remarks should perhaps be added concerning the “tense” of emanation and creation. The theological account of the origination of things is for various reasons less likely than the metaphysical to admit that God is “always” making the world, even though the eternality of creatures in divinis is necessarily implied by their inevitability, just as their inevitability is by Divine power, for “it is alike impious and absurd to suppose that there was a time when Goodness did not do good and omnipotence did not exercise Its power” (Origen). The theologian often objects, not in this case that God has suffered demotion, being constrained to act in a way He would otherwise not, but that the creation has benefited from an unjustified, and blasphemous, promotion, being accounted “as old as” God. But this is to neglect the fact that not all ontological dependence exhibits itself in chronological succession, as the filiation and procession of the second two Persons of the Holy Trinity should be enough to establish. Whenever there is a mind there is thought, and whenever a sun there is light, and yet the relationship remains in both instances causal and asymmetrical. And so, despite its eternality, “the universe was created by God, and there is no substance which has not received its existence from Him” (Origen). Whatever their disputes as to whether the world has “always” existed, the metaphysician and theologian are agreed that “as long as” there has been a cosmos, God has “always” been responsible for it. The universe is never a fait accompli. It is in each instant, or better between every instant, being brought forth—by God, the theologian will say, from God, in metaphysical terms; or as above, and according to a certain fusion of perspectives, by God from nothing other than God. The personal and transpersonal explanations are thus alike in insisting that the contingency of all that is other than the Supreme Reality is such that the cosmos cannot stand on its own, however briefly, but requires, in order to be, the continuous infusion of uncreated power. Whether one thinks of the world as an emanation or a creation, the tense of the process is present: it is streaming forth; it is being made. *** The world as a whole, an ordered whole, and not successively or piece by piece, is a continuous production of God or (one might say) eduction from God, according to one’s angle of vision—with the “process” in either case being a movement “from above to below”. Altogether different of course is the explanation of the world provided by the transformist or Darwinian account of evolution, which rests upon a total negation of God, the true Source of all creatures, and which purports to account for the variety of natural forms by means of strictly natural processes, “upward from below”. Six reasons for rejecting the theory may be adduced. (4) If these reasons are only briefly considered here, it is because the chief point of this article is not to examine in full all the many problems with the transformist theory, but to present a very different view of evolution, one which takes these criticisms seriously, which builds upon them, and which conforms to the metaphysical perspective they in part reflect. In the first place, the explanation of order by “natural selection”, as even its more honest proponents admit, is no more than a theory, and one moreover which can never be tested, let alone proved. (5) Like all scientific theories, it is inevitably tentative and probabilistic, being not even so solid or certain as the empirical data it is meant to explain, themselves of course always subject, if not to doubt or denial, then to continual reinterpretation. Having therefore only provisional force, because an origin strictly inductive, the Darwinian doctrine simply cannot compete at the same level of truth with either metaphysics or theology. Of these, the former proceeds from noesis or intellection, which involves the direct apprehension of the Real as Object by virtue of the Real as Subject; it is a matter of theoria, not theory, and rests upon the knowledge of like by like, when What truly is so becomes aware of Itself. The latter, theology, though not equally certain with respect to its mode of reception, is equally true in its content; for theological thinking—one must add, in its orthodox forms—is dependent on Revelation, and Revelation is intellection quenched as it were in the form of result: not knowledge, as Plato would say, but true opinion, orthodoxy. Opinion per se, however—whatever so-and-so happens to think at this moment about his more or less regular contacts with the more or less fluid domain of so-called physical “things”—is comparable to neither; and a thought dependent on the data of sense cannot but be an opinion. The second reason is this. Like all scientific theories, transformist evolution (even supposing its validity) is limited to the strictly material or terrestrial plane, which is only a part of the cosmos, the least real and accordingly the least intelligible. As he attempts to explain what he sees, the Darwinian theorist neglects to remember that what can be physically sensed is not only much less than the whole, but less real than the “parts” of the whole which it is not, as the images of a dream are less real than the objects of waking perception. And yet this quite partial character of his hypothesis—and by “partial” I mean both “biased” and “incomplete”—is seldom if ever considered. Just the reverse: it is often assumed instead, not that all that is said about fossils applies in addition all the way up to the angels, though this would be more than absurd enough, but that there is no “up” in the first place, nothing besides matter at all. De non apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est ratio. The indefensible presumption of this materialism should be obvious. A third observation naturally follows, and it concerns the reductionism implicit in the transformist cosmogony, its attempt to explain the more by the less. I have said that the scientific evolutionist often assumes that matter is all that exists, or matter-energy if a greater subtlety is required. But even when he does not so assume, or says he does not, the theory invariably leads its proponent to think that if there is something more or higher than physical substance, it can be approached only by way of the lower, and only as the product, result, or extension of processes and forces first apprehended, or inferred, at the empirical level. But if the lower explains the higher, then the lowest will explain most of all, and one is left to conclude, however preposterously, that something is derived from nothing, quod absit. It is as though the evolutionist had transferred the creationist cosmogony, uninformed by metaphysics, onto the material plane, together with the problems already considered, but without the theologian's God, and the result is doubly absurd: the creation of something from nothing by nothing. Logic itself compels one to see that “every productive cause is superior to that which it produces”, and that “whatever is produced by secondary beings is in a greater measure produced from those prior and more determinative principles from which the secondary were themselves derived” (Proclus). The fourth problem with the transformist position is that it mistakes temporal or chronological succession for ontological causation and so falls prey to the sophism post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Neither the metaphysician nor the theologian denies, or needs to deny, that the fossilized vestiges of various species of organic life appear in the geological record in an order of increasing complexity. Nor must he posit some extraordinary act of God by virtue of which that record was made to appear as it does by a miraculous “pre-fabrication”, after the fashion of certain “scientific creationist” schemes. Instead he accepts the fact, though a priori and not by induction, that the various kinds of plants and animals have appeared successively over time, with the sensible manifestation of humanity coming near the end of the process. But appearance is one thing, and Reality quite another. To admit that reptiles roamed the earth before the appearance of mammals, or more precisely that they entered into the substance of physical bodies in advance of the mammals, does not entail the admission that the latter, by whatever temporal and biological channels one might wish to propose, therefore came from the former, though they may in a sense have come through them, as I shall later suggest. The metaphysician teaches instead, and quite the reverse, that the order in which the various species have been deployed over time, and thus the evolutionary sequence of their disclosure in matter as physical organisms, is just the opposite of their “original” order as archetypes or Divine ideas. Inasmuch as the world is the reflection of God, and inasmuch as reflections invert, this is precisely what one should expect—a kind of chiastic reduplication of the higher in the lower. It is essential of course to remember that the procession of the world out of God is eternal, hence in temporal terms both continuous and instantaneous. When it is said that man’s appearance on earth toward the end of the cosmological “process” is the inverted reflection of his theological and metaphysical primacy in the Divine Logos, it should be understood that this primacy refers to the “spatial” super-ordination of human beings over animals in a purely ontological, static, and vertical sense, and not to their being an initial effect in a series of sequential creational acts. Man’s primacy is that of the microcosm, of a “container” with respect to its “contents”. Fifthly, the Darwinian conception of evolution is utterly blind to the essential distinction of form from shape. By the word “species” it means to signify what many individual organisms have in common: a notional abstraction derived by generalization from particular facts and serving as a linguistic tool for classification. But these facts are all of an empirical, material kind and have to do solely with structural resemblances and other physical features susceptible to measurement and quantification. A species thus considered, ab extra ad intra and as it were by dissection, is therefore dependent on shape, even as shape is a function of surface. By “surface” we do not mean only the most outwardly external plane of an organism's solidity, the place where its skin (or some similar feature) meets the air, but also whatever relatively inward part of its physical substance could be exposed to the air, in fact or in principle, if our techniques were sufficiently refined. In this sense, what can be seen even through the most powerful of electron microscopes, or read on the screen of some other highly sophisticated detection apparatus, is still only “surface”, and still therefore a matter of shape. Form is quite different. By “form” the metaphysician means to refer to that quality by virtue of which a physical object, whether living or not, transfers the attention of those who perceive it through itself and along a kind of ontological corridor up and into its celestial archetype. Form is liquid where shape is solid, though solids of course nonetheless display the various forms; form is transparent or diaphanous whereas shape is opaque; form insists that it not be confused with a surface. As shape is the place where empirical apprehension must necessarily stop on its way in the direction of being, form is the place where being willingly pauses on its way in the direction of knowledge. Form is on the “other side” of the existence of things from species and shape. Not at all derived from those things or dependent upon them, they are rather derived from it. It is what accounts for the qualitative existence of the animals or plants that possess it in common—whose commonality or similarity, however, far from being the measure or the standard of form, is as much an indication of the fragmentation and incompleteness of these particular creatures as it is a reminder of that which is whole, and which they seek to emulate, which is, once again, their form. A truly adequate cosmological explanation of the world is an explanation of forms and their hierarchical order, and of That which they wish to express. But all this, for obvious reasons, is quite beyond the expectations of a strictly empirical scientific method, the kind of method that has generated the transformist doctrine. The sixth and final problem with this theory, the most fatal of all, is its failure to account for the mind of the theorist himself, and thus its suicidal self-contradiction. If the Darwinian is correct that the body of man, his brain included, like the bodies of the other animals, is the result of the operation of certain subordinate forces, whether physical, chemical, or biological; and if he is correct to assume that the mind is in some way a function of organic tissue and that thoughts are the result of electrical transmissions in the cerebrum: then precisely because of his claims he is not correct, nor could he be “correct” whatever he said. For from this point of view, no idea, including the theory of evolution, is true; none is conformed or adequate to the actual nature of things in a way that its competitors are not. If the transformist is right, all ideas, including his own, and thus all possible theories, are already equally conformed to the real, because they are all equally determined to be what they are by their respective biochemical histories. And so to repeat, if he is right he is not. Truth, like the mind which thinks it, requires a freedom from all conditioning, hence a freedom from all “horizontality”, all physical process, and thus from the whole of nature, which is by definition a concatenation of effected causes and caused effects. Nothing is true—including the statement that “nothing is true”— unless the power of knowing within us “came down from Heaven”, having proceeded out of the only completely unconditioned Reality: the Source of emanation and the God of creation. “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.” In sum, the Darwinian theory of evolution reflects in various ways, and as considered in its several particulars, each of the more or less typical tendencies of modern critical thinking: it is by turns empiricistic, materialistic, reductionistic, historicistic, nominalistic, and relativistic. It is a veritable “hydra of heresies”. And it is for this reason that the theory has been the object of so severe a reproach on the part of both the metaphysician and the orthodox theologian. Let us be clear. The evolutionism which must be repudiated is in no sense the claim that there has been a sequence in the appearance of the forms of life on this planet, nor that changes have occurred and continue to occur in the physical constitution of the various species of plants and animals, for these facts, to the degree that the data of sense can provide us with “facts”, are amply attested by the geological record, by the techniques of radiometric dating, and by the observations of breeders. (6) What must be rejected instead is the attempt to explain such changes in strictly physical terms as if that explanation accounted not only for intra- specific differences between individual organisms, but for the existence and variety of species as such, and as if those species had developed ex nihilo from the simple to the complex, with the inanimate giving rise to the animate, the animate to the sentient, and the sentient to the self-conscious—the last of which must clearly be first in any intelligible causational series. Efforts to describe physical phenomena at the level of empirically observable causes alone are one thing, and are as useful in certain limited cases as they are unobjectionable. But it is quite another to insist, as the more hyperbolic of Darwinians often do, that an empirical explanation renders all other accounts of the same phenomena impossible, or that it can account in addition for the origin of non-empirical realities, or (worst of all) that it somehow proves that only such things exist as can be empirically measured. Herein lie the absurdities mentioned earlier. *** The question remains, however, whether it is possible to formulate a view of the cosmos from an infrapersonal angle that is free from these several defects. Can the major forms of life in this world be described according to the temporal order in which their appearance occurs per ascensum, but so as to protect the metaphysical and theological truths of their “original Origin”—from and by God per descensum? Is it possible to envision the chronological order among the kingdoms on earth in such a way as to see, by a kind of noetic transposition, their ontological order in God? In order for this question to be answered in the affirmative, it is essential that one first understand the purpose of cosmologies in general—perhaps we should say of 10 traditional cosmologies or “natural sciences”, lest they be confused with fields of study like astrophysics, which though it may purport to consider the cosmos as a whole suffers in obvious ways from the same limitations as the other empirical sciences. The traditional intention is basically this. Whatever shape it takes, and whatever the symbols or language it might employ, a true cosmology, by virtue of its conformity with metaphysical and theological principles, must be such as to make the natural a means of support for our awareness of the supernatural, whence nature proceeds and upon which it is permanently and perpetually dependent. A vision of the world which is not conducive to this intellection, and hence to the actualization of what is highest in man, simply cannot be admitted as valid. The strictly utilitarian tendencies of our age notwithstanding, the only good reason for an infrapersonal approach to the cosmos is that it might serve as an aid on the spiritual path toward the transpersonal. If it fails to do this, it has lost its very reason for being. Indeed this is the most fundamental danger with Darwinian evolutionism, that it causes a man to forget where he came from, thus abolishing his nobility. Nevertheless, provided that this danger is kept in full view, the metaphysician and theologian need not in principle be opposed to the idea that the world is evolving. There is after all nothing etymologically wrong with the word “evolution”, nor anything intrinsically absurd about every activity or process which it might be used to signify. (7) As we have seen, the transpersonal explanation is agreed that the cosmos becomes what it is through an “unwinding” or explication of What is already inside, which is “turned out” or evolved into what It is initially not but can then be seen in. As long as the true nature of this original “inwardness”, which is of course God in His immanent presence—“the dearest freshness deep down things”—is not debased by confusion with something created or relative; as long as we recognize that if matter can be said to evolve, it is only because of the presence within it of the Supreme Reality, which it expresses and seeks to return to; and as long as we realize that the world is not what the materialist thinks, but at once a symbol, a veil, and a channel: then an evolutionary cosmogony can be legitimately entertained, not simply as an acceptable theory, but as a genuine theoria, a vision opening up into metaphysical insight. If it is the case that the cosmos is a message sent by God from Himself to Himself, then we may expect the metaphysical truth of emanation, which 11 considers the world as proceeding from God, and the theological truth of creation, which explains the world as fashioned by God, to be open to a corresponding scientific “truth”, according to which the world is envisioned on its way back to God; and we would not be wrong in calling this last process an “evolution”. The distinctive features of an evolution consistent with God and conformed to His nature have already been anticipated indirectly, and by contrast, in our treatment above of the six Darwinian errors. The task now is largely one of organization and synthesis as we present a sketch, not of course of transformism, but of what might be called an “emanational evolution”. The word sketch should be stressed. What follow are no more than leading thoughts, provocations and pictures, designed to suggest a possible line of reflection. There is certainly no intention of exhausting the topic, nor do we aim to anticipate all the conceivable objections. It should be emphasized in any case that the temporal terminology with which we are obliged to speak is not to be taken literally, for obviously God is not Himself subject to the developments here envisioned; only in seeming does the deployment of creatures “take time”. The difficulty, of course, is that our discursive thought must by definition do its work in that seeming and with the materials thus afforded. Hence “stage and sequence are transferred, for clarity of exposition, to things whose being and definite form are eternal” (Plotinus). This caveat must be kept in mind throughout. By “emanational evolution” we mean two things: the deployment of form in matter as shape and the explication in the substance described by that shape of certain qualities or attributes. The total process may be called emanational since both of its “stages”, both the deployment and the explication, proceed in the first place per descensum from higher, immaterial planes. The cosmogony here presented, though it offers a reason for the cosmos “from beneath”, thus begins “from above”, in accordance with the stipulations already established. More precisely, it begins by analogy and, for the sake of maieusis, with the act of knowing, which itself proceeds also from the higher to lower, “for everything that is known is known not according to its own power, but rather according to the capacity of the knower” (Boethius). And it begins by implication with that One which is the principial Knower, and knowing Principle, wherever the knowledge 12 of being arises. The metaphysical scientist or cosmologist begins in this way with the Self as Subject. (8) The Self is truly Subject only in its recognition of Itself as such, and only in knowing Itself as the Knower It is, hence only to the extent that It “becomes” an object as well. One says “as well”, but of course the Principle from which we are starting, and which these altogether inadequate words are meant to evoke, is not an object as well as or in addition to Subject. Rather than both It is neither, though within this “non-dual” transpersonal primacy, It is nonetheless rather more like what is meant by a subject than by an object. If we allow as a provisional means the language of change and transformation in the case of the strictly changeless and impassible, it can be said that what was “once” purely Subject “becomes” Its own object in the “midst” of Its act of knowing, for we are speaking of something whose very nature is such that It cannot but radiate outside of Itself, outside Its “initial” subjectivity, thus taking the form of “whatever is left”—that is, the object, in whatever modality one might wish to imagine. Of course, to speak in these temporal terms is only symbolic, as we have already noted. What are here being pictured as the stages of a process in time are in fact the multiple states of a single, non-temporal Essence. (9) The stages are no more than superimposed “translucencies” of varying colors through which one is intended to glimpse, as “through a glass darkly”, the infinity of that Essence. It may prove helpful to make use of an image. Consider a point. The geometrical point is after all the closest of all mathematical forms to the nature of the Subject and to the root of intellection. Altogether independent from objects, even from the dot that serves as its representation, but which is already more extended than an actual punctum, the point is pure inwardness, uncompromised by any equivalent externality to which it might otherwise be thought to correspond. It is “an inside without because prior to an outside”. (10) And yet again like the Subject, the point tends to search for itself, to spill over the edges of its invisible and dimensionless essence into the dimensions of the things that are seen. In seeking itself, it produces in the first place a line, a figure we may mistake for a collection of discontinuous “points”, but which (as Zeno implied) is more like an effort or energy suspended between them, or better expended by one such point— stretched as it were between itself in the form of subject and itself as found in the object. 13 This line, one might say, is the line of knowledge, connecting the Self or Principle with each of Its innumerable objectifications. But the point is not “satisfied” with the line, which actualizes its possibilities in but a single direction. It searches for breadth in addition to length, projecting itself at right angles to its original motion. In this way, the plane is “evolved”, which in metaphysical terms is the demarcation of a particular level of being—in this case, below the Divine but above the visibly human—a plane which provides for the “clothing” of the as-yet-immaterial entities that dwell upon it. No longer quite pure in its initial inwardness, the point as expressed in this dimension is nevertheless still intangible, invisible, and unresisting—still fluid because having no depth or physical substance, containing as yet nothing external in any material sense. Here is the field, in traditional cosmological language, of the subtle body and its world, the mundus imaginalis. And yet, still unquenched in its thirst, the Subject as point become line and then plane must “explode” once again, in this case into the solid. (11) It is now for the first time that the energy of ontological knowing becomes coagulated or fixed, as what was before a “gas” and then a “liquid” now becomes “solid”, possessed of three dimensions. What had been an idea in the “celestial” world, an ontological ray projected by the Supreme Knower, and what then was condensed on the “intermediate” plane, is now frozen by the dimension of depth as it enters the “terrestrial” order, which is the familiar world of material objects and empirical perceptions, the world studied by the physical scientist and Darwinian. (12) It is of course here, at the level of matter, that the evolution of species is usually assumed to begin, by which “evolution” is normally meant: first the production of life from inorganic substances, and then the development of the various living species from simple to complex, culminating in man. From the point of view of pure metaphysics, however, the true development must be understood very differently: not to the exclusion of all that exceeds the material order, but in full view of the “higher”, and as an extension or prolongation of the earth's pre-material history. (13) This “history”, the emanational sequence by virtue of which the physical plane proceeds by way of the subtle or animic order from out of its principial Source, is sometimes referred to as an “involution”, a word which calls attention less to the metaphysical movement in divinis from within to outside—to evolution per se—and 14 more to the cosmic receptacle into which the movement enters, into which the Subject is incarnated or emptied, “Who being in the form of God made Himself of no reputation, and took the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of man”. From another point of view, however, the one which is here being stressed, the entire process, whether in its involutionary or evolutionary “stages”, and whether outside or inside the material plane—deployment or explication—is all of one piece: it is an evolution or “opening out” of none other than God throughout its entire extent. For it is one and the same Subject— or, to make use of our image again, the very same point—which accounts for the whole, for all of the degrees of Reality and all of their innumerable contents. Of course to see that this is so requires a method of investigation and a perceptual sensitivity quite different from the ordinary empirical orientation. Things must be approached from within, with a view to their forms, not to their shapes. We have said that one of the problems with transformist evolution is its inadequacy to the full range of the cosmos, that it looks at only a part of the whole. But the problem is also that it looks only at a part of the whole. Its approach to the world is therefore bound to eclipse the metaphysical transparency of natural forms, which are intended by God to be His self-expression, the expression of “even his eternal power and Godhead”, but which can be seen as such only if men look not at but along or perhaps even through the creatures around them. If they were so to look, what they would see is that the production of solids from their source in the point is not the end of the story. The radiantly explosive energy of the Subject is not yet exhausted, nor can it be. But having as it were no more room to expand, all the dimensions being filled with Its presence, It cannot but turn in Its movement toward the center of the things it has made. This center must certainly not be confused with some sort of spatial position, half-way between the front and the back, or the top and the bottom, of a particular solid entity. It is rather the “inside without because prior to an outside” of the point itself, into which, as into Itself, the Subject now proceeds. The resulting introsusception marks the beginning of an act of return, of remanation and recapitulation. And yet it is also “more of the same”—simply another manifestation of the Self’s unfathomable plenitude. Having then, to repeat, no more room for itself, in “need” of expansion but lacking an adequate space, the point undertakes something “new” and begins to move 15 along a novel course. It begins to display in the solids once made a range of qualities or attributes, unveiling itself in the how not the what, in the kind not the fact, of the already existing material objects. Thus no sooner are the solids crystallized than, by virtue of the same pre-material emanational energy that first produced them, there begins to burgeon inside a series of “higher dimensions”. An interiorizing action is initiated, according to which the manifestations of the Subject become increasingly central to the creatures in question. At first the point, having just completed its third and final “spatial” deployment, presents itself in a uniform way throughout a particular object, equally in length, in breadth, and in depth, and in the form of a special property, as for example in the attractive power of the lodestone or the crystalline structure of the diamond. Such a property is everywhere all that it is, as much in the parts as in the whole, a piece of a given substance having “as much” of the quality—to use the uselessness of such language—as any other. The Source of the substance, for those who have eyes to see, is thus written upon its very surface. But the surface of things is far too confining for the Subject. It needs the amplitude afforded by Its own infinity, and soon becomes “discontent”, diving below the surface of physical objects, going “indoors”, and there presenting itself in the guise of a process. Here is the beginning of life in its organic expression and as unfolded on the inside of matter. What one immediately notices in looking along such a process, however—along a vital or physiological function—is that a certain specialization among the parts of the whole has been introduced. Unlike a mineral, not all of a living being is all that it is all the way through. Certain aspects, even when they are not as clearly distinct as the individual organs of the higher species, assume a certain priority as providing the channels or openings through which life may enter the entire being. These aspects are to the substance of a living creature what the plane is to the solid; they are its conditio sine qua non—in it, but not of it. Quite the contrary, it is dependent on them. But more to the purpose, where mineral properties had been too restrictive, the more inward character of biological process provides the Subject with additional opportunities for expansion, as is evident in growth. Although the manifestation of the Subject in organic life has become in a sense itself restricted to certain more or less specialized aspects of an entity, and in a way that the properties of a diamond are not, these aspects are actually 16 open along a metaphysical passageway to far wider possibilities than inorganic matter per se can allow for, and it is thus that there enter into the being the “uncreated energies” that are necessary for the unfolding of its life. It is in this sense that the plant kingdom, though emerging later in the temporal sequence, may be said to be higher than the mineral, for the plant provides a greater degree of openness to its source. (14) Now we encounter yet another development, a further “evolution” of the point. Although the plant is able to grow and blossom in a way that the mineral cannot, it remains subject to limitations, which the Subject must still overcome, limitations visibly expressed in its attachment to the earth. If unrestricted emanation is to continue, therefore, an altogether different access must be provided through which the point might be enabled to pass into an even more resplendent qualitative expression. Here, it would seem, is the metaphysical explanation for the birth of sentience and the power of locomotion, the two most telling features of the kingdom next to develop, that of the animals. An even more pronounced interiorization has here taken place, for while an animal's movement is already a sign of deeper capacities evident even to a purely empirical outlook, the power of conscious response which gives rise to this movement, and which can be seen (once again) only by “looking along” the locomotion, is even further within than the power of life, and yet, precisely because it is further inside, it is correspondingly closer to an exteriorization or evolution on the other side of the creature, the side opposed to the facet discerned by the purely sensory eye—even as form is on the further, but shape on the hither, side of material objects. As the point strives to make room for itself in a space that is already exhausted, channels are established through which there can flow the greater intensity of sentience. It is in this way that the flower is opened to the butterfly, a blossom released from its stem. (15) Nevertheless, this release or liberation could not have been accomplished by the plant on its own. The flower has served as a portal for creative, causative Power, but is not itself that cause. Even as apart from the plane the line would remain invisible, in proportion as the plane apart from the solid would be intangible, so in the absence of life would consciousness be hidden from the organs of sense. On the other hand, the plane could not exist at all apart from the line, nor the solid without the plane, nor any dimension were it not for the point; and were it 17 not for the Subject, neither matter, nor life, nor sentience would ever have been deployed or explicated—Subject through matter as life, and Subject through life as sentience. It is worth pausing to emphasize the radical difference between this view of the sequence of forms and that of the Darwinian or transformist theory. The metaphysician is not saying that matter evolves into life, or life into sentience. Nor, on a smaller scale, do amphibians evolve into reptiles, or reptiles into birds; Galapagos finches are always finches, and peppered moths are always moths. (16) The only evolution is that of the point, which is the Divine Self as Subject. The forms of existence through which It “passes”, in a strictly non-temporal and instantaneous way, do not themselves change, for they are the unalterable images of celestial ideas—the distinct and immutable shadows cast by the Divine Sun as It shines upon the eternal archetypes of Its myriad creatures. (17) There is obviously a final chapter, a final stage to be sketched, and this is the case of man himself, and hence of the mind which theorizes with a view to the truth: man, in whose various levels of being there is uniquely exhibited, emerging through the sentience he shares with the animals, the life he shares with the plants, and the body he shares with the minerals, an incomparably different quality, his consciousness—one should perhaps say “potential” or “virtual” consciousness—of Self. (18) Here the centripetal, intropulsive, and interiorizing tendency of the point has “at last” caught up to itself, having step by step provided ever more extended possibilities for irradiation, “until” the level is reached where it “becomes” the field of its very own motion and expression. The circle has been closed; the goal is attained. Intellection has fulfilled its reason for being and has realized in the only fully adequate way the plenitude of its unconditioned freedom, within the limitless “space” of its very Self. For to say man, the last of the species to appear on the earth, is to say capacity for the Absolute and the Infinite, for the Supreme Reality, since it is only in man, of all creatures, that the Subject is able to find a sufficient accommodation for Its full intensity. No mere bodily, three dimensional entity as such can hope to contain the fons et origo of all things, nor do the “dimensional” qualities, whether property (as a recapitulation of the solid), life (as a recapitulation of the plane), or sentience (as a recapitulation of the line) ever more than approach It. Its energy is such that It can be fully manifest only in a mode which is equally infinite and therefore 18 equally without dimension—equally like a point. But this is precisely what Self-consciousness is, what intellection and noesis are: an unbounded instantaneous inwardness, which, like the attributes of life and sentience, is not at all of the human body, but which unlike these lower qualities is not even in it, because not expressed even as it were on its “edge”, as the plane and the line can be seen on the sides and the corners of solids. “Word as He was, so far from being contained by anything, He rather contained all things Himself” (St Athanasius). (19) The act of ontological knowing issues from a central and hidden point so concentrated as to exceed altogether the reach of the body and, hence, the all too limited means of empirical research. Although as this sketch has been intended to show man’s intelligence can be said to evolve through what is beneath it in the order of being, it evolves even so, and can only evolve, from the higher and indeed as the Highest. What is length, breadth, and then depth on the way “down” to the earth becomes triply and inversely displayed on its way “in”, and in a certain sense “up”, as the qualities of physical substance—in property, process, and sentience—the prematerial construction of matter being mirrored in the succession of creatures. And yet none of the dimensions would be what it is, nor would the dimensional qualities be recognized for what they are, if it were not for the point, the sovereign Subject, which is both beginning and end. (20) *** As announced at the outset, the aim of this article has been to provide an account of the world per ascensum which is in full conformity with the view per descensum propounded by metaphysics and theology; and we have therefore been obliged to insist throughout that none “hath ascended up to Heaven, but He that came down from Heaven, even the Son of Man which is in Heaven”—hence that no infrapersonal or evolutionary explanation of the world can have the slightest value unless it acknowledges, and repeatedly stresses, the absolute supremacy of God, our ultimate Source. (21) Nonetheless we have also assumed that the sequence in the terrestrial appearance of certain forms of existence is not without a symbolic message, and that reading that message in the light provided by traditional authorities might help to point certain of our 19 contemporaries, who wish to make so much of the “facts” and who often falsely suppose them to be incompatible with a Divine explanation, back and up to principles. For truths are always consistent with Truth. Whatever the benefits of this reading, and quite apart from the question of whether it might prove as convincing to the theologian as to the metaphysician, it is worth emphasizing once again that the picture presented here is precisely a “picture”—no more than a sketch, a possible darshana. Simply because a certain vocabulary and particular images have been used as maieutic means, no one should imagine that all others have been thereby excluded. We readily admit that this cosmogony does not, cannot, and need not stand opposed to other equally effective “impersonal” visions, provided of course that they are equally subject to the irrefragable truths of pure metaphysics, concerning which there can be no compromise. It is to be understood in any case that the sufficient reason for having a view of the cosmos is not that it might correspond in some more or less mathematical way to the world as it is in itself, which is as far beyond perfect comprehension as it is below perfect being. The aim instead is to provide various keys or supports for intellection, that uncreated power of knowing What is and being What knows by which we are enabled to transcend this world altogether— though then only in seeing, through a prayerful looking along it, that this same world is “already” the kingdom of God. Adveniat regnum tuum, fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra. 20 1. This is a revised version of an article first published by Dialogue and Alliance, Vol. 4, No. 4, Winter 1990-91. Permission to reprint is gratefully acknowledged. 2. We are referring to the authors of the “traditionalist” or “perennialist” school, especially Frithjof Schuon, whose influence will be noticed throughout these observations. For an introduction to Schuon’s work, see our Advice to the Serious Seeker: Meditations on the Teaching of Frithjof Schuon (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1997). 3. This synopsis is meant to reflect a perspective much more thoroughly developed by Schuon in “Dialogue Between Hellenists and Christians”, Light on the Ancient Worlds, trans. Lord Northbourne (Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom Books, 1984); “Creation as a Divine Quality”, Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism (Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom Books, 1986); “Ex Nihilo, In Deo”, The Play of Masks (Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom Books, 1992); and “Theological and Metaphysical Ambiguity of the Word Ex”, The Eye of the Heart: Metaphysics, Cosmology, Spiritual Life (Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom Books, 1997). 4. In presenting these reasons, we have been assisted especially by E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), Ch. 9, Sect. II; Martin Lings, Ancient Beliefs and Modern Superstitions (London: Unwin, 1980), Ch. 1; Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth: The Primordial Tradition (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), Ch. 6; Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred (New York: Crossroad, 1981), Ch. 7; and Titus Burckhardt, “Cosmology and Modern Science”, The Sword of Gnosis: Metaphysics, Cosmology, Tradition, Symbolism, ed. Jacob Needleman (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986). The specific formulations, however, and accordingly all the infelicities, are our own. 5. Of course the theory has been accepted as indisputable fact by a majority of the “educated public”, doubtless to the delight of those like Richard Dawkins (The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986) whose explicit and unabashed intention is to dethrone the Divinity of traditional theism. One hopes that books like Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Bethesda, Maryland: Adler and Adler, 1986), Phillip E. Johnson, 21 Darwin on Trial (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1993), and Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: The Free Press, 1996) will help in exposing the common fallacy that transformism cannot be scientifically challenged. Their detailed examinations of the physical evidence against evolution, drawn among others from the disciplines of paleontology, comparative anatomy, and molecular biology, might be usefully studied as an empirical complement to the strictly metaphysical arguments presented here. 6. “Modern science is right when it describes the succession of geological periods, but not when it tries to describe the origins of life or of intelligence. Modern cosmology cannot be something other than geology, paleontology, and astronomy; and there exists not the least difficulty in combining them either with Semitic creationism or with Indo-Greek emanationism, for the simple reason that facts are always compatible with principles” (Schuon, unpublished letter to the author). 7. The term obviously had a pre-Darwinian history. The earliest English uses recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary are by two of the Cambridge Platonists, Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, whose understanding of the world and its creatures was quite far from transformist. And when Dr Samuel Johnson later wrote that “he whose task is to reap and thresh will not be contented without examining the evolution of the seed”, it is clear he was speaking of how oaks come from acorns, and not men from the “lower primates”. On the other hand, these philological data should not blind us to the fact that the connotation of the term has certainly changed since the eighteenth century, and that its user today must be extremely cautious lest he be thought a Darwinian. 8. No attempt is here made to defend the Platonism and Vedantism implied by these assertions, though the substance of that defense is implicit in our reference above to the sixth of the Darwinian mistakes. An explicit and extended consideration of the primacy of consciousness can be found in our book The Form of Transformed Vision: Coleridge and the Knowledge of God (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1987). 9. “The concept of multiple states permits us to envisage all these states as existing simultaneously in one and the same being, and not as only able to be traversed successively in the course of a ‘descent’ which supposedly passed not only from one being to another, but even from one species to another” (René Guénon, The Multiple 22 States of Being, trans. Joscelyn Godwin [Burdett, New York: Larson Publications, 1984], 73). 10. This locution is borrowed from Coleridge, as is the point as image of the Subject. Suggestions for several additional features of our “sketch” can be found in Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), Ch. 12; and in “Hints Toward the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life”, Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge, ed. Donald A. Stauffer (New York: Random House, 1951). Similar employments of the geometrical point can be found in St Clement of Alexandria, and Guénon makes use of the image throughout his Symbolism of the Cross, trans. Angus MacNab (London: Luzac, 1975). 11. The word “explode” is deliberately used, and it could in fact be repeated below with respect to each of the “stages” and forms of existence envisioned, in order to denote the discontinuity between various levels and the suddenness with which they arise. Martin Lings has pointed out that the teaching of Jalal ad-Din Rumi concerning rebirth “from vegetable to animal and from animal to man”, analogous in certain respects to the sequence we are about to discuss, has sometimes been misinterpreted as an anticipation of Darwinian “evolutionism”, in spite of the fact that in Rumi “there is no gradual development but a series of sudden transformations”, and even though “the mineral, vegetable, animal, and human states are envisaged”—both in Rumi and here— “as already existing and fully developed. The evolution in question is that of a single being, from the lowest to the highest states, from the periphery to the centre” (Lings, The Eleventh Hour: The Spiritual Crisis of the Modern World in the Light of Tradition and Prophecy [Cambridge, England: Quinta Essentia, 1987], 28n). 12. The terms “celestial”, “intermediate”, and “terrestrial” have been used by Huston Smith to designate the degrees of Reality below the “Infinite”, below (that is) what we are calling the Subject and depicting by means of the point. See his Forgotten Truth, Ch. 3. 13. “A minus always presupposes an initial plus, so that a seeming evolution is no more than the quite provisional unfolding of a pre-existing result; the human embryo becomes a man because that is what it already is; no ‘evolution’ will produce a man from an animal embryo. In the same way the whole cosmos can only spring from an embryonic 23 state which contains the virtuality of all its possible deployment and simply makes manifest on the plane of contingencies an infinitely higher and transcendent prototype” (Schuon, Understanding Islam, trans. D. M. Matheson [London: Unwin, 1963], 108-109n). 14. A qualification to this principle is in order, however, since the “metaphysical transparency” (Schuon) of a given creature depends not only upon the plane of being it occupies, but upon its relative “centrality” on that plane—its proximity to the point at which that plane is intersected by the axis mundi—not to mention other imponderables. While plants may in general be “higher” than minerals, because of the organic life that is in them, a precious gem remains a more lucid theophany than a weed. The same qualification must be applied to the relative positions in the great chain of being of plants and animals, and of animals and man. A noble animal, like an eagle or a lion, is “more Divine” than a human being who lives below himself. We do not in any case mean to propose a rigid system. 15. “The insect world, taken at large, appears as an intenser life, that has struggled itself loose and become emancipated from vegetation. . . . We might imagine the life of insects an apotheosis of the petals, stamina, and nectaries round which they flutter, or of the stems and pedicles, to which they adhere" (Coleridge, “Theory of Life”, 594). 16. The variations within certain populations of finches, first noted by Darwin in the Galapagos Islands during his 1831-36 voyages on the H.M.S. Beagle, are well known. As for this particular species of moth, “Kettlewell’s observation of industrial melanism in the peppered moth (Biston betularia) has been cited in countless textbooks and popular treatises as proof that natural selection has the kind of generative power needed to produce new kinds of complex organs and organisms”, even though in this case there was never any change of the kind alleged by transformists (Johnson, Darwin on Trial, 176). 17. “Evolution is the unfolding of a given virtuality and not the passage of a given possibility to a quite different possibility” (Schuon, unpublished letter to the author). “The form of a peripheral being, whether it be animal, vegetable, or mineral, reveals all that the being knows, and is as it were itself identified with this knowledge; it can be said, therefore, that the form of such a being gives a true indication of its contemplative state or dream. . . . Needless to say, the object of knowledge or of intelligence is always and by 24 definition the Divine Principle and cannot be anything else, since It is metaphysically the only Reality; but this object or content can vary in form in conformity with the indefinite diversity of the modes and degrees of Intelligence reflected in creatures” (Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions [Wheaton, Illinois: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1984], 56). 18. Notice the emphasis on the preposition through, not “from”. Man's consciousness of himself, his power of self-reflection, can obviously come only from the Self, on pain of the contradiction referred to earlier in considering the sixth of the Darwinian errors. Failure to attend to this crucial “prepositional” difference can result in a kind of “optical illusion”, which is perhaps at the root of that impossible compromise popularly known as “theistic evolutionism”, whose proponents contend that God somehow manages to create the world by means of the process described by Darwin. It should be clear by now that the metaphysical or emanational “evolution” here envisioned has nothing in common with this absurdity. 19. The saint adds that “man, enclosed on every side by the works of creation and everywhere beholding the unfolded Godhead of the Word, is no longer deceived concern- ing God” (our italics). 20. “When all is said and done, there are only three miracles: existence, life, intelligence; with intelligence, the curve springing from God closes on itself, like a ring which in reality has never been parted from the Infinite" (Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, 42). “As regards manifestation, it may be said that the ‘Self’ develops Its manifold possibilities, indefinite in their multitude, through a multiplicity of modalities of realization, amounting, for the integral being”—represented here by the point—“to so many different states, of which states one alone, limited by the special conditions of existence which define it, constitutes the portion or rather the particular determination of that being which is called human individuality" (René Guénon, Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta, trans. Richard C. Nicholson [New York: The Noonday Press, 1958], 29-30). 21. Though far less has been said of a specifically “personal” nature or in dogmatic terms, and far more along metaphysical lines, the theological bases for an acceptable interpretation of evolution should be deducible from this and other traditional 25 Christian teachings alluded to at various points throughout this article. Further support can be found in the dogma of the early Church regarding the Blessed Virgin as the Theotokos or “Mother of God”, and in the metaphysical insight it affords concerning the substance of materia prima, a substance which is not unconnected (when rightly considered) to that “material matter” through which the “message” sent by God from Himself passes on its way of return. Even as that Man was born of Mary in Whom was “recapitulated the ancient making of Adam” (St Irenaeus)—that is, the eternal emanation of primordial man in divinis—the Virgin being the earthly expression of the “fecundation latent in eternity” (Eckhart): so there proceed out of matter, and by virtue of the “dimensional” elaborations described above, the forms of the minerals, plants, and animals, which were likewise “already” eternally made, and through the material “coagulations” of which the idea of Man is enabled to move in its “progress” towards full disclosure on earth. As St Anselm writes, “The Holy Ghost and ‘the power of the Most High’ wonderfully begat a Man from a Virgin Mother. Thus with respect to the others it lay in Adam, that is, in his power, that they should have being from him, but with respect to this Man it did not lie in Adam that He should exist in any way, any more than it lay in the slime that the first man, who was made from it, should come from it in a wonderful way, or in the man, that Eve should be of him, as in fact she was made. But it did not lie in any of them, in whom He was from Adam to Mary, that He should exist. Nonetheless, He was in them, because that from which He was to be taken was in them, just as that from which the first man was made was in the slime, and that from which Eve was made in him. He was in them, however, not by the creature's will or strength, but by the Divine Power alone.”
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- [The Archetypes of Devotional Homage](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/lings-archetypes) - Martin Lings To grasp the symbolism of the reciprocity we are considering, it is essential to understand that all devotional homage, all hero-worship worthy of the name, proceeds subjectively from the perfection which exists in every soul, even though, in the majority, it has been buried under the rubble of a fallen second nature. Click
- [The Phoenix and the Turtle](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/phoenix-and-the-turtle) - William Shakespeare Listen to the poem, read by Edith Evans and Donald Wolfitt: Click here to download – 4:47 (4.6MB) > Click here to read the poem and delve into its meanings with our brief dossier. >> or click here for a tablet/Kindle PDF of the same dossier. And do make use of our Selected
- [Jewish–Muslim Mystical Encounters in the Middle Ages](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/jewish-muslim-mystical-encounters) - With Particular Attention to al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) by Sara Sviri It is the religious act in itself, in its concrete actuality and physicality, which reflects and embodies God’s creative powers. By carefully performing the commandments, the worshipper, in a mysterious way, participates in God’s work and its influence in the cosmos. Moreover, man can even
- [Teresa of Jesus and Islam: The Simile of the Seven Concentric Castles of the Soul](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/teresa-of-jesus-and-islam) - Luce López-Baralt God placed for every son of Adam seven castles, inside of which is Himself and outside of which is Satan barking like a dog. When man allows a breach to be opened in one of them, Satan enters through it. It is to be advised, then, that he guard and keep watch over
- [Sacred Music and Hindu Religious Experience](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/beck-sacred-music) - From Ancient Roots to the Modern Classical Tradition by Guy L. Beck The chanting of OM is almost always tonal, unless muttered in near-silence. That is, OM is normally executed in a kind of monotone on the tonic note of a scale. This method is still the foundation of Hindu worship and the basis for
- [When the Rose Blooms](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/when-the-rose-blooms) - by M. Ali Lakhani, 2021. ISBN 978-1-908092-22-9 A voice from the edge of silence is heard throughout this book; it is at turns metaphysical, mystical, moral, practical, wounded, healed, searching and even humorous. This voice is that of the spiritual seeker's heart and mind laid bare and the nearly whispered words are like small whirlpools
- [Infinite Life Sutra](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/infinite-life-sutra) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9TUjO7gZD4
- [Kumulipo: Hawaiian Creation Chant](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/kumulipo-hawaiian-creation-chant) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection The Kumulipo chant is the cosmogonic poem of the Hawaiian religion, relating the origin of the cosmos to the origin of the human race and the royal lineage of the Hawaiian archipelago. We present here a recording of the opening lines. Kumulipo / “Beginning-in-deep-darkness” Click here to
- [Sufi Shaykhs and Disciples](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/dabbagh-shaykh-disciple) - An excerpt from Pure Gold: the Words of Shaykh Abd al-Aziz al-Dabbagh, edited by John O’Kane and Bernd Radtke. “On the office of the spiritual master (shaykh) and being a disciple (irada).” The purpose of training is to purify the body (al-dhat) and cleanse it of its vanities so it becomes capable of carrying the
- [Akathist Hymn to the Mother of God (Audio)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/akathist-hymn-audio) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection An akathist (Greek, akathistos) is a hymn dedicated to a saint, holy event, or one of the persons of the Holy Trinity. The word akathist itself means "not sitting," after the standing stance of the faithful as they listen. The akathist par excellence is that written in
- [Akathistos Hymn: “Salutations to the Virgin Mary”](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/akathistos-hymn-salutations-to-the-virgin-mary) - This is an English translation of the most famous and liturgically important hymn of the Orthodox church, not only a timeless Chritian prayer, but also a perennial source of theological doctrine and artistic inspiration. Reproduced here with thanks to the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. Recordings of this hymn are available from our Sacred Audio
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- [The Flower Garland: Avatamsaka Sutra](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/avatamsaka-sutra-flower) - This colosal sutra, dating approximately from the 1st or 2nd century AD, has been described as “the richest and most grandiose of all Buddhist scriptures, held in high esteem by all schools of Buddhism that are concerned with universal liberation.” We present the introduction and Book 26 from Thomas Cleary’s translation, which runs to more
- [Ethiopian Dabtara: The Musician and Transmission of Religious Tradition](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/ethiopian-dabtara-the-musician-and-transmission-of-religious-tradition) - Kay Kaufman Shelemay Among the Beta Israel and in the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Churches, a debtera (or dabtara) is an itinerant religious figure who sings and dances for the congregation, and who performs exorcisms and medicinal magic. The world and praxis of musicians often extend beyond musical performance into other realms, transcending narrowly
- [A Mountain of Saints and Sages](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/brown-mountain-of-saints) - Tristan G. Brown “I, the Emperor, have evaluated the ancient and present classics of the Han and the Muslims: both from the onset aim to propagate the Way.” Click here to view the PDF. The teacher (Khoja ‘Abd Allah) studied deeply the transformations of the taiji and the profundities and subtleties of the adjoined “two”
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- [The Seven Liberal Arts and the West Door of Chartres Cathedral](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/seven-liberal-arts-and-chartres) - Titus Burckhardt In medieval science, it is less a question of knowing many things, than of having a “whole” view of existence. Its method was anything but designed for the investigation of the material world and the furthering of technology. On the contrary: it possessed the means to open the spiritual eye to the beauty
- [Who is Man? The Perennial Answer of Islam](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/nasr-who-is-man) - Seyyed Hossein Nasr Who is this man to whom the world is said to belong, the world or the “earth” which he has conquered yet is on the verge of destroying at the very moment when his conquest seems most complete. Click here to view the PDF, or click here to view the original page.
- [The O Antiphons](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-o-antiphons) - Follow the links below to listen to recordings. What are the “O Antiphons”? The “O Antiphons” refer to the seven antiphons that are recited (or chanted) preceding the Magnificat during Vespers of the Liturgy of the Hours. They cover the special period of Advent preparation known as the Octave before Christmas, Dec. 17-23, with Dec.
- [The Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/thirty-seven) - A Commentary on The Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva by Ngulchu Thogme. Now that we have a vessel of leisure and resources, so difficult to find, So that we may bring ourselves and others across the ocean of samsara, Without a break during day or night To listen, reflect, and meditate is the practice of
- [Spirit Doctors](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/spirit-doctors) - Marie Burke A short documentary on the spiritual world of traditional Indigenous medicine of the Cree nation in Canada. “What we do, we do every day, and it is natural for us… The medicine people are born with it, because that’s what was given to us from the beginning of time…” One of the things
- [Mother of All Creatures: Alchemical Views on Matter](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/mother-of-all-creatures) - Michela Pereira Una materia (according to the widely adopted motto: una materia, unum vas, unus lapis) becomes the synthetic statement, found in innumerous texts, that the alchemical opus can begin from any kind of stuff – not only metals and minerals, but also several different organic substances. Click here to view the PDF. Republished here
- [Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/orpheus-and-the-roots-of-platonism) - ORPHEUS AND THE ROOTS OF PLATONISM Algis UŽdavinys THE MATHESON TRUST For the Study of Comparative Religion © The Matheson Trust, 2011 The Matheson Trust PO Box 336 56 Gloucester Road London SW7 4UB, UK www.themathesontrust.org ISBN: 978 1 908092 07 6 paper All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Cover: Detail from a Graeco-Roman vase, 2nd-3rd century CE. CONTENTS Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix I. A Model of Unitive Madness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 II. Socratic Madness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 III. Socrates as Seer and Saviour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 IV. Philosophy, Prophecy, Priesthood. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17 V. Scribal Prophethood. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19 VI. Eastern and Greek Prophethood. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21 VII. Inside the Cultic Madness of the Prophets . . . . . . . .25 VIII.EgyptianPriesthood ........................32 IX. Orpheus as Prophet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . X. Orpheus and the Pythagorean Tradition XI. Orpheus and Apollo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XII. The Orphic Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . XIII. Knowledge into Death. . . . . . . . . . . . XIV. Telestic Restoration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XV. The Lyre of Orpheus. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XVI. The Cosmic Unfolding of the One . . . . . . . . . . . . . .37 ...........41 . . . . . . . . . . .44 . . . . . . . . . . .47 . . . . . . . . . . .52 . . . . . . . . . . .58 . . . . . . . . . . .61 . . . . . . . . . . .64 Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism XVII. Recollection and Cyclic Regression . . . . . . . . . . . 68 XVIII. Orphic and Platonic Forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 XIX. The Method of Philosophical Catharsis . . . . . . . . . 76 XX. Deification of the Egyptian Initiate-Philosopher. . . 79 XXI. From Homer to Hermetic Secrecy ............. 84 XXII. Into the Mysteries. . . . . . . . . . . . ............. 89 XXIII. Beyond the Tomb . . . . . . . . . . . ............. 93 XXIV. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ............ 97 viii PREFACE The present book is closely related to that famous Pre-Socratic fragment about the bow and the lyre, where their “back- stretched” or “retroflex” harmony (palintonos harmonia) is said to depict the tense inner cohesion of a diverging unity. The same authority, Heraclitus of Ephesus, employs a Greek pun to show how in the bow itself, one of whose names is bios, both the name of life and the act of death coexist. Orpheus, as a mythical hero?indeed, one of the famed Argonauts?stands right at the centre of these junctions. So it is no wonder that this book shares in that harmonious tension: a tension rooted in the nature of the lyre and the bow, whose products may be piercing sounds or slaying arrows. Here, we have first a tension within the author, who is in- toxicated with his theme and yet committed to carry out his exposition in a discursive and academic manner. We can al- most feel his plight: having in mind the “tremendous contem- plation of the divine truth and beauty”, which would merit either a bakchic outburst or a “supra-noetic metaphysical si- lence”, he is forcing himself to compose a “scientific” treatise. Having heard the music of Orpheus’ lyre, he is trying to con- vey as best as he can the unspeakable beauty of those notes in an all too earthly human language. Second, as a direct consequence of the first, there is ten- sion for the reader as he tries to follow the argument itself: strands of myth and mythic lore mix with dense epistemo- logical and metaphysical discussion; abstruse Egyptian and Babylonian sources stand next to conventional Greek philo- sophical and 21st century academic references. The thing is ix Preface said, yet not fully; inadequately expressed with an almost deliberate disdain for exactitude on a plane which becomes redundant in the light of spiritual vision. This book moves uneasily between the apophatic and the cataphatic: trying to say something, saying something, hinting at something else, then finally keeping silent, finding itself lost for words, leav- ing the doors thrown open to a different understanding. Then we find a third sort of tension, springing from the duality at the heart of the subject: Orpheus is a strange hero, one who has music and singing for weapons. He is a seer and tragic lover, yet a crucial figure in the history of philosophy. His place in the history of Greek religion and thought is still, even in specialised circles, something of a riddle, enigmatic and vague. This book, densely packed with references, challenges, and subtle invitations, is a recapitulation or a critical reas- sessment of ancient and contemporary literature devoted to Orpheus, the “paradigmatic itinerant seer”, “the Theologian”, “the Saviour”. It gives special attention to his relations with both the Egyptian and the Platonic tradition. At the heart of this book we have a glimpse into the substance, nature and development of the Orphic mysteries, but the reader must be warned: this is not a history of Orphism, and this is no ordinary scholarly monograph. Those who approach this book with respect for the ancient mysteries, humbly trying to understand why our ancestors across cultures unfailingly gave to Plato the epithet of “Divine” (Divus Plato, or Aflatun al-Ilahi, as the Arabs used to call him), hoping for that “epis- temic and hermeneutical illumination mediated by the holy light of myths and symbols,” such will find a treasure here: not a wealth of answers to be sure, but a wealth of mystagogic insights and intimations, sparks perhaps of that “fiery beauty of truth” contemplated by the author. The brief earthly transit of Algis Uždavinys started in Lith- uania in 1962. He completed his studies in Vilnius, gradu- ating from the former State Art Institute of Lithuania, now Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts, where he would eventually x Algis UŽdavinys become head of the Department of Humanities. Uždavinys was widely respected as a prolific author in Lithuania and abroad. He was renowned as a translator into Russian and Lithuanian of Ancient Egyptian and Greek texts, of Tradi- tionalist works by Frithjof Schuon and Martin Lings, and he was active as well as an art critic and author of numerous articles and monographs (a list of his books can be found at the end of this volume). His interest in traditional doc- trines would eventually take him around the world and to Jordan and Egypt, where he met living representatives of the Prophetic chain of wisdom embodied in the Qur’an and the Sunna. These would foster and orient his research projects until his untimely death in 2010. Not long before his passing and after he had completed this, his final book, he told his wife: “I have nothing else to say.” As someone who devoted his life to the understanding and cultivation of the Divine, Al- gis Uždavinys must surely be taken as evidence of the ancient Greek saying “whom the Gods love, die young.” Like the Homeric epics, the current work is formed by twenty-four untitled chapters. Given the character of the book, less informative than mystagogic, and less systematic than symphonic, we have preferred to leave the brief chapters as they are, adding titles for ease of reference only in the table of contents. Five major sections may be discerned in the book: chapters I-III deal with inspired madness in general, and with Socratic mania in particular; IV-VIII with the relations between phi- losophy, prophecy and priesthood, considering Middle East- ern, Egyptian and Greek traditions in general; chapters IX- XII narrow the scope to the figure of Orpheus as a prophet, considering his place in the Pythagorean tradition and in the development of Greek philosophy; chapters XIII-XVII touch on some of the deepest aspects of Orphic symbolism, consid- ering the Orphic bakcheia (initiatic rites) and way of life (the bios Orphikos); chapters XVIII-XXII relate all the above to the history of Greek wisdom-philosophy, from Homer down to Hermeticism with special attention to Plato’s theories and xi Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism their Egyptian associations. The book concludes with a chap- ter on the realities beyond the tomb (XXIII), followed by a surrender of all arguments and a moving self-disclosure (XXIV). Silence reigns pregnant with mystical resonance. Juan Acevedo Director The Matheson Trust xii ORPHEUS AND THE ROOTS OF PLATONISM Melancholy and the awakening of one’s genius are inseparable, say the texts. Yet for most of us there is much sadness and little genius, little consolation of philosophy, only the melancholic stare—what to do, what to do. . . . Here our melancholy is trying to make knowl- edge, trying to see through. But the truth is that the melancholy is the knowledge; the poison is the antidote. This would be the senex’s most destructive insight: our senex order rests on senex madness. Our or- der is itself a madness.1 *** To this we may add the conclusion. It seems that, whether there is or is not a one, both that one and the others alike are and are not, and appear and do not appear to be, all manner of things in all manner of ways, with respect to themselves and to one another.2 I In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates argues paradoxically that “our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness” (ta megista ton agathon hemin gignetai dia manias: Phaedr. 244a). The four 1. The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire, introduced and edited by Thomas Moore (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 212 & 215. 2. Plato, Parmenides 166b. tr. F. M. Cornford, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 956. 1 Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism kinds of divine inspiration, or madness, are viewed as a divine gift provided by the Muses, Dionysus, Apollo and Aphrodite (or Eros) respectively. In the same dialogue, the “divine ban- quet” is depicted as a metaphysical place of contemplation and vision. For Plato, the contemplation (theoria) of the eter- nal Ideas transcends our rational ability to comprehend and analyse these Ideas discursively. The desperate longing for this paradigmatic contempla- tion is imagined as a yearning for wings and the regained ability to fly to the divine banquet. Accordingly, this pressing desire is the desire for wholeness, for noetic integrity, and for one’s true divine identity provided by dialectical searching, philosophical recollection and erotic madness. The hierar- chically organized troops of gods are led by Zeus. They lack both jealousy and passion, being involved neither in plots, nor in heavenly wars: The gods have no need for madness, let alone erotic madness; hence the gods are not philosophers. It is not surprising, then, that the gods seem to have no need for logos (let alone for rhetoric). Although there is a certain amount of noise in the heavens, there is no reference whatsoever to there being any discourse among the gods or between gods and men.3 Therefore the Platonic philosopher, as the madman who nurtures wings, is the dialectically transformed “speaker” (the fallen soul encharmed by the magic of logos) whose ap- parently mad desire and erotike mania are not so much direct- ly sent from the gods as sparkling from within as a desire for the divine banquet and for wisdom. But the three other kinds of madness discussed in Plato’s Phaedrus, namely, poetic (poi- etike mania) telestic (telestike mania), and prophetic or mantic madness (mantike mania) indeed are sent by the gods. 3. Charles L. Griswold, Self-Knowledge in Plato’s Phaedrus (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 97. 2 Algis UŽdavinys The Muses are specified as the source of the poetic inspi- ration and of the three forms of madness; “the poetic sort seems to be the closest to Socratic-Platonic philosophizing and hence to be its most complex antagonist,” as Charles Griswold remarks.4 The telestic madness is anagogic, and leads the soul to its forgotten origins through the theurgic rites of ascent or other sacramental means of purification. The inspired telestic lit- urgies (telestike, hieratike telesiourgia, theophoria) are not nec- essarily to be regarded straightforwardly as “operations on the gods”, thus deliberately and incorrectly equating the ani- mated cultic statues located in the context of particular ritual communications with the invisible metaphysical principles themselves. Otherwise, tacitly or not, the polemical prem- ises for a certain iconoclastic bias are maintained. And so H.J. Blumenthal puts too much weight on the verb theour- gein, supposing that one who does theia erga is one who oper- ates on the gods, thereby making theurgy a nonsense.5 The mantic inspiration, or prophetic madness, which alleg- edly produces countless benefits, is evoked and evidenced, first of all, by the prophetesses at Delphi, thus recalling the close connection between the Apollonian shrine at Delphi and the philosophical self-knowledge required by Plato’s Socrates. According to Griswold, “Socratic prophecy seems to combine the human techne of division or dissection with the divinely given techne of madness; that is, it somewhat combines . . . madness and sophrosyne.”6 The Apollonian prophecy is inseparable from philosophiz- ing and, hence, from rhetoric in its expanded general sense, showing and leading souls by persuasion or imperative—like a sacrificial priest, using the dialectical art of definition, divi- 4. Ibid., p. 77. 5. H.J. Blumenthal, “From ku-ru-so-wo-ko to theougos: word to ritual,” in Soul and Intellect: Studies in Plotinus and Later Platonism (Aldershot: Ashgate, Variorum, 1993), XI, p. 6. 6. Charles L. Griswold, ibid., p. 76. 3 Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism sion and collection. Yet neither is the sacrificer to be viewed as a paradigm of theological understanding, nor the user of the art of rhetoric made subject to his own enchanting pow- er of persuasion. However, they may become types of self- duped “believers” or acquire the ideologically tinctured, and therefore very “orthodox”, ability to talk about “truth”—or virtually any subject—and so become “difficult to be with”. As Griswold correctly observes, Plato’s Socrates seems to fear the canonization of a biblos. That is, the written word lets us persuade ourselves too easily that we are in irrefu- table possession of the truth, while in fact we are not. It fa- cilitates our tendency to become dogmatists or zealots rather than philosophers. . . . Under these conditions philosophy can have the same corrupting influence that sophistry does or worse.7 However, academic paranoia differs from prophetic mad- ness. The so-called prophets (theomanteis, manteis theoi, or Ar- istotle’s sibullai kai bakides kai hoi entheoi pantos: Probl. 954a.36) fall into enthusiasmos, the state of a particular “inspired ec- stasy”, and utter truths of which they themselves presumably know nothing. Hence, being entheos means that the body has a god or a daimon within, just as the Egyptian animated statue has a manifestation (ba) of a god (neter) within. Simi- larly, empsuchos means that both the physical human body and the cultic body (the hieratic statue or the entire sanc- tuary, itself full of images, statues and hieroglyphs) have an animating, life-giving and self-moving principle—namely, a soul (psuche)—inside them. Orpheus is an example of one who has all these four kinds of inspiration or madness according to Hermeias the Alexan- drian Neoplatonist, whose commentary on Plato’s Phaedrus reflects the views of his master Syrianus.8 Since these four ma- 7. Ibid., pp. 207 & 208. 8. Anne Sheppard, The Influence of Hermeias on Marsilio Ficino’s Doctrine 4 Algis UŽdavinys niai assist the soul in its ascent and return to its noetic father- land, Hermeias maintains that poetry and music are able to bring the disordered parts of the soul into order. The hieratic rites and sacramental mysteries of Dionysus make the soul whole and noetically active. Subsequently, the prophetic in- spiration (mantike mania) is provided by Apollo and gathers the soul together into its own unity. Hermeias regards the charioteer in the Phaedrus myth as the noetic part of the soul and the charioteer’s head as the “one within the soul”, or the soul’s ineffable henadic summit which alone may be united with the One. Thus, finally, as Anne Sheppard explains, “the inspiration of love takes the unified soul and joins the one within the soul to the gods and to intelligible beauty.”9 II Perhaps with a certain measure of irony, Socrates was viewed by the majority of Athenians as a chatterer, an idle talker (alolesches). But this alleged idle talker obeyed and followed his god Apollo. He philosophized in the streets on the god’s behalf, and preached a kind of “spiritual pederasty” that leads the lovers (eirastes) of youths to the ideocentric love of Platonic truth and beauty. In this respect, Socrates is neither a “typical representative of the Greek Enlightenment”, nor the “intellectual leader of Athenian intellectuals”, as influen- tial Western scholars would claim until recently, “. . . nor did he discourse, like most others, about the nature of the uni- verse, investigating what the experts call ‘cosmos’. . . . Those who did so he showed up as idiots,” according to Xenophon (Mem. 1.1.11). of Inspiration, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 43, 1980, p. 105. 9. Ibid., p. 106. 5 Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism Initially acting as a typical idle talker, Socrates realizes himself as a moralist. Strictly speaking, the man who is per- suaded by nothing in him except the proposition which ap- pears to him the best when he reasons about it (Crit. 46b) is no metaphysician either, though Apollo commanded him (as he “supposed and assumed”) to live philosophizing, examin- ing himself and others (Ap. 28e). Socrates saw his own work in “philosophizing”, that is, in summoning all citizens (but especially wealthy youths of aristocratic origins) to perfect their soul, as a sort of socio-political mission following the god’s command and acting on the god’s behalf. Therefore, his performance of thus understood “dialectical” work (er- gon) can be imagined as a form of piety in service (latreia) to the god. Gregory Vlastos argues: Were it not for that divine command that first reached Socrates through the report Chaerepon brought back from Delphi there is no reason to believe that he would have ever become a street philosopher. If what Socrates wants is part- ners in elenctic argument, why should he not keep to those in whose company he had sought and found his eudaimon- ist theory—congenial and accomplished fellow seekers after moral truth? Why should he take to the streets, forcing him- self on people who have neither taste nor talent for philoso- phy, trying to talk them into submitting to a therapy they do not think they need?10 There is no explanation other than a supposed divine com- mand (be it just literary topos or some inner experience) or Socrates’ own wild presumption, keeping in mind that Socrates was no mystic in any conventional religious sense, but rather a zealous social worker and rationalizing moralist serving his god for the benefit of his fellow Athenians. This 10. Gregory Vlastos, Socratic Piety, ed. Gail Fine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 558-59. 6 Algis UŽdavinys “madman’s theatre” is nevertheless regarded as a revolution- ary project: “ And it is of the essence of his rationalist programme in the- ology to assume that the entailment of virtue by wisdom binds gods no less than men. He could not have tolerated a double-standard morality, one for men, another for the gods. . . . Fully supernatural though they are, Socrates’ gods could still strike his pious contemporaries as rationalist fab- rications. . . . 11 Socrates undoubtedly regarded his own “rationalism” and his leap from epistemological ignorance to public political and moral expertise as devised by the daimonion, the super- natural guide. His own front door was adorned, as A.H. Arm- strong relates, by “an unshaped stone called Apollo of the Ways and another stone called a Herm with a head at the top and a phallus halfway down, which Socrates would tend at the proper time like every other Athenian householder”.12 In this respect he was quite traditional, although his pre- sumably esoteric side (if this curious aspect of Socrates is not invented by Plato’s dramatic imagination) is close to the madness of Orpheus, the divinely inspired mythical singer. In the context of traditional Hellenic culture, Orphism and Pythagoreanism may be viewed as a “small sectarian move- ment”. Alternatively, Orphism may be presented as a new spiritual programme of radically revised anthropology and of both cosmic and personal soteriology, partly derived from Egyptian and Anatolian sources. In either case, the Orphic doctrines sharply differ from those of early Hellenic (the so- called Homeric and pre-Homeric) spirituality. 11. Ibid., pp. 545 & 547. 12. A.H. Armstrong, “The Ancient and Continuing Pieties of the Greek World,” in Classical Mediterranean Spirituality: Egyptian, Greek, Roman, ed. A.H. Armstrong (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), p. 68. 7 Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism The main Orphic doctrine follows the pattern already es- tablished in the Pyramid Texts, asserting that the royal soul has its goal in unity with the divine through ascent and recollec- tion. With considerable modifications, this anagogic scenario became an integral part of Platonism, whose adherents prac- tised rising up to the heights of philosophical contemplation through the anagogic power of eros, and were able to reach the noetic Sun by a combination of dialectical and telestic means. In short, Orphism maintained that the human soul is immortal and is subject to divine judgement: The divine in us is an actual being, a daimon or spirit, which has fallen as a result of some primeval sin and is entrapped in a series of earthly bodies, which may be animal and plant as well as human. It can escape from the “sorrowful weary wheel”, the cycle of reincarnation, by following the Orphic way of life, which involved, besides rituals and incantations, an absolute prohibition of eating flesh. . . . 13 The somewhat clumsy Socrates hardly fits the much de- manding Orphic ideals, although he nevertheless functions in Plato’s Symposium as an Orpheus figure, being presented as a literary double of Phanes. The self-manifested Phanes of the Orphic cosmogonies should be described as Protogonos (the first-born, tantamount to the noetic light which appears from the egg of ineffable darkness), whose other name is the demiurgic Eros.14 He carries within himself the seed of the gods and copulates with himself like the Egyptian Atum. Sara Rappe emphasizes “the centrality of Orphic symbol- ism in the Symposium as a whole”, arguing that there is good reason to attribute the allegorizing use of Orphic material to 13. Ibid., p. 99. 14. Sara Rappe, Reading Neoplatonism: Non-discursive thinking in the texts of Plotinus, Proclus, and Damascius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 150. 8 Algis UŽdavinys Plato himself, and not only to Syrianus, Proclus, Damascius or Olympiodorus. She says: The Orphic mystery purports to be an esoteric tradition, one that liberates people from the petrifying conventions of the mass sex-gender machine. Its purpose is to re-create the sub- ject, to wrench him away from the public fiction in which he has hitherto been schooled. . . . The Orphic myth promises a return to the undifferentiated state before sexual identity arises, promising to deliver us back inside the egg to become in the Lacanian sense, hommelettes. But of course, this is a delusional aspiration, as the myth makes clear, and it is in fact a self-destructive delusion. . . . In my reading of the Or- phic cosmology in Plato’s Symposium, I have emphasized its function as an etiology for human consciousness, prior to its regeneration by philosophy. This is the exoteric mind that desperately requires enlightenment but because of its condi- tioning, all too rarely seeks it.15 III The alleged correspondences between Socrates and Orpheus, or rather, between Plato and Orpheus, are explored by Pro- clus, to whom an esoteric interpretation of Plato’s dialogues is tantamount to the initiatory Orphic doctrine. Accordingly, the Orphic Phanes (like the Egyptian Atum-Ra) shows forth the soul as an image (eikon) of the shining divine Intellect. The recognition of the pharaonic imago dei (tut neter in the Egyptian royal theology) and of its restored Osirian whole- ness (the right Eye of Horus made sound) itself constitutes a sort of initiation that enables the soul’s access to the divine realm. Rappe claims that since the time of Syrianus, either Or- phism is attached to metaphysics in order to transform the 15. Ibid., pp. 152 & 155. 9 Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism Neoplatonic doctrine into ritual, or the language of meta- physics is grafted on to a traditional Orphic narrative.16 How- ever, such theurgic convergency is initially based on Egyptian hermeneutical and cultic patterns. She argues as follows: The “Rhapsodic Theogony” ends with a famous hymn to Zeus, in which his identity as the coincidentia oppositorum is revealed. . . . This vision of the world of Zeus gives us a kind of mirror of the Proclan universe, in which each being is an all, and all beings are in each. . . . The multiple states of being, each level mutually reflecting all of the others, proliferate as a hall of mirrors. It is this great world of mutual interpenetra- tion endlessly expanding as a single drama, that the Orphic theogony captures. And not surprisingly, this vision is ex- actly the mythic equivalent of Proclus’ central metaphysical views.17 Proclus’ assertion that all Hellenic theology ultimately derives from Orphic mystagogy (Plat. Theol. I.5.25)18 may be regarded as a normative and paradigmatic claim of his philo- sophical hermeneutics. Thus, Orpheus constitutes the arche- typal mark of his metaphysical topography. In this particular sense, the name and image of Orpheus function more like the theological arche, like the canonized philosophical hupostasis, than as an unquestioned and factual person of ancient his- tory. This imaginative assertion of Proclus, though belong- ing to the realm of semi-mythic genealogies, is shared by the countless followers of the ancient Hellenic tradition and con- stitutes one of its main etiological kernels. Consequently, it is this image of the esoteric Orpheus that counts, not one pro- vided by the modern academic interpretations that present 16. Ibid., p. 164. 17. Ibid., p. 160. 18. Algis UŽdavinys, Introduction, The Golden Chain: An Anthology of Pythagorean and Platonic Philosophy, ed. Algis Uzdavinys (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2004), pp. XXIV-XXV. 10 Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism still belongs to the realm of the ineffable supra-noetic tran- scendence, but the goddess Neith (equated by the Platonists to Athena, the mistress of philosophy) calls the world of man- ifestation (kheperu) into being “through seven statements, which in a later magic text become the sevenfold laugh of the creator god”.170 Mankind originated from Atum-Ra’s tears, “in a temporary blurring” of Atum’s vision, though the period of the golden age is still regarded as the solar kingdom of Ra, where gods and humans inhabit the stage of the extended sacred mound of Heliopolis together. During this blessed time (paaut)—be- fore the human revolt against Ra—the divine maat (truth, perfect harmonious order) reigns. XVII In Platonic parlance, the main “initiatory” and “philosophi- cal” goal of fallen humanity consists in the recollection of an ideal beginning and in solar contemplation of the enneadic totality of the Ideas. In order to do so, and achieve the de- sired goal, writing is established by Thoth and Sesheta as the instrument of revelation which provides access to the world of the gods; this is simply because it is, at the same time, the instrument of theophany and creation. In fact, the hiero- glyphs (medu neter) are viewed as traces of noetic being, as archetypes and metaphysical symbols, even epiphanies of the gods themselves. They constitute the revealed body of divine knowledge necessary for salvation.171 After Ra’s departure and the subsequent end of the direct divine rule, the distorted human race lives in a state of pun- ishment and blindness. Hornung describes this as follows: 170. Erik Hornung, Idea into Image, p. 44. 171. Dimitri Meeks and Christine Favard-Meeks, Daily Life of the Egyptian Gods, tr. G. M. Goshgarian (London: John Murray, 1997), pp. 5-7. 68 Algis UŽdavinys Henceforth war and violence shape the lives of human be- ings. Having lost the paradisiacal innocence of their begin- nings, they can regain access to the world of the gods only in death. Moreover, their rebellion suggests a dangerous threat to the continued existence of creation itself, insofar as it hints at the existence of destructive forces that seek to bring the normal course of events on earth to a halt.172 The memory of the divine presence is maintained by means of the Horus-like pharaoh whose rites enacted in the temple recall the initial foundation of the world as “revelation of the divine Face”. The ritual act of unveiling and adoration of the Face establishes the royal paradigm of pious contemplation. The Egyptians, in order to become a “holy people” once again, needed to walk “on the water of God”, that is, follow the path of the deity (be it Atum-Ra, Amun-Ra, Ptah, Khnum or Sobek), proclaiming God’s power even to the fish and the birds. This manifestation of divine power is to be regarded as a kind of revelation, as a miracle to be proclaimed, according to Assmann, so that the whole universe is told of the power of God.173 This all-encompassing proclamation of social maat prac- tice, recollection and revelation, means that the ideal person is one who “is able to remember”.174 Accordingly, the ritual of the judgement of the dead assumes a kind of manual for the life-style and education of the living. The Egyptian initiate hopes “to go forth” and “to see Ra”, ritually maintaining the metaphysical memory that conveys the pattern of alchemical transformation as well as rational calculability, responsibility and accountability. In this context the “initiate” simply means the official member of the pharaonic state who is able 172. Erik Hornung, Idea into Image, p. 48. 173. Jan Assmann, “Confession in Ancient Egypt,” in Transformations of the Inner Self in Ancient Religions, ed. Jan Assmann and Guy G. Stroumsa (Leiden: Brill, 1999), p. 236. 174. Ibid., p. 240. to manage and present himself as a substitute (albeit inward- ly and mystically) for the king—either ideally patterned as Horus’ image, or as the “mummified” and reanimated Osiris image. Finally, through the restored akh-identity, he hopes to be like a living god and stand in the sun barque. Although the standard New Kingdom Egyptian is a po- litically responsible devotee of Amun and does not feel like a gnostic stranger in this world, death (mut) and initiation through the Osirian suffering and rebirth seems to be his only gateway to the noetic realm of Ra. Assmann argues that the gods are to be confronted “only by priests, indirectly in a statue ritual or directly after death”,175 when the Egyptian in the form of his ba appeals to the court of Osiris for justice: He does not accuse the gods for his misfortune, nor does he perceive his sufferings as unjust punishments for crimes he did not commit. He knows that the gods do not interfere in human affairs, and that a human being is exposed to all kinds of misfortunes that have nothing to do with the gods and have no religious significance whatsoever. They just occur. The only way to address the gods and to enter into forms of belonging and connectivity that bind him to the gods is to die and to present himself to the judgement of the dead.176 Proclus provides the following account, which presents an analogous but different story of royal succession and cyclic regression, based on the myth of the Titanic act of violence. Here the dismemberment of Dionysus (that partly follows the Osirian pattern) represents the proceeding of the One into the Many. Proclus says: 175. Jan Assmann, “A Dialogue Between Self and Soul: Papyrus Berlin 3024,” in Self, Soul and Body in Religious Experience, ed. Albert I. Baumgarten with Jan Assmann and Guy G. Stroumsa (Leiden: Brill, 1998), p. 388. 176. Ibid., pp. 400-01. 70 Algis UŽdavinys Orpheus the theologian had handed down three races of man: first the golden, which he says Phanes governed; second the silver, which he says the mighty Kronos ruled; third the Titanic, which he says Zeus assembled from the Titanic limbs; thinking that in these three categories every form of human life was included (In Remp. II.74-75; Orph.frag. 140).177 Yet another version is presented in the so-called Rhapsodic Theogony (the Hieroi Logoi in 24 Rhapsodies). In a related prayer to Apollo-Helios (at the beginning of the Orphic Rhapsodies) this poem is described as the twelfth revelation of Orpheus.178 According to this Orphic theogony, current among the late Neoplatonists (especially Proclus, Damascius and Olympi- odorus), there were six successive divine kingdoms ruled by Phanes, Night, Uranos, Kronos, Zeus and Dionysus respec- tively. Phanes reigns before Night in this account, and his reign (understood both metaphysically and as a pedagogical myth of perfect politeia) is somewhat analogous to the reign of Ra. Dionysus corresponds to Osiris, who comes back to life at the level of anima mundi—not only as the ruler of Duat (the Netherworld, tantamount to his own, or Nut-Hathor’s, body-temple), but also as a model for the deceased, that is, for the “initiate” and “philosopher”. The main difference between the Egyptian and the Hel- lenic models is that the attainment of life (ankh) in the noetic Heliopolis depends not only upon knowledge and piety, but (first of all) upon service to the Egyptian holy state and to the pharaoh, the son of Ra, suckled by the goddess Hathor.179 In the form of the ka-statue, located within the special man- sions (wrongly designated as “mortuary temples” by mod- ern scholars), he is expected to spend “millions of years” in 177. Velvet Yates, The Titanic Origin of Humans: The Melian Nymphs and Zagreus, p. 194. 178. M.L. West, The Orphic Poems, p. 227. 179. Dietrich Wildung, Egyptian Saints: Deification in Pharaonic Egypt (New York: New York University Press, 1977), p. 20. 71 Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism mystic union with the deity.180 His mummy (the symbolic im- age of Osiris) is the exemplary receiver of life (shesep rankh), of the reviving solar rays, thus becoming “his hieroglyphic spell generating his immortality”,181 and showing the theurgic way to his “initiates”—the bureaucratic and priestly staff. In this respect, he is the death-conquering immortal Horus, the golden Falcon. As Alan Segal remarks: “Eventually, ordinary Egyptians understood themselves and the transcendent part of their lives, by imitating the Pharaoh’s path through the un- derworld. The afterlife became the mirror of the self.”182 Since “the true and eternal life” begins (or rather, is re- gained) only with death, the term ankhu, “the living ones”, as Gerhard Haeny aptly surmises, is used in a double sense: “of those alive on earth as well as of those living in the hereafter”.183 XVIII The language of Plato describing the Forms is reminiscent of the Parmenidean and Orphic revelations. This is not presuma- bly an anachronistic “Platonic” reading of Parmenides, as cer- tain modern historians of Hellenic philosophy would claim. Parmenides’ otherworldly journey to the point where all the opposites meet, or are transcended, repeats that of Heracles and Orpheus. According to Kingsley: “Everyone runs from death so everyone runs away from wisdom. . . . Parmenides’ journey takes him in exactly the opposite direction. . . . To 180. Gerhard Haeny, “New Kingdom ‘Mortuary Temples’ and ‘Man- sions of Millions of Years,’” in Temples of Ancient Egypt, ed. Byron E. Shafer (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), p. 86. 181. Alan F. Segal, Life after Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion (New York: Doubleday, 2004), p. 50. 182. Ibid., p. 69. 183. Gerhard Haeny, ibid., p. 92. 72 OTHER TITLES BY ALGIS UŽDAVINYS The Golden Chain: An Anthology of Platonic and Pythagorean Philosophy (World Wisdom, 2004) Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth: From Ancient Egypt to Neoplatonism (The Matheson Trust and Prometheus Trust, 2004) The Heart of Plotinus: The Essential Enneads (World Wisdom, 2009) Philosophy and Theurgy in Late Antiquity (Sophia Perennis, 2010) Ascent to Heaven in Islamic and Jewish Mysticism (The Matheson Trust, 2011) ORIGINAL LITHUANIAN WORKS (forthcoming in English from The Matheson Trust) Labyrinth of Sources. Hermeneutical Philosophy and Mystagogy of Proclus (Vilnius, 2002) Hellenic Philosophy from Numenius to Syrianus (Vilnius, 2003) Hermes Trismegistus: The Way of Wisdom (Vilnius, 2005)
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- [Music as a Tool for Self-Realization in Chinese Culture](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/mazur-music-as-a-tool) - Based on the Practice of Playing the Guqin by Rafal Mazur Research on music as a cognitive practice anticipating certain sage-specific way of action, described in the Daoist classics; practice that allows to reach the wuxin state of mind which enables perception of the world in its transformations, in perpetual motion, and therefore allows to
- [St Brendan’s Navigation: Landscape and Paradise in Early Medieval Ireland](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/st-brendans-navigation-landscape-and-paradise-in-early-medieval-ireland) - Elva Johnston The clearest example of a liminal landscape is the fog through which the voyagers must pass before reaching the Promised Land of the Saints. The latter is the earthly paradise… but also the Heavenly Jerusalem, the apocalyptic Heaven at time’s end. The Navigatio begins and concludes with this passage between worlds… Passing through
- [A Mystical Encounter: Beaurecueil and Ansari](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/a-mystical-encounter-beaurecueil-and-ansari) - Minlib Dallh I wish, only, with others, often by and through them, step by step, day by day, to move toward the Truth, in order that she possesses me. At times, no matter how dark is our night, I believe with all my being, for them (others) and for me, in the radiant morning star
- [Disagreeing to Agree: A Christian Response to A Common Word](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/disagreeing-to-agree) - Disagreeing to Agree: A Christian Response to A Common Word © 2009 James S. Cutsinger “Theory and Application of A Common Word Between Us and You” University of South Carolina Barnes Symposium 27 March 2009 “Conform to holy separation to realize holy union.” Frithjof Schuon I have long been fascinated by the traditional Islamic account of what may well have been the very first interfaith dialogue between Christians and Muslims, an account handed down to us by Ibn Is?aq, a biographer of the Prophet Muhammad, and by other early Muslim historians.1 It is an important tradition, for it helps to clarify the context of the opening verses of the third Koranic s?rah, “The Family of ?Imr?n”—a context in which Christians were invited by Muslims to a common word between us and you (3:64). Interfaith Dialogue in the Time of the Prophet Jesus said unto them, “Who do men say that I am?” And they answered, “One of the prophets” (Mark 8:27-28). Imagine the scene. It is the year of our Lord 632—the tenth of the hijrah.2 A deputation of some sixty Christians, including a bishop by the name of Abu Harithah bin ?Alqamah, has just arrived in Medina from the Yemeni city of Najran, a dusty seven days’ ride to the south. Like many other tribal groups from throughout the Arabian peninsula, they have come seeking to establish a pact and terms of peace with the Prophet of Islam. Muhammad shows them great hospitality, generously allowing his guests—despite the objections of some of his companions—to say their prayers in his mosque. Discussions 1 See Muhammad Saed Abdul-Rahman, The Meaning and Explanation of the Glorious Qur’an (London: MSA Publications Limited, 2007), 602-604. A short summary of the encounter may be found in Martin Lings, Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources (Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 1991), 326-27. 2 Dates in the sources vary, some indicating that the year was 10 A.H., others 9 A.H.; the meeting may thus have occurred as early as 630 A.D. and as late as 632 A.D. For discussion of this question, see Mahmoud Ayoub, The Qur’an and Its Interpreters (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1992), Vol. 2. 2 afterward naturally turn to the subject of religion and to the theological differences between Christianity and Islam, notably their differing understandings of Jesus. The Christians say they are puzzled. You Muslims agree—do you not?—that the son of Mary was no ordinary man. On the contrary, you too believe in his miracles, including his healing of the man born blind and his raising of the dead (S?rah 3:49), and you describe him as the Messiah, as illustrious both in this world and the next, as one of those brought near to God, and indeed as God’s very word (3:45-46). If—as you also claim to agree—his mother was a virgin (3:47), and if he therefore had no human father, does it not follow that he must have been the Son of God? No, the Prophet responds, this does not in fact follow, and he recites as his reason a Koranic revelation that has just been given him: Lo! the likeness of Jesus with God is as the likeness of Adam. He created him of dust, then He said unto him: Be! and he is. This is the truth from thy Lord (3:59-60). The prophetic logic is clear. Adam had neither father nor mother, and yet neither Christians nor Muslims believe that he was anything more than a creature of God. So why would anyone suppose that the absence of only one human parent somehow constitutes a proof of divinity? Yes, the logic seems clear enough. But realizing that his Christian visitors might require something more than this single sign to convince them, the Prophet is told that he should propose a test to determine which of their divergent Christologies is the true one. He invites them to engage in a mub?halah, an ancient rite in which the parties to a dispute attest to their confidence in their respective positions by invoking the curse of God upon those who lie (3:61). We are told that the Christians at first accept this challenge, but when the time arrives for the contest itself, they are daunted to find that the Prophet has returned with his daughter F??imah, her husband ?Al?, and their children ?asan and ?usayn, all of whom he enfolds in his cloak, as if to say, Look! I am prepared for my whole family to be killed if we are the ones whose understanding of Jesus is wrong. According to the Islamic sources, this powerful demonstration of certitude causes the Christians to lose heart, and they decline to proceed with the imprecation. The Prophet’s response to their demurral is especially intriguing. Once again a heavenly sign is given him, and it is precisely this additional ?ya, bestowed in precisely this interfaith context, which has provided the name for A Common Word Between Us 3 and You:3 Say, Muhammad is told, O People of the Scripture! Come to a common word between us and you: that we shall worship none but God, and that we shall ascribe no partner unto Him, and that none of us shall take others for lords beside God (3:64). According to the traditional sources, the Prophet then tells the Christians that they are free to continue practicing their religion, and in exchange for their payment of the jizyah, or poll tax, he pledges to protect their churches and possessions. A treaty is signed, and the deputation returns to Najran. I find this account fascinating on many levels, not least because it raises a number of provocative questions. Who exactly were these Christians? Were they members of one of the heretical sects of the era, or were they fully Orthodox adherents of Chalcedon? If they were Orthodox, as some of the sources suggest in calling them “Melkites” and in describing them as followers of the “Byzantine rite”, why, unlike the many early martyrs of their faith, do they appear to have been so reluctant to stand up for their convictions regarding Christ’s divinity? Or was it reluctance? Did they change their minds and withdraw from the mub?halah because they had lost their self-confidence, as the Islamic report appears to imply? Or did they draw back, though still firmly believing themselves to be right, because they were unwilling to put the Prophet and his family at risk? Which in other words was the more confident party, and whose the more generous and effective interfaith diplomacy? The most important question for me as an Orthodox Christian, however, is whether, and if so how and to what extent, the historical background I have been sketching is germane to contemporary Christian-Muslim dialogue. Are we to read the prophetic overture of S?rah 3:64 on its own and in isolation from its Koranic and commentarial context? Or should this verse be interpreted in light of the Christological controversy hinted at in the preceding ?y?t and detailed in Islamic tradition? In issuing their own invitation to Christians today, the Muslim signatories to A Common Word have chosen the first approach, and they have done so in order to underscore precisely the “common ground” (36) shared by our traditions, especially our respective teachings 3 An open letter to Christians entitled A Common Word Between Us and You was issued on 13 October 2007 by 138 leading Muslim authorities and scholars. For the “Official Website of a Common Word”, see http://www.acommonword.com/index.php?lang=en&page=option1. The text of the Common Word letter has been published in Sophia: The Journal of Traditional Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Winter 2008-2009), 16- 38; page numbers throughout this paper refer to this published version. 4 concerning the love of God and neighbor. Moreover, in a spirit of friendship and dialogue, they have provided a conciliatory gloss for three crucial phrases in the verse in question that might have otherwise seemed divisive. To worship none but God, they tell us, is to be “totally devoted to God” (17); to ascribe no partner unto Him means acknowledging “the Unity of God” (17); and to say that none of us shall take others for lords beside God implies that “none of us should obey the other in disobedience to God” (17), which is to say that “Muslims, Christians, and Jews should be free to each follow what God commanded them” (35), since there is no compulsion in religion (S?rah 2:256). This is doubtless the most appropriate way of reading the Prophet’s concluding words to his Najrani guests if one’s primary aims are peaceful co-existence and the promotion of religious tolerance. It goes without saying, of course, that these are highly laudable goals, and like other Christians who have contributed a response to the on-line Common Word statement,4 I am very happy to support any effort that may help to reduce tension and violence between the adherents of our historic faiths. Nevertheless, as I study the opening verses of S?rah 3 and the traditional Islamic account of their historical background, I confess that it is the differences between our traditions, and especially our Christologies, that appear by far the more prominent feature, and it seems to me we shall miss a valuable opportunity for deepened insight if we focus only on obvious and rather anodyne commonalities.5 Indeed, speaking as a metaphysician, I would dare to go further. I would say that it is only by first accentuating our theological differences that we can hope to attain to a truly transformative unity. For it is not on their surfaces or along their circumferences but at their centers—where outwardly they are furthest apart—that the real “common ground” between genuine religions may be realized. What I have in mind is something of a paradox, and a visual image may be helpful.6 Suppose we envision the Christian and Muslim religions as geometrical figures. 4 See http://www.acommonword.com/index.php?lang=en&page=responses for “Responses from Christian Leaders”. 5 While stressing commonalities, A Common Word Between Us and You does acknowledge that “Islam and Christianity are obviously different religions” and that “there is no minimising some of their formal differences” (33). 6 I have adapted this paragraph and the next from the “Introduction” to my Reclaiming the Great Tradition: Evangelicals, Catholics, and Orthodox in Dialogue (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 10; a similar image was used in that context, though of course for a significantly different purpose. 5 Several configurations are possible. Exclusivists within each tradition will no doubt prefer to think of these figures as lying in parallel, and therefore never-intersecting, planes and as having different sizes and shapes representing what are perceived to be their respective degrees of perfection and comprehensiveness. One’s own tradition will in this case be given the larger shape, no doubt circular in form—whereas a rather cramped and irregular polygon will be employed to symbolize the competing religion! Other Christians and Muslims, more sanguine about the prospects for interfaith concord, will imagine the figures as existing instead on the same plane, where contact is possible. Certain of these hopeful ecumenists may picture the shapes as moving ever closer to each other, while even greater optimists may see them as already touching or perhaps overlapping. The problem with all these representations, however, is that they end up depicting the relationship between our religions, even at its best, in merely superficial and peripheral ways, as if the possibility of mutual comprehension and respect depended solely on external proximity or juxtaposition, whether between two parallel planes or between two discrete figures in the same plane. But this is to understand ecumenism in merely planimetric, dogmatic, and exoteric categories. I propose we envision a rather different, three-dimensional model, where divergence and convergence are each given their due by means of an intersection of planes. Of course, Christianity and Islam must still be represented by two distinct figures, for doctrinally they are quite dissimilar. But they should both be pictured as circular, for each expresses a unique mode of perfection. Furthermore, I suggest that we inscribe these circles inside a single sphere where, to highlight their exoteric differences, they are deployed at right angles to each other, but where, in order that attention might be directed toward their inward or esoteric commonalities, they are pictured as sharing the same diameter. For the perennialists in my audience, I could add that the sphere is the religio perennis, while the common diameter, stretching from the north to the soul pole of the sphere, is the axis mundi and thus the seeming distance between God and man. I shall return to this diameter and to a discussion of these “inward commonalities” later on in my talk. But first I must concentrate on the divergence of planes so as to underscore for my audience the difference, indeed the radical disparity, between our 6 traditions’ respective understandings of Jesus, and by extension our understandings of the relationship between the Divine and the human. Metaphysics comes later. For now I speak as an Orthodox Christian theologian. Christology, Theosis, and A Common Word “Thou, being a man, makest Thyself God!” Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, Ye are gods’?” (John 10:33-34). The Prophet Muhammad asked the deputation from Najran, and contemporary Muslim scholars and leaders are asking my fellow Christians and me, to come to a common word or agreement with them.7 Central to what my co-religionists and I are being asked to accept, as the Koranic text of the invitation specifies, is the premise that God has no partners or associates and that it is therefore wrong to regard anyone other than God as divine or to take anyone other than God as one’s lord. Fundamental to these claims, of course, are two key points of Islamic doctrine: on the one hand the defining shah?dah or “testimony” L? il?ha ill? ’Ll?h, “There is no god but God”; and on the other hand the resulting conviction that shirk—that is, the “association” of others than God with God, the worshipping of others as if they were God, the attribution of God’s characteristics to others than God—is the gravest of sins.8 In deciding whether to accede to a theology thus defined, the first question a Christian must ask himself is whether Jesus Christ, whom Christians certainly do worship and to whom they certainly do attribute divine characteristics, is Himself actually God. According to the Islamic revelation, He clearly is not. Indeed, even if we had never heard of the Najrani deputation, or their meeting with the Prophet Muhammad, or the proposed but then averted test of their respective claims about Jesus, the Koranic text itself is unambiguous: however wondrous His deeds may have been and however exceptional—even prophetic—His stature, Jesus Christ is human and not divine. 7 The Arabic phrase kalimatin sawa in S?rah 3:64 is translated into English as a word common by Arberry and as an agreement by Pickthall; in Yusuf Ali it is common terms, in Hilali-Khan a word that is just, in Khalifa a logical agreement, in Shakir an equitable proposition, and in Sale a just determination. 8 Lo! God forgiveth not that a partner should be ascribed unto Him.... Whoso ascribeth partners to God, he hath indeed invented a tremendous sin (S?rah 4:48; cf. 4:116). 7 Needless to say, the Christian perspective on Christ—whether Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant—is radically different. In their open letter, the authors of A Common Word have asserted that “Christians themselves ... have never all agreed with each other on Jesus Christ’s nature” (36), but with due respect I must say that this seems to me a most misleading claim. Disagreements can certainly be found if one includes the opinions of heretics, whether the Arians, Apollinarians, or Nestorians of the first Christian centuries, who had not yet come to terms with the full mystery of the Gospel,9 or else the de-mythologizers and other historicist critics of recent times, who, though they may still call themselves “Christian”, have capitulated to the reductionist pressures of modernity in their search for a purely “historical Jesus”. Be that as it may, the vast majority of Christians, at least since the Fourth Ecumenical Council in A.D. 451, have been of one mind in believing that Jesus Christ is the divine Son of God, and each time they express this consensus by repeating the words of the Nicene Creed, traditional Christianity’s most important statement of faith, they categorically reject the Koranic teaching of S?rah 3:59 that the likeness of Jesus with God is as the likeness of Adam. For the Creed makes a point of stating—quite emphatically— that Jesus is “begotten” (genn?thenta) but not “created” (poi?thenta), being “of one essence [homoousion] with the Father”, and indeed that it is Jesus Himself, the eternal Word of God, “by whom all things were made”.10 Of course Christians also believe that Jesus became fully human, for though He was in the form of God ... He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men (Phil. 2:6-7). According to the Formula or Definition promulgated by the Fourth Council, this divine kenosis or self- emptying means that the Son of God is now “like us in all things with the exception of sin”. But He who thus entered the human condition, the uncreated Word, is not a human being. On the contrary, Christ’s persona or hypostasis—to use the technical theological language—remains strictly divine, though within this Person, the second of the Holy Trinity, there exist two distinct natures, one fully divine and one fully human, each with 9 A “mystery”, according to Saint Paul, “which was kept secret for long ages but is now disclosed” (Rom. 16:25). It is possible that the Najrani Christians were members of the Nestorian sect, and this might account for their apparent lack of resolve. For the Nestorians believed that Jesus was a human being joined with the divine Son or Word of God in a unity of “function” or “honor”, but that He was not the Son as such. 10 “All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:3). 8 its own set of distinguishing idiomata or attributes.11 This traditional Christology developed in part as a way of grasping synoptically what the Bible teaches concerning Christ’s divinity. To mention only a few representative passages, Jesus is proclaimed to be the Light of the world, which enlightens every man coming into the world (John 9:5, 1:9), and it is said that all things ... in heaven and on earth, both visible and invisible were created in Him and through Him and for Him (Col. 1:16); that He reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of His nature, upholding the universe by His word of power (Heb. 1:3); and that He is the Alpha and the Omega— the Beginning and the End of all things—for He is He who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty (Rev. 1:8). Furthermore, contrary to what the Common Word initiative would appear to require of those who agree to its terms, Jesus is referred to and worshipped as “Lord” (Kyrios in Greek) well over 700 times in the New Testament. In fact, regarding Christ as Lord is said by Saint Paul to be the very key to eternal life: If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved (Rom. 10:9). Certain Christian respondents to A Common Word, in an effort to move the conversation forward on this difficult point—and to exonerate their tradition of what might otherwise seem to Muslims the sin of shirk—have made a point of insisting that in these and other such Biblical passages, Jesus is not in fact being presented as a “partner” of God, or taken as a “Lord” in addition to God, or worshipped as God while nonetheless not being God. He simply is God as Christianity conceives of God—not something or someone else or other, but a Christian name for the one and only Divinity. This is the strategy used by Rowan Williams, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, in his June 2008 response to the Common Word letter. “It is important to state unequivocally,” Dr Williams writes, that the association of any other being with God is expressly rejected by the Christian theological tradition.... “God” is the name of a kind of life, a “nature” or essence—eternal and self-sufficient life, always active, needing nothing. But that life is lived ... eternally and simultaneously as three interrelated agencies are 11 Speaking in Orthodox dogmatic terms, Christ has a human physis or “nature”, which means that whatever can be truly predicated of us—with the exception of sin—can be truly predicated of Him; but He does not have a human hypostasis and is therefore not “a” human person. His humanity is “anhypostatic”, though it is “enhypostasized” in the Logos, which means that the personal subject of all His thoughts, words, and actions is divine. 9 made known to us in the history of God’s revelation.... In light of what our Scripture says, we speak of “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”, but we do not mean one God with two beings alongside him.... There is indeed one God, the Living and Self-subsistent, associated with no other.12 There is certainly an important truth in this formulation, for Christians do indeed believe that there is only one God; like Muslims, we are monotheists, not polytheists. Nonetheless, as an Eastern Orthodox theologian, I am obliged to point out that this way of expressing Trinitarian doctrine comes rather too close for comfort to the modalist or Sabellian heresy, in which a single God was said to have appeared in three distinct modes or forms, whether successively or simultaneously. No doubt the Archbishop understands this distinction and is fully aware that the early Church rejected modalism; I do not mean to suggest he is consciously opting for heresy. His aim is ecumenical diplomacy, and to this end he is quick to agree with our Muslim interlocutors that nothing and no one should be associated with the only God. The result, however, is a kind of planimetric ecumenism, to refer once again to my geometrical imagery. Like many another enthusiastic proponent of exoteric religious concord, Williams has pictured Christianity and Islam as if they existed on the same theological plane, and he seems prepared to blur the sharp dogmatic outlines of his own religion so as to make it more compatible, if not congruent, with the Muslim perspective. But the Trinity is a much greater mystery than this too simplistic equation of theologies suggests. Part of the mystery turns on exactly what, or rather whom, one means by “God”. As we Orthodox see it, prayerful fidelity to the witness of Scripture, the decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, and the language of liturgical worship requires that the word “God” be reserved, strictly speaking, not for some generic form of “self- sufficient life” but for God the Father alone, the first Person of the Holy Trinity, who is said to be the Fount (p?g?) of all divinity and the uncaused Cause (aitia) of the other two Persons, the Son and the Spirit. In defense of this perspective, we cite such Biblical texts as John 17:3, where Jesus prays to His Father, saying, This is eternal life, that they know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent, or again Christ’s response to the rich man, Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone (Luke 18:19). 12 Rowan Williams, “A Common Word for the Common Good”, Sophia: The Journal of Traditional Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Winter 2008-2009), 44-45. 10 The opening salutations and concluding blessings of several Pauline epistles further support the Orthodox Trinitarian vision, as for example the doxology in the final verse of the Letter to the Romans: To the only wise God be glory for evermore through Jesus Christ (Rom. 16:27). What one passes “through” is evidently not the same as what one passes “to”, and it follows that Jesus is not to be equated or identified with “the only wise God”. Now admittedly the Biblical language is not systematic, and it would be going too far to claim that Christ is never referred to as “God” in the scriptures. But even when He is thus described, the reader is not allowed to forget that there is Another who is even “more God” than He—if you will permit me this admittedly curious phrase. For as Jesus Himself insists, speaking as the divine Son and not merely as man: The Father is greater than I (John 14:28).13 The opening chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews offers a memorable illustration of this koanic complexity. Appropriating Old Testament texts from 2 Samuel and the Psalms and applying them prophetically to Christ, the author writes: To what angel did God ever say, “Thou art my Son, today I have begotten Thee”?... But of the Son He says, “Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.... Therefore God, Thy God, has anointed Thee with the oil of gladness beyond Thy comrades” (Heb. 1:5, 8-9). Strange as it may sound even to some Christian ears, there is a hierarchy within the divine order itself. Even though Jesus can in one sense be rightly called “God” since He has the same essence as His Father, the “God” that He is has a God. This astonishing claim is born out, among other places, in the risen Christ’s encounters with Thomas Didymus and Mary Magdalen, as recorded in John 20. Having touched Christ’s wounded hands and side, the erstwhile “doubting Thomas” is moved to utter the most exalted profession of faith in the entire New Testament: My Lord and my God! (John 20:28), a profession Christ in no way rejects or rebukes him for. But when Mary attempts to embrace Him, Jesus stops her, saying, Do not cling to me ... but go to my brethren and 13 According to Saint Thomas Aquinas, these words are to be predicated of Christ’s human nature alone (Summa Theologica, Part 3, Question 20, Article 1). From the Orthodox point of view, however, words can be spoken and deeds performed only by a person, not a nature, and like all of Christ’s words this witness to the superiority of God the Father must therefore be attributed to the divine persona or hypostasis of the Son of God. 11 say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God (John 20:17). We find this highly paradoxical point reaffirmed in the Nicene Creed, where the grammatical apposition in the opening article shows beyond doubt that the Father alone is unequivocally “God”. The Christian recites, “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” Once again it is evident that the unity of God is not to be understood as residing in some generic nature shared by three specific Persons. The oneness of God is the specificity of the Father; it is He who is the “one God” in whom Christians believe. As Saint Gregory the Theologian puts it, “The union is the Father, from whom and to whom the order of the Persons runs its course”.14 As for Jesus Christ, the second article of the Creed makes it clear that His divinity, while entirely real and efficacious, is in some sense derivative. For He, “the only-begotten Son of God”, is confessed to be “Light of Light” and “Very God of Very God”. In Orthodox liturgical texts, this subtle but extremely important distinction is often conveyed by using the word “God” on its own when speaking of the Father while adding the possessive pronoun “our” in phrases referring to the divinity of the Son, as in the frequently recited prayer “Lord Jesus Christ, our God, have mercy on us and save us”. It is as if the tradition were endeavoring to remind the Christian of the difference between Jesus’s words to Mary and Thomas’s words to Jesus. Once again it would be misleading to suggest that there is anything systematic or invariable about this usage—devotional piety is not mathematics—but it occurs frequently enough to be worthy of note. Clearly much more could be said concerning this crucial theological distinction; indeed, to appropriate the final verse of the Fourth Gospel, The world itself could not contain the books that would be written (John 21:25) if our hope was in some way to exhaust in prose the mystery of Christ’s relation to His Father—let alone to the Holy Spirit. My aim here is merely to raise a question, a question not yet adequately addressed in the responses I have read to A Common Word. We Christians worship Jesus Christ as God’s very Son, and we take this same Christ as our Lord. And yet at least in one sense the Son of God is not God, or not at least God as such—not the metaphysical Absolute 14 Theological Orations, 42.15; quoted by Bishop Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way (Crestwood, New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995), 32. Saint Gregory can be even more direct: “There is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things” (Orations, 39.12). 12 and sovereign Source of all things, including the Son’s own consubstantial divinity. So the question is this: Is it really appropriate for a faithful Christian to accept an invitation to theological dialogue the stipulations of which are that we shall worship none but God, and that we shall ascribe no partner unto Him, and that none of us shall take others for lords beside God (S?rah 3:64)? But this is by no means the most vexing of the questions we face, for Christology is not the only way in which the Christian and Islamic planes diverge—nor, I suspect, will it prove the most problematic form of divergence for many Muslim exoterists. Let us assume for the sake of the argument that we all agree to prescind from the historical background in which the faithful of our respective traditions first exchanged views in Medina. Let us assume further that Anglican and other Western theologians are right to prioritize the unity Christ shares with His Father and the Holy Spirit and right to use the word “God” to refer to this unity. And let us assume finally that, since Jesus Christ may thus be regarded as one expression of that unity, worshipping Him is not—or at least need not be—an obstacle to interfaith harmony between Christians and Muslims. Even if our discussions were to proceed as swimmingly as these assumptions suggest—and I am none too sure they would, or should—we would still find ourselves facing a tremendous dialogical dilemma. For Jesus is not merely some strange though still acceptable exception to the Islamic rule that God alone is divine. According to Christianity, He is the salvific means whereby this rule is meant to be repeatedly broken. I said earlier that the traditional Christian understanding of Christ, as expressed by the early Councils of the Church, developed in part as a way of grasping synoptically what the scriptures teach concerning the two natures of the divine Son of God. But it would be wrong to suppose that Christological doctrine came about solely, or even primarily, as a means of collating the titles and descriptions of Christ that one finds in the Bible. On the contrary, Christian understanding of Jesus is above all a way of making soteriological sense of the Christian experience of theosis or deification—an experience, promised by scripture and realized in the lives of many saints, in which human beings are enabled to participate in the very powers and properties of God Himself. Granted, it is my Orthodox tradition that has especially stressed this experience as the defining element in salvation and as the ultimate goal of the whole spiritual life. But the essential teaching, 13 firmly based on the Bible and attested to by the entire Patristic tradition, is no more Eastern than Western. If the conviction that “there is no god but God” is foundational to Islam, the conviction that “God became man that man might become God” is foundational to Christianity. References to theosis can be found throughout the New Testament. One of the most arresting passages comes in Saint Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, where he tells his correspondents that he is praying on their behalf that they may be filled with all the fullness of God (Eph. 3:19). What is particularly striking is that the very same phrase is also used by Paul in his Letter to the Colossians in reference to Jesus Himself, in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell (Col. 1:19).15 An equally important formulation is found in the Gospel of John, where we read that those who receive Christ are given the power to become the sons of God (John 1:12). But the most decisive of Biblical supports for this distinctively Christian teaching comes in the Second Letter of Peter: May grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us to His own glory and excellence, by which He has granted to us His precious and very great promises, that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion and become partakers of the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:2-4). Each of these lines deserves attentive study, but it is enough for our purposes here to focus on the last phrase alone. God has given us the power through Jesus Christ to become partakers of the divine nature—theias koin?noi physe?s in the Greek. The word koin?noi is particularly important for our dialogue. Translated here as partakers, it can also be rendered into English as “participants”, “companions”, “sharers”, “communicants”,16 and—yes—as “partners”. According to Peter, the precious and very great promise of God is that man, creature of God though he is, can nonetheless become 15 Read in context, the phrase follows logically from a description of Christ’s creative and salvific power, a power—the Apostle seems to suggest—which would be inexplicable were Jesus not divine: He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature: for by Him were all things created.... All things were created by Him, and for Him: and He is before all things, and by Him all things consist. And He is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things He might have preeminence. For in Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell (Col. 1:15-19). 16 It is impossible not to hear the Eucharistic overtones of this word. Needless to say, the Mystical Supper, in which Christians assimilate the Real Presence of the Son of God by eating His body and drinking His blood, provides yet another reminder of the divergence between our traditions. 14 nothing short of God’s partner. This for Christianity is the divinely willed culmination of human life. Nor do we Christians regard this koin?nia, or “communion”, in the divine nature simply as an unrealized human potential or an as yet unfulfilled promise. According to the Fathers of the Church, it is something the greatest saints have already experienced. Saint Athanasius’s dictum that “God became man in order to make us God” is one of several Patristic sources often quoted in defense of the doctrine.17 But it is important to realize that Athanasius was not speaking in a merely speculative or theoretical way; he was talking about the concrete effects of theosis as he had personally witnessed them in his spiritual master Saint Anthony the Great, the first and most famous of the Desert Fathers of Egypt. At the end of his biography of the saint, Athanasius tells his fellow monks that they should read what he has written not only to “the other brothers, so that they may learn what the life of monks ought to be” but to “the pagans as well, so they may understand by this means that our Lord Jesus Christ is God and Son of God”.18 For Athanasius, the quality of Anthony’s life—indeed the transfigured nature of his very being—was such that it could not be described except in terms of divinity, but this divinity in turn could not be adequately accounted for without a sufficient reason that was itself divine. To repeat the critical point I made earlier: for Christians, Jesus is not some strange exception that ends up merely proving the rule that God alone is divine. He is the divine cause of the continuing effects of theosis among other men, and thus of the ongoing and divinely intended violation of this rule.19 17 On the Incarnation, 54. According to Saint Irenaeus, “We were made men at the beginning, but at the end Gods” (Against Heresies, 3:19); Saint Clement of Alexandria puts it this way: “God’s Word became man so that you might learn how to become God” (Protrepticus, 1:9); Saint Gregory the Theologian writes, “I may become God to the extent that God became man” (Theological Orations, 3.19); the boldest formulation of all comes from Saint Basil the Great: “Man is a creature under orders to become God” (reported by Saint Gregory the Theologian, Oration 43, “In Praise of Basil the Great”). 18 Athanasius: The Life of Anthony and the Letter to Marcellinus, trans. Robert C. Gregg (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 99.94. 19 According to Saint Maximus the Confessor, full participation in the divine nature comes about when “God suspends in created beings the operation of their natural energy by inexpressibly activating in them His divine energy” (Two Hundred Texts on Theology and the Incarnate Dispensation of the Son of God, First Century, 47; The Philokalia, Vol. 2, ed. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware [London: Faber and Faber, 1981], 123). Like other Fathers, Maximus understands deification to be a reversal of what happened when Christ became man, for in that case an uncreated and eternal being assumed created and temporal attributes, whereas in theosis created and temporal beings are granted uncreated and eternal attributes. First articulated at the Council of Ephesus (A.D. 431), the Christological 15 I should add that for Orthodox Christians the transformative experience of deification is not merely a thing of the past; on the contrary it is believed to continue right down to our own time. The Greek Orthodox bishop and spiritual writer Hierotheos Vlachos, recalling his encounter in the late 1980s with a gerondas, or spiritual elder, on the Holy Mountain of Athos, describes the old man as “participating in the uncreated energies of God” and as having “everything that God has, yet without having His essence”.20 Even supposing that there may be a certain amount of deliberate hyperbole in this formulation, it is clear that the promise of theosis, the realization of which such accounts are intended to document, remains very firmly rooted in my tradition, and it points to a hugely important planimetric divergence between Christianity and Islam. As A Common Word makes abundantly clear, “partnership” with God is for Muslims the one thing to be avoided at all costs, but for Christians “partnership” with God—indeed partnership in God—is the sine qua non of salvation. For you it is the greatest sin, while for us it is the distinguishing mark of sanctity. The very thing you proscribe we prescribe. So is it really possible for us to “come to a common word” with each other? Toward a Metaphysical Dialogue “I in them, and Thou in Me, that they may be perfectly one” (John 17:23). Despite the stress I have been placing on divergence and dissimilarity, I myself certainly believe that it is possible. I agree in other words that it is entirely appropriate, and indeed highly desirable, for traditional Christians and traditional Muslims to seek common ground. But as I have more than once hinted, and shall now endeavor to explain more precisely, I also believe that this search, rather than neglecting or downplaying our differences, should insist they be treated as the very key to our unity. What this means, however, is that any “common word” or agreement between us must be of a metaphysical rather than a theological order. Simply put, metaphysics is to theology what absoluteness is to relativity. Now of course, the theologian is also concerned with what he rightly regards as absolute and principle of communicatio idiomatum, that is, an “exchange of properties” between the divine and the human, also applies to the deified man. 20 A Night in the Desert of the Holy Mountain, trans. Effie Mavromichali (Levadia, Greece: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, 1991), 31-32. 16 eternal Truth. But his understanding of this Truth is inevitably colored by the revealed forms in which, he believes, it has found its most definitive religious expression.21 This is obviously the case with Christian theology, where the doctrine of God is ineluctably tied to the saving events of Christ’s life, but the general principle applies to each of the Semitic traditions, and mutatis mutandis to all religions. Compared to Christianity, where the revelational weight is placed on the incarnate presence of God at a particular moment of time, Islam accentuates what God has revealed to all His prophets across the ages. Nonetheless Islamic theology (k?lam) remains bound in its own way to the conceptual categories with which it articulates the Message behind all the messengers. No less an authority than al-Ghazzali goes so far as to say that “spiritual knowledge (ma?rifa) cannot be attained by the science of theology”, for theology is like a “veil” (hij?b) and a “barrier” (m?ni?).22 By contrast, metaphysics is the science of absoluteness as such, or more precisely of the Absolute as such, and the metaphysician is the person who knows that this Absolute must by its very nature transcend every form, even the relatively absolute forms through which it has revealed itself in his religion. This is obviously not the place for a justification or defense of this science. Fellow scholars of religion who have managed to convince themselves that no one can know anything except relativities will no doubt remain unconvinced by what I say here, and so will fellow religious believers, whether Christian or Muslim, who are intent upon treating their doctrines about God as if they were God Himself. I am not addressing either of these groups at the moment. I am speaking instead to those who have already realized that, without at least some incipient knowledge of a Reality transcending all form, the very concept of form would be meaningless, and I am inviting them to look through the forms of their religious traditions, treating them as open windows and not opaque works of art.23 Let us remind ourselves of the challenge we face. We have before us two great 21 One recalls the expression of the Sufi Abu al-Qasim al-Junayd: “The water takes on the color of its cup”; see William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1989), 341. 22 The Revival of Religious Sciences; see Reza Shah-Kazemi, “God as ‘The Loving’ in Islam”, Sophia: The Journal of Traditional Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Winter 2008-2009), 81. 23 See the closing pages of my article “Hesychia: An Orthodox Opening to Esoteric Ecumenism”; published in my Paths to the Heart: Sufism and the Christian East (Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom, 2002), it is also available here: http://www.cutsinger.net/scholarship/articles.shtml. 17 world religions whose defining doctrines are mutually exclusive, or at least so they appear. Either “God became man that man might become God”, or else “there is no god but God”; either Jesus Christ is the uncreated Son of God, or else He is a created human being; either sharing in God’s nature is the very pinnacle of holiness, or else it is the abyss of sin. As I noted near the start of this paper, if our traditions are placed within a single plane of theological reference—a plane defined, in other words, by the dogmatic formulations of Christianity alone, or alternatively those of Islam alone—then confrontation or compromise will be our only options. If the Christian is right, the Muslim is wrong; if the Muslim is right, the Christian is wrong. And in each case he who is wrong must either modify his doctrinal claims or be prepared to face condemnation— whether through a formal rite of mub?halah or by some more terrestrial and less frightening means! But what if we take a step back from these dogmatically divisive formulations, not to dismiss or abandon them certainly, but to envision them in a new perspective? To revert to my earlier geometrical image, let us picture our religions as circles of equal sizes but placed in different planes. And let us position these planes in such a way that the circles intersect through their diameters and along the axis of a single sphere. Now suppose we ascend above the north pole of this sphere and then descend beneath its south pole, taking turns looking down and then up along the axis. What might we see? What might our apparent oppositions together be pointing us toward? Metaphysics, as I am using the term, is precisely this stepping back, this positioning of planes, and this looking along a shared diameter. There are three basic steps to this process. First, we must try to understand why “God became man that man might become God” if in fact it is nonetheless true that “there is no god but God”; what deep truth within the Christian doctrine of the incarnation is revealed if, but only if, we also profess the shah?dah? Second, we must try to understand why “there is no god but God” if in fact it is nonetheless true that “God became man that man might become God”; what deep truth within the Islamic prohibition of shirk is revealed if, but only if, we also accept kenosis, theosis, and koin?nia as real possibilities? And third, we must try to understand how these deepened insights into our defining 18 doctrines might together aid us in better knowing the Reality whom Christians and Muslims are both called to love; what deepest truths about God will we glimpse if, but only if, we transcend a merely planimetric ecumenism? Please understand: there can be no question of somehow solving these three riddles here. What follow are merely a few scattered hints and provocations. The Muslim signatories to A Common Word Between Us and You have issued an invitation to Christians. All I am doing is extending in turn an invitation of my own. Step One Step One will require that Islamic doctrine be accorded a certain priority. Without giving up their belief that Jesus Christ is the divine Son of God and the saving means whereby others may come to share in God’s nature, Christians who take this step must be willing to grant that “there is no god but God”—in other words, metaphysically speaking, that the Absolute is incomparable to anything else. In order to do this, however, they must be prepared to rise above the north pole of my imagined sphere in order to look down its axis toward their accustomed immanence by way of transcendence. Even the most faithful and serious of Christians should be willing to adopt this perspective, whether they are metaphysicians or not. Certainly the Eastern Orthodox, notwithstanding their emphasis on deification, yield to no one in their apophatic insistence that the true God transcends every possible category, even that of divinity itself, and that He therefore remains asymptotically forever beyond His creation. Saint Maximus the Confessor speaks about theosis with greater authority and confidence than perhaps any other Father of the Church, and yet he especially is quick to explain that “God is ... incomprehensible ... altogether excluding notions of when and how, inaccessible to all.... He is undetermined, unchanging, and infinite, since He is infinitely beyond all being”.24 This is precisely why the Christian East accentuates the primacy of the Father in relation to the other two Trinitarian Persons, for in spite of the fact that the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, hath declared Him, it remains the case—even “after” the incarnation—that no man hath seen God at any time (John 1:18). 24 Two Hundred Texts on Theology and the Incarnate Dispensation of the Son of God, First Century, 1, 2; The Philokalia, Vol. 2, 114. 19 This is also why the doctrine of deification is almost always presented with an important disclaimer. Yes, says the Orthodox theologian, we are called to participate in the very life of God, but this participation extends only as far as His uncreated energies, and not to His essence.25 The description of the Athonite gerondas I quoted above may seem overblown to some in my audience, but the writer was actually being very carefully and circumspectly Orthodox when he said that the old man had “everything that God has, yet without having His essence”.26 There need be no opposition, therefore—at least in principle—between the Muslim’s conviction concerning God’s incomparability and the Christian’s conviction concerning the divinity of Christ and the deification of man. But metaphysical dialogue involves a great deal more than a half-grudging, half-apologetic acceptance of minimally compatible truths. In taking Step One, we Christians are not being asked to affirm the transcendence of the divine Absolute in spite of, or even in addition to, our continued belief in the incarnation. On the contrary, we are being invited to plumb the depths of our Christological teachings by means of the apparently contradictory doctrine that “there is no god but God”. And the question, as I have said, comes down to this: What deep truth may be revealed in our claim that “God became man that man might become God” if, but only if, we also profess the shah?dah? If nothing else, granting dialogical priority to this Islamic doctrine should help Christians to see that whatever the incarnation and deification may involve on the human side, they entail absolutely no change, and certainly no diminution, on the part of God. Christian theologians have always known this, of course; they have known—to quote again the words of Saint Maximus—that God is “unchanging” and beyond all “notions of when and how”, and they have therefore known as well—in the classic formulation of the 25 “The saints do not become God by essence nor one person with God, but they participate in the energies of God, that is to say, in His life, power, grace, and glory.... The energies are truly God Himself—yet not God as He exists within Himself, in His inner life” (Bishop Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way [Crestwood, New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995], 125-26). 26 My italics. The same principle is involved in Saint Gregory of Nyssa’s signature teaching concerning epektasis, a perpetual “stretching forward” or unending progress toward a goal one never reaches; according to Gregory, participation in God entails continual growth in virtue, but man will never understand, let alone attain, God’s transcendent perfection. The saint therefore writes, “Whoever pursues true virtue participates in nothing other than God.... Since this good has no limit, the participant’s desire itself necessarily has no stopping place but stretches out with the limitless. It is therefore undoubtedly impossible to attain perfection” (Gregory of Nyssa: The Life of Moses, trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson [New York: Paulist Press, 1978], 31 [Sections 7-8]). 20 Athanasian Creed—that to “believe rightly in the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ” is to understand that it came about “not by the conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by the taking of the manhood into God”. But even theologians can easily forget this fact; even they sometimes talk as if something actually happened in Heaven in the year 0 A.D. The impact of the shah?dah is such as to remind anyone, whether Muslim or Christian, that God simply is and that the relativities of the world and the apparent movements of time have no effect whatsoever upon Him. “There is no god but God” means that God is eternal and hence that His acts are all now—or rather that He does not truly “act” insofar as action entails change and becoming. But what this means in turn is not only that the world is still being created and that the Second Coming has already occurred;27 it also means that God has always been man, and man always God. Can Christians accept the “common word” of such insights? Are we willing to grant that the operative power of the incarnation “for us men and for our salvation” (Nicene Creed) depends on the metaphysical fact that God begetteth not nor was begotten, and there is none comparable unto Him (S?rah 112:3-4)? Can we admit, in other words, that the south would not be fully south without north? Step Two In this case the tables are to be turned and Christian doctrine prioritized. Without giving up their belief that “there is no god but God”, Muslims who take this step must be willing to grant that “God became man that man might become God”—in other words, metaphysically speaking, that the Absolute is necessarily Infinite and that because it is Infinite there is nothing not it. In order to do this, however, they must be prepared to descend beneath our sphere in order to gaze upward toward their accustomed transcendence by way of immanence. The first step required Christians to position themselves in such a way as to envision their most important belief from the “northern” perspective of the Islamic shah?dah. Now I am asking Muslims to return the favor—to 27 The Koranic “Be!” (S?rah 3:47, 19:35) and the Biblical fiats (Gen. 1:3, 6, 14), like all imperatives, do not have tense. In the Anaphora of the Divine Liturgy, the trans-temporal reality of the Second Coming is acknowledged when the priest offers thanks to the Father, “who didst bring us from non-existence into being, and when we had fallen away didst raise us up again, and didst not cease to do all things until Thou hadst brought us back to heaven, and hadst endowed us with Thy kingdom which is to come”. 21 position themselves in such a way as to envision their most important point of doctrine from the “southern” perspective afforded by Christian teaching concerning the incarnation and theosis. Unless I am mistaken, this second step will present more of a problem for most Muslims than will Step One for most Christians. While bringing the shah?dah into direct contact with the doctrine of the incarnation is certainly a strange thing to do, and though it cannot but lead to a “de-temporalized”—and to this extent unfamiliar—understanding of what is meant when we read that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John1:14), there is certainly nothing intrinsically problematic from the Christian perspective in saying “there is no god but God”. The situation in this second case is very different, however, and Muslim exoterists will almost certainly be scandalized. For taking Step Two means accepting the idea that the divinity of the one and only true God is in no way threatened or compromised, but is instead most profoundly affirmed, in being shared. Emphasizing the primacy of God the Father in relation to the other two Persons of the Holy Trinity is essential when it comes to Step One. But it would be a mistake for our discussions to stop there, for it is clear in the Gospel that everything the Father has—and is—has been fully given to the Son. Though Jesus Himself testifies to the primacy of the Absolute in saying that the Father is greater than I (John 14:28), He at the same time makes a point of insisting that He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father (John 14:9) and that I and my Father are one (John 10:30). Emphasizing the transcendent incomparability of the divine essence in relation to human beings is likewise essential to the first step of this dialogue. But again it would be a mistake to stop there, for it is also clear in the Gospel that everything the Son has received from the Father He means to give us as well, which is why He can pray—why He who is God can nonetheless pray to God—that we men be empowered to enter into Their union. John 17 records His potent words: Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on Me through their word, that they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us.... The glory which Thou gavest Me I have given them, that they may be one, even as We are one: I in them, and Thou in Me, that they may be perfectly one (John 17:20-23). For Christians, the perfect unity of God is inseparable from man’s own perfect union in 22 Him, which is why they believe God is love (1 John 4:16) and not just the Loving. But what this means—dare I say it?—is that a God without partners is not really God; interpenetration among the Persons of the Trinity, on the one hand, and the promise and possibility of our own participation in the eternal life of that Trinity, on the other, are essential in Christianity to God’s being God. As I have noted already, most Muslims will be thoroughly scandalized by the seeming shirk of this claim, and theologically they should be scandalized. Unless I am mistaken the Sufis in our midst will be more amenable, drawing as they do on the insights of their esoteric traditions, including an understanding of the divine tawh?d, or oneness, that accentuates “union” and not only “unicity”.28 But whether or not there are Sufic approximations to the distinctively Christian doctrines I have stressed in this paper is not the question. The question is whether the parties to our dialogue are willing to adopt, and not just concede, each other’s perspectives. In taking Step One, I did not ask my fellow Christians to give a merely provisional nod to the shah?dah; I asked them to permit this distinctive Islamic doctrine to deepen their understanding of the incarnation. And in just the same fashion I am now inviting my Muslim interlocutors to accept the incarnation of God and the deification of man not in spite of, or even in addition to, their conviction that “there is no god but God”, but as a means of plumbing the depths of the divine incomparability. Muslims can—in fact they must—affirm the radiance of the divine Infinite, for whithersoever ye turn, there is the Face of God (S?rah 2:115), and We are nearer to [man] than his jugular vein (S?rah 50:16). No faithful Muslim, whether Sufi or otherwise, can object to the proposition that God is amidst us and in us. But what about the reverse formulation? Is it possible for there to be something amidst and in God—others than God within God who are “God” nonetheless, ourselves among them? I am eager to know what the signatories to A Common Word think about this distinctively Christian paradox. Are they willing to grant that no one hath ascended up to heaven but He that came down from heaven (John 3:13) and that it is therefore possible to 28 I am thinking, for example, of Ibn al-‘Arab?’s precision with regard to the divine infinitude: “Do not declare [God] nondelimited and thus delimited by being distinguished from delimitation! For if He is distinguished, then He is delimited by His nondelimitation. And if He is delimited by His nondelimitation, then He is not He” (William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, 112). For Saint Gregory the Theologian and other Greek-speaking Fathers, divine unity is a function of hen?sis, which is the “union” or “unification” among the three Persons of the Trinity, and not merely hen, which is the oneness of an arithmetical “unit”. The Sufi doctrine of the “unity of being” (wa?dat al-wuj?d) is clearly pertinent here. 23 be born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God (John 1:13)? Can they admit, in other words, that the north can still be north in the south? Step Three This third step is going to be the most difficult by far. For here it is no longer a question of simply bringing the central teachings of our religions into contact with each other, however intimate and fructifying that contact might prove, nor of visualizing our defining doctrines from above or beneath the “poles” of each other’s perspectives. We cannot simply look toward immanence by way of transcendence or toward transcendence by way of immanence. The challenge at this point is to envision our respective teachings in complete coincidence, as if they had been reduced not just from their divergent planes to a single line but from that line to a point—as if in fact the sphere had collapsed and north and south had met in the center. Steps One and Two entail rethinking the meaning of our most essential doctrines, and in each case our understanding of those doctrines, under pressure as it were from their theological opposites, must undergo a certain modification. Without denying the southern truth that God became man in Jesus Christ, the Christian remembers, or perhaps realizes for the first time, that God is nonetheless beyond all becoming and that the incarnation is therefore not, or not only, an event in time but an eternal state of being. And without denying the northern truth that there is nothing comparable to God, the Muslim remembers, or perhaps realizes for the first time, that there is nonetheless nothing not comparable to God since whatever is—to the measure it is—must be He. Thus summarized, however, it may sound as if a metaphysical dialogue were no better able than its planimetric counterparts to avoid the dangers of compromise or capitulation. It may seem that each party to our conversation has been obliged to sacrifice at least a part of what makes his religion distinctive: the Muslim at least some of the transcendence implicit in the shah?dah and the Christian at least some of the immanence implicit in the doctrine of theosis. But this is not so, or rather, though it would perhaps be an indirect and unintended result of our dialogue if we stopped short at this point, the aim of Step Three is precisely to reinstate and accentuate our exoteric and theological 24 differences in order to demonstrate how, precisely as differences, they point toward an esoteric and metaphysical unity. If we are successful in this quest, Muslims will come to see their transcendence not through or even in but as the deepest immanence; and Christians will come to see their immanence not through or even in but as the highest transcendence. I shall not presume to try to work this out from the Muslim side. But perhaps I can give you just a hint as to what Step Three might involve for us Christians by invoking the authority of one of my tradition’s greatest spiritual masters, Saint Gregory Palamas. I have in mind a short passage from his most seminal work, a three-fold collection of treatises written “In Defense of the Holy Hesychasts” of Mount Athos and often simply referred to as The Triads. Here is what he says: The divine Maximus [the Confessor] taught that [theosis] is not only enhypostatic but also unoriginated—and not merely uncreated—as well as indescribable and supra-temporal, and that those who attain it become thereby uncreated, principial, and indescribable, even though in their own nature they come from what is not.29 The words “indescribable” (aperigrapton) and “supra-temporal” (hyperchronon) speak for themselves, while the term “enhypostatic” (enupostaton) underscores the fact that deification involves an ontological transformation: in the language of Sufism theosis is a permanent “station” (maq?m), not just a passing “state” (??l). But the most important words in this passage—and they are nothing short of astonishing—are the adjectives “unoriginated” (agen?ton) as applied to deification and “principial” (anarchos) as applied to deified human beings. They are astonishing because they appear to crack the glass ceiling which my Orthodox tradition is otherwise so careful to maintain—and which I alluded to earlier—between God’s uncreated energies on the one hand, in which deified men are permitted to share, and God’s essence on the other hand, which is said to remain forever beyond even them. What is perhaps most surprising is that of all the Fathers of the Church Gregory was himself one of the most indispensable in transmitting, and arguably the most assiduous in preserving, this classic distinction. But now look what he has gone and done! In defending the methods and exalting 29 The Triads, 3, 1, 31 (my translation); for the Greek text, see the critical edition: Grégoire Palamas: Défense des saints hésychastes, ed. Jean Meyendorff (Louvain: Spicileg
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- [Paths That Lead to the Same Summit](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/paths-that-lead-to-the-same-summit) - by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos, 2020. ISBN 978-1-908092-20-5 At the summit where all paths converge in the transcendent Unity, the seeker and the sought, appearing as subject-object also coincide and become One, as the Divine alone exists, and this is the dominating paradox of the human condition. Without seeking, the Self cannot be found, and yet
- [The Mysteries of the Letter <em>Nun</em>](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-mysteries-of-the-letter-nun) - René Guénon …the actual form of the Arabic letter nun … is made up of the lower half of a circumference and a point representing the center of this circumference. Now the lower half of a circumference is also a figure of the Ark floating on the waters, and the point at its center represents
- [Les mystères de la lettre Nûn](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/les-mysteres-de-la-lettre-nun) - par René Guénon [Publié dans les Études Traditionnelles, août-septembre 1938. Repris dans les Symboles fondamentaux de la Science sacrée, chap. XXIII.] La lettre nûn, dans l’alphabet arabe comme dans l’alphabet hébraïque, a pour rang 14 et pour valeur numérique 50 ; mais en outre, dans l’alphabet arabe, elle occupe une place plus particulièrement remarquable, car
- [The Flood in Hindu Tradition](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-flood-in-hindu-tradition) - Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Each renewed cycle of manifestation is a bringing forth on the next “day” of forms latent as potentiality in the floods of reservoir of being. In each case the seeds, ideas, or images of the future manifestation persist during the interval or inter-Time of resolution on a higher plane of existence, unaffected
- [Yogaswami: Life and Teachings of Sri Lanka’s Great Master](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/yogaswami-life-and-teachings-of-sri-lankas-great-master) - A collection of biographical vignettes and testimonials about one of the great Hindu masters of the past century, the “Lion of Lanka”, Yogaswami of Jaffna. Call not any man a sinner! That One Supreme is everywhere you look. Ever cry and pray to Him to come. Be like a child and offer up your worship.
- [Sufi Songs: Al-Iraqi (Persian)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/sufi-songs) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection The turuq or Sufi brotherhoods concentrate in their gatherings the most profound expression of Muslim piety, but far from being the exclusive treasury of an elite, they are woven into the texture of daily life in every Islamic community. They range from diversely accompanied multitudinous chants in
- [Sultan Bahu: <em>Alif Allah chambe di booti</em>](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/sultan-bahu-alif-allah) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection Sultan Bahu (d. 1691) was a Sufi poet and scholar active during Mughal times in the Punjab region. He belonged to the Qadiri order, and he founded the branch known as Sarwari Qadiri. Alif: Allah is like the jasmine plant which the master planted in my heart
- [The Library of Saint Catherine’s Monastery: intellectual treasures and spiritual perfection](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/saint-catherines-library) - Charles Méla A sacred place is a site endowed with a transcendent presence. It is a place set apart from the profane world, a place where you are commanded not to touch, and to remove your sandals from your feet. But the unique feature here, without parallel in the antique world, is the desolation of
- [Turning to the Heart to Find the Pearl of Eternity](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/turning-to-the-heart-to-find-the-pearl-of-eternity) - William Law Selected pages from the book Wholly for God: the True Christian Life. In the greatest truth, and highest reality, every stirring of the soul, every tendency of the heart towards God and goodness, is justly and necessarily ascribed to the Holy Spirit, or the grace of God. It is because this first Seed
- [Syriac Orthodox Chant: “Like the Merchants” (<em>Akh tagorye</em>)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/syrian-akh-tagorye) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection The takhshfotho (pl. of takhshefto) are melismatic, non-measured chants which span a complete octave. This particular type of takhshfotho is attributed to Bishop Rabola of Raha, who died 425 CE. Performed by Evelyne Daoud (Evlin Dawud, 1935-2002) Recorded in the town of Qamishli (North-east Syria). • Click
- [Visualization of Colors: David ben Yehudah he-Hasid’s Kabbalistic Diagram](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/visualization-of-colors-david-ben-yehudah-he-hasids-kabbalistic-diagram) - Moshe Idel Don’t pronounce the word Yisra’el until one will visualize the Divine Name, which is YHWH, with its vowels and its color, and one will visualize it as if the last letter of the Divine Name, namely H, surrounds the entire world, from above and below. Click here to view the PDF. Originally Published
- [The Qualities of the Solitary Bird](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/solitary-bird) - St John of the Cross The qualities of the solitary bird are five: The first, that it flies to the highest point; The second, that it does not suffer company, not even of its own kind; The third, that it holds its beak windward; The fourth, that it has no specific color; The fifth, that
- [Dark Night / Living Flame](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/dark-night-living-flame) - Saint John of the Cross (San Juan de la Cruz) Translated by Sister Marjorie Flower OCD Two poems by the 16th century Spanish mystic and doctor of the Church, read in English and in the original Spanish. The Dark Night of the Soul (Noche oscura del alma) Click here to download – 4:13 (4.1MB) The
- [The Eight Trigrams and Their Changes](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/hayek-trigrams-and-changes) - An Inquiry into Japanese Early Modern Divination by Matthias Hayek This kind of divination, hakke-uranai, was closely related to Onmyodo, or On’yodo, the “Way of Yin and Yang”, and thus essentially to the lore and science of calendars and popular almanacs, with applications in religious rites. The will to offer a correct(ed) knowledge to guide
- [Te Ira Atua: The Spiritual Spark of the Child](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/rameka-te-ira-atua) - Lesley Rameka From a traditional Maori perspective, not only is the child endowed with spiritual potential or a divine spirit, but the world the child is born into is also endowed with spiritual influences. Click here to view the PDF. With thanks to Dr Rameka, the University of Waikato, New Zealand, and the journal He
- [Marc Loopuyt: Art & Wisdom of the Oud — UK events 2019](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/loopuyt-events-2019) - The events described below took place as programmed and very successfully. We are very grateful to the host institutions and our co-organizers. Here are links related to Marc’s performances while in the UK. • From the Cambridge Faculty of Music Mirroring Musical Traditions project, a blog entry with some reflections on the visit and the
- [Spiritual Discipline and Psychic Power](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/cowan-spiritual-discipline) - James Cowan The Dreaming is a fragile place. For it to weave its spell again, men and women of all creeds and beliefs will need to throw off the cloak of logic and raciocination, and accept the mytho-poetry of the Dreaming as a supernatural reality. They will have to recognize also that the Aborigines have
- [Movement and Stillness in Sufi Dhikr](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/bashir-movement-stillness) - Shahzad Bashir Baha’ al-Din Naqshband indicated that dhikr was effective only when a master specifically instructed a disciple to perform it. This meant that the method of dhikr had to be conveyed through a human chain down the generations and that it had no effect, or could even be harmful, if one took it up
- [Twelve Criteria for Sacred Architecture](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/critchlow-twelve-criteria) - Keith Critchlow We take it as a first principle that we not only live in a cosmos but are ourselves a total reflection of this cosmos. After we acknowledge this reflective principle, the next step is to see the necessity of fabricating or expressing a means whereby we can appreciate the unity between ourselves and
- [Sacred Audio Collection (Home)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/sacred-audio-collection-home) - Welcome to the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection. This section of our website contains a unique selection of live recordings from the world’s major religious traditions: prayers, hymns and scriptural recitations from all corners of the world, performed as they have been for thousands of years, mostly in their original ancient languages. The selection here
- [Kinds and Uses of Dreams](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/dream-yogas-wangyal) - Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche If we make the mistake of believing that samsaric dreams are offering us true guidance, then changing our lives daily, trying to follow the dictates of dreams, can become a full-time job. It is also a way to become stuck in personal drama, believing that all our dreams are messages from a
- [Gaelic Psalm Chanting](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/gaelic-psalm-chanting) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection This kind of Gaelic congregation psalmody is technically called “free heterophony”: a precentor leads off with the first lines of a psalm, and the congregation follows, ebbing and waning. Similar liturgical forms survive, among others, in congregations of Old Time Baptists in the Appalachian Mountains, and Black
- [On Those who Think that They are Made Righteous by Works](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/marcus-eremita-righteous-by-works) - Mark The Ascetic (Marcus Eremita, ca. 5th century) He who does not understand God’s judgments walks on a ridge like a knife-edge and is easily unbalanced by every puff of wind. When praised, he exults; when criticized, he feels bitter. When he feasts, he makes a pig of himself; and when he suffers hardship, he
- [“In That Luminous Darkness”](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/in-that-luminous-darkness) - “The Poetry of Vicente Pascual Rodrigo” an article by William Wroth. Pascual’s work is clearly inspired by the great spiritual traditions in many religions : Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, American Indian and others. Immersion in these traditions and understanding of what they share in common played a necessary role in his maturation… He saw both
- [What Is a “Good Life”?](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/williams-a-good-life) - A talk by former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. One of the great fallacies that people often discuss in connection with goodness, morality, is the fallacy that when you know what to do, you can do it: ‘The key to virtue is knowledge.’ It doesn’t take very much observation to remind us that that doesn’t
- [Kebra Nagast: The Queen of Sheba and Her Son Menelik](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/kebra-nagast-queen-of-sheba) - An excerpt from the foundational scripture of the Solomonic dynasty of the emperors of Ethiopia, in the translation of Sir E.A. Wallis Budge. And after he slept there appeared unto King Solomon in a dream a brilliant sun, and it came down from heaven and shed exceedingly great splendour over Israel. And when it had
- [The Maiden of Ludmir–The Maiden Possessed](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-maiden-of-ludmir-the-maiden-possessed) - Nathaniel Deutsch They called me before the heavenly family and posed the question to me, namely, what do I want to be done with me—whether I should return to health or die. I did not think for long and shortly gave my answer: I began with a biblical verse from King David: “I will not
- [A Traditional Critique of Humanist Art](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/traditional-critique-of-humanist-art) - A Traditional Critique of Humanist Art by José Segura This essay was first published in Volume 3 (1999) of the journal, Sacred Web (www.sacredweb.com), and is reproduced here with the kind permission of Sacred Web Publishing. Logical and honest materialists are quite ready to admit that the abolition of God brings with it the abolition of art as such. What they will not admit is that such a development must inevitably lead to the abolition of man, to the transformation of man into something subhuman, into a machine, a robot. Hans Sedlmayr True aesthetics is nothing else than the science of forms and its aim must therefore be what is objective and real, not subjectivity as such. Forms, intellections: the whole of traditional art is founded on this correspondence. Frithjof Schuon Introduction In this essay we shall talk about art from the standpoint of the Perennial Philosophy, the one revitalized in the West by authors like René Guénon, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and Frithjof Schuon. To be precise, however, we must say that we are going to talk about art as understood by metaphysical principles in a society whose main artistic productions are in line with postmodernity. This means above all that, if the reader belongs to the postmodern mentality, he will simply reject any view that is anchored in the very premise that characterizes the Perennial Philosophy, which is that every activity must be founded or guided by the principles that have been established by Tradition. With Seyyed Hossein Nasr we understand that Tradition means “truths or principles of a divine origin revealed or unveiled to mankind.”1 In this sense Tradition is synonymous with Revelation. In the West the main source of Revelation is the Bible, a sacred book where we can find a statement about almost anything we need to know. The Bible, however, could be understood as the nucleus to which authors contribute on the basis of knowledge obtained by means of their Intellect. An example of such an author is Meister Eckhart whose Sermons are considered to be “an Upanishad of Europe.”2 In the Perennial Philosophy, the Intellect is the cognitive organ that allows the individual to apprehend in an immediate fashion the principles of the metaphysical plane. In contrast to the superhuman character of the Perennial Philosophy, which, on account of the central role played by the Intellect, could be called “intellectualism”, we have “humanism”, which can be defined as the natural inclination of man to rely on his mere rational faculty to obtain knowledge. Reason in Perspective The Matheson Trust Reason, then, to the extent that it is artificially divorced from the Intellect, engenders individualism and arbitrariness. Frithjof Schuon What has never been seen hitherto is a civilization built up exclusively upon a purely negative basis, upon what might be termed an absence of principle; it is precisely this absence of principle which endows the modern world with its abnormal character, turning it into a kind of monstrosity. René Guénon In order to understand the real nature of humanism, which is the basis for modernity and postmodernity, we have to observe it from the point of view of intellectualism, its nearest opposite ground, for in the human plane nothing exists in isolation or without opposition. A period in which we can see humanism clearly emerging against intellectualism is the twelfth century, when the West is considerably well established in the Christian Tradition. And we say “considerably” because, in the West, Tradition has never been free from conflicts, for the simple reason that the natural tendency of mankind is to embrace humanism. And this is so because the normal condition of man is one in which the Intellect is obscured, and that obscurity affects reason, since the latter is a reflection of the former. The obscured reason in turn causes the sensual part of man to be the leading part of the soul, a situation that brings about disorder both in the individual and in society. Despite this natural disposition of humans to disorder, twelfth century Europe could still listen to the voices of its greatest traditional leaders. Thus St. Bernard could act as an arbiter in political affairs and set forth the rules of the newly established Knights of the Temple, while Hildegard of Bingen could give advice to Pope and king alike. These are voices that arise from the universal knowledge of the Intellect or from inner visions that transcend the humanist’s delight, namely, personality. If we look at art at this particular moment in time we will notice that a work is not signed; if we glance at literature, what we will find are anonymous long poems. Yet, lurking beneath this apparent absence of human interference with the traditional status quo, reason is trying to revolt against the Intellect once more. For, if we watch closely what is happening in philosophy, we shall hear the voice of the best representative of the humanists in the heart of traditional Europe, Abelard. What is the problem with Abelard? According to St. Bernard, he “deems himself able by human reason to comprehend God altogether.”3 In a general sense he is convinced that logic is all that man needs to build a philosophical architecture or explanation of things. But, as Etienne Gilson points out: Philosophy cannot be obtained from pure logic.4 Philosophy in fact, if it is traditional in character, is never built by the human power of logical formulae; it rests rather on the assumption that it is the love of a kind of wisdom which, as Seneca declared, is “bestowed by the gods.”5 The point we are trying to make is this: If, in the midst of the twelfth century, the best epoch enjoyed by the Christian Tradition in Europe, a philosopher could take logic for a fitting tool to think about God and reality, it was not, as Gilson supposes, because medieval men “became intoxicated with the wine of formal reasoning and the abstract beauty of its laws.”6 It was rather because those who were unable to comprehend the Perennial Philosophy found in the then rediscovered Aristotelian logic the tool to express their human understanding— which is an unavoidable misunderstanding—of the traditional philosophy, the philosophy accepted by the majority in those days and therefore the target for any opposition. This argument is crucial because, if correct, points to the very core of our present situation, not only in art, but in any given topic: degeneration. Everything in modernity is the result of a long process of degeneration of the views that were upheld by those in the medieval world who understood Tradition. The following structure may be proposed for the comprehension of our present situation: generation—degeneration— regeneration. The first proceeds from the Divinity and is actually the establishment of the Primordial Tradition; the second is the inevitable situation created by the imperfect condition of mankind in any given period; and the third is the corrective response of a particular tradition to the degenerate condition brought about by those who try to understand things by their sense-based rational faculties. According to Albert Borgmann, the main founders of modernity are Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes and John Locke.7 But, since these philosophers wrote their seminal works in the seventeenth century, Borgmann does not deem it necessary to explain what exactly is the role of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the rise of modernity. A somehow more comprehensive view is given by Ken Wilber when he says that: Modernity, for historians, refers very loosely to the general period that had its roots in the Renaissance, blossomed with the Enlightenment, and continues in many ways to this day.8 For Stanley J. Grenz: The Renaissance laid the foundation for the modern mentality, but it did not erect the superstructure of modernity. The Renaissance cosmology elevated humankind to the center of the universe, but it did not establish the individual ego as the self-determining center of the world. Renaissance theorists pioneered the scientific method, but they did not reconstruct the pursuit of knowledge in accordance with the scientific vision... Perhaps we could say that the Renaissance was a grandmother of modernity, and the Enlightenment was its true mother.9 If we accept Guénon’s view, these dates are not accurate. The reason for their inaccuracy is that, for judging the birth of modernity, Guénon considers the moment in which a definitive “rupture with tradition” takes place; and that rupture for him starts in the fourteenth century, and not “one or two centuries later.”10 The rupture is characterized by “individualism”, defined by Guénon as: the denial of any principle superior to the individuality and, as a consequence, the reduction of civilization in all its departments to purely human elements; fundamentally therefore it comes to much the same thing as what was known as “humanism” at the time of the Renaissance.11 We can say now that the “rupture with tradition”, which, according to Guénon, took place in the fourteenth century and gave birth to the modern era, can be defined as a major form of degeneration. “Major” in that it severely handicaped the effectiveness of the next wave of regeneration. In the fourteenth century regeneration was undertaken by figures of the calibre of Dante and Meister Eckhart; it was a time when St. Catherine of Siena, like Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century, was able to rebuke Popes if it came to that. What we have with this kind of “rupture with tradition” which occurred in the fourteenth century, is the end of the traditional civilization in Europe. Henceforth, we can no longer speak of a society which, despite its occasional opponents, is ruled by metaphysical principles, but of the intermittent appearance of traditional authors in the midst of a secular society, just as before we would have spoken of the sporadic appearance of secular authors in the heart of a traditional society. As a consequence of this, the West has lost the sense of norm and can only offer its citizens an abnormal conception of life. The history of the West from the fifteenth century onward is the ever-growing tendency to eliminate Intelligence altogether, which is supra-individualistic, and to establish rationalism, which is individualistic, as the sole guide for the understanding of human and divine things. Rationalism, however, once established, does not remain for long as the only ruler, for—as pointed out earlier—in the human plane there is nothing capable of existing without opposition. When something assumes protagonism, it automatically enters into relationship with its opposite as well as with its counterparts on other levels. In the case of rationalism, its opposite is intellectualism (the rule of the Intellect), and its counterparts, in the West, are irrationalism (the forces of surrealism and nihilism) and antirationalism (postmodernity). The moment that rationalism takes over the leadership once enjoyed by intellectualism, it has set in motion the composition of a new moving ground for the never-ending battle of reality. This is not determinism. This is the admirable display of the “logical” articulation of the components of reality. As Heraclitus states: One must realize that war is common, and justice strife, and that all things come to be through strife and are (so) ordained.12 The protagonism of rationalism can only lead to its own overthrow, for sooner or later it will be forced to move toward its underground counterpart: the irrationalism of the so-called subconscious (Goya was already painting from the subconscious before the surrealists). The overthrow of rationalism will also come from the antirationalism of those who, like the postmoderns, deny that there can be any truth, without realizing the contradiction inherent in such an assertion; a denial of the truth does constitute another truth, its erroneous assumption notwithstanding. And finally, the protagonism of rationalism will also be forced to face its never-silenced opponent, intellectualism, the central player of the game, although for the present majority it might not appear to be so. For the individual who is guided by human reason alone, the subconscious is perceived as that sphere where things move in a chaotic fashion; the truth of the matter, however, is that everything in man has its own kind of logic. In the case of the subconscious we are dealing with a material that Intelligence uses to communicate with the soul; for the most part, this communication is received by the individual during sleep as images of a symbolical logic. Subconscious images, however, can surface at any time, since what makes them possible is the receding of reason to the background of normal human consciousness. The subconscious images depict our spiritual condition with regard to transformation, a program that is always in progress, although we may be unaware of its presence within us. When these images are not understood as messages from Intelligence, they are mainly taken as either pure nonsense or as the reflection of a sickly soul that can be cured by psychotherapy. In fact, though, the therapy that counts cannot be founded on the rational knowledge of man; real help comes indeed from a knowledge that bypasses the intervention of human reason and thereby challenges our common faculties of comprehension. The belief that something in the constitution of human beings can be intrinsically alogical is the product of a degenerate conception of man. Degeneration first arises from the humanistic logic of rationalism. Detached from Tradition, the West enters the path of fragmentation where each fragment sees itself as the whole, asserting its primacy based on its own logic which is bound to be self-contradictory. And so it is that the latest modality of rationalism, postmodernism, may appear to be a novelty to many, though in reality it is but a new face for the old individualism. Look carefully at its logic: it negates validity to the universal so that the particular may assume the right that can only belong to the universal. In practical life, this abnormality imposed on Intelligence creates a series of impasses; in the so-called human rights field, for example, the individual’s freedom of speech collides with society’s right to protect itself from all kinds of dangerous nonsense, those which derive from that very freedom society has granted to the individual. In religion, the impasse consists in giving the individual the right to interpret for himself the Bible, overlooking the fact that an individualistic interpretation is contrary to the universal view that belongs to the Divinity, the inspirer of that book. The Purpose of Art and the Artist’s Modus Operandi It is the business of art to grasp the primordial truth, to make the inaudible audible, to enunciate the primordial word, to reproduce the primordial images—or it is not art. Walter Andrae If the artist is to represent the eternal realities, he must have known them as they are. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy The specific impasse that arises from the individual’s right to create a work according to his personal understanding of the artistic creation constitutes the very end of art. For without rules that are universally accepted on the basis of metaphysical principles, the work dissolves within the private domain of each person. The problem here is that artistic individualism, or any kind of individualism for that matter, destroys itself by virtue of its own singleness. The reflection of something human on its own imperfect nature creates variations of useless narcissism. It is the universal rule that stimulates the will. It is the common principial ingredient that supplies the roots to the individual. It is indeed on account of the universal that the individual is possible. And in this, in the individual joined to the universal, the will never fails to have purpose and direction. The end of art is well illustrated in the following statement made by the British painter Roger Bacon in 1963: In my case all painting—and the older I get, the more it becomes so—is an accident. I foresee it and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. I don’t in fact know very often what the paint will do, and it does many things which are very much better than I could make it do. Perhaps one could say that it’s not an accident, because it becomes a selective process what part of the accident one chooses to preserve.13 We are witnessing here the justification of accidental “art” by an “artist” who has just confessed that he is not the maker of his own work. All Bacon can do in this conception of art is to select the best part—as it appears to him—of an accidental construction. What is the possible meaning of such a work of art? If none, what is its function? But before that: Can we see that in the face of accidental art these questions cannot be asked? That is because we are faced here with a particular case of impasse. Intelligence never appears brighter than when ignorance tries to show its best nonsensical mechanism. Ignorance has no place to run, for it is Intelligence upside down. But let us consider a very interesting variation of meaningless art before pursuing the case of Roger Bacon. Let us take Cubism, a school which, according to Herbert Ferber, “fragmented the object in creating the work of art from its parts.”14 As explained by Jorgé Romero Brest, Cubism aims at abolishing the habit of presenting images in perspective, so that painting becomes a matter of intersections of planes within a sort of anti-perspective. Painting here is an interplay of forms intent at suggesting a relative independence from their naturalistic images.15 In fact, Picasso himself conceived Cubism as “an art dealing primarily with forms,” and thought that once “a form is realized, it is there to live its own life.”16 This type of art, together with the general trend of the avant-garde around the two first decades of the twentieth century, prompted the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset to write in 1925 his well- known essay, The Dehumanization of Art, in which he states that one of the main characteristics of the art he is analysing is its total lack of transcendence.17 This would indicate that “form” in modern art, in most cases anyway, is an empty abstraction. It would probably be in order at this point to connect with Tradition in order for us to realize the degree of degeneration reached by modern art around the first three decades of the twentieth century. We may start by recalling that, as Coomaraswamy points out: The purpose of any art, and no less of that highest art of theology, in which all other arts, whether literary or plastic, subsist per excellentiam, is to teach, to delight, and above all to move.18 In fact, in India art is conceived as a “means of reintegration,”19 as “a yoga.”20 This of course is not exclusive of any country. Daisetz T. Suzuki reminds us that in Japan: Art is studied... not only for art’s sake, but for spiritual enlightenment. If art stops at art and does not lead to something deeper and more fundamental, if, that is to say, art does not become equivalent to something spiritual, the Japanese would not consider it worth learning. Art and religion are closely bound up with one another in the history of Japanese culture.21 According to Marco Pallis, in Tibet, before the arrival of the Communists, the concept of “profane literature was unknown, all books being attached to the sacred interest in some degree or other.” Pallis is convinced that this situation is applicable to any genuine traditional society, whether Eastern or Western.22 Certainly, the view that the content of art is reserved for the sacred seems to be confirmed by the Tibetan language. In effect, the very fact that the term for a sculptor, lha dzowa, means “deity-maker”23 indicates that the designers of the Tibetan language presupposed that the sole image that was there to be made by the sculptor was that of God. The same can be said of painting, since painter, lha tripa, which means “divinity scribe,” shows that such an artist was expected to deal exclusively with the graphic representation of divine things. An important issue which comes to the fore in those Tibetan linguistic examples just cited is that there is reason to believe that language must have been the creation of intellectual man, the man who is in possession of the Intellect and is therefore capable of laying down the proper structure of a given civilization. A traditional language is thus sacred because it has been made not only to express a metaphysical (or spiritual and consequently revealed) message, but also because it possesses a built-in mode of Wisdom. It is like a temple: something made not only to contain the Divinity, but at the same time a construction that is the very (symbolical) reflection of the Divinity. Thus viewed, language (which is itself a work of art) is something that has been rescued from the profane order of the rationalist and placed in the domain of the sacred, where things participate in the divine. Traditional language is divine in the measure that it mirrors the Logos or Word of God. This is crucial for our topic. For painting, or sculpture, or literature, or any activity worthy of mankind, is only—and can only be—saved from falling into the trivial or profane state in which humanism forces it to be, if it is made by Wisdom. This is in fact the modus operandi of God himself, as we can see from the Bible: “Omnia in sapientia fecisti;”24 literally: “You made everything by wisdom.” If we keep in mind that—traditionally speaking—the maker is an artist and that the maker of anything whatsoever is expected to operate in accord with the basic postulate of Wisdom, we will see why for Tradition, as Coomaraswamy so well put it, “the artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist.”25 The first postulate of the traditional modus operandi of any maker is, then, that whatever the artist makes is to be made by Wisdom. Now in the traditional system the Wisdom needed for any making can be obtained by two legitimate ways. The first is by means of the Intellect, in which case the maker (the “artist”) apprehends that Wisdom directly, so that it coincides with the existing revealed material that constitutes the doctrinal basis for the society in which he lives—and it will so coincide because this Wisdom is purely universal. The second way is by means of what we can call Understanding, the cognitive organ that allows the individual to apprehend the reflected state of Wisdom in the visible plane of Reality. This type of Wisdom is universal in a very specialized way, because it is constituted by the universal within the particular. What makes it difficult, although not impossible, for someone to totally agree with the material that someone else obtained by equally applying his Understanding to the same subject (material that we shall call here “the understandable”) is the fact that the understander himself belongs to the realm of the particular, and this condition stains the degree of purity with which he apprehends the universal component of any object. For this reason “the understandable” captured by the understander is subject to corrections that can be made by another person who has developed a higher degree of Understanding. Perfection here can never be attained, since, metaphysically speaking, perfection belongs to the state called telos (end), and telos is already present in the state known as arche (beginning). At this juncture we should point out that the metaphysical plane is that which allows something to be by itself, that is, without the constrains of any kind of opponent, since opposition here exists in a state of conjunction, one that is usually referred to as coniunctio oppositorum. We can say that “the understandable” is captured by the Understanding and converted into a work of art. For the viewer to be able to apprehend the “understandable” material, he has to consider the work as an artistic object that shelters an “understood” reflected principle, just as its creator considered the original natural object as the bearer of the reflected state of the universal. In the traditional system the “understandable” in the work is what the universal is in the physical object: the invisible component of the visible. For, in the physical plane, the visible is what enables the manifestation of a metaphysical principle. But the way this manifestation crystallizes is in itself a wonder: it hides in the visible by a natural disposition. This is why Heraclitus can say that: “????? ?????????? ?????;”26 literally: “the principle [of things] loves to hide.” It is for man to love to uncover it. In this context a traditional work of art cannot fail to be the vehicle of an intellectual or understandable universal. If we now go back to a modern work of art, such as that of Cubism, we can see that we are justified in judging it as a meaningless work, and as such it is merely a profane object, possible only in a society that has lost all sense of the real function of art. The View from the Humanist Perspective: the Phenomenon as Reality Appearance [phenomenon] leads us astray. Plato ????? ?????????? ?????: (no appearance [phenomenon] is good). St. Ignatius Let us now see if we can approach our subject from the standpoint of the humanist, because his misunderstanding of things will help us to comprehend the traditional mode of viewing reality. For modern man, Cubism (to stay with our example) is a perfectly logical stage of the development of art. The modern artist sees himself as a legitimate heir of the past. He cannot suspect for a moment that, if we regard the Middle Ages as a period in which Europe embraced Tradition in its Christian version (one which includes, among others, Greco-Roman ingredients), what he takes as a logical development is merely a degeneration. What complicates matters is that the latest version of humanism, namely postmodernity, has created an individual whose mentality is incapable of distinguishing the tenets of modernity, which he rejects, from the doctrine of Perennial Philosophy. The basic claim of postmodernity is that modernity was based on the Cartesian, Newtonian, rational and mechanistic paradigm of reality, one which in addition accepted authority and the universal character of truth. The case against modernity is made on the grounds that the individual believes that you have the self or the subject, on the one hand, and the empirical or sensory world, on the other, and all valid knowledge consists in making maps of the empirical world, the single and simple “pregiven” world. And if the map is accurate, if it correctly represents, or corresponds with, the empirical world, then that is “truth.”27 From this description, which is mainly correct, we can easily see that both the conception of reality held by modernity and its epistemology are materialistic and rationalistic. Such a view, however, has nothing to do with the traditional philosophy, the basic premise of which is that the visible world has meaning only when considered as a reflection of its metaphysical model, the only one that is real. The so-called empirical world of the humanist, by itself, is just a “phenomenon,” a word which in the sacred language means “appearance,” that is to say, something which is devoid of that which confers a certain degree of reality on things. It is extremely important that this point be clear in the mind of the reader, for the concept of “phenomenon” is the basis for understanding the difference between the humanist and the traditionalist Weltanschauung. Let us then dwell on this. When a humanist looks at a thing, what he sees is something physical; for the traditionalist, that same thing is the hidden manifestation of a principle. Based on this, we can say that what the humanist does is to disembowel a thing, to take out the bowels or essential component from a thing, thus rendering it an empty, useless, shell. As such, the thing is now a phantom: it exists in appearance; it is indeed an appearance. But an appearance is that which exists without a substance, that is, without having in itself the very element that functions as the foundation on which its existence is possible. This is an impossible state. This is exactly the state of a phenomenon; the existence that consists in appearing to be while in fact there is no platform on which to stand. The truth is that in actuality there are no such things as phenomena; it is man who creates them as a result of his degenerate condition. It is precisely as phenomena that things can be the subject of physical measurement and analysis; it is actually because things are taken as phenomena that modern science is possible. When a human being is taken as a phenomenon, then we have the chaos that nobody likes and everybody helps to sustain. If we want to understand the productions of the humanist, we must keep in mind his natural tendency to look at reality as a phenomenon. To be sure, scientists will build a theoretical model of phenomenal reality; but we have to realize that this model has been drawn from the partial study of a totality that can never be embraced by physical instruments, natural or artificial. Any attempt to obtain a total view of the physical plane leads inevitably to the realm of the metaphysical, for the total belongs to the universal, just as the partial pertains to the particular. For his part, the modern or secular painter will create his work in such a way that it will be more and more in accord with the modern scientific mind, one which sees reality as a phenomenon or a conglomerate of phenomena. It matters little that the phenomenon be depicted in a photographic, a fuzzy, or geometric way; what counts for our analysis is that all of these treat the object as something detached from its metaphysical life-giving support system. Thus, naturalism will emphasize the sensuality of bodies; impressionism will focus on the transitoriness of its subject; and the so-called metaphysical painting will stress the psychological aspect of reality through desolation, the enigmatic and the like, as illustrated by De Chirico’s work. With the latter the viewer is easily brought to believe that he is before the “metaphysical” themes of timeless mankind, yet the fact is that De Chirico’s paintings are the product of the rational observation of an unbalanced soul. In the traditional anthropology the soul is that middle ground between the Spirit and the body; its destiny, as set forth by the revealed message, being voluntary death, not the damaging display of its pitiful disharmonies. That a school of painting whose theme is psychological should have been labeled “metaphysical” is a clear example of the gross misuse of language, something that fits very well the state of confusion created by modernity and to which postmodernity, its fierce enemy, is adding its share of misunderstandings. But let us see now some of the ways in which these two contemporary players (modernity and postmodernity) differ. Nigel Watson tells us that: The modernist architects—like modernist writers and painters in their respective fields— rejected all previous forms and insisted that both traditional and classical forms of architecture should be replaced by buildings based upon rational and universal principles. In practice this meant an emphasis on plain functional design usually in concrete and glass. The building was decontextualized and universalized. Watson goes on to say that, by contrast, postmodern architecture proposes that the new building should fit in its designated surroundings and include a variety of styles in “an ironic and eclectic way,” taking care at the same time to give equal value to the popular and elite components of the whole.28 For Huston Smith modernity is based on three chief presuppositions. The first, which is actually one of doubtful certainty, is that “reality may be personal;” the second is that reality is “ordered;” and the third is that reason is an adequate instrument for recognizing this order in nature’s laws. Against this background, Smith defines the “Postmodern Mind” as “one which, having lost the conviction that reality is personal, has come to question whether it is ordered in a way that man’s reason can lay bare.”29 This of course is too brief and broad a platform, and insufficient to account for the nature of all the phases that modern and postmodern conceptions of art have gone through during the past six hundred years; but it does give a general ideological backdrop which is useful for contrasting humanist art with traditional art. What is certain, though, is that from Leonardo to Picasso the loss of the sapiential content of the work is an ever-increasing fact, although we must allow room for intermittent exceptions, as the case of Blake, for instance, shows. No doubt a glance at art after 1945 is sufficient to conclude that artists follow their own inclination to produce endless variations of their desire to reach for the extraordinary. But it is the extraordinariness of the ego, which cannot escape the ordinary: the self-expression of the particular. Hence, in his quest for uniqueness, the artist turns to the common longing of the average individual: self-gratification, which is the very opposite of what people want from anybody and has nothing to do with genuine art. We should not be surprised at this. For by now we should have realized that, unlike natural things, the aspiration for human uniqueness is a real phenomenon; it is indeed an illusion that vanishes as one insists on its fulfillment. “The art of our times,” writes Edward Lucie-Smith, “has been more notable for taking existing ideas to extremes than for new inventions.”30 The novelty of any humanist art is a dream, for, whether its mode of representation is naturalistic or abstract, its subject is an imitation of a visual or rational rendering of phenomena. The ego-inflated personality of Michelangelo could only produce the gigantic conceptions that so well reflected the human craving for earthly glory. Likewise the robotization of our present society conditions its best artists to produce machine-like interpretations of reality, best seen in the conceptualized visions of the computer. We are in love with objects. Therefore we become objects; replaceable, disposable, pieces of plastic which have their market. The artist who may be able to doubt his own importance in a society where everybody feels so unique now has this choice: “[to sink himself] in technology; to imitate the procedures of science, and conduct experiments rather than make works of art.”31 The most ironic situation arises when the artist thinks that by denouncing the evils of society through a critical representation of them he is helping that society. Obviously he does not realize that a work which represents any negative part of reality, no matter how critical its intention may be, cannot avoid being some part of that same reality, unless the representation contains within itself its opposite. Poison can be used to cure its own effects only in so far as we know how to use it. To illustrate this we can remember that Cervantes wrote his Don Quixote to attack the distorted versions of the romances of chivalry that prevailed in his days. Yet he wrote his critique in such a masterful traditional manner that we are still today trying to uncover the perfect antidote that he included in it. It is a matter of Intelligence. Ignorance can be employed to counteract ignorance if the operation is conducted by Wisdom. Art, literature, or music has no value whatsoever if its productions originate from a disordered mind within a materialistic society. The dangerous situation created by postmodernism is easily missed, for it is highly subtle. We are living in a society where people are satisfied with things they presume can be known without first securing understanding. This is indeed a society of knowers; books are there to prove it; institutions are there to authenticate it. We have confused knowledge with information. Information is that knowledge which needs no understanding. It is prefabricated, a ready- made mass of data. In the epistemological field of reality information is indeed the phenomenon that replaces genuine knowledge—with this particularity: that the possessor of phenomenal knowledge has no means of becoming aware of its fraudulent nature. The postmodern is convinced that he has labored to obtain his knowledge, unaware that all he ever did was to react against modernity, gathering afterwards the broken pieces that issued from their collision. Thus we can say that the phenomenal knowledge of postmodern man emerges from the only position which is possible for a humanist: that of reacting to something which was pre-existing. This is actually the human predicament of any period in history. Man cannot generate knowledge; strictly speaking, generation (in the sense of creation) is the prerogative solely of God. Man-without-God (fallen man) causes something to degenerate by way of reaction, for he cannot act. And his primordial reaction is directed toward the primordial action in place: Revelation and any of its supplementary sources. Active knowledge (Wisdom, Gnosis or Revelation), being something created ex nihilo, that is, something which is not the product of a reaction to a previous body of knowledge in the physical plane, is in fact timeless, changeless, and not susceptible of being reacted against. Active knowledge is thus principial, related to the “first principles” of Tradition; furthermore, it is archaic in all its possible meanings: ancient, primordial, related to the arche (principle, beginning, fountain of authority, ultimate foundation). This is a knowledge apprehended by the Intellect, the cognitive organ required by the operations of Intelligence. It is a knowledge which cannot be contradicted because it is founded on that totality which allows none of its constituents to be effective by itself. Intelligence can only be contradicted in appearance by that Ignorance which exists as absence of Wisdom. This is in fact the anatomy of humanistic knowledge; it is made of the absence of that Wisdom which is not missed because the humanist is lacking the organ to perceive the abnormality of his epistemology. Modern art is the reaction to traditional art. Postmodern art, while being the reaction to modernist positions, does not coincide with the traditional ones for the simple reason that postmodernism is still a humanistic product. From the standpoint of Tradition, postmodernism in general is a convoluted, self-twisted system of ideas, since it is at least a twice-reactive position. This does not preclude postmoderns from stating a number of observations of invaluable merit. But the merit of the observations might very well reside in that they are corrections of a previous mistake made by modernity. Such a correction might still, on the one hand, be within the realm of the incorrect from the traditional point of view. A posmodernist correction, on the other hand, might be truly valid in the measure that it coincides with truth, in which case the correction is not postmodernist at all. If it is a case of true statement, then the matter is ipso facto within the boundaries of intellectualism. This is an example of how intellectualism is present in the game as an invisible opponent. We find an illustration of this in the scientific field of inquiry. Here, modernist science, whose immediate object was the measurement and analysis of phenomenal reality, thought that reason had found an unshakable explanation of the world. Postmodern science corrected that modernist position from the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1925 Alfred North Whitehead concluded that, on the basis of the discontinuous existence of the electron, “we have to revise all our notions of the ultimate character of material existence.”32 Thus we can see that it is in the spirit of freedom from the limitations of rational thinking that postmodernism proves to be an improvement over the old modernist stance. Yet the improvement is the result of a quarrel among relatives; it is still reason arguing with yet another type of reason. Science, whether modern or postmodern, has not ceased to be secular. Reason and its avowed enemies are yet to discover and recognize Intelligence.33 Is there any sign that this will soon change? The reason why postmodernism will not change its essential configuration is because it views change and variety as a friendly novelty. Given this viewpoint, change cannot become the instrument of stabilization. This would be a blatant contradiction. But contradicting elements in a distinct antirational system poses no problem to the antirationalist. If this were not so, then the history of mankind would have no degeneration periods. Of course in the rational camp things are no better, for, as Ortega has pointed out, reason does not function in mankind as perfectly as we would like to think34—a problem that was very well known by Aristotle, who declared that by means of our “????? ? ????“(“the mind of our soul”) we are unable to look directly at those things that manifest themselves most clearly.35 The Sufis make reference to this issue when they warn that, just as the eyes cannot look at the sun, reason is unable to gaze at absolute Reality.36 Basically, humanism has two methodologies: rationalism and antirationalism, irrationalism being the extreme attitude of the latter; each one of these is unconsciously opposed to intellectualism and purposely against the other two. We say “unconsciously” because intellectualism does not exist as such for the three contenders; it is actually considered as nonsense by rationalism, antirationalism and irrationalism, since it cannot be comprehended by mere human reason or even by the normal intuition of the best irrationalism. Intellectualism can only be “understood,” and for that operation we need the Understanding. The true state of affairs is that the very nature of mere human reason is such that it encompasses what the humanist perceives as being its opposite. The antirationalism of the postmoderns is no less rational than the rationalism of the moderns. A humanist can delude himself by thinking he is outside the field of rationalism just because he disagrees with a large number of its issues. He does not see that his real opposite would be the position he is unfit to comprehend. That is exactly what happens when any type of humanist meets the traditional doctrine. In the field of art when the surrealist, for example, thinks that by portraying what he takes for absurd imagery of the subconscious he has distanced himself altogether from the rational, he is under his own delusions. For, as we mentioned before, the subconscious images may be incomprehensible for the humanist; in reality, however, they are moved by a logic that is no less comprehensible than that which rules the conscious level of the mind. The irrationalist rejects the rational position because of the latter’s failure to deliver a continuously convincing explanation of things; while the rationalist repudiates any view of reality which he finds difficult to comprehend by the limitations he himself sets on the rational sphere. Thus the two contenders (although the two can be three) are engaged in a game that shows the shortcomings of each as they enter the interplay of the two faces that reason is forced to assume in the field of duality, one that exists for fallen mankind alone. Behind the scene Intelligence smiles, for she knows that the game, being endless, can only be the product of man’s incapacity to view the structure of reality through helpless lens of reason. “Helpless” because reason cannot accept the very explanation that would solve its impasse. Any traditional explanation given to the humanist regarding the correct vision of things will not survive without being misunderstood. A great deal of the teachings of the Bible is dedicated to the correction of the individual who, having entered the path of transformation, is entangled in his incapacity to understand his misunderstood vision of spiritual things. This is to emphasize that, like any topic of the Perennial Philosophy, the traditional doctrine of art, and the critique of humanistic art that emerges from it, are inextricably connected with things which a humanist would not include, were he to give his interpretation of that same theory. The View from Tradition: a Reality for each Mode of Cognition The thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower. St. Thomas Aquinas To be a traditional artist is to operate in conformity with the divine model. But before he can do that, he first must have a sound grasp of reality, something that is possible by steps. First he lets Tradition be his guide through the labyrinth that the humanist has created; for this he needs faith. Then he concentrates on the basic task of learning how to apprehend things in such a way as to escape the phenomenal vision of the humanist he himself used to be; for this he will need Understanding. In Tradition, faith is not belief, if for belief we understand an inclination to accept something on the basis of its seemingly commonsensical content. Faith is a modicum of logic, taking that term here as that which participates in the Truth of the Logos, the fountainhead of metaphysical reality and thus the very support of physical things. Logic is not then what causes something to be humanly rational, but intellectually rational. In this sense, for the individual who is exercising faith, a modicum of logic is composed of reason that is illuminated by the intellectual nature of the traditional doctrine. Hence faith implies knowledge. Which is why faith must be something granted from above, or built in, the very degree of Being that exists in correlation with Goodness within a given individual. From the standpoint of faith, Beauty manifests itself already as the splendor of Truth, although only in a minor way. As far as the creative purpose of the traditional artist is concerned, archetypal Beauty is a principle and, as such, it is apprehensible only by the Intellect. But since at this point the artist is lacking that cognitive organ, he has to rely for the time being on his eye of faith. The exercise of faith produces the Understanding, which increases the logic in the cognitive faculty of the individual engaged in the development of undeterminate, unlimited Intelligence. The artist at this level looks at things logically, intent on unveiling the principle that underlies the physical aspect of what is. This means that, if you are an understander, when you look at things you do not first see a physical object; you see the particular way a metaphysical principle has found for its best adaptation to the physical aspect of reality. In other words, you base your apprehension on the essential fact that reality is physical and metaphysical, and then you can see that the reality that counts is that which comes through the physical to the foreground. This mode of cognition makes it possible for you to detect whatever you see as a hierophany: a manifestation of the sacred. You have thus entered the sacred dimension of Nature. Are you a painter by vocation? Then you will endeavor to paint what the eye of your own Understanding is capable of apprehending from the world as a hierophany. Are you a sculptor, an architect, a musician, a poet? Then, like the painter, you will do your best to translate the “understandable” (that which your Understanding has captured from the hierophanic aspect of physical reality) into a logical construction that is going to be, not an addition to the existing chaos produced by the humanist (modernist, postmodernist or otherwise), but an ordered object in tune with Wisdom and apt to create order in those who contemplate it. It is in this sense that the traditional artist is an imitator of the Divine Artist: a creator whose creation is—and can only be—a ?????? (cosmos), a unit so perfectly in harmony with Wisdom as to present itself as an ordered, beautiful enclosure, autarkic (autos-arkes, that which has in itself the power to assist itself), self-sufficient, since it is built on and by that which is the real foundation: the principle or arche. If we have accepted Nature as the reflected state of the principle, we no longer see the physical as a phenomenon, something devoid of its underlying metaphysical core. Furthermore, and for that very reason, as artists, we cannot take the phenomenon as a model to create our work either. The model has now become the reflected principle, the one that points to the actual metaphysical principle which resides in the divine plane. It is there that the Logos has its dwelling, and there that it found the models to create its Great Work of Art: the Cosmos, we ourselves included. We are just that: God’s handiwork. Which is why we all are (potential) “artists” now and can be real ones once we actualize our potentiality. To the extent that the traditional artist at the level of Understanding has employed the reflected principle for his work, we can say that he has followed the correct procedure. That procedure has been expressed by St. Thomas Aquinas in this general formula: “Artifex autem per verbum in intellectu conceptum et per amorem suae voluntatis ad aliquid relatum operatur.”37 Literally: “Now an artist operates through the Word he has conceived in [and by] his Intellect and through the Love that his Will has directed to something.” We have capitalized those words that are actually technical terms in the Christian traditional theory of art. Thus Word must be taken as Verbum understood as the Latin rendering of Logos, the Son, the very stuff and instrument used by God the Father in his capacity as Artist to create his work of art. Note how the logical nature of the operation is meant to coincide in God and man. This is the Logos that can only be conceived in and by the Intellect, the organ fit to apprehend and comprehend the things of the metaphysical order. We have introduced here the faculty of Understanding because it is by this cognitive organ that we believe the majority of well-known traditional works of art and literature were produced. There are indeed very few works done by means of the Intellect. The general formula of St. Thomas is valid for both, since the Understanding can be considered as a lesser mode of intellectual apprehension and comprehension. To be sure the capturing of the reflected principle presupposes a modicum of Intelligence. At any rate, art, unless it is a mechanical copy of a phenomenon, is, in the words of Aristotle: “???? ??? ???? ????? ??????? ????????;”38 literally: “a[n acquired] capacity for making something by means of true reason”—reason [logos] here being the term that corresponds to Intelligence in any of its various differentiated states. Hence to make something “by means of true reason” is to produce an “understandable” work of art or literature (Shakespeare’s love poems, for example) or an intellectual work (such as that of Dante, for instance). Let us now assume that the traditional artist has conceived a particular Word (that is to say, has apprehended a specific reflected principle) from the hierophanic aspect of physical reality. We know that that operation has been accomplished by the Understanding. We have to add now the roles that Love and Will play in the artistic activity. For we cannot overlook the fact that, as suggested by St. Thomas, the operation of the Intellect (or of the Understanding) is prompted by its Will to know the principles in order to Love them properly. Creation is an act of Love emerging from its seat, the Will; but that Love is directed toward the knowledge of what can only be the desired object of the Intellect, the Principles. Now in the case of God, His Love creates, motivated by a willingness to give knowledge to His creatures; in the case of man, he creates because he loves to gain knowledge from God’s creatures. If we now go back once again to the pure humanist conception of art, as illustrated by the British painter Roger Bacon, we should see more clearly this time why his paintings are the result of degeneration. For, if you remember, Bacon was not even in control of the outcome of his own work. He started with one project only to end up with a chance product. He was lacking the Will to Love his subject, for he was not painting what he had to know: a principle hidden in something viewed as a creature (the name for God’s work of art). Bacon’s is an empty aesthetic object destined to decorate the wall of a room; an object that will be admired by people who dare not criticize what so-called “experts” praise so much without understanding it, since, in actuality, there is nothing to be understood, no logical content to be loved, no hidden principle to uncover; just the personal sensorial and/or rational response provoked by aesthetic phenomena. Of course, there is the history of painting; the complicated explanation of a permanent search for new forms; the linkage with the past in order to destroy any trace of regard for the old or create a novel appreciation for the timeless. These are the phantom explanations of humanistic “aesthetics,” a term that accurately defines the main factor governing the modernist and postmodernist conceptions of a work of art, namely, sensation (????????, aisthesis, the faculty of perception proper to the senses). That, technically speaking, aesthetics is meant to signify “philosophy of art” does not change the fact that it is based on a materialistic, rationalistic and antirationalistic understanding of art. It is by reason subjected to the senses that we see phenomena which are pleasant or unpleasant to the ego; things here are for the sensual gratification of the materialized Soul. It is by Traditional Understanding that we can “understand” things as reflected principles; things are here for helping in the dematerializing of the Soul. It is by the Intellect that the elect apprehend the very principle in itself; Intellection taking place now for the life required by the Spirit. Rational man cannot avoid being a sensually-oriented individual, for, without the guidance of the Intellect or Tradition, reason turns its attention down to the sensual aspect of life. Thus, it is in its attempt to break with naturalistic painting that Impressionism claims victory over the past by representing the transitoriness of nature in a most sensorial way. It is by a deep desire to provide a new vision of reality that some painters today resort to the sharp lines of geometrical figures in combination with objects; while doing so, however, they are giving you the graphic version of a reality that any computer is able to produce. You are being asked to conform your mode of looking at things to the way a machine processes data through circuits; you are being robotized. Look at an icon now, any one in which the theotokos is holding her conception: You are invited to contemplate how the fruit of the Virgin Soul would look at you if you were the person who had experienced the highest goal of mankind; you are being asked to witness how an authentic human is being divinized. ________ 1 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred (State U of New York P, Albany, 1989) p68. 2 Coomaraswamy, The Transformation of Nature in Art (Dover, New York, 1956) p61. 3 St. Bernard quoted in Charles Homer Haskins’, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Harvard UP, Cambridge, 1971) p258. 4 Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience (Scribner, New York, 1937) p29. 5 Seneca, Letters from a Stoic (Penguin, Middlesex, 1969) p162. 6 Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience, op. cit. p31. 7 Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide (U of Chicago P, Chicago, 1992) p22. 8 Ken Wilber, The Marriage of Sense and Soul (Random House, New York, 1998) p41. 9 Stanley J. Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 1996) p60. 10 René Guénon, Crisis of the Modern World (Luzac, London, 1975) p56. 11 René Guénon, ibid. p51. 12 Heraclitus, Fragments: A Text and Translation with a Commentary (U of Toronto P, Toronto, 1991) p49. 13 Francis Bacon in Herschel B. Chipp’s Theories of Modern Art (U of California P, Los Angeles, 1968) p621 14 Herbert Feber in Herschel B. Chipp’s Theories of Modern Art, ibid. p554. 15 Jorgé Romero Brest, Que es el cubismo (Columba, Buenos Aires, 1961) pp13-17. 16 Picasso in Herbert Read’s A Concise History of Modern Painting (Praeger, New York, 1974) p78. 17 José Ortega y Gasset, La deshumanizacion del arte (Revista de Occidente, Madrid, 1970) p27. 18 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Selected Papers:2 Metaphysics (Princeton UP, Princeton,1977) p37. 19 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Selected Papers:1 Traditional Art and Symbolism (Princeton UP, Princeton, 1977) p145. 20 Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By (Bantam, New York, 1972) p109. 21 Daisetz T. Suzuki, “Foreword” in Gustie L. Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Flower Arrangement (Routledge and Kegan, London, 1960) ppxiii-xiv. 22 Marco Pallis, “Living One’s Karma” in Jacob Needelman’s The Sword of Gnosis (Penguin, Baltimore, 1974) p270. 23 Glenn H. Mullin and Andy Weber, The Mystical Arts of Tibet (Longstreet P, Atlanta, 1996) p59. 24 Ps. 103:24. 25 Coomaraswamy, The Transformation of Nature in Art, op. cit. p64. 26 Heraclitus, “The Fragments,” in Charles H. Kahn’s The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 1981) p32. 27 Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything (Shambhala, Boston, 1996) p59. 28 Nigel Watson, “Postmodernism and Lifestyles (or :You are What you Buy” in Stuart Sim’s Postmodern Thought (Icon Books, Cambridge, 1998) p61. 29 Huston Smith, Beyond the Post-modern Mind (Theosophical Publishing House, Wheaton, 1989) p6-7. 30 Edward Lucie-Smith, Movements in Art since 1945 (Thames and Hudson, New York, 1985) p8. 31 ibid. 32 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Free Press: New York, 1967) p35. 33 Someone could object that science concerns itself with the material world, not with the metaphysical realm, and that, consequently, the present|quarrel is not called for. But the fact is that that is not the case. The scientific view of the material world is either applied to the understanding of the metaphysical reality (scientism) or is the only one possible on account of the validity blindly granted to scientific knowledge (materialism). There is nothing wrong with science if it stays where its place is: the rational or antirational consideration of the phenomena created by the humanist. 34 Jose Ortega y Gasset, La idea de principio en Leibniz.- II (Revista de Occidente, Madrid, 1967) p179. 35 Aristotle, Metaphysics I-X (Harvard UP, London, 1989) p84. 36 Toshihiko Izutsu, Creation and the Timeless Order of Things. Essays in Islamic Mystical Philosophy (White Cloud P, Ashland, 1994) p9. 37 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologicae I a, 45, 6. 38 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics (Harvard UP, London, 1990) p334.
- [The Well Amid the Waste](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-well-amid-the-waste) - The Well Amid the Waste by Alvin Moore One Moment in Annihilation’s Waste One Moment of the Well of Life to taste— The Stars are setting and the Caravan Starts for the Dawn of Nothing—Oh, make haste! In the following remarks we speak from both the Christian and universalist perspective: from the Christian because our own affiliation and praxis are those of the oldest branch of the Christian tradition. And we speak from a universalist perspective, because, as Eric Hansen very perceptively remarked: if one is true, then all orthodox revelations and traditions must be true. It is inconceivable that the Most Merciful would withhold from the greater portion of mankind that knowledge of himself and his ways which is necessary to salvation. And metaphysically, it is not in the nature of things that the Message of Heaven and its will to save should be reflected in only a single form, a single body of belief; knowledge is in the knower according to the mode of the knower. Omnia veritas quocumque dictur, est a Spiritu Spiritu. What is Prayer? What is prayer? Popular definitions, like those of the better dictionaries, though obviously not without merit, nevertheless stop short at the outer perimeters and leave by far the greater part unsaid. If one consults standard reference works one may find even less satisfaction; instead, one may find authors handling material with which they are unfamiliar, frequently unsympathetic and occasionally even hostile. Fortunately printed (Rubáiyát, Omar Khayyám Fitzgerald’s first version) works are not our only resource for knowledge of the subject; there is a kind of a priori tropism in man 1 that often disposes one to pray. One is “in trouble, sorrow, need, or sickness” or some other adversity and, acutely aware of his helplessness, he cries out for aid, “a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core...” Averring a counter view, the Victorian poet William Ernest Henly wrote: In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud... the menace of the years finds and shall find me unafraid. Whatever Henly’s self-understanding, objectively he was a poseur. If we are mature and honest we know there are rather near limits to our intelligence, our strength, our endurance, our human worth, and that defiance and self-assertion are themselves based on a strength that ultimately is not our own. When poses fail, as fail they must, we cast about for something greater than ourselves, our own powers and talents. This “something” is nearer than we may think. Said Aristotle: There is a life which is higher than the merely human; man will not live it insofar as he is man but insofar as he has within himself something Divine; and inasmuch as this Divine part excels the composite, so much does its energy surpass the energy of every other virtue... so far as possible we should immortalize ourselves... and live according to our most excellent part. 2 This something is, in the near term, a God-given life in and orientation of the soul; it is a life that is impossible apart from prayer, but which can be brought to birth and even to perfection through genuine prayer with all this implies. For prayer is conatural to man, a function of his essential nature; and, especially in its higher forms, it is his noblest activity. Without prayer man becomes delusional, for a living and conscious link to That which is above him, to That on which he is entirely dependent, is essential to spiritual, psychological, and even physical health. Formed and deformed by modern life, man is engaged in an accelerating flight from the Center of his being. This centrifugal movement has its roots in the cosmogonic process itself, so it is certainly not something easily overcome; but our task as men is precisely to undo this flight into ever greater exile. This complete other-directedness involves a denial of 1. 2. 26 It should not need mentioning that man, men, he and his in this paper refer not to gender but to the human race. According to the Manusmriti (ix,45), man is not the man alone; he is man, woman, and progeny. Come l’uomo s’eterna?, asked Dante. the ultimate Subject; moreover, this denial builds upon itself from which comes an increasing imbalance and instability in man’s very substance and by consequence in all human works and activities. Nevertheless, in spite of the difficulties, in spite of the inertia of man’s present state, it is man’s duty qua man to look within, to know himself, to dominate himself (for “there are two in man”, duo sunt in homine), to “go back the way you came”; for “the Kingdom of God is within you”. All this is to say that man’s essential nature is not “out there” somewhere; not in craniometry, in measurements of footprints and skeletal remains, not in cultural or even linguistic anthropology, not in conventional or even depth psychology, but in a transcendent nature that “has nothing to do with time”. In ordinary life man is an alienated creature, almost wholly exteriorized. Even so, from time to time in calmer souls something makes itself vaguely known; makes us aware of a need to rein in our faculties, restrain frenetic activity, redress the balance between an interior we fear or shun—if only from boredom—and our habitual extroversion, the paucity and intrinsic deficiency of which are only too well known. This small hint of our essential nature is both an opening and an invitation to something greater than one’s empirical self. It is akin to a second factor in human life that disposes men to pray: namely, a modest contentment which descends when things go well with us—well, but not too well. At such times we may be gently moved to gratitude. We are not inebriated by good fortune which we know may go more swiftly than it comes; and we have an inkling that gratitude keeps open the channels of blessing. We want to preserve such conditions, knowing that the better part of our nature is our intelligence and that the mind, the vehicle for this intelligence, functions better when we are reasonably content. The relatively few who find motives for prayer in such conditions are truly blessed. No longer prey to that familiar “chaos of thought and passion all confused”, they behold the early glimmerings of man’s true estate; and some of them, blessed with insight, seize opportunity thus presented. Still less numerous are those whose native constitution, the balance of their psychic components and faculties, their intelligence and spiritual dispositions, dispose to an ongoing contemplative effort. There are still such souls, Deo gratias, even in these last times; not only in monasteries and among the clergy, but in the work-a-day world, especially among those who gravitate to independent or solitary occupations. But we also know there are souls with such inclinations who work in circumstances seemingly inappropriate to such noble pursuits, and we mention them to show that one must not await perfect and inviting circumstances to enter the Way. One can, for example, practice the Jesus Prayer, the Sufi remembrance (dhikr), or the Buddhist nembutsu in surroundings that might seem quite unfavourable to a spiritual life. Potentially, interior quality dominates exterior circumstance, and the longer and more intense one’s interior struggle the greater the supremacy of that which is within over that which is without. Kinds of Prayer We do not suggest that these three groupings are exhaustive; but they may help in one’s orientation and can serve to illustrate three principal kinds of prayer: personal, canonical, and invocatory, a ternary enunciated by Frithjof Schuon which, though admitting some modification, is nevertheless the most comprehensive schema known to us. In personal prayer man enters into his true vocation as interlocutor with God, for to this man is called and this constitutes a central element in human dignity. Man must tell God of his hopes, his fears, his needs; and he must seek God’s favours for others. At the same time he must avoid thinking of God as a mere provider; it was Eckhart who said that some people love God as one might love a cow—for the good things she gives. God is not there merely for our convenience; He does not need us, but no poor man is more desperately in need than we are of Him. It is entirely legitimate to ask for favours and help, and especially guidance, understanding and virtue. Modern education, however, is largely inimical to prayer. So what should one actually say in prayer? How and when to pray? The Psalms provide good beginnings, for several reasons. For Jews and Christians they are inspired prayers that cover the spectrum of human needs and concerns, both positive and negative. Positive, for man also must worship the Divine, express his gratitude, and emulate Heavengiven role models. But the Psalms also bridge the gap between personal and canonical prayer. Unmatched as expressions of individual needs, they also form part of the body of canonical prayer for Judaism as also for most Christian denominations, especially for Catholics and Orthodox. Schuon observed that in personal prayer we approach God as individuals with all our private concerns. In canonical prayer, however, we approach God in the name of all humanity, voicing those recurring interests that are shared by all men simply because we are men. Both these attitudes are intrinsic to the Psalms. We should note also that canonical prayer and community prayer, though not entirely identical, nevertheless mightily converge. The words and formulae of canonical prayer are often of great beauty and gravitas, invested as they are with centuries of human aspiration and will to the good. One need think only of the Schema, the Lord’s Prayer, or the Ta’awwudh and Basmalah. There is a category of man’s yearning for the Real which falls within the range of both personal and canonical prayer, and this is meditation. Frithjof Schuon has written luminously both on prayer and meditation and we recommend his Station of Wisdom, especially chapter 5, “Modes of Prayer” (to which we are indebted), to anyone interested in this arduous but noblest activity which is prayer. Meditation is the means whereby man can rise above himself and his individual biases to examine and contemplate truths—and Truth—with an unwonted degree of objectivity. Enjoined by all traditions as indispensable for the inward journey, it is discipline whereby the more recalcitrant components of our existential self can be opened to the Light and brought under the influence of Way, Truth, and Life. It is not sufficient to acknowledge truth only with the surface mind and will; one must assimilate it as thoroughly as possible to the point of having it permeate our reflexive nature. The third mode of prayer in Schuon’s ternary is invocatory or jaculatory prayer (a term used frequently in Latin Christianity, and one very suggestive in this context). Invocatory prayer is universal, used in one form or another in all the major traditions: the Hindu japa, the nembutsu of Pure Land Buddhism, the Sufi dhikr; and it is found in Orthodox Christianity in the hesychast Prayer of the Heart. Invocatory prayer is less well known but by no means absent in Latin Christianity (see The Holy Name: the Prayer of Jesus in the Western Church, by Rama Coomaraswamy). The common and essential element in all forms of invocatory prayer is a Divine Name or a formula containing a Divine Name. Why the invocatory repetition of a Divine Name? Because there is a interior and secret (in the sense of ineffable) sense in which the Name is identical with the Named; in invocation, we assimilate ourselves to Him whom we invoke. Why the reiteration? Does this not run counter to the “vain repetition” proscribed in the Gospel? No; what is proscribed is insincerity, parading one’s piety “to be seen of men”, thoughtless babbling; for “words without thoughts will not to Heaven fly”. The repetitive element in invocatory prayer is a very legitimate means for fixing in duration one’s attention on the “one thing needful”, moving thereby closer to the goal of praying without ceasing—indeed, of ourselves becoming prayer. The attention span of modern man is notoriously short, and there is very little in modern life that encourages concentration. In fact, the opposite is so true that we have forgotten what might be accomplished if our powers of concentration were not so thoroughly dissipated, a dissipation encouraged and abetted by the patterns of modern life formed as they are as if to thwart men from giving their attention to precisely those matters that concern them most. In spite of these unpromising circumstances to which almost everyone in the modern world is more or less subject, it is still possible to advance in the degrees of prayer. But before going further we must mention very cursorily major differences in the forms of prayer developed respectively in Latin and Orthodox Christianity. Our comparison is basically with post Tridentine Catholic and hesychast spiritualities, and if this does not do entire justice to the global picture it will, nevertheless, serve the points we wish to make. Western Christianity was heir to the devotio moderna of the late Middle Ages which found its greatest expression in The Imitation of Christ, with its emphasis on the humanity of Christ, the events of the Life and the agonies of his Passion. It was an individual and even a “sin-centered” piety and marched in step with the growing sense of individuality developing in western Europe. The religious orders, for their part, developed systems of mental prayer which were in effect formal systems of meditation usually similar to the renowned Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola. In a contrast heightened by the Turkish occupation of Greece and the Balkans, the Orthodox were outwardly stagnant but inwardly their spiritual patrimony not only remained intact but flourished (especially in the development of hesychasm), relatively uncontaminated by contacts with Renaissance and post-Renaissance Europe. A line can be drawn from the Orthodox Church under the “Turkocratia” to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the publication of the Philokalia, and the flowering of the staretz movement in the Russian Orthodox Church, a movement the last elements of which extended well into the twentieth century, marked in part by the appearance of the anonymous The Way of the Pilgrim, first in Russia, then in Germany, and then in western Europe and North America. And this brings us back to the present moment. The elaborate and formalized exercises employed in the mental prayer of Renaissance and Post Renaissance Catholicism, for a number of reasons, can no longer be prescribed for people living active and busy lives in the modern world. A monastic or at least a clerical context for their efficacy must be presumed. In a kind of irony, however, Orthodox hesychasm, older by far in its roots and universal in form is found to be much more adaptable to conditions of life in the modern world. This is certainly not to say that the quiet and serenity of the cloister do not present desirable conditions for prayer, and for someone living in the world it is particularly desirable to retreat from time to time to surroundings more dispositive to recollection and the divine remembrance. But once one has a certain basic formation the Jesus Prayer or Prayer of the Heart can be pursued as a background to exterior activity in the manner of the drone familiar in Byzantine chant and in classical Indian music. Moreover the Jesus Prayer, like the dhikr, can be utilized by those not disposed to elaborate mental constructs, somewhat as Aristotle observed: that there are men who have the habit of first principles but who are not proficient in discursive thinking. With enduring use the Jesus Prayer or Prayer of the Heart can become ingrained in the psyche to the point of becoming self-operating. The Way of the Pilgrim, mentioned above, is one good introduction to this way of prayer, and a good complement is A Night in the Desert of the Holy Mountain by Hierotheos Vlachos. But we must do justice to Post Reformation Catholicism, which produced many outstanding saints from the time of Trent onwards until the early twentieth century. But during this time there seems to be a quality that characterizes most of these beati, namely a declining prominence of the theological and speculative virtues and a growing preponderance of the social virtues in those whom the Roman Church canonized. Nevertheless, it is unquestionable that there were many saints-to-be in the Roman Church who found their way to the holy and blessed silence of hesychia (a quiet or stillness beyond discursive thought), even if they did not call it by this name. And if they often lacked adequate theory beyond the moral and psychological order, nevertheless there were Catholic saints such as St. John of the Cross who in his writings not only dissected the human psyche in excruciating detail but, judging from the literary evidence, passed well beyond the formal order. 3 Motives for Prayer What are the motives for entering a Way centered upon the Prayer of the Heart or the Jesus Prayer? What is demanded of one coming to this practice? What are the goals? The motives, first of all, must be God-given, for “without Me you can do nothing”. If we simply wish to “try” the prayer, this is frivolous and entirely insufficient. Someone once said to us: “Oh, I have tried the Jesus Prayer and it didn’t do anything for me!” Of course it would do nothing for anyone taking up the practice with such inadequate motives; in fact, an experiment of this kind might well be counter-productive and detrimental, for an orthodox (note the lower case initial letter) context is presumed for the legitimate practice of the Prayer of the Heart. We read in the Acts of the Apostles of certain itinerant Jewish exorcists who undertook to invoke the Name of Jesus, saying “‘We command you by Jesus whom Paul preacheth’...The reply of the evil spirit to them, however, was ‘Jesus I know and Paul I know, but who are you?’. And the man possessed by the evil spirit sprang on them and mastered both of them so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded.” One must not handle sacred things casually or without the requisite dispositions. The Jesus Prayer is comparable to the Eucharist in this respect, namely that it is surrounded with requirements and conditions lacking which what is meant as a means of grace may become counter-productive. “Thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord thy God in vain”. Further, it is well to observe that the minimum motives and criteria for entering the Way of the Jesus Prayer or, mutatis mutandis, the Prayer of the Heart in whatever traditional context are readily provided by the Tradition itself. We will not discuss faith here beyond noting, with Schuon, that genuine faith is an unarticulated gnosis in the depths of the heart, which completes 3. That the saint’s writings went well beyond the formal order is attested by the case with his own Carmelite order which “doctored” his writings so as to avoid unwanted attention from the Inquisition, a fact ascertained by two contemporary Catholic contemplatives who followed St. John’s teaching. Indeed, someone who could write the poems Noche Oscura and Entréme Donde No Supe could not have been limited to the bhaktic realm. the Catholic notion of faith as an intellectual virtue. As to the much abused word love, it is unfortunate that English uses this single word to cover the spectrum of meanings from lust to agape. Properly speaking, however, love in Christian usage is not a passion, not a feeling or sentiment; rather is it a work, a continuing effort to focus all one’s faculties on the Personal God, the Lord. In Christian ambience the concept love is transposed so that this focus is not upon the humanity of Christ alone but especially upon the Logos, Divine Intellect and Lord of the worlds. Obstacles to Prayer Almost everyone who enters this way of the Prayer of the Heart will face a variety of obstacles and difficulties. There is, for example, simple inertia which exists in the psychic as well as in the physical world; indeed, physical inertia is often more easily overcome than psychic inertia. There is also the fact, mentioned above, that the cosmogonic process itself abets modern man’s extreme extroversion. Then there is the fact that an initiative such as entering a Way of prayer implies the rupture of at least a peripheral equilibrium, involving “concomitant actions and reactions”. On another level, all Traditions agree there are celestial creatures, intrepid and fulgurant beings of the formless order whom the Semitic monotheisms call angels—not to be confused with currently popular fantasies. There are also malign creatures inhabiting the cosmos, working in the psychic or subtle realm. The Semitic monotheisms call them fallen angels; or they may be what Muslims call jinn (whence “genie”), again creatures of the subtle order, though not all jinn are malevolent. There are also what Guénon called “wandering influences”, vagrant psychic entities often harnessed for magic. And there is the psychic detritus of once-living beings, individual or collective. The nether world and its Lord (the “Lord of the flies”) may be the polar attraction for many of these entities, and they are intent upon making mischief for men. Further, as in organic life the individual is continually assimilating from and excreting into his ambience, so there are analogous processes in the subtle or psychic realm. The individual, taking his cue from corporeal individuality, is not so discrete as he believes. Any of these factors may have some influence on the “noble traveller” who sets out on the Way. The psyche, in its lower registers especially, is like a zoo; when we sit down to invoke every manner of unimagined beast comes forth to disturb our effort. The cosmos, Schuon observed, does not want anyone to escape its grasp. Goals of Prayer In closing let us turn briefly to the goals of invocatory prayer. The immediate goal for most men will be to bring a measure of order and direction into their lives. Expressed in another way, it is to effect an “auto-exorcism” 4, for in nomine meo daemonia ejicient (Mk xvi, 17). An intermediate goal is to win a better post-mortem destiny. Death does not effect instant conversion; outre tombe there will be continuity in quality of life if not in kind. To the perennial question, cur Deus homo, why did God become man?, the response of the Christian East from St. Ireneus (himself a Greek from Asia Minor though he served as bishop of Lyon) onward was: “God became man that man might become God”; or as others put it, “the Word became flesh that flesh might become Word”. Or again, as Schuon aptly paraphrased it: “the Truth became flesh that flesh might become Truth”. The Goal is deification or theosis; image must return to Archetype, to its Divine Exemplar, part from which it totally lacks reality. This is what Dante expressed in The Divine Comedy in his relation with Beatrice who represents his Exemplar in divinis. It is true, unfortunately, that most contemporary exegetes do their best to bypass or attenuate this doctrine, doubtless believing their attitude necessary for pastoral reasons. Catholics, eg., simply ignore deification as far as possible. The Orthodox, with a greater sense of continuity with the Fathers, endeavour to attenuate its import. Responsibility for this lies in part in the fundamentally bhaktic character of Christianity—a character which is nevertheless not total because the Tradition itself implies complete metaphysical amplitude. Deification or theosis is the corollary of Incarnation. In any case, the Orthodox doctrine implies an ontological reintegration. If Catholics are more reserved in expression, yet their doctrine of the lumen gloriae, the Light of Glory, fully implies the fullness of salvation through the knowledge of God—which can only be God knowing Himself in us. Nevertheless, it is not as individual that man will know God; “human nature has nothing to do with time”, said Eckhart. Frithjof Schuon has written that man can (and must) enter into relationship with 4. See La Vie en son Nom, Michel Laroche, 1992. 34 God as Divine Person, but that the Divine Person cannot be realized; one cannot “become” the Divine Person. On the other hand, man cannot have a relationship with the Absolute or Godhead, for It is beyond all relationship, beyond even the highest dualities, but one can realize It—with God’s help and according to the Will of Heaven, to be sure. And why can one not have a relationship with the Godhead or Self? Because the Self is the ultimate and universal Subject, the ultimate Understander. As the Upanishads ask, by what understanding could one understand the Understander? Schuon has also written of the anomaly of multiple “I’s” imagining themselves to be eternal entities. Similarly, the late physicist Erwin Schrödinger 5 wrote that “consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown”. And Plotinus spoke of God as “transcendently the Self”—God in Whom we are able to make legitimate distinctions but Who, nonetheless, is supremely One. Indeed, from the perspective of the Vedanta, “Unity is already a procession”, as Coomaraswamy remarked. Man hungers and thirsts for Reality. His intelligence, his will, his affective nature are all fashioned to a divine measure. This deiformity “is because the Intellect [both created and uncreated] is preeminent among our inner powers...”, according to St. Gregory Palamas. “God is the Light of the heavens and the earth...Light upon Light; God guides to His Light whom He will” (Qu’ran, xxiv, 35, Surat an-Nur). “In Him was Life, and this Life was the Light of men” (John i, 4); and “in His Light we see Light” (Psalm xxxv, 10). “One Eternal of all those that pass and are not. One Conscious in all consciousness...He alone is the great Source. Master of their works and home of all that liveth, the great Witness, the Well of conscious life, Absolute, without qualities [in the sense of being beyond qualification]” (Svetasvetara Upanishad vi, 13 & 11). God is infinitely present and near, “closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet”, more truly our Self than we are ourselves. But for His Presence and perfect knowledge of us we would be totally absent, that is to say, nonexistent. Man has paid a dreadful price for his wish to be totally independent, to forget and turn his back upon the Divine. More and more the modern world, man’s own creation, is being revealed as a wasteland, void of 5. To cite Schrödinger does not imply that physicists or any other scientists have special competence outside their rather narrow fields of expertise. genuine values, void of any but the most peripheral satisfactions, void of ultimate meaning. Time is short and life is fleeting, but there remains a “Well amid the waste,” a “fountain of Living Water”; and this is prayer, a window on Eternity, constantly beckoning, constantly rewarding. Carpe diem! Seize the day, the opportunity. (Rubáiyát, Omar Khayyám Fitzgerald’s fourth version) A Moment’s Halt—a momentary taste Of BEING from the Well amid the Waste— And Lo!—the phantom Caravan has reacht The NOTHING it set out from—Oh, make haste!
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- [A Genealogical Study of <em>De</em>: Poetical Correspondence of Sky, Earth, and Humankind](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/wang-genealogical-study-of-de) - Huaiyu Wang The crystalline and blissful music (deyin) illumined the gracious personalities of wise leaders and glorified the majesty of the heavenly grace that was realized through the virtuous practice of benefaction. It evoked harmonious communication (gantong) among all human and natural beings and the poetical concordance of sky and earth, the human and the
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- [The Tibetan Guidance for the Intermediate State (<em>Bardo Thodol</em>)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/bardo-thodol) - The Bardo Thodol, or “Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State”, usually known as the “Tibetan Book of the Dead”, is the foremost example of a fully developed Buddhist ars moriendi or “technique of dying”. The text, a prolonged and detailed “remembrance of death” (dhikr al-mawt) which at times reads like a travel guide of
- [Qur’an: <em>Juz’ ‘Amma</em>](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/quran-juz-amma) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection A juz' is a thirtieth part of the Qur’an, and the Juz’ ‘Amma is the name of the last thirtieth of the Qur’an. Due to the particular structure of the book, in which the suras decrease in extension gradually, this thirtieth contains almost half the total number
- [Thomas Merton (1915-1968) An Appreciation of his Life and Work, by One Who Knew Him](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/pallis-merton-appreciation) - Marco Pallis Never shall I forget that afternoon spent in his company pacing slowly round the wide courtyard adjoining the abbey buildings or else sitting under a great tree turned to sheer gold by the magic touch of the North American autumn. On that day I got the clearest impression that I was with a
- [The Perennial Philosophy and the Recovery of a Theophanic View of Nature](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/naydler-perennial-philosophy-recovery) - Jeremy Naydler All things have an inner disposition to be known and stand, as it were, ready and yearning to be known in their truth. There is, then, a specifically human task in the greater ecology of the cosmos to know things in the right way, to know them in the truth of their being,
- [Sanskrit Alphabet Shiva Sutras (<em>Maheshvara Sutrani</em>)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/shiva-sutras) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection These fourteen verses are a recitation of the Sanskrit alphabet (47 letters: 14 vowels and 33 consonants). It is known as the Akshara-samamnaya, “recitation of phonemes”, and popularly as the Shiva Sutras, because they are said to have been revealed to Panini by Shiva. Maheshvara, “the Great
- [Bach as Architect and Servant of the Spiritual](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/bach-architect-and-servant) - A closer look at the Goldberg Variations by Tjako van Schie The work is like a big diamond, polished by a super-diamond-polisher, in which every time again a certain face can be admired or looked at. The more often you hear the piece, the more it becomes clear, but also the more miraculous stuff you
- [And Why Bach?](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/and-why-bach) - Rosalyn Tureck In analyzing the music and perceiving the elements of the unusual Subject and its relationship with the contrapuntal and harmonic elements, I suddenly lost consciousness, whether for a few seconds or half an hour, I shall never know. When I came to, my whole being was possessed of an insight which involved Bach’s
- [Qur’an: Sura Ya-Sin](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/quran-036-yasin) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection Sura Ya-Sin (chapter 36 of the Qur’an) was called by the Prophet the “Heart of the Qur’an”, and its recitation accompanies all significant occasions in the life of Muslims, from births to any troubled or joyful events through to funeral rites. It is often learnt by heart
- [Modern Science and the Dehumanization of Man](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/sherrard-modern-science-dehumanization) - Philip Sherrard Modern science has its origin in a loss of memory, a forgetfulness by man of who he is. By an ineluctable logic inherent in this origin it proceeds along a course each step of which is marked by a further fall by man into deeper ignorance of his own nature and consequently into
- [Solitary Meditation in Jewish and Islamic Mysticism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/solitary-meditation-jewish) - Paul B. Fenton The third remedy for the sickness of the soul is solitude… At moments of grace, it behoves the worshipper to isolate himself in a particular place in order that men should not see him… Thus I learned from my master, the saintly and pious rabbi Joseph Sagis, for he was accustomed to
- [The Qur’an in Comparison and the Birth of ‘scriptures’](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/quran-in-comparison) - Alexander Bevilacqua Jan Loop Early modern European scholars demoted the Bible from Scripture—a divinely inspired revelation—to one of many scriptures… The comparative notion of scripture provided the basis for the many nineteenth-century comparative studies of the ‘sacred books’ of all religions… impossible to imagine without the generic concept of scripture that emerged from the early
- [<em>Amatsu Norito</em>—Shinto Incantations](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/amatsu-norito-shinto-incantations) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection Norito are ancient Shinto ritual incantations (at least ca. 10th century CE) through which the faithful address the kami of heaven and earth. They are recited both in temple and household devotion using the indigenous yamato kotoba (classical Japanese terms, predating Chinese influence). Amatsu Norito has to
- [Ignorance in Swordsmanship (Kenjutsu Fushiki Hen)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/kimura-kenjutsu) - Kimura Kyuho, ca. 1768 The master replied, “although what we call ‘single mindedness’ may be inferior to full understanding, it’s a state you can’t achieve unless you practice the sword. Originally swords were not to be used as dangerous weapons. However, when used properly, they would help bring good fortune to society. So, in other
- [Loving Compassion in Islam and Buddhism: Rahma and Karuna](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/loving-compassion) - Charity and Compassion: Interreligious Perspectives By Reza Shah-Kazemi Compassion, even on the human plane, is not just a sentiment, it is an existential quality. This existential quality presupposes a concrete sense of participation in the suffering of others, as is expressed by the etymology of the word: com-passion means to ‘suffer with’ another. The metaphysics of tawh?d finds its most appropriate ethical expression in this quality, for when the illusion of separation is overcome, the suffering of the ‘other’ cannot be separated from oneself; the virtues of compassion and mercy, generosity and love thus become the hallmarks of the character of one who has truly realized Unity. Likewise, but from a different angle: when self-centredness is overcome, together with the worldliness, subtle or overt, which feeds it, then the same qualities centered on compassionate 43 Loving Compassion in Islam and Buddhism: Rahma and Karun? love will flow forth naturally and spontaneously: these qualities, inherent in the spiritual substance or fitra of each soul, will no longer be constrained or suffocated by coagulations of egotism and worldliness. Rather, compassionate love will emanate to the whole of creation, the compassionate soul will reflect and radiate the all-encompassing grace of God. Speaking of two types, those who reject God and those who believe in Him, the Qur’?n declares: Unto each, the former and the latter, do We extend the gracious gift of thy Lord. And the gracious gift of thy Lord can never be confined (17:20). This is because God’s Rahma, being infinite, can be excluded from nowhere, and from nobody: My loving Compassion encompasses all things (7:156). Islam and Buddhism are not so far apart from each other as regards the role of this quality of compassionate love. Despite their very different conceptual starting points, both traditions stress this human quality as a key ethical trait; and for both traditions, this human quality is inseparable from the Absolute—from All?h in Islam, and the Dharma, or the Void (Sh?nya) or Nirv?na in Buddhism.1 In this article we intend to show ways in which the Islamic conception of Rahma helps to render explicit what is largely implicit in the earliest texts of the Pali canon; in this respect, it can be seen to serve a function similar to that of Mahayana Buddhism, wherein compassion comes to play a determinative role, elevated as the very principle, cosmological and not simply ethical, which motivates the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. We would therefore argue that for both Muslims and Buddhists, the quality of loving compassion must determine the core of one’s personality, and it must dominate the nature of one’s conduct in relation to others; this ideal, at once ethical and spiritual, derives its ultimate justification and transformative power from the fact that it expresses on the human plane a principle which is rooted in the heart of the Absolute. In both traditions compassion is inseparable from love, mahabba in Islam and mett? in Buddhism.2 In Buddhism one even finds the compound maitr?-karun? ‘love-compassion’ which expresses the intertwining of these two principles; in Islam, likewise, Rahma cannot be adequately translated by the single English word ‘compassion’ or ‘mercy’, but requires the addition of the element of love. A compelling reason for translating Rahma as ‘loving compassion’ and not just ‘compassion’— and certainly not just ‘mercy’—is provided by the Prophet’s use of this word in the following incident. At the conquest of Mecca, certain captives were brought to the Prophet. There was a woman among them, running frantically and calling for her baby; she found him, held him to her breast and fed him. The Prophet said to his companions: ‘Do you think this woman would cast her child into the fire?’ We said, ‘No, she could not do such a thing.’ He said, ‘God is more lovingly compassionate (arham) to His servants than is this woman to her child.’3 The Rahma of God is here defined by reference to a quality which all can recognize as love: the mother’s acts of compassion and mercy stream forth from an overwhelming organic love for her child. One cannot love another without feeling compassionate to that person, while one can feel compassion for someone without necessarily loving that person. The Jewish scholar Ben-Shemesh goes so far as to translate the basmala as ‘In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Beloved’ to bring home this key aspect of love 44 proper to the root of Rahma.4 He argues that in both Arabic and Hebrew the meaning of love is strongly present in the root r-h-m, and gives the following evidence: Psalm number 18 contains the phrase: Erhamha Adonay—‘I love thee my Lord’.5 In Aramaic/Syriac, the root r-h-m specifically denotes love, rather than ‘compassion’. One can thus feel the resonance of this Syriac connotation within the Arabic Rahma. Moreover, there is epigraphic evidence that early Christian sects in southern Arabic used the name Rahm?nan as a name of God, and this would probably have been understood as ‘The Loving’.6 God’s Rahma is described by the Prophet as being greater than that of the woman for her child, implying that the transcendent prototype of this most loving and compassionate of all human qualities is found in the divine Reality. It is interesting to note that the Buddha refers to an almost identical image in order to bring home the meaning of mett?, the love that is inseparable from karun?. This is from a passage in the Mett?-sutta (‘Teaching on love’) in the Pali canon: Even as a mother watches over and protects her child, her only child, so with a boundless mind should one cherish all living beings, radiating friendliness over the entire world, above, below, and all around without limit. So let him cultivate a boundless good will towards the entire world, uncramped, free from ill will or enmity. Standing or walking, sitting or lying down, during all his waking hours, let him establish this mindfulness of good will, which men call the highest state!7 It is out of compassion, indeed, that the Buddha preached his Dhamma: his desire was to liberate people from suffering by enlightening them as to its cause, and show- ing them the means—the ‘noble eightfold path’—to eliminate that cause. It is clear, then, that even in early Buddhism compassion was not just a cardinal virtue, it went to the very heart of the Buddhist up?ya, the ‘expedient means’ or ‘saving strategy.’ However, it is not hard to see that in the later texts, those from which the Mahayana branch of Buddhism derive, the stress on compassion goes well beyond anything found in the earliest texts, those of the Pali canon, upon which the Theravada branch of Buddhism is based. In the latter, compassion is indeed fundamental and indispensable, but it remains a human virtue; in Mahayana texts, by contrast, it takes on altogether mythological dimensions, and enters into the definition of what most closely approximates the Personal God in Buddhism, namely, the Buddha of Infinite Light, Amit?bha. By tracing the compassionate function of Gautama the sage back to its principial root, Mahayana Buddhism helps to solve a logical problem within the very structure of Theravada Buddhism, or at least makes explicit what is implicit in the earlier tradition. The logical problem is this: If, as the Buddha preached, there is no ultimate reality pertaining to the individual soul (this being the doctrine of anatt?, ‘no soul’), from where does the compassion derive its substance, and its enlightening efficacy? If the soul is but a conglomeration of empirical and psychic envelopes (skandhas), with no essential reality, can the compassion manifested by such a soul have a more substantial reality than these ‘envelopes’ themselves? In other words, what is the ultimate source of the compassion of the Buddha? A simple answer would be that this source is none other than the enlightened state itself: compassion flows forth from the very nature of Nirvana or Sh?nya. But the question remains: how does compassion spring forth from an impersonal or supra-personal state, when the very nature of compassion is so clearly personal, that is, it so intimately implies a personal will, actively and compassionately involved in the lives of suffering humanity, a personal will which, moreover, must at the same time be transcendent or absolute. It must be transcendent, otherwise it could not save relative beings through its compassion; but it must also assume a dimension of relativity, otherwise it would have no relation to living human beings. It is precisely this combination of absolute transcendence and personal compassion which is expressed in the Islamic conception of divine Rahma, and in the various heavenly Buddhas depicted in later Mahayana texts.8 According to these texts, the principle of compassion, so perfectly embodied in Gautama the sage, is depicted as a principle transcending his own empirical individuality. He insisted that one can only ‘see’ the Buddha in the light of the reality of the Dharma, the supreme principle,9 of which he is an embodiment: ‘Those who by my form did see me, and those who followed me by my voice, wrong are the efforts they engaged in; me those people will not see. From the Dharma one should see the Buddha, for the dharma-bodies are the guides.’10 The compassion proper to the Dharma is universal; Gautama the sage manifested this quality in one particular modality. This relationship between the particular and the universal is expressed in Buddhism by means of the mythology of cosmic Buddhas existing in unimaginably distant aeons prior to the earthly appearance of the Gautama. Mahayana texts therefore present a picture of a ‘Personal God’ with diverse traits—the ?di-Buddha, Vairochana, Amit?bha, etc—without whose grace and mercy, one cannot attain salvation into the celestial domains known as the ‘Pure Land’, let alone that state of Nirv?na wherein the various Buddhas themselves are all transcended. It is clear, then, that Mahayana Buddhism comes close to the Islamic conception of divinity as regards the root of the quality of compassion. Both traditions make explicit a metaphysically irrefutable principle, one about which the Buddha himself was silent, but which he did not contradict: compassion cannot be exhausted by its purely human manifestation; on the contrary, it derives all its power and efficacy from its supra-human, absolute or ‘divine’ source. This source is transcendent, but insofar as it radiates towards all creatures, it assumes a ‘personal’ dimension, for it consists of an active, conscious and loving will to save all creatures: and to speak of such a will is to speak of some kind of ‘person’ directing that will. In one respect, then, this can be seen as a personalization of the Absolute, bestowing upon the pure, ineffable and inconceivable Essence a personal or anthropomorphic dimension, a dimension without which it cannot enter into engagement with human persons. For the pure Absolute has no relation whatsoever with any conceivable relativity. But this personal dimension does not in any way diminish the intrinsic absoluteness of the Absolute. For the manifestation of such qualities as compassion, love, and mercy does not exhaust the nature of the Principle thus manifested. In Islamic terms, the pure Absolute is the Essence (al-Dh?t), transcending the Names and Qualities which are assumed by the Absolute in its relationship with the world; transcending these Names and Qualities implies transcending those ‘personal’ dimensions of God which presuppose and manifest these Names and Qualities. The Islamic synthesis between two conceptions of God—the supra-Personal and the Personal—can be seen as analogous to the synthesis effected by Mahayana Buddhism between the two dimensions of the Absolute. For the personal and supra-personal dimensions of All?h, comprising all the qualities designated by all of the divine Names, are in perfect harmony and perfect synchronicity. There is no contradiction between asserting, on the one hand, that the Essence of God infinitely transcends all conceivable ‘personal’ qualities, and on the other, that God assumes these personal qualities for the sake of entering into compassionate, enlightening and saving relationship with His creatures. This Islamic synthesis can help to show that what has been called Mahayana ‘theism’ does not violate early Buddhism’s insistence on the impersonal nature of the Absolute, the transcendence of the Dharma/Nirv?na/Sh?nya visà-vis all conceivable qualities, personal or otherwise. Oneness and Compassion Islam also helps to answer the question which might be posed to a Buddhist: what is the connection between the metaphysics of unity—in terms of which there appears to be no ‘other’, no ‘dualism’, Sams?ra and Nirv?na being ultimately identical—and the quality of compassion—which logically presupposes both an agent and a recipient of compassion, thus, a duality? Or it might be asked: is there a contradiction between the absolute transcendence of Reality, and the compassionate manifestation of this Reality? We would answer in terms of Islamic metaphysics that the oneness of Reality strictly implies compassion. For the oneness of God is not simply exclusive, it is also inclusive—it is both Ahad and W?hid, it is both transcendent and immanent. As al-W?hid, all-inclusive oneness, God encompasses all things, whence such divine Names as al-Wasi‘, ‘the Infinitely Capacious’ and al-Muh?t, ‘the All-Encompassing’. Now it is from this all-embracing dimension of divine reality that compassion springs: for it is not just as being or knowledge, presence or immanence, that God encompasses all, it is also as Rahma: My Rahma encompasses all things, as we saw above. The angels, indeed, give priority to God’s Rahma over His knowledge (‘Ilm) when addressing Him as the one who encompasses all things: You encompass all things in Rahma and ‘Ilm (40:7).11 It might still be objected: God is certainly ‘merciful’ but He should not be called ‘compassionate’ as He does not ‘suffer’ with any creature. Mercy, it will be argued, is the more appropriate word by which to translate Rahma. One may reply as follows: insofar as compassion is a human virtue, it cannot but be rooted in a divine quality; it is this divine quality of Rahma which serves as the transcendent archetype of the human virtue of compassion. The relationship between this divine quality and its human reflection is characterised by two apparently contradictory principles: similarity (tashb?h) and incomparability (tanz?h). Thus, in respect of tashb?h, God as ‘The Compassionate’ can metaphorically be said to manifest sympathy for us in our suffering; and it is out of this ‘com-passion or ‘sym-pathy’ that He graciously lifts us out of our suffering. However this conception needs its complement: the point of view deriving from the principle of tanz?h: inasmuch as the quality designated by ‘The Compassionate’ has no self-subsistent essence, but subsists solely through the Essence as such, it cannot possibly be subject to any relativity. The inner dimension of this divine quality must perforce transcend the sphere within which suffering and other such relativities are situated, failing which it would not be a transcendent quality, that is: one that is rooted in the utter transcendence of the divine Essence. Conversely, on the human plane, compassion as Rahma is evidently a virtue which one must acquire and cultivate; it must therefore be present in God, failing which our human quality of compassion would lack any divine principle; compassion would then be a human effect without a divine cause. This is made clear in the prophetic saying on the Rahma of the mother for her child: human compassion is akin to the compassion of God for all creatures, except that divine compassion is absolute and infinite, while human compassion is relative and finite. The essence of the quality is one and the same, only its ontological intensity, or mode of manifestation, is subject to gradation. The aspect of transcendence proper to God implies that this attribute, when ascribed to God, has an absolute and infinite quality, in contrast to the relative, finite participation in that quality by human beings. In the human context, then, compassion manifests two things: a virtue whose essence is divine, on the one hand, and a human capacity to suffer, on the other. In the divine context, the transcendent source of human compassion is affirmed, but the susceptibility to suffering, which accompanies the human condition, is totally absent. As between the human virtue and the divine quality—or simply: between the human and the divine—there is both essential continuity and existential discontinuity, analogical participation and ontological distinction, tashb?h and tanz?h. Another way of resolving the apparent contradiction between divine compassion and divine unity is provided by al-Ghaz?l?. If compassion be understood as a mode of love, then one can reformulate the question and ask whether it is possible to ascribe love to God: can God be susceptible to desire for His creatures, when He possesses perfectly and infinitely all that He could possibly desire? Can the Absolute desire the relative? Al-Ghaz?l? addresses this question, first in theological mode, and then in terms of the metaphysics of oneness, from the point of view of ma‘rifa. One can legitimately apply the same word, love (mahabba), both to man and to God; but the meaning of the word changes depending on the agent of love. Human love is defined as an inclination (mayl) of the soul towards that which is in harmony with it, beauty both outward and inward, seeking from another soul the consummation of love. Through this love it attains completeness, a mode of perfection which cannot be attained within itself. Such love, al-Ghaz?l? asserts, cannot be ascribed to God, in whom all perfections are infinitely and absolutely realized. However, from a higher, metaphysical point of view, one can indeed say that God loves His creatures. God’s love is absolutely real, but His love is not for any ‘other’ being or entity. Rather, it is for Himself: for His own Essence, qualities and acts. There is nothing in being but His Essence, His qualities and His acts. Hence, when the Qur’?n asserts that ‘He loves them’ (5:54), this means that ‘God does indeed love them [all human souls], but in reality He loves nothing other than Himself, in the sense that He is the totality [of being], and there is nothing in being apart from Him.’12 Al-Ghaz?l? demonstrates that God is the entirety of being by reference to the holy utterance (had?th quds?), in which God speaks in the first person, on the tongue of the Prophet: ‘My slave draws near to Me through nothing I love more than that which I have made obligatory for him. My slave never ceases to draw near to Me through supererogatory acts until I love him. And when I love him, I am his 48 hearing by which he hears, his sight by which he sees, his hand by which he grasps, and his foot by which he walks.’13 It is the saint, the wal? All?h (literally: friend of God), who comes to understand the reality that God alone is—that there is no reality by the divine reality—and this understanding comes through effacement, fan?’, in that reality, and this, in turn is the function of God’s love: ‘My slave never ceases to draw near ... until I love him.’ It is from this divine love that the saint comes to see that God loves all creatures, and that the reality of this love is constituted by God’s infinite love of Himself. This love is expressed not just by the term mahabba but also by Rahma, which encompasses all things. Rahma as Creator Turning now to another aspect of compassion, that of its creative power, we see again that what is left implicit in early Buddhism is rendered altogether explicit both in Islam and in such Mahayana traditions as Jodo Shin. In both traditions, the Creator is nothing other than the ‘All-Compassionate’, or the ‘AllLoving’; but whereas this conception is enshrined in the very heart of the Qur’?n, it emerges in Buddhism only in certain Mahayana traditions. The Muslim consecrates every important action with the utterance of the basmala, the phrase: Bismill?h al-Rahm?n al-Rah?m. This formula also initiates each of the 114 chapters of the Qur’?n (except one). It is altogether appropriate that all ritual and significant action be initiated with a recollection of the compassionate source of creation. In terms of the two divine Names deriving from the root of Rahma, the first, al-Rahm?n is normally used to refer to the creative power of Rahma, and the second, al-Rah?m, to its salvific power. Combining these two properties of loving compassion, the creative and redemptive, one sees that ultimately nothing can escape or be separated from God’s all-embracing Rahma. 49 This is why calling upon al-Rahm?n is tantamount to calling upon God: Call upon All?h or call upon al-Rahm?n (17:110). If al-Rahm?n is so completely identified with the very substance of God, then it follows that the Rahma which so quintessentially defines the divine nature is not simply ‘mercy’ or ‘compassion’ but is rather the infinite love and perfect beatitude of ultimate reality, which overflows into creation in the myriad forms assumed by mercy and compassion, peace and love. Rahma is thus to be understood primarily in terms of a love which gives of itself: what it gives is what it is, transcendent beatitude, which creates out of love, and, upon contact with Its creation, assumes the nature of loving compassion and mercy, these being the dominant motifs of the relationship between God and the world. As was seen above, God’s transcendent Rahma is alluded to by the Prophet in terms of the most striking expression of Rahma on earth—that expressed by a mother who, after searching frantically for her baby, clutches it to her breast and feeds it. ‘Call upon All?h or call upon al-Rahm?n; whichever you call upon, unto Him belong the most beautiful names’ (17:110). It should be noted in this verse that all the names are described as ‘most beautiful’, including therefore all the names of rigour as well as those of gentleness. But the most important point to note here is that the name al-Rahm?n is practically coterminous with the name All?h, indicating that the quality of loving mercy takes us to the very heart of the divine nature. In two verses we are told that Rahma is ‘written’ upon the very Self of God: He has written mercy upon Himself (6:12); Your Lord has written mercy upon Himself (6:54). The word kataba, ‘he wrote’, implies a kind of inner prescription, so that Rahma can be understood as a kind of inner law govern- ing the very nafs, the Self or Essence of God. The use of the image of ‘writing’ here can be seen as a metaphor for expressing the metaphysical truth that Rahma is as it were ‘inscribed’ within the deepest reality of the divine nature. God’s ‘inscription’ upon Himself is thus God’s description of Himself, of His own deepest nature. The creative aspect of the divine Rahma is vividly brought home in the chapter entitled ‘al-Rahm?n’ (S?ra number 55), it is al-Rahm?n who ‘taught the Qur’?n, created man, taught him discernment’ (verses 1-3). The whole of this chapter evokes and invokes the reality of this quintessential quality of God. The blessings of Paradise are described here in the most majestic and attractive terms; but so too are the glories, beauties and harmonies of God’s entire cosmos, including all the wonders of virgin nature, these verses being musically punctuated by the refrain: so which of the favours of your Lord can you deny?. In this chapter named after al-Rahm?n, then, we are invited to contemplate the various levels at which Rahma fashions the substance of reality: the Rahma that describes the deepest nature of the divine; the Rahma that is musically inscribed into the very recitation of the chapter; the Rahma that creates all things; the Rahma that reveals itself through the Qur’?n and through all the signs (?y?t) of nature. One comes to see that God has created not only by Rahma, and from Rahma but also for Rahma: ... except those upon whom God has mercy: for this did He create them (11:119); and within Rahma: My Rahma encompasses all things (7:156). Combining these two properties of loving compassion, the creative and redemptive, or the ontological and salvific, we see why it is that ultimately nothing can escape or be separated from God’s all-embracing Rahma, which is the divine matrix contain- 50 ing the cosmos. The word ‘matrix’ should be taken quite literally, in relation to its root: ‘mother’. The word for womb, rahim, derives from the same root as Rahma. The entire cosmos is not just brought into being by Rahma, it is perpetually encompassed by Rahma which nourishes it at every instant, as the mother’s womb nourishes and encompasses the embryo growing within it. One should note here that in Buddhism, one of the terms denoting the Buddha is Tath?gatagarbha, which literally means the ‘womb’ (garbha) of the Tath?gata, the ‘one thus gone’. This womb or matrix not only contains all things, it is also contained within the soul, being one with the immanent Buddha-nature (Buddhadhatu) which each individual must strive to realize. In the Islamic worldview, God’s Rahma is not just mercy; rather it is the infinite love and overflowing beatitude of ultimate reality, one of whose manifestations is mercy. In this light, one can better appreciate such perspectives as the following, within Jodo Shin Buddhism: ‘The inner truth is: From the Eternal Love do all beings have their birth’.14 Such a statement articulates a dimension of causality left completely out of account by the earlier Buddhist scriptures, where the entire emphasis was on escape from the round of births and deaths. The only important point about the ‘birth’ of beings was the existence of the ‘unborn’ to which one must flee for refuge: the process by which beings were born was thus seen as a process of enslavement to the ineluctability of suffering and death. In Mahayana Buddhism, however, one can find expressions of love and compassion which are identified with the creative power of the Absolute. This passage from Naturalness shows that the Absolute reveals its ‘Eternal Life’ through the dimension of its ‘Great Compassion’: Amida is the Supreme Spirit from whom all spiritual revelations grow, and to whom all personalities are related. Amida is at once the Infinite Light (Amit?bha) and the Eternal Life (Amit?yus). He is at once the Great Wisdom (Mah?prajna: daichi)— the Infinite Light—and the Great Compassion (Mah?karuna: daihi)—the Eternal Life. The Great Compassion is creator while the Great Wisdom contemplates.15 Some lines later, we read about the unitive power of love; this can be compared with the compassionate love which is spiritually required and logically implied by the metaphysics of tawh?d: ‘In love ... the sense of difference is obliterated and the human heart fulfils its inherent purpose in perfection, transcending the limits of itself and reaching across the threshold of the spirit-world.’16 In love, the sense of difference is obliterated: the unity of being, which may be conceptually understood through knowledge, is spiritually realized through love, whose infinite creativity overflows into a compassion whose most merciful act is to reveal this very oneness. To return to al-Ghaz?l?: the perfect and eternal love of God creates the human being in a disposition which ever seeks proximity to Him, and furnishes him with access to the pathways leading to the removal of the veils separating him from God, such that he comes to ‘see’ God by means of God Himself. ‘And all this is the act of God, and a grace bestowed upon him [God’s creature]: and such is what is meant by God’s love of him.’17 This enlightening grace of God towards His creatures is constitutive of His love for them, a love which in reality is nothing other than His love for Himself. Human love and compassion, by means of which the sense of difference is obliterated between self and other, can thus be 51 seen as a unitive reflection herebelow of the oneness of the love of God for Himself within Himself. Absolute compassion and transcendent oneness, far from being mutually exclusive are thus harmoniously integrated in an uncompromisingly unitive tawh?d. The compassion which we have been examining is clearly an overflow of the beatitude which defines an essential aspect of ultimate Reality, the oneness of which embraces all things by virtue of this compassion, precisely. Inward beatitude, proper to the One, and outward compassion, integrating the many, is a subtle and important expression of the spiritual mystery of tawh?d. We observe in this affirmation of tawh?d another conceptual resonance between the two traditions, a resonance made clear by the following verses of Milarepa, the great poet-saint of Tibet: Without realizing the truth of Many-Being-One Even though you meditate on the Great Light, You practice but the View-of-Clinging. Without realizing the unity of Bliss and Void, Even though on the Void you meditate, You practice only nihilism.18 The truth of ‘Many-Being-One’ can be read as a spiritual expression of tawh?d, and mirrors many such expressions in Islamic mysticism, indeed, the literal meaning of tawh?d being precisely a dynamic integration, not just a static oneness. It is derived from the form of the verb, wahhada, meaning ‘to make one’. Phenomenal diversity is thus integrated into principial unity by means of the vision unfolding from this understanding of tawh?d. In these verses, Milarepa tells one of his disciples that however much he may meditate on the supernal Light, if he regards that Light as being separate from all things by way of transcendence, then he cannot realize the immanence of that Light in all that exists, that immanence by virtue of which the ‘many’ become ‘one’, the ‘face’ of reality being visible in everything that exists. In the absence of this vision, then meditation on the Light results only in ‘clinging’—clinging, that is, to a false distinction between the One and the many, a duality which will imprison the meditator within the realm of multiplicity. It is when Milarepa addresses the intrinsic nature of the Void, however, that the similarity with the Islamic conception of the beatific rahma of God emerges in a striking manner. ‘Without realizing the unity of Bliss and Void’, any meditation on the Void is but nihilistic. The Void is intrinsically blissful, or it is not the Void. Nirvana and the Void (Sh?nya) are identical in essence, the term Nirv?na stressing the blissful nature of the state wherein one is conscious of the Absolute, and the term ‘Void’ stressing the objective nature of the Absolute, transcending all things are ‘full’—full, that is, of false being. Milarepa’s verse makes clear this identity of essence, and shows moreover that it is precisely because the Void is overflowing with beatitude that the experience of the Void cannot but be blissful: it is far from a nihilistic negation of existence and consciousness. Knowing and experiencing the beatitude of the Void thus cannot but engender in the soul a state of being reflecting this beatitude, and a wish to share that beatitude with all beings: such a wish being the very essence of compassion, which is not simply a capacity to feel the suffering of others as one’s own—which articulates one level of ethical tawh?d—but also, at a higher level of tawh?d, a capacity to bring that suffering to an end through making accessible the mercy and felicity ever-flowing from ultimate Reality. This is the message—which is immediately intelligible to any Muslim—of the following verses of Milarepa: If in meditation you still tend to strive, Try to arouse for all a great compassion, Be identified with the All-Merciful.19 Here, we see the All-Merciful being identified with Absolute Reality, referred to earlier as the Void, but here, the character of the Void is clearly affirmed as infinite mercy. To identify with this mercy is to identify with the Absolute; arousing for all ‘a great compassion’ means infusing into one’s soul a quality which reflects the infinite compassion of the Absolute. One from whom compassion flows to all is one in whom ‘the overflowing Void-Compassion’, as Milarepa calls it in another verse, has been realized: it ceaselessly overflows from the Absolute to the relative, and to the extent that one has made oneself ‘void’ for its sake, one becomes a vehicle for the transmission of the Compassion of the Void: Rechungpa, listen to me for a moment. From the centre of my heart stream Glowing beams of light. ... This shows the unity of mercy and the Void.20 To conclude this article, it may be objected that however remarkable be the similarities between the Islamic and the Jodo Shin conceptions of the loving compassion that articulates the creativity of the Absolute, Jodo Shin cannot be taken as representative of the broad Buddhist tradition, and is rather an exception proving the rule. To this, we would reply that the Jodo Shin presentation of this crucial theme—God as Creator through compassion—does not prove that the two traditions of Islam and Buddhism can be crudely equated as regards this theme; rather, it simply demonstrates that the differences between the Islamic conception of God as Creator through compassion and the Buddhist silence on the question of such a Creator need not be seen as the basis for a reciprocal rejection. Rather, the very fact that at least one Buddhist school of thought affirms the idea of a compassionate Creator shows that there is no absolute incompatibility between the two traditions as regards this principle. There is no need to claim that the principle plays an analogous role in both traditions, far from it: definitive, central and inalienable in Islam; and conceivable, possible, and, at least, not absolutely undeniable in Buddhism. Notes 1 It is all too often stated that Buddhism is ‘atheistic’, insofar as it does not speak about the Personal God. But, as Frithjof Schuon explains, the Buddhist notion of the Void, or of extinction, is God conceived in subjective mode, as a ‘state’; what is called ‘God’ in the theistic traditions is conversely, the Void considered objectively, as principle. F.Schuon, Treasures of Buddhism (Bloomington: World Wisdom, 1993), p.19. See also our Common Ground between Islam and Buddhism (Louisville: Fons Vitae, 2010), on which this article is based. 2 Anukamp? and day?, translated as ‘sympathy’, are closely related to the idea of compassion. See Harvey Aronson, Love and Sympathy in Theravada Buddhism (Delhi, 1980), p.11. As Reverend Tetsuo Unno notes in his introduction to Kanamatsu’s Naturalness (p.xiii), the author uses the English word ‘love’ to translate karuna, normally translated as ‘compassion’. 3 Bukh?r?, Sah?h, kit?b al-adab, b?b 18 had?th no. 5999 (Bukhari summarized: p.954, no.2014); Muslim, Sah?h, kit?b al-tawba, had?th no. 6978. 4 See A. Ben Shemesh, ‘Some Suggestions to Qur’an Translators’, in Arabica, vol.16, no.1, 1969, p.82. 5 Ibid. 6 See Albert Jamme, ‘Inscriptions on the Sabaean Bronze Horse of the Dumbarton Oaks Collection’, in Dumbarton Oaks Papers, vol. 8 (1954), pp. 323-324 et passim. 7 E. Conze, Buddhist Scriptures (Baltimore, 1968), p.186. 8 This celestial level of the manifestation of the Buddha-principle is referred to as Sambhoga-k?ya, in contradistinction to the Dharma-k?ya—which pertains to the supra-manifest Essence—and the Nirm?na-k?ya, the human form of the earthly Buddha. 9 Marco Pallis, in his important essay, ‘Dharma and Dharmas as Principle of Inter-religious Commu- nication’, shows convincingly that the concept of ‘Dharma’ is a bridge linking Buddhism to the other religious traditions: ‘If Dharma corresponds, on the one hand, to the absoluteness and infinitude of the Essence, the dharmas for their part correspond to the relativity and contingency of the accidents.’ M. Pallis, A Buddhist Spectrum (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980), p.103. It should be noted that just as Dharma can mean both Reality and the Law or Norm or Rectitude which leads to that Reality, so the Arabic concept of Haqq refers both to the ultimate Reality and the human obligations and duties fashioned by conformity to that Reality. 10 Vajracchedik?, 26a, b. Cited in Buddhist texts through the Ages eds. E. Conze, I.B. Horner, D. Snelgrove, A. Waley (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1954), p.144. 11 It is interesting to note that in Tibetan Buddhism, there is likewise a certain priority of compassion over knowledge, as far as the manifestation of these qualities is concerned on earth, for the Dalai Lama, representing the Bodhisattva of compassion (Chenrezig, the Tibetan name of Avalokiteshvara) has priority over the Panchen Lama, who represents the Buddha of Light (Opagmed, the Tibetan name for Amit?bha). See M. Pallis, The Way and the Mountain (London: Peter Owen, 1991), pp.161-162. 12 Al-Ghaz?l? is here cites the saying of Shaykh Sa‘?d al-Mayhin?. This is from ‘The Book of love and longing and intimacy and contentment’ of his Ihy?’ ‘ul?m al-d?n (Beirut: D?r al-J?l, 1992), book 6, part 4, vol. 5, p.221. 13 An-Nawaw?’s Forty Hadith, p.118, no.38. It is cited there from Bukh?r?, Kit?b al-riq?q, p.992, no.2117. 14 Kenryo Kanamatsu, Naturalness—A Classic of Shin Buddhism (Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2002), p.113. 15 Ibid., p.63. 16 Ibid., p.64. 17 Al-Ghaz?l?, Ihy?’, op. cit., pp.221-222. 18 The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa, (tr. Garma C.C. Chang) (Boston & Shaftsbury: Shambhala, 1989),vol. 2, p.526. 19 54 Ibid., vol.2, p.561. 20 Ibid., vol.2, p.445.
- [The Oneness of God's Community](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/oneness-of-gods-community) - THE ONENESS OF GOD’S COMMUNITY* by Bishop George Khodr *Translated from Arabic by Mark Farha Why is Abraham considered to be our common father? It is because our Lord told him: “Leave your country and your kinsfolk and your father’s house for the land which I will show you” (Genesis 12:1). Faith is the departure from man-made idols to the spiritual abode in which you settle to behold the face of God who fashions you at will. Faith is always an exodus, that is to say a leaving behind of what you were immersed in your terrestrial world, so that you may receive what you hope to be bestowed on you from on high. In the Semitic orbit Abraham appears as the first monotheist in history. This is confirmed by the Qur’?n in which Abraham avers: “Verily, I have turned my face toward Him who created the heavens and the earth, and I am not of the polytheists” (Surat al-Anaam, 79). The designation “the community of Abraham” may be taken as a reference to a unified religious group anteceding Moses. This would cohere with Paul’s affirmation in the letter to the Romans and the Galatians that it is Abraham who is the bearer of the faith, vindicating him prior to the descent of the Ten Commandments to Moses. Yet the term “the religious community of Abraham” in fact carries wider implications than to be confined to the followers of the Qur’?n. After all, the latter ascribes to Joseph in the words: “And I followed the religion of my fathers Abraham and Isaac and Jacob” (Surat al-Yusuf 38). All these men came before the message of Muhammad. The expression “Community of Abraham” appeared as a reference to the Abrahamian family lineage in the work of the orientalist Louis Massignon1, and became known as such in Western circles several for decades even though it refers to the Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. Affirming the Abrahamic pedigree then is nothing other than an affirmation of the proclamation of faith in one God. And God’s most fundamental truth is nothing other than his oneness which prompts me to employ the expression of “the different monotheistic religions” whose perspective differs from the religions of the Far East. To be sure, to speak of the kinship between these three faiths implies the existence of distinctions without which these religions would have merged completely. A concise study of these religions, their respective temperament and singularity is bound to reveal differences, underscoring that each faith has abolished what was before it even as it has claimed to complete its predecessor. In broaching the issue of religious beliefs, there is no escape from agreement, differentiation and clash between them. And yet, by ways of a disciplined, religious, existential, spiritual and methodological taming of your ego you may be able to arrive at the discovery of mutual [confessional] affinities. You may then interpret these seeking to approach and embrace the other so that you will find yourself standing firmly on your ground and on the ground of the other with a complete love. This does not at all push you into the pitfall of relativism in which the faiths are mixed and confounded, nor does it come at the expense of your integrity or make you succumb to a suspicious lassitude. We shall first seek to fathom the contours of this kinship in each of the three conceptions of the Divinity. In the Old Testament, the first historical entreaty to God, the testimony to Him is as follows: “Hear o Israel, the Lord our God is one” which likewise appears in Mark 12:29-30 and is reiterated a second time in Deuteronomy 6:4. This is not to mean that He is a God of the Hebrew tribes. Rather, it is the idea of a people unified [in God]. The author of the psalms longs that all and sundry give Him praise: “kings of the earth and all people, princes and all the rulers of the earth” (Psalms 148:11). This is echoed by the Qur’?n’s assertion that He is the God of the Two Worlds [i.e. of the entire universe]. This universal supremacy and unity of God is underscored by Christianity: “There is no God but the one God” (Corinthians 8:4). This verse corresponds verbatim to the first profession in Islam (with the addition of the adjective “the one” in Paul). And so too the Creed of the Nicean Council of 325 begins with the invocation: “I believe in the one God.” It is a well-known fact that the first Christian martyrs were killed by the Roman Empire for their belief in the one God at a time in which the constitution of the Empire mandated the worship of the Caesar [as a deity]. There is no room to cast any doubt on the monotheism of Christianity despite its association with the trinity. The Church, in its proclamation of the trinity, fully recognizes that there are no three gods but one Divine essence. It views the three personages [of the trinity] from the perspective of God’s unity. Indeed, the insistence on the unity of God is salient throughout the New Testament, the teachings of the ecumenical councils and the patristic fathers as well as their successors and followers. In fact, the Qur’?n itself does not contain a single phrase charging the Christians with polytheism. Those that are branded with heresy – the “Nasara” or “Nazarenes”are not confounded by the Qur’?n with the Christians who did not call themselves “Nazarenes.” Just who then are these Nazarenes to whom the Qur’?n attributes these beliefs? Did they stem from the Church whose creeds were formulated prior to Muhammad’s mission, or are they a different phenomenon altogether? It is clear that they are not identical with the Christians of Najran. Nor does the biography of the Prophet indicate that he was acquainted with the other Christian communities of the Arabian peninsula which excavations in Qatar and Bahrain have revealed. Muhammad was an adolescent on a caravan going to Damascus when he was received by the monk Buhayra in the Syrian town of Busra. But this encounter cannot be taken as evidence that Muhammad was influenced by Buhayra. The Qur’?n refuted the accusation of the Prophet having been influenced by human teaching: “We know well that they claim that a man has taught him. The tongue of those who utter such apostasy is garbled and foreign, while his speech is pure and lucid Arabic” (al-Nahl 103). Yet there is no doubt that the Prophet did entertain close relations with Waraqa Ibn Nawfal, the cousin of his wife Khadija. Even so, there is nothing to indicate that the latter was a Christian priest residing in Mecca. In my estimate he was a Nazarene. These were a community of pre-Islamic monotheists who did not belong to any recognized Indeed, the insistence on the unity of God is salient throughout the New Testament, the teachings of the ecumenical councils and the patristic fathers as well as their successors and followers. 23 If the Surat al-Ikhlas states that God is not begotten and does not beget, so too Christianity emphasizes that the Divine essence is indivisible and neither begets nor is begotten by another. a decisive way in his famous monograph on Mecca prior to the Hijra.2 Perhaps more significant than all this is that the ecclesiastic history of the Church does not know of any Christian structure in the entire Arabian Pre-Christian church and themselves were divided. What is more, we do not find any organized Christian community in the Hejaz in the era of the Prophet as Fr. Henri Lammens has demonstrated in Christianity. What makes this thesis more plausible is that the Gospel of the judaized Ebionites [“the poor ones”] was well known in Church history and in the lost book on the Elkasaites which was disseminated east of the Jordan river in the fourth century. The significance of this group is that they were expecting the mission of a new prophet. All this is alien to the traditional forms of Christianity which we know from the Najran or the Ghassanides and the ongoing debate in the Arabian Peninsula. None of these Christian groups appear in the biography of the Prophet except for the invitation to a mutual imprecation (Mubahala) by the Prophet with the Christians of Najran which the latter rejected (3: 61)3. Furthermore, how is it conceivable to designate the Christians as Nazarenes when their book/scripture says: “It was in Antioch that the disciples for the first time were named ‘Christians’” (Acts 11:26). The term “Nazarenes” was first used for the followers of Jesus the Nazarene at the dawn of Christianity in the Fertile Crescent even though peninsula other than in Yemen. Nor did the Church enjoy any civilizational relation with the Hijaz other than what is hinted at in terms of the image of the Quraysh travelling in “seasons of winter and summer.” Thus we are constrained to acknowledge without accepting all its arguments, entire thesis and dearth of sources some of the truth of what Professor Haddad has claimed in his book “The Qur’?n: A Nazarene Gospel.” For the aforementioned Nazarenes were but a splinter group of a Judaized this designation fell completely out of use by the seventh century. So how did the Nazarenes become the Arabic “Nasara” and in which of the Aramaic dialects did it find its way into the covers of the Qur’?n? If our hypothesis is true then all of the Christians of the entire period between the descent of the Qur’?n down to our present day are not the point of reference when the Qur’?n speaks about the “Nasara,” except as regards the few point of overlap. And this holds true for every verse which contains such declarations. It is not permissible to argue in reverse, i.e. “you Christians say this and that because the Qur’?n says this about you.” Rather, the correct inference must be the other way: “If you Christians claim this and that, you are the intended objects of the Qur’?n.” The premise cannot simply be: “The Nasara are the Christians.” This was the claim of the exegetes who wrote in the lands of the Islamic conquest; they got to know the Christians and reached the conclusion that they must be one and the same with the Nasara mentioned in the revelation. And when we come across the line: “They say that the Most Merciful has begotten a son” (Mariam 88) and similar verses, we cannot understand this as a repudiation of the Christianity which we know and which equally rejects such begetting, that is to say the elevation of a created being to the status of a deity. The heresy that Christ was elevated to that divine status was known as adoptionism. It was also propounded by the Gnostics who went so far as to say that God made Christ his son during the baptism in the river Jordan. If the Surat al-Ikhlas states that God is not begotten and does not beget, so too Christianity emphasizes that the Divine essence is indivisible and neither begets nor is begotten by another. If we wanted to understand the meaning of divine birth and begetting by God according to the Qur’?n, would it not be closer to the scriptural context to say that what the Qur’?n rejects is angels being daughters of the God: “And they ascribe to God almighty daughters as they wish” (al-Nahl 57). Al-Jalalayn’s exegesis of this verse reads: “He does not beget due to the absence of anything like Him, and He is not begotten, due to the impossibility of anything acting upon Him.”4 The text therefore does allude to declaring the Christians heretics due to their belief in the pre-eternal filiation of Christ to God. The Surat al-Ikhlas does not point to this since the transcendence of [Christ’s] birth is tantamount to the transcendence of God above any sexual element. This is precisely the standpoint of Christianity. It is also supported by verse 101 of the Surat al-Anaam: “How can He have a child if He has no consort?” This is decidedly not the concept of Christ’s filiation to God amongst Christians who completely reject out of hand the notion of a transcendent and wholly ineffable God having any physical relation with Mary. Rather, the filiation of Christ and God refers to the eternal relationship between God and the Word prior to the latter having taken on a human form. This unique relationship is even alluded to in the Qur’?n which refers to Jesus alone amongst all prophets as the “Word of God” (3:46; 4:171). It is regrettable that the Christian theology has not yet been arabized, i.e. it has not faced the Islamic consciousness in a dialogical approach to make itself clear and to seek clarification of Islam as well. 25 There is a unique aspect in which the Quran and the Gospels find themselves in accord, and that is the status of veneration according to Mary in the two books which creates as a common bond between Christians and Muslims. and my mother as gods besides God?” (al-Maida 211). This verse to my mind provides us with an image of the astral trinity as it was current amongst the Arabs worshiping a greater deity. In the Yemen it was the 26 The Qur’?n’s stance on the trinity is governed by the verse: “O Jesus, son of Mary! Did thou say to people: `take me mitting blasphemy. It is clear that he mistook Mary’s intercession, and her supplication to God. For this honouring of Mary and her intercessionary role never, not once, amounted to her Divinity or worship as God in the Church. As for the Imam Razi, he interprets the verse by claiming that the Nasara took the creator of the miracles of Jesus and Mary to be Jesus and Mary themselves, and that God had not created them, and that Mary and Jesus were therefore considered as two deities. Clearly such talk contradicts what we find amongst the Christians, for Christ never ascribed to himself the power to perform deeds independently from God. “I cannot do anything of myself” (John 5:30). It is equally clear that the Church does not ascribe to Mary and the saints any autonomous power apart from God. “Two deities without God” remains a phrase of the Arab apostasy [erroneously] affixed to the Christian trinity. We only know of one Arabic faction, mentioned by Saint Epiphanius the Cypriot in the forth century, which offered devotions to Mary.6 Cognizant of the considerable mystery which still surrounds this sect, we condemn its divinization of Mary. And yet after this period, that is to say between the fourth century and the beginning of Islam we do not find evidence substantiating the continuation of this movement in the Arab peninsula. Be that as it may, the fact remains that the Church did not know anything about such matters; the trinity which the Qur’?n repudiates is simply not the Trinity of the Church. Regular Christians who know the basics of their faith will not feel targeted in the verses on the Nasara which we have cited here. It is natural that Christianity conceives of itself as the fi- moon which gave birth to the radiating sun so that amongst the polytheistic Arabs there were two small gods below the supreme deity. Upon closer examination, we find the prototype of a grand trinity, but the supreme deity here is Baal Shamin, the god of the Heavens. It was sex which governed the relationship of all the male and female deities in the ancient civilizations of the Middle East, Greece and Rome. It is the particular trinity ascribed to the Nazarenes which is the reference point for Maida 211 according to Jalalayn5. And when the verse appears: “Do not say there are three deities. Desist! It is better for you. God almighty is only One (Surat al-Nisa, 171-2),” it becomes evident that the trinity here pertains to Jesus, Mary and God as it does in Surat al-Nisa 73: “They disbelieve who say that God is one of three in a trinity.” Jalalayn’ s commentary is unequivocal: “The trinity here refers to deities, one of which being God, the other Jesus and the third his mother Mary. ‘They’ refers to the Nasara.” The Imam Bidawi has purported that the Christians worship Jesus and his mother as two deities as if they were worshiping God himself, thereby com- nal religion even as Judaism saw itself as final, yet this is on the creedal level. In the official Christian sources and references I do not find a single Christian text confronting Islam. The intellectual encounter will be facilitated if you seek to comprehend Islam from its sources and Christianity from its own references. Each religion should speaks for itself. Yet this necessitates a historical reading of the holy scriptures since each and every revelation emanates within a set of historical circumstances which illuminate understanding. What we lack is that Christianity clarifies its core pillars in a plain, lucid Arabic vocabulary, that is to say that it discloses itself by itself and speaks to the Arab mind rather than merely speaking to its own flock in the terminology it inherited from the Greeks and Syriacs. It is regrettable that the Christian theology has not yet been arabized, i.e. it has not faced the Islamic consciousness in a dialogical approach to make itself clear and to seek clarification of Islam as well. And it is this clarification of one’s own stance, and the quest to gain a more accurate image of the other, which are the fundamental premises for a free and unperturbed meeting of minds. What remains to be discussed is the name which pervades the scriptures of both religions more than any other, some 1052 times in the Qur’?n: the name of God. It is He upon whom rests the entire body of religious thought. It is He who is the mainspring of monotheism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam alike. And there is the matter of the Divine attributes. Whatever the debate may be surrounding the 99 beautiful names of God, we can generally say that the followers of these religions view God from one perspective, whether they believe that they are His people or his family ( ummah) or his sons or his servants. And it is from this vantage point that they regard their faith and their subservience to God. The paramount importance of the pervasive supremacy of God in the scriptures of the monotheistic religions calls for a review of the beautiful names whose implications share much in common. Furthermore, there must be a juxtaposition of the Christian axiom that “God is Love” with the name of “God the Merciful” in the Qur’?n so that we can properly asses the development of the theological conception of God in both religions. For the notion of “God is Love” appears in a passage rich of connotations in John’s first letter: “So let us love one another dear friends: for love is of God; and every one that loves is born of God, and knows God. He that does not love does not know God; for God is love. And God manifested his love towards us by sendinghisonly,thatwe might live through him” (1 John 4:7-9). It becomes clear in this passage that God moves towards humanity through his love for it. They, in turn, receive this love and love him and each other in return. And yet it is not sufficient to consider the expression “God is Love” as a mere description of God. Rather, God essentially makes love his own nature, it is His innermost being, and, consequentially, the reason for his continual, dynamic In an exceptional testament to dialogue, 138 Muslim scholars from all over the world sent a declaration of reconciliation to the spiritual heads of the Christian churches on the occasion of Ramadan in the year of 1428 h. or October 13, 2007. 27 28 activity so that each believer receives God’s power which enables him to love. Perhaps “the Compassionate” in the Qur’?n is the closest analogue to the New Testament’s description of God as the lover. It denotes the abundance of compassion, and the Arabic inflection (al-Rahman) accentuates the surfeit of mercy while the similar attribute of the merciful (al-Rahim) connotes permanence and staying power7. Tabari writes in his commentary on the Qur’?n: “The scope of the compassionate (al-Rahman) is wider than that of the merciful (al-Rahim). It is customary to gradually ascend from the lower to the higher, because the compassionate (al-Rahman) encompasses the fruits of divine bounty and its roots, while its peripheral extensions to the merciful are like a completion of what has been refined and soothed by him.8 We thus do not find the interpreters of the Qur’?n making any great distinction between the two forms compassion and mercifulness; both refer to the relationship between God and man and creation. By contrast, the love referred to in the Epistle of John, even if the author connects it to man in terms of its application, he also establishes it as the nature of God rather than merely one of his attributes. The depth of Christian theology allows for this. The question then remains: are the Qur’?nic notions of mercifulness and compassion synonyms of the evangelical notion of love? We need to more closely examine the Qur’?nic verses dealing with compassion (al-Rahman) in order to determine whether the two concepts of compassion and love have the same sig- nificance or similar implications. There is a unique aspect in which the Qur’?n and the Gospels find themselves in accord, and that is the status of veneration accorded to Mary in the two books which creates as a common bond between Christians and Muslims. It is a bond which softens the hearts and discloses an astonishing affinity between the devotees. For example, if we read the verses of the Sura Mariam dealing with Zakharias and his son John – who corresponds to John the Baptist in the Gospel of Luke – we find an astounding similarity. Likewise, you find a remarkable similarity between the people of Imran and the Gospel of Luke which ascribes to Gabriel the words:“Rejoice! [or Peace be upon you!] Ye who is full of grace,the Lord is with thee”(Luke1:28) whereupon is added: “Blessed art thou amongst women” (Luke 1:42). These then are two verses which correspond to the Qur’?nic verses in Sura al-Umran 24: “And thus the angel said: God has selected you Mary and your chastity, and He has selected you amongst all the women of the world.” The Christian belief in the immaculate chastity of the Virgin reverberates in Mary’s pronouncement in the Qur’?n: “Far be it that I bear a child while no man has touched me” (al-Imran, 54). The sanctification and the glorification of Mary in both verses can- not be impugned. Besides the creeds in God and his unity we must look at the Beautiful Names to highlight in their gamut the kinship between Islam and Christianity. I will confine myself here to only a few quick deliberations of the Lord’s relationship to man. Amongst the most important of these encounters is kindness. In point of fact, the issues of kindness and agreement and serenity all overlap. They all usher from the commandment which is a work of God as he charges his servants to assume their duty. The Muatazalites held that he who is charged to observe the commandments, by being kind to God, thereby obeys Him. There is a concordance between the divine command, on the one side, and the kindness which God dispenses on man so that he may act virtuously, on the other. Without any undue generalization and simplification, it may be said that intellectual probity and the appreciation of the values of the other are in the process of spreading, especially amidst those who live their faith. We may equate the notion of kindness in Islam with the notion of grace in Christianity, the indispensible divine blessing without man cannot assume any virtuous task. In the Christian formulation, the person who accepts the Divine blessing becomes sanctified by God and moves towards Him. The core of this notion of grace in Christianity is akin to the state of contentment and satisfaction in the Islamic terminology: the self on whom God has dispensed his favour and blessing is the calm, serene self. Even in the commiseration of God with man the favour returns to God, its initiator. For He is the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega. Man is the recipient, yet in Islam he is an active, free subject because he is a responsible agent. After a long disputation between the theologians and the philosophers in Islam, the case for freedom won out in Islamic society. This too is a common juncture shared with Christianity where John Calvin propounded the thesis of the double predestination in determining man’s fate in heaven or hell until this aspect of this confession came to an end in the modern age. In 29 The Muslim minority in the West for instance needs time until the reciprocal acculturation between them and the indigenous French population expands further. This has little to do with a religious problematic in a country in which a great many have distanced themselves from their erstwhile faith. in a reasonable way without being idolatrous? Needless to say, all this requires a discussion of belief first and foremost. The relation of man to man is simpler when viewed from a contractual perspective. Even so, the spiritual interconnectedness of man is a result of man’s 30 all denominations of Christianity, there must be a cooperation between Divine grace and human effort are needed for salvation to come to pass. And if the particular notion of a “cooperation between God and man” may not be customary in Islam, it remains the case that the individual Muslim contributes to his salvation and may not perish in the afterlife, except for the unbelievers. I am of the conviction that the discussion of the true relationship between God and man remains one of the most important points in Islamic-Christian dialogue. Is there a permanent relationship between the Being which we call God and the other, human being? Can we conceive of an intimate conjunction between the Creator and the created Qur’?nic call to come to a common word of agreement. The significance of this document was not the concern for any scientific approach but rather the quest for peace in the world based on the presumption that a recognition of kindred beliefs would aid the cause of peace. The drafters of the document saw that the common ground of Islam and Christianity lay in man’s love for God and his love for his neighbour. It is such love which is affirmed in one of the first verses to descend in the Qur’?n: “Mention the name of your Lord and devote yourself to Him with full devotion” (al-Muzzammil 73:8). The undersigning scholars further expound on this dialectic of love in Christianity. When a legal expert asked the lord in order to trap him: “Oh teacher, which commandment is the greatest in the law?” And Christ answered him: “That you love your Lord with all your heart and all your being and all your thought. This is the first and greatest of the commandments. And the second is like it: Love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments rest all the law and prophets.” (Mathew 22: 40-43). Further shedding light on the common ground, the signatories of this letter add: “As Muslims we tell the Christians that we are not against you, and that Islam is not opposed to them.” After this creedal exposition and the affirmation of reconciliation on a global level, the thinkers issue a call for a burying of hatred and dissension so that mutual respect, equity, justice and cordial friendship may prevail instead. The most important element in this document is the appeal to the communities of these two religions to live God-inspired regard for his fellow man. In an exceptional testament to dialogue, 138 Muslim scholars from all over the world sent a declaration of reconciliation to the spiritual heads of the Christian churches on the occasion of Ramadan in the year of 1428 h. or October 13, 2007. The importance lies in the affirmation of these scholars that Christians are monotheists; they thereby laid the basis for the famous together without resorting to the habitual mode of interaction between them under the headings of “majority” and “minority.” The document does not resolve all issues but it does, if pursued, pave the way for a new seriousness of correspondence which could, in turn, prepare for an uprooting of the roots of division and mutual animosity. This fresh atmosphere in turn could enter us into a face to face encounter with the powers that be so that we might recognize kinship in matters in which we share a lot in common and which we tended to ignore in the days of confrontational discourse which could even reach the degree of verbal violence. Two things promise to make the mutual encounter of Christians and Muslims living at a level of depth a genuine one: 1. Each party finds a lot to approve and appreciate amongst the other, be it in word or deed, be it consciously or unconsciously. 2. Terms enter from other languages along with their associated concepts. To take an example, the Christians of this country rejoice in the advent of Ramadan while the spiritual heads will understand the Fast of Ramadan as the equivalent to their Fasting, both being an effort to approach God and flatter Him. Many Christians derive pleasure from the Muslim call to prayer and the recitation of the Qur’?n. There is at least one salient emanation of a civilized Islam which is comparable to a parallel Christian evolution of customs and refinement. Yet there are things which are more valuable than tradition. In the countries of the Levant, you will find amongst the Muslims a genuine relishing of the concept of love as it is manifested in the Gospel and as it is borrowed from the relationship between man and woman as you will find greater respect shown to monks and nuns due to the long experience of living side-by-side (and not just on account of the Qur’?nic text). This is reflected in thought and discourse. Without any undue generalization and simplification, it may be said that intellectual probity and the appreciation of the values of the other are in the process of spreading, especially amidst those who live their faith and have not fallen under the spell of syncretism which has come to dominate quarters of the naïve, the aware and the extremist alike. Intimate knowledge of the texts does not always lead to love of the other. For love is a divine grace which often can dispense with a lot of knowledge. Insofar as the Christians are Arabs, Islamic civilization reveals to them something of their mental constitution so that they devote themselves to its study in their school curricula and colleges of the social sciences. It is regrettable that Christianity in the Middle East does not enter the curricula of any school or university so that the Muslims might in turn catch something of it from their foreign perusals. In conversations amongst intellectual circles, Christians do not necessarily appear superior in their command of foreign languages. In the francophone summits Muslims are no less prominent than Christians. I happen to know that Salah Stetie, a Muslim, dictated the Lebanese during the universal francophone summit. The Lebanese have come to reach full parity intellectually in literature and the sciences, including specialized fields of medicine. Moreover, due to demographic intermixing, we often find in Lebanon an overwhelming Muslim majority in Christian secondary schools without there being the slightest trace of evangelization. Nor is this phenomenon new to the Near East. The foreign missionaries who undertook the schooling were not intent on summoning the Muslim students to Christianity but rather aimed at the dissemination of knowledge which they considered as their Christian commitment to serve man whatever his colour or creed. We are left to address what is hidden beneath the text and the talk. In general, you will not find many traces of the religious debate, or even the mere talk which reveals differences, in the ordinary life of society. Many a time this person will refer to that book to discover the shared vision and to supplicate the face of God. The fundamental divergences go unmentioned and are eschewed for the sake of the mildness of the meeting. This may be on account of some timid diffidence at times, but most of the times it is on account of sheer ignorance of the other and his belief. What remains is the unifying invocation of God along with the premonition that our counterpart too is seeking God’s goodness and lives through and from it. Many times one is humbled and touched when one espies the radiant glow on the face of the other, and each person opens to the other, taken by the momentum of love which renders the religious institution redundant. The formation of this spiritual union in communal gatherings is the condition for peace in them. Politics corrupts everything in this virtuous journey in that it fashions a path of dichotomy. This is what happens in the sectarian clash of politics. Despite this, a friend may continue to exchange affection with his friend in personal discussion, whilst they close in on themselves when it comes to political talk. To be sure, this phenomenon is destined to disappear as sects intermingle and ideologies shared by members of different sects arise and compete with each other. Likewise, authoritarian systems may put a lid on sectarianism. This is what may be observed in the Arab East insofar as Christians and Muslims partake of one Arabic culture and set of customs, having been trained by time to live side by side. It is not so when disagreements arise from racial difference. The Muslim minority in the West for instance needs time until the reciprocal acculturation between them and the indigenous French population expands further. This has little to do with a religious problematic in a country in which a great many have distanced themselves from their erstwhile faith; rather, it is an ethnic problem revolving around the lingering doubt that the alien brown or black person is capable of integrating into French society. You cannot seek to insert yourself into a society in a few years. And if you venture to do so, you want to preserve the identity of your ancestors, i.e. you want to remain a civilized Muslim while becoming a civilized French citizen while pondering the points of divergence between the two identities. Often enough, globalization and cultural individualism appear at odds with one another, and perhaps you will refrain from practicing religion deeply lest you set yourself in opposition to the other. You are against the total and genuine assimilation on account of which the other might welcome you with joy. It is my sense that the Muslims are Muslims forever and likewise the Christians. Each party may lose a number of devotees for various reasons, yet a large core constituency will remain. I thus harbour no great practical hopes of great changes brought about by proselytizing, however perspicacious. I am not saying that we are predestined to live together. It is equally inappropriate to just have a quantitative proliferation without meaning. What I do hope is that the growing numbers of adherents of both faiths can live next to each in an understanding and loving way in order to afford a constructive and new human model. Rather than a mere national cohesion, an intelligent reciprocal familiarization will evolve, one which we hope will be grounded in the freedom and development which is congruent with the common good of all of us. I have the impression that the societies governed by the pure, loyal and courageous love of God breathe life into such familiarization of different communities. The most important of all freedoms is the freedom of faith, including idolatry. You accept me when you accept the form of my existence with my brethren in faith as we understand this existence. There is room here to delve into details, but any feeling of oppression stems from oppression and not from fantasy. There is therefore no space here to renew the inquisitorial courts and mentality of the Middle Ages just as there is no ground to portray Christians as if they are still “dhimmi” protected subjects after the Ottoman Empire suspended this category some 150 years ago. Civil freedoms are established in all advanced countries. Those social segments who are at ease with their faith will not fear the sweeping tide given that their house is not made of glass which anyone can pelt. The age of imperialism has passed and nobody is attached to it. We Orientals see our trust increased in each of us. May this trust be supported by a respect for the other and his articles of faith? I dare say that we monotheists have become a family of God which finds itself in agreement on much of what we know of Him. And we yearn for the other in order to embrace God with humility and sincerity. Metropolitan George Khodr is the Archbishop of the Orthodox Archdiocese of Byblos, Botris (Mount Lebanon) of the Church of Antioch. He was born in Tripoli in 1923. He worked as a professor of Arabic Culture in the Lebanese University and of Pastoral Theology in St. John of Damascus Institute of Theology in the University of Balamand. He has been active in the ecumenical movement and in dialogue with Islam, as well as representing the Church of Antioch in pan-Orthodox and ecumenical meetings. He has several writings on Religion, Philosophy and Christian Islamic Dialogue. NOTES 1 Louis Massignon, Les Trois Prières d’Abraham, Paris: Cerf, 1998. 2 P. Henri Lammens, La Mecque à la veille de l’Hégire (Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph,t.IX,fasc.3), Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique,1924,pp.97-439. 3 Alfred Guillaume, The Life of Muhammad. A translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul All?h. Oxford: OUP, 1955, p. 277. 4 Jalal al-Din Muhammad al-Mahali, Tafsir al-Jalalayn bi Hamish al-Qur’?n al-Karim, Beirut: M. al-Risala, 1995. 5 Ibid. Also see: http://www.altafsir.com/Al-Jalalayn.asp 6 The Panarion of St. Epiphanius, Bishop of Salamis Philip R. Amidon, translator. New York: Oxford, 1990. 7 Muhammad Tabatabai, al-Mizan fi Fi Tafsir al-Qur’?n, Beirut: Muassasat alAlami, 1970. 8 Abu Jafar Bin Jarir al-Tabari, Tafsir al-Tabari : al-musamma Jami’ al-bayan fi ta’wil al-Qur’?n. Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-’Ilmiyah, 1997
- [A Conversation on Love](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/a-conversation-on-love) - Charity and Compassion: Interreligious Perspectives Patrick Laude: What are the Hebrew words that would best encapsulate the meanings of love and compassion in religion? What do these words suggest? Rabbi Steinsaltz: The Hebrew words for love – ahavah – and compassion – rahamim – are used in the language in a general way, namely, there is no linguistic distinction between the use of the words in a religious sense and in a secular sense; moreover, the terms are not always confined to humans but sometimes are used even in regard to animals. There is a general distinction between love and compassion, although the root of the word rahamim, compassion – rhm – also carries the meaning of love (a similar word is found in other Semitic languages too). In many cases, the difference between the words is that the term “love” is used towards one who is of equal or higher status, while “compassion” is connected with whoever is of equal or lower standing. In the broadest sense, there is a certain linguistic and intrinsic difference between the two words: love contains an element of wanting something, while compassion is mostly connected with the notion of giving. There are, however, other distinguishing features between the two words when used in a purely religious sense, vis-à-vis God (and in Biblical and post-Biblical thinking this love is mutual and expressed both ways – from God to man and from man to God), as it assumed that the human ability to love God is, in itself, a mark of Divine grace, of God loving this person; while when used in the human sense they may as well be one-sided. PL. What is the specifically Judaic perspective on human love, i.e. conjugal love, but also friendship? RB. As stated before, the meaning of the word “love” is very general, and therefore the main distinction between love in the religious sense and in the general sense is not the power and depth of the emotion, but in its subject. In common usages the word “love” may sometimes be downgraded to mere liking or plain desire; but the general meaning of love contains two elements: the wish to be closer to the subject of love, and the wish to give more and more to this subject. In this sense, love in the human context may be more specific, or more confined, than Divine love, but essentially is not different from it. In fact, in many Jewish sources the love relationship goes both ways: on the one hand, love between human beings is seen as derived from Divine love; and on the other, human love is often used as a symbol for Divine love. Friendship, in a fullest sense, is not considered different from love, even though in practice it expresses itself in different forms and ways than conjugal love, for instance. On a deeper level, friendship that does not contain the element of love is not considered true friendship, but only a mutual agreement to work together, or at least not to harm each other. PL. What are the main lessons about love and compassion to be found in the Talmud? RB. In the Talmud – which is a compilation of the Oral Law and is much more detailed and elaborate than the Scriptures – love and compassion are treated in a very detailed way. In fact, in Talmudic or even pre-Talmudic times a new term was coined: Gemilut Hasadim. This term has no adequate translation into any other languages, and its various loose translations are not very enlightening. On the whole, Gemilut Hasadim is a very generalized notion of charity. But while charity is connected with giving financial help to the destitute, Gemilut Hasadim is the general admonition to help other people in every sphere of life and give them every kind of help they might need. Unlike charity, which is mostly to poor people, Gemilut Hasadim is for everybody who needs assistance, even temporarily or subjectively, regardless of whether the receiver is poor or rich. In this sense, Gemilut Hasadim bears the fullest meaning and is the actual expression of the term “compassion”, which literally means “to feel with somebody else,” whenever that person has any problem. Gemilut Hasadim involves a very large set of instructions and advice, and the important place that this set of instruction occupies in Jewish life is reflected in the Talmudic saying, that Gemilut Hasadim is one of the three pillars upon which the world stands (Pirkei Avot – Ethics of Our Fathers 1:2). On a more theological level, all acts of Gemilut Hasadim are a part of the very general notion of imitatio Dei. Indeed, in many cases it says that a certain deed is not just a good deed which is beneficial for society, and that a certain intention is not only right in the sense that it is a positive mindset and a state of spiritual devotion, but that according to Scripture it is the way in which God Himself acts. The importance of Gemilut Hasadim is such, that sometimes not only whatever is directly connected with “good deeds,” but practically the entire body of commandments and instructions that deal with our world (not necessarily those of direct worship) is seen as included within Gemilut Hasadim, since any good deed that is done by people (including some rituals) is seen as a way in which people give something in order to make the very structure of the world higher and nobler. Doing all these deeds it is part of sanctifying the universe. In this sense doing good deeds, giving and helping others, saying pleasant things etc., goes beyond the realm of human needs and is part of the general notion that doing positive acts toward everything – animals, plants, and even inanimate objects – is also an act of Gemilut Hasadim. According to this view, the act of doing anything positive, whatever its object, is considered a display of mercy and compassion, and therefore has an aspect of Divine worship. PL. Has Kabbalah something specific to teach us about love? RS. In the world of Kabbalah there is a further distinction between love and mercy. The basic idea is that love, on any level, stems from within and is fundamentally non-judgmental. Very broadly speaking, love – or its outward manifestation as Chesed, which is the attribute of goodness as well as showing goodness – can be seen as defining one of the main powers in the world, which is an emotion or deed that flows from within out unto the world in general, to specific objects within it, and most specifically to people. This force may be seen as the centrifugal power of the universe, whereby things go from the center (or the self, in human terms) to the periphery: giving, embracing, sharing, keeping the world in balance. Parallel to it is the centripetal power of constraint, Gevurah, the power that works from the periphery inwards and which keeps a certain equilibrium in existence. According to this view, Mercy, Rahamim (or Tifereth, in Kabbalistic terminology), is seen as a combination of the centrifugal and centripetal powers, because Mercy is not only an outburst of an inner feeling, but also a reaction to the outside existence. The object of love may be anything and anybody, and a gift of love is not meant to fulfill any lack in the object; rather, it is an expression of the innermost drive: to love, to give. Mercy, on the other hand, although it too contains the notion of giving and sharing, is judgmental, because it starts with the notion that somebody or something is in need, is lacking. Fulfilling such a need is an act of mercy, but mercy is invariably a response or reaction to something which is seen as a lack or a blemish. Whereas love is based on an inner drive to give, to be closer, regardless of whether the recipient actually needs anything, Mercy starts out from the recipient, from the object, and is an attempt to fulfill a want. In this sense, Mercy is more defined and more “objective” than love; that is why it is seen as a very central power: judgment treated with love. In fact, some Jewish sources say that the name of the Lord (Y-H-W-H) is the name of the attribute of Mercy, which is the centre point, that combines both the inner self and the outer existence. Human beings may feel mercy most strongly when they encounter pain and suffering; but in the eyes of the Lord the whole world, being intrinsically confined and incomplete, deserves mercy. This is how the verse “and His mercy is on all His deeds” (Psalms 145) is understood: all creatures, even the Archangels, deserve this kind of mercy. Mercy in people can be felt towards anybody (or 10 anything) that is suffering for whatever reason. Love has in it a certain amount of respect for and appreciation of the beloved, while mercy does not have this limitation; the farthest and the lowest can equally be objects of mercy. PL. Considering the ternary of “Abrahamic religions”, some writers have associated hope to Judaism, charity to Christianity and faith to Islam. How do you see the specificity of Judaism in relation to these three “virtues,” and particularly in relation to charity, or more broadly to love? RS. If I were to make such a succinct definition of these three religions, I would do it very differently – namely, by relating more to the core ideas and self-understanding of these religions, rather than by attaching a slogan to each. I think that even linguistically, and surely historically, Islam is the religion of acceptance of yoke and subjection to God (as far as I know, this was how Muslims and Islam defined themselves in the beginning); Christianity is mostly about Divine redemption, and Judaism is overwhelmingly theocentric, as it concerns itself mainly with being connected to God and doing His will. In this context, charity is a very broad view of everything. The general aim of life is to fill gaps, to give, to mend whatever exists, from the inanimate to the human beings. Nobody and nothing is complete, and making things better is our way of continuing God’s creation. Charity towards human beings, then, is basically the same thing: it is the attempt to fulfill the lacunae of existence in whatever way; sometimes it can be done with a coin, sometimes with a compliment. PL. It has also been written that Judaism is more centered on fear of God than on love and knowledge of God. How would you respond to this view? How do you see the relationship between fear and love, knowledge and love in Judaism? RS. Judaism deals both with love of God and with fear of God; however, in order to define it properly it should be stated that Judaism as a living religion is unique among world religions in that it is very much concerned with the knowledge of God. There is a huge drive in Judaism to attain more and more of this knowledge. Furthermore, in Judaism there has never been a defined group or caste of “the knowledgeable ones”; on the contrary: everybody – young or old, rich or poor, scholarly or ignorant – is expected to be knowledgeable, although there always will, of course, be differences between individuals, and there will always be those who are more capable of studying and gaining knowledge, and others who for many reasons cannot do that to an equal degree. In fact, the Messianic dream of Judaism, which is also the very last and summarizing sentence in Maimonides’ Code of Law, is: “for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea” (Isalah 11:9). The act of attaining this knowledge is considered not only the fulfillment of a wish, but an act of worship. PL. Is there a universality of Judaism, and how would you define or suggest it? RS. In Judaism, there are two aspects. One is the particular duties and commandments that are pertinent only to Jews, while the other is a very clear view of a universal religion which is the dream and desire of Judaism to share with the world. The commandments of this universal religion are formalized as the Seven Noahide commandments (those which pertain to all of Noah’s descendants – namely, every human being). They are general precepts about faith and behavior which are the common human heritage: belief in God, prohibition of murder, adultery and incest, creating a just society, and caring for the well-being of all other creatures. This “religion of Adam,” of humanity, is seen as the ideal way of life for humanity in general, and therefore spreading it (but not the commandments that pertain particularly to Jews) is seen as an ideal. PL. How do you understand interfaith dialogue from a Jewish perspective? What is/are its goal(s)? What are its prerequisites? What are its pitfalls and limits? What can Jews bring to interfaith dialogue? RS. Interfaith dialogue can be a positive deed, if it is done with care, understanding and sensitivity. Its main goal is, mostly, listening and getting to know each other. The pitfall of such interfaith dialogue may be in all kinds of missionary attempts, in which the other is seen as lacking something essential that does not make it possible for him to attain fulfillment and redemption. Judaism can share some of the many treasures it has accumulated in its more than 3000 years of existence, some of which can surely be useful and helpful for others. In its essence, Judaism is not a missionary religion, and this fact can surely contribute to creating a better, saner relationship with other religions. PL. Some important intellectual figures in Judaism defined the relationship of Jews with other communities as a “confrontation” (not in the negative sense of the term but in the general sense of “being confronted” by alterity); what do you think of this assessment? RS. The confrontation of Judaism with other communities stems from the assumption that the Jews shouldn’t be different. However, difference does not necessarily mean animosity or hatred; it is just the acknowledgment of the fact that religions, like individuals, are different. Love between man and woman begins with the acknowledgment of difference. Difference, then, may be one of the main forces that create love. But the desire to enforce uniformity – by force, by laws, by temptation – creates a negative response. Confrontation is sometimes just the natural reaction to an invitation such as “You have to join us.” In those places where the notion of difference was accepted (e.g., India), there was also no feeling of confrontation. PL. Given the highly politicized and sensitive context that surrounds the relationship between Abrahamic faiths, and particularly Muslims and Jews in the modern world, what would you say to a Muslim about your faith that may help him or her understand the Jewish point of view? RS. It is a great pity that the relationship between the Abrahamic religions is connected to politics. In the long run – as can be seen from any examination of the existing problems between Muslims and Jews – these problems are based on misunderstandings and on creating justifications for hatred. The modern combination of nationalism and religion can be lethal, both psychologically and literally. The first and obvious results appear at first in hating and fighting a real or imaginary enemy. But in a very consistent way it develops into a toxic mixture which destroys both nation and religion. Hopefully, this phenomenon will subside, even though many people with short-sighted views try to fan the fires instead of quenching them. The main thing to say to Muslims about Judaism is to offer them to gain a better, more comprehensive view of the Jewish faith. Hatred is so often based on ignorance and prejudice, both of which can be cured by trying to know more, to understand better.
- [Sources of Tolerance and Intolerance in Islam](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/sources-of-tolerance) - SOURCES OF TOLERANCE AND INTOLERANCE IN ISLAM The Case of the People of the Book by Ibrahim Kalin Islam’s encounter with other religions is as old as Islam itself. The two sources of Islam, i.e., the Qur’?n and Hadith, contain extensive discussions, narrations, and injunctions on the various religious traditions before Islam and especially Judaism and Christianity. The Muslim awareness of the multiplicity of faith traditions is evident not only in the Qur’?n but also in the sayings of the prophet Muhammad as well as in the later Islamic scholarship. Historically, the first Muslim community came into being within a fairly diverse society where Jews, Christians, pagans, polytheists, monotheists, fire-worshippers (Magians or Majus), and others lived together across the Arabian Peninsula. The major and minor religions that the Islamic world encountered from its earliest inception to the modern period make up a long list: the religious traditions of the preIslamic (jahiliyyah) Arabs, Mazdeans in Mesopotamia, Iran, and Transoxania, Christians (of different communions like Nestorians in Mesopotamia and Iran, Monophysites in Syria, Egypt and Armenia, Orthodox Melkites in Syria, Orthodox Latins in North Africa), Jews in various places, Samaritans in Palestine, Mandaeans in south Mesopotamia, Harranians in north Mesopotamia, Manichaeans in Mesopotamia and Egypt, Buddhists and Hindus in Sind, tribal religions in Africa, pre-Islamic Turkic tribes, Buddhists in Sind and the Panjab, and Hindus in the Panjab.1 In short, Islam is no stranger to the 36 challenge of other religions. The fact that IslamisthelastofthethreeAbrahamic faiths puts it in a special relationship with Judaism and Christianity. On the one hand, the Qur’?n defines Jews and Christians as the People of the Book (ahl al-kitab) and gives them the status of protected religious communities (ahl aldhimmah) under the provision of paying a religious tax called jizya (compare the Qur’?n, al-Tawbah 9:29). Within this legal framework, the People of the Book are accorded certain rights, the most important of which is the right of religious belief, i.e., no forced conversion. On the other hand, the Qur’?n engages the People of the Book head-on as the primary counterparts of a serious dialogue on the unity of God, the Abrahamic tradition, some biblical stories, salvation, the hereafter, and the nature of Jesus Christ. The Qur’?n is explicit and occasionally harsh in its criticism of certain Jewish and Christian themes because no serious dialogue is possible without raising the most fundamental issues. In relation to the treatment of non-Muslims, we thus see a tension between what we might loosely call the requirements of law and theological doctrine. Islamic law grants certain rights to non-Muslims including freedom of religion, property, travel, education, and government employment. These rights extend not only to Jews and Christians but also to other faith traditions such as the Manicheans, Hindus, and Buddhists. Muslims encountered these latter communities as the borders of the Islamic world expanded beyond the Arabian Peninsula. One of the major legal adjustments in this process was the enlargement of the concept of the People of the Book to include those other than Jews and Christians. This, however, was complemented by an economic system that allowed non-Muslims to move freely across the social strata of Muslim societies in which they lived. Following the vocation of Prophet Muhammad, Muslims always encouraged free trade and, therefore, unlike Christianity, did not have to discriminate against Jews as international merchants or moneylending usurers. Socially, there was nothing in the Islamic tradition similar to the Hindu caste system that would have led to the treatment of Hindus in discriminatory manners. Instead, Muslims treated Hindus as members of a different socio-religious community whose internal affairs were regulated by Hindu, not Islamic, laws. Politically, Muslim rulers were more or less pragmatic and used relatively lenient legal provisions to ensure the loyalty of their non-Muslim subjects. Forced conversion or economic discrimination was not in the interest of the state or the Muslim communities. This socioeconomic and legal framework, thus, played a key role in the rapid spread of Islam and facilitated the development of a “culture of coexistence” in Muslim societies that had considerable nonMuslim populations from the Balkans and Anatolia to the subcontinent of India. Legal protection, however, is not a licence to theological laxity. The Qur’?n sharply criticizes the Meccan polytheists and accuses them of failing to understand the true nature of God. Jews and Christians are not spared from criticism, some of which are general and some specific. The primary reason for the Qur’?n’s constant dialogue with them is its unflinching effort to hold them up to higher moral and religious standards than the Meccan pagans. As the two heirs or claimants to the legacy of Abraham, Jewish and Christian communities are expected to uphold the principles of monotheism and accept the new revelation sent through the prophet Muhammad. The Qur’?n calls upon them to recognize Islam as part of the Abrahamic tradition: 2 “Say: O People of the Book. Come to a word [kalimah] common between us and you: that we shall worship none but God, and that we shall ascribe no partners unto Him, and that none of us shall take others for lords beside God. And if they turn away, then say: Bear witness that we are they who have surrendered (unto Him).” 3 (al-i ‘Imran 3: 64) The tension between theological certitude and legal protection is further complicated by another tension between the unity of the essential message of religions and the multiplicity of socio-religious communities. The tension is real with theological and political consequences. The problem is how to explain and then reconcile the discrepancy between the unity of the divine message and the diversity of faith communities to which the divine message has been sent. As I shall discuss below, the Qur’?n seeks to overcome this problem by defining the plurality of socio-religious communities as part of God’s plan to test different communities in their struggle for virtue and the common good (al-khayrat). The universality of divine revelation is a constant theme in the Qur’?n and forms the basis of what we might call the Abrahamic ecumenism of monotheistic religions. As the father of monotheism, Abraham is assigned a central role to represent the universalist nature of the divine revelation: he is the most important figure to unite Jews, Christians, and Muslims, despite the fact that Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad are also accorded special places in the Islamic tradition. While Abraham represents the pinnacle of this ecumenism, other prophets are seen as bearers of the same message, i.e., believing in the unity of God, worshipping him alone, and leading a virtuous life. “And before thy time We never sent any apostle without having revealed to him that there is no deity save Me, [and that,] therefore, you shall worship Me [alone]!” (al-Anbiya 21:25). The Qur’?n presents this claim to universality as a trait of not only Islam but also other Abrahamic faiths and calls upon Jews and Christians specifically to renew their bond with the father of monotheism. The true religion is “islam” (with a small “i”) in the sense of “surrendering oneself to God” fully and unconditionally. Once this common denominator is secured, ritual differences and even some theological disparities can be overcome. The Qur’?n calls all to islam without making a distinction: “Do they seek a faith other than in God [din All?h], although it is unto Him that whatever is in the heavens and on earth surrenders itself [aslama], willingly or unwillingly, since unto Him all must return?” (al-i ‘Imran 3:83; compare also al-Ra’d 13:15). The reference to the cosmological order of things, which we see in some Qur’?nic verses (compare al-Rahman 55:1–18; Isra 17:44), is of particular significance since it establishes “surrendering to God” (islam) as both a cosmological and human-religious principle. The universality of divine message extends beyond revealed books all the way to the natural world. This universalism, however, is always qualified by a reference to true faith in God and His decision to send messengers to warn those who are mistaken. “Say: “We believe in God, and in that which has been revealed unto us, and that which has been revealed unto upon Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and their descendants, and that which has been vouchsafed by their Sustainer unto Moses and Jesus and all the [other] prophets: we make no distinction between any of them. And unto Him do we surrender ourselves [literally “we’re muslims to Him”].” (al-i ‘Imran 3:84) These specific references to the prophets of Abrahamic monotheism shows Islam’s specific interest to have a constant dialogue with the People of the Book and form a kind of religious alliance with them against the Meccan polytheists. If the prophet Abraham is understood correctly as the father of monotheism, then the theological differences between Jews, Christians and Muslims can be negotiated. The Qur’?n is, thus, absolutely uncompromising on the fundamental Abrahamic principle, i.e., surrendering oneself to the one God alone: “For, if one goes in search of a religion other than surrendering to God (al-islam), it will never be accepted from him, and in the life to come he shall be among the lost” (al-i ‘Imran 3:85). Commenting on the verse, Ibn Kathir says that “whoever follows a path The universality of divine revelation is a constant theme in the Qur’an and forms the basis of what we might call the Abrahamic ecumenism of monotheistic religions. opposition to Him. This is the quality of those who believe in God and they are the people of peace [ahl al-silm].”5 Despite the narrow interpretation of some classical and other than what God has ordained, it will not be accepted.”4 Fakhr al-Din alRazi quotes Abu Muslim as saying that the expression “we surrender ourselves to Him” (muslimuna lahu) means that “we submit to God’s command with consent and turn away from all discussion. I shall claim that, while Islam does not claim a monopoly on belief in God and leading a virtuous life, it sets strict conditions for accepting a faith as a legitimate path that one can follow to reach salvation. The tensions between the oneness and universality of the divine message on the one hand and the multiplicity of human communities on the other will also be discussed. The following verse is the anchor point of our discussion: “Unto every one of you We have appointed a [different] law [shir’atan] and way of life [minhajan]. And if God had so willed, He could surely have made you all one single community [ummah wahidah]: but [He willed it otherwise] in order to test by means of what He has vouchsafed unto you. Vie, then, with one another in doing good works!” (al-Ma’idah 5:48; see also Hud 11:118). I shall discuss the extent to which the call for “vying for the common good” can form the basis of an Islamic notion of religious tolerance. Universal Revelation and Abrahamic Ecumenism The Qur’?n presents revelation (wahy, kitab) as a universal phenomenon. Whether it talks about the creation of the universe or the stories of the prophets, it refers to revelation as having both historical continuity and claim to universal truth. Revelation is historically universal for God has revealed his message to different societies to remind them of faith and salvation and warn against disbelief: “Verily, We have sent thee with the truth, as a bearer of glad tidings and a warner: for there never was any community [ummah] but a warner has [lived and] passed away in contemporary Muslims, this reading of the verse supports our rendering of islam as “surrendering to God.” This emphasis on the unique nature of the Abrahamic tradition underlies Islam’s attitude towards other religions. It is by virtue of this linkage that Judaism and Christianity receive more attention in the Islamic sources than any other religion besides, of course, polytheism, which the Qur’?n rejects unconditionally. Islam recognizes the reality of other religions but does so with a critical attitude in that all religious communities are called upon to (re)affirm and appropriate the main thrust of Abrahamic monotheism. Any claim to religious belief short of this is denounced as an aberration, metaphysical error, schism, and affront to God. In what follows, I shall analyze the applications of these general principles and discuss the grounds and limits of tolerance and intolerance towards other religions in the Islamic tradition. The focus will be Judaism and Christianity, leaving aside other religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism for another its midst” (al-Fatir 35:24). The same principle is stated in another verse: “And for every community there is a messenger [rasul]; and only after their messenger has appeared [and delivered his message] is judgment passed on them, in all equity” (Yunus 10:47). In both verses, the word ummah is used to refer to different communities to which messengers have been sent.6 While ummah has come to denote specifically the Muslim community in the later Islamic scholarship, it is used in the Qur’?n and the Hadith to describe any faith community whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. The word ummah is also used for humanity in general (compare al-Baqarah 2:213). While all revelation comes from God, revelation in the specific sense such as a revealed book originates from what the Qur’?n calls the “mother of the book” (umm al-kitab). Like all other revelations, the Qur’?n originates from this “mother book,” which is the “protected tablet” (lawh mahfuz) in the divine presence7: “Consider this divine book, clear in itself and clearly showing the truth: behold, We have caused it to be a discourse in the Arabic tongue, so that you might encompass it with your reason. And, verily, [originating as it does] in the source, with Us, of all revelation, it is indeed sublime, full of wisdom” (al-Zukhruf 43:2–4). The word umm, literally “mother,” means origin and source.8 The word kitab, book, in this context refers not to any particular revealed book but to revelation as such. This comprehensive meaning applies to all revelation: “Every age has its revealed book [kitab]. God annuls or confirms whatever He wills [of His earlier messages]; for with Him is the source of all revelation [umm al-kitab]” (al-Ra’d 13: 38–39). The Qur’?n, thus, considers the history of revelation as one and connects the prophets from Adam and Noah to Jesus and Muhammad in a single chain of prophetic tradition. The continuity of divine revelation links different socio-religious communities through the bondage of a common tradition. The following verse, while making a strong case against religious communalism and ethnic nationalism, which was rampant in the pre-Islamic Arabia, points to what really unites different communities: “O humans! Behold, We have created you all out of a male and a female, and have made you into nations and tribes so that you might come to know one another. Verily, the noblest of you in the sight of God is the one who is most deeply conscious of Him. Behold, God is all knowing, all-aware.” al-Hujurat 49:13 Commenting on the above verses, Fakhr al-Din al-Razi points out that human beings are born in total equality. They acquire the qualities that distinguish them from others as inferior or superior only “after they come into this world; and the noblest among these qualities are the fear of God [al-taqwa] and closeness [al-qurb] to Him.”9 All “nations and tribes” are called upon to posses these qualities and honour the primordial covenant they have made with God to worship him alone and “turn their face [i.e., whole being] to God.” This “turning towards God” is also the essence of the natural disposition or state according to which God has created human beings: “And so, set thy face steadfastly towards the [one ever-true] faith [al-din], turning away from all that is false [hanifan], in accordance with the natural disposition [fitrah] which God has instilled into man. No change shall there be in God’s creation [khalq]. This is the established true religion [al-din al-qayyim] but most people know it not.” (al-Rum 30:30) Two words require our attention here. The word hanif(an), translated by Asad as “turning away from all that is false” and by Pickthall as “upright,” is used in the Qur’?n twelve times (two times in the plural) and derived from the verb hanafa, which literally means “inclining towards a right state.” A hanif is a person who turns towards God as the only deity. In pre-Islamic Arabia, there was a group of people called hanifs, who were neither polytheists nor Jew or Christian. Their theological lineage went back to Abraham, who is mentioned seven times in the twelve verses that have the word hanif in them. Abraham is presented as the perfect example of those who are upright and turn their whole being towards God: “Verily, Abraham was a nation [ummatan] by himself, devoutly obeying God’s will, turning away from all that is false [hanifan], and not being of those who ascribe divinity to aught beside God: [for he was always] grateful for the blessings granted by Him who had elected him and guided him onto a straight way” (al-Nahl 16:120–21). Another verse stresses the same link between Abraham and monotheism: “Say: God has spoken the truth: follow, then, the creed [millah] of Abraham, who turned away from all that is false [hanifan], and was not of those who ascribe divinity to aught beside God” (al-i ‘Imran 3:95). Millat Ibrahim, “Abraham’s community,” represents the transnational community that believes in the pure and simple unity of God in tandem with one’s primordial nature. Muslims are urged to be Abraham’s community today and, thus, go beyond both Judaism and Christianity.10 In this sense, Abraham does not belong to any of the particular faith traditions: “Abraham was neither a ‘Jew’ nor a ‘Christian,’ but was one who turned away from all that is false [hanifan], having surrendered himself unto God [musliman]; and he was not of those who ascribe partnership to Him [mushrikin]” (al-i ‘Imran 3:67). Commenting on the word hanif, Ibn Kathir describes Abraham as “turning away from polytheism [al-shirk] to faith [ali iman].”11 The commentators Jalal al-Din al-Mahalli and Jalal alDin al-Suyuti interpret it as “turning away from all other religions towards the one firmly established religion” (al-din al-qayyim; compare Qur’?n, alTawbah 9:36, al-Rum 30:30, al-Mu’min 40:12). It is only when commenting on 3:95 that they use the word al-Islam, meaning the religion of Islam.12 The famous Andalusian commentator Qurtubi concurs: the word hanif means “turning away from abhorrent religions [al-adyan al-makruhah] towards the true religion of Abraham.”13 In the Qur’?nic reading of biblical history, the adjective hanif places all prophets including Moses and Jesus in a position beyond any particular religion including Judaism and Christianity. The Religious Dialogue of Jerusalem, a ninth-century polemic between a Christian monk and Abd al-Rahman, the supposed amir of Jerusalem, quotes the Muslim interlocutor as saying that “you have accredited Christ with idolatry because Christ was neither Jew nor Christian but hanif, surrendered to God (Muslim).”14 Another key term that points to the universal nature of belief in God is the word fitrah, translated as natural disposition or primordial nature. Fitrah is the noun form of the verb fatara, which literally means to fashion something in a certain manner. It denotes the specific nature or traits according to which God has created human beings. In a famous hadith of the Prophet narrated by both Bukhari and Muslim, the word fitrah is used as the presocial state of humans: “Every child is born in this natural disposition; it is only his parents that later turn him into a ‘Jew,’ a ‘Christian,’ or a ‘Magian.’” It is important to note that the three religious traditions mentioned here are also the three religions that are considered to be the People of the Book. The Hadith states the same principle outlined in the above verses: while belief in one God (and acting in accord with it) is universal and the revelations are sent to confirm it, it is through the multiplicity of human communities that different theological languages develop and come to form one’s religious identity as Jew, Christian, Magian, or Muslim. In relation to the People of the Book, the Qur’?n makes specific references to the Abrahamic tradition and asks Muslims as well as Jews and Christians to recognize and appreciate the underlying unity between their religious faiths. “In matters of faith [aldin], He has ordained for you that which He had enjoined upon Noah and into which We gave thee [O Muhammad] revelation as well as that which We had enjoined upon Abraham, and Moses, and Jesus: Steadfastly uphold the [true] faith, and do not break up your unity therein” (al-Shura 42:13). This is usually interpreted as referring to the doctrine of tawhid, unity of God, which is the same doctrine revealed to other prophets before Muhammad.15 According to al-Razi, the warning about breaking up “your unity” pertains to disunity resulting from worshipping deities other than God.16 The term al-din, translated conventionally as “religion,” refers not to any particular religion and certainly not to “institutional religion” but to the essence of tawhid. The life of Abraham and his followers is a testimony to the robust monotheism of the Abrahamic cannot be appropriated by a particular religion or community. His mission is universal as his legacy: “Behold, the people who have the best claim to Abraham are surely those who follow him as does this Prophet and all who believe [in him] and God is near unto the believers” (al-i ‘Imran 3:68). The Qur’?n goes even further and describes all prophets after Abraham as neither Jew nor Christian: “Do you claim that Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and their descendants were ‘Jews’ or ‘Christians’?” Say: “Do you know more than God does? And who could be more wicked than he who suppresses a testimony given to him by God?17 Yet God is not unmindful of what you do” (al-Baqarah 2:140). According to the Islamic sources, this is a reference to the fact that Judaism and Christianity came into being long after Abraham and other prophets. Their claim to call Abraham Jew or Christian is, therefore, supported neither by scripture nor history.18 The figure of Abraham is central not only for the universal proclamation of divine unity but also for Muslims as the youngest members of the Abrahamic tradition. In the following verse, Abraham is presented as the “forefather” of all those who believe in one God and follow his “path” (millah): “And strive hard in God’s cause with all the striving that is due to Him: it is He who has elected you [to carry His message], and has laid no hardship on you in [anything that pertains to] religion, [and made you follow] the path [millah] of your forefather Abraham. It is He who has named you in bygone times as well as in this [divine writ] “those who have surrendered themselves to God” [al-muslimun], so that the instead of God: we deny the truth of whatever you believe; and between us and you there has arisen enmity and hatred, to last until such a time as you come to believe in the One God!” (al-Mumtahina 60:4) Since both Judaism and Christianity trace their origin to Abraham, the Qur’?n returns to him over and over again and invites Jews and Christians to think of Abraham not within the narrow confines of their respective theologies but in light of what he represents in the history of divine revelations. The Qur’?n makes a special note of the disputes among Jews and Christians about Abraham: “O People of the Book! Why do you argue about Abraham, seeing that the Torah and the Gospel were not revealed till [long] after him? Will you not, then, use your reason?” (al-i ‘Imran 3:65). Abraham, whom “God has taken as a sincere friend (al-Nisa 4:125), is the “forefather” (abikum) (alHajj 22:78) of monotheism and, thus, Messenger might bear witness to the truth before you, and that you might bear witness to it before all mankind. Thus, be constant in prayer, and render the purifying dues, and hold fast unto God.” (al-Hajj 22:78) This verse establishes an unmistakable link between Abraham and the Prophet of Islam. The Qur’?n narrates the story of Abraham to confirm the divinely sanctioned authority of prophet Muhammad as the last messenger. The Prophet’s legitimacy is, thus, underlined by linking him to Abraham. Yet the verse also indicates to the newly established Muslim community where they agree and part ways with the followers of the earlier revelations. On the one hand, Abraham unites all monotheist believers since he is the most important figure on whom Jews, Christians, and Muslims can agree. Despite the obvious differences in theological languages and historical narratives, his message of divine unity is essentially the same in the three traditions. On the other hand, Jews and Christians are divided over Abraham, each calling him heir own “forefather.” The Qur’?n seeks to overcome this impasse by declaring Abraham neither Jewish nor Christian but muslim, i.e., “he who surrenders himself to God.” This is where the prophet Muhammad joins Abraham, and the Qur’?n invites the People of the Book to recognize the continuity between the two. The Prophet of Islam is asked to reassert the essential unity of all revelations but to do so with a sense of compassion and respect: “Because of this, then, summon [all mankind], and pursue the right course, as thou hast been bidden [by God]; and do not follow their likes and dislikes, but say: ‘I believe in whatever revelation God has bestowed from on high; and I am bidden to bring about equity in your mutual views. God is our Sustainer as well as your Sustainer. To us shall be accounted our deeds, and to you, your deeds. Let there be no contention between us and you: God will bring us all together for with Him is all journeys’ end.’” (al-Shura 42:15) While the Qur’?n presents Abraham as the unifying father of monotheism and emphasizes the essential unity of the Abrahamic tradition, it also recognizes the multiplicity of “nations and tribes.” As we shall see below, this multiplicity is presented as part of God’s plan to test different communities in their effort to attain goodness. Yet the tension between the unity of the divine message and the plurality of different communities remains as an issue taken up by the later scholars of Islam. Whether the plurality of human communities is a natural state to be accepted or a state of disorder and confusion to be overcome would occupy the Islamic religious thought up to own day. Those who see plurality as chaos and detrimental to the unity of the community would reject all lenient measures and argue for radical orthodoxy. The Qur’?n and the Sunnah, however, present different possibilities, to which we now turn. Plurality of Human Communities: A Paradox for Religions? According to the Qur’?n, each prophet has been sent to a particular community with a particular language while the essence of that message is the same.19 The Qur’?n accepts the multiplicity of human communities as part of God’s creation: “Now had God so willed, He could surely have made them all one single community” (al-Shura 42:8). Multiplicity is presented as contributing to the betterment of human societies whereby different groups, nations, and tribes come to know each other and vie for the common good. “O humans! Behold, We have created you all out of a male and a female, and have made you into nations and tribes so that you might come to know one another” (al-Hujurat 49:13). Underlying all this diversity is the same message embodied in the figure of Abraham: believing in one God and leading a virtuous life. In addressing the question of plurality, the Qur’?n uses the word ummah in both the singular and the plural forms. Ummah signifies a socio-religious community bound together by a set of common beliefs and principles. Within the pagan context of pre-Islamic Arabia, it is contrasted with such communal bonds as family, group, tribe, and nation. All of these associations are based on lineages other than what makes different communities an ummah. According to Ibn Qayyim, an ummah is “a single group [sinif wahid] held together by a single goal [maqsad wahid].”20 The Qur’?n says that “all mankind were once but one single community [ummah wahidah], and only later did they begin to hold divergent views. And had it not been for a decree that had already gone forth from thy Sustainer, all their differences would indeed have been settled [from the outset]” (Yunus 10:19). The essential unity of humankind has been broken because of the inevitable differences that have arisen among people in the long course of history. The Qur’?n does not explain what these differences are, but it is not difficult to see that they pertain primarily to the essential matters of religion and faith.21 Prophets have been sent to address these differences and invite their communities back to their original faith in one God: “All mankind were once one single community (ummah wahidah).22 [Then they began to differ] whereupon God raised up the prophets as heralds of glad tidings and as warners, and through them bestowed revelation from on high, setting forth the truth, so that it might decide between people with regard to all on which they had come to hold divergent views.” (al-Baqarah 2:213) The plurality of socio-religious communities is accepted as divinely decreed because God has willed to make humanity composed of different “tribes and nations”: “And had thy Sustainer so willed, He could surely have made all mankind one single community [ummah wahidah]: but [He willed it otherwise, and so] they continue to hold divergent views” (Hud 11:118). These and similar verses display a constructive ambiguity about the delicate relationship between the plurality of human communities and the differences of opinion about God. It is not clear which comes first and what it implies for the history of religions. Are the differences of opinion a natural result of the existence of different communities or have different communities come about as a result of holding divergent and often conflicting views about God? It is hard to state with any degree of certainty that the Qur’?n completely endorses or abhors the plurality of “divergent views” held by different communities. At any rate, unity is not uniformity and the Qur’?n tries to overcome this tension by calling all communities to renew their covenant with God and seek guidance from him. “For, had God so willed, He could surely have made you all one single community; however, He lets go astray him that wills [to go astray], and guides aright him that wills [to be guided]; and you will surely be called to account for all that you ever did” (al-Nahl 16:93). In another context, the “plurality factor” underlies one’s attitude towards other communities. While it is true that God has willed communities to be different, it is also clear that the goal is to regulate plurality in such a way to reach a desirable level of unity. The absence of unity in the sense of religious consensus or social cohesion does not nullify the good deeds of those who believe in God and seek virtue: “Verily [O you who believe in Me,] this community of yours is one single community, since I am the Sustainer of you all: worship, then, Me [alone]! But men have torn their unity wide asunder, [forgetting that] unto Us they all are bound to return. And yet, whoever does [the least] of righteous deeds and is a believer, his endeavour shall not be disowned: for, behold, We shall record it in his favour.” (al-Anbiya 21: 92–94) That plurality is not a case for disunity is highlighted in the verses that talk about diverse laws and paths given to different communities. There is no doubt that Islam, like all other religions, would like to see a unity of believers built around its main pillars. The exclusivist believer sees anything short of this as an imperfection on the part of the community of believers and even an affront to God. This is where theologies of intolerance arise and lead to sole claims of ownership over religious truth. Oppositional identities based on narrow interpretations of core religious teachings threaten to replace the universal message of faith traditions. Yet to look for perfect unity in a world of multiplicity is to mistake the world for something more than what it is. The following verse sees no contradiction between the oneness of God and the plurality of ways and paths leading upto Him: “Unto every one of you have We appointed a [different] law [shir’atan] and way of life [minhajan]. And if God had so willed, He could surely have made you all one single community: but [He willed it otherwise] in order to test you by means of what He has vouchsafed unto you. Vie, then, with one another in doing good works! Unto God you all must return; and then He will make you truly understand all that on which you were wont to differ.” (al-Maidah 5:48) It is important to note that the word shir’a(tan) is derived from the same root as the word shar’iah. Even though the word shari’ah has come to mean Islamic law, it essentially indicates the totality of the moral, spiritual, social, and legal teachings of Islam (or any religion for that matter). Even if we understand the shari’ah as law specific to a religion, the above verse adds the word minhaj(an), implying that the combination of the two gives us a a belief system, a code of ethics and a way of life. In this context, each socio-religious community has been given a “clear path in religion to follow.”23 According to Qurtubi, “God has made the Torah for its people, the Gospel for its people and the Qur’?n for its people. This is in regards to laws [shara’i] and rituals [‘ibadat]. As for the principle of divine unity (tawhid), there is no disagreement among them.”24 He then quotes Mujahid as saying that “the law [shari’ah] and the way of life [minhaj] are the religion of Muhmmad; everything else has been abrogated.” According to Ibn Kathir, God has certainly sent different paths and “traditions” [sunan] for people to follow but all of them have been abrogated after the coming of Islam.25 While this is invariably the position of the most of the classical Islamic scholars and can be seen as a clear case of theological exclusivism, it does not appear to have invalidated the policies of tolerance and accommodation towards other religions and particularly the People of the Book. This is borne out by the fact that the treatment of the plurality of human communities in the Qur’?n is not merely general or abstract. The Qur’?n is deeply conscious of the presence of Jews and Christians in Mecca and Medina and sees them closer to Muslims than other communities. It is this historical and theological proximity that creates a sense of theological rivalry as to who is best entitled to the legacy of Abraham. A large number of verses talk about specific Jewish and Christian objections against the new revelation and the prophet Muhammad. Even though they focus on specific arguments, they provide general guidelines about Islam’s attitude towards the People of the Book. And they display both inclusivist and exclusivist tones. They contain ele-ments of inclusivism because Islam relates itself to Judaism and Christianity through the figure of Abraham, the story of Noah, the story of creation, and the stories of Solomon, Joseph, Moses, Mary, Jesus, and other prophets who are common to the Bible and the Qur’?n. The moral and eschatological teachings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam can also be included in this category of teachings. The focal point of such verses is the recognition of the truth of the new religion and its prophet by acknowledging their common lineage that goes back to Abraham. Instead of rejecting in toto the earlier revelations and the religious communities that subscribe to them, the Qur’?n invites them to agree and eventually unite on the fundamental principles of the Abrahamic tradition. Besides specific theological arguments that contain elements of inclusivism, it should also be mentioned that Islam did not have to quarrel with the People of the Book in the way Christianity did with Judaism. Since Islam was neither the fulfilment of a Judaic or Christian prophecy nor was the prophet Muhammad the messiah, Muslims did not have to contest Jews or Christians on issues specific to the theological traditions of these two communities. Furthermore, there was no ground for a blood libel between Islam on the one hand and Judaism and Christianity on the other. Even though Islam quarrelled with these two religions on many theological issues, it started out with recognizing and accepting their existence. Since Islam was ethnically diverse and culturally plural from the very beginning, it did not have any reason to oppose or defame Jews on account of their ethnic identity. In short, Islam did not need to establish itself at the expense of its Judaic or Christian predecessors. This explains to a large extent why there was no demonization of Jews or Christians by Muslims despite the rich literature of intense polemics, bitter arguments, and counterarguments. Yet, despite the legal and sociopolitical factors that have facilitated the policies of tolerance towards the People of the Book, the Qur’?n also contains elements of exclusivism, for it calls itself with a specific name, Islam, and invites its followers to be Muslims. No religion can be entirely inclusivist because this would destroy the spiritual integrity of any tradition. In this sense, Islam could not have called itself simply the religion of Abraham; it had to distinguish itself from the other contenders in a way that would give its followers a nonambiguous sense of allegiance and integrity. This has not prevented the Qur’?n from approaching the People of the Book with differing degrees of critical engagement while calling upon them to understand the essential meaning of religious faith. A good example of this is the treatment of non-Islamic rituals in the Qur’?n. Putting aside the polytheistic rituals of the pagan Arabs, which Islam rejects unequivocally, the Qur’?n discusses a number of ancient ritual practices and asks what purpose they are meant to serve. In its anthropological analyses of rituals, the Qur’?n draws attention to their fundamental meaning and invites non-Muslims to look for what is essential in the Muslim rituals. I will pick up two examples to illustrate this point. The first example is from the Meccan polytheists. To show that true piety is not to perform blindly certain rituals but to seek proximity to God, the Qur’?n refers to the Meccan custom of “entering houses from the rear.” The Meccans used to dig up holes and stay in them during the time of pilgrimage. As part of the customary ritual, they also used to enter their houses from the backdoors. Thepluralityofsocio-religious communities is accepted as divinely decreed because God has willed to make humanity composed of different “tribes and nations”. When the Meccans asked the prophet Muhammad about the significance of the “new moons” and the time of pilgrimage, he was told to give the following answer: “They will ask thee about the new moons. Say: ‘They indicate the periods for [various doings of] mankind, including the pilgrimage’” (al-Baqarah 2:189). While this answer addresses the specific question about the “new moons” (ahillah), it shifts the focus from a specific ritual to the general question of what constitutes piety and God-consciousness (al-taqwa), which is the essence of all rituals. The remainder of the verse refers both to a specific ritual during pilgrimage and to the larger meaning of an act deemed to be pious: “However, piety [al-birr] does not consist in your entering houses from the rear [as it were] but truly pious is he who is conscious of God. Hence enter houses through their doors, and remain conscious of God, so that you might attain to a happy state” (al-Baqarah 2:189). The verse disapproves of the act of “entering houses from the rear” yet gives no specific reason for it. But it also uses a metaphorical language, for the expression “enter(ing) houses through their doors” has the meaning of doing something properly. Al-birr, thus, points to the spiritual meaning of ritual acts and invites the Meccan polytheists as well as the People of the Book to go beyond the narrow perspectives of their respective traditions. The second example is related to facing the Ka’ba as the direction of prayers. In the early years of the revelation, the prophet Muhammad had instructed Muslims to pray towards Jerusalem while facing the Ka’ba at the same time.26 While this had certainly gained the favour of the Jews of Mecca and Medina especially against the Christians, it has also led them to boast of the fact that Muslims were facing their qiblah. This seems to have caused some concern for the Prophet leading him to pray to God for a new direction of prayer for Muslims: “We have seen thee [O Prophet] often turn thy face towards heaven [for guidance]: and now We shall indeed make thee turn in prayer in a direction which will fulfil thy desire. Turn, then, thy face towards the Inviolable House of Worship [masjid al-haram]; and wherever you all may be, turn your faces towards it [in prayer]” (al-Baqarah 2:144). This change was probably expected because, according to the Qur’?n (ali ‘Imran 3:96), the Ka’ba is the first sanctuary devoted to the worship of God to which Abraham (and his sons) turned (al-Baqarah 2:125–29).27 The incident appears to have caused a rift between Muslims and certain members of the Jewish and Christian communities in Medina. The Qur’?n accuses them of not being sincere in their hardened positions: “And, verily, those who have been given the book aforetime know well that this [commandment] comes in truth from their Sustainer, and God is not unaware of what they do” (al-Baqarah 2:144). The People of the Book are expected to welcome such a change because they know the meaning of praying towards a certain direction: “They unto whom We have given the book aforetime know it as they know their own children: but, behold, some of them knowingly suppress the truth” (al-Baqarah 2:146). The prophet Muhammad is asked to endure any criticism or ridicule that may come from the Arabian Jews and Christians. He is also advised to distinguish his qibla from theirs and accept it as a fact: “... even if thou were to place all evidence before those who have been given the book, they would not follow thy direction of prayer [qiblah], and neither mayest thou follow their direction of prayer [qiblah], nor even do they follow one another’s direction. And if thou shouldst follow their errant views after all the knowledge that has come unto thee, thou wouldst surely be among the evildoers.” (al-Baqarah 2:145) The Qur’?n addresses the qibla incident to give assurances to the Muslim community in Medina on the one hand and draw attention to the futility of taking rituals to be an absolute indicator of piety on the other. Against religious sectarianism, God asks all believers to put aside their petty differences: “... every community faces a direction of its own, of which He is the focal point.28 Vie, therefore, with one another in doing good works. Wherever you may be, God will gather you all unto Himself: for, verily, God has the power to will anything” (al-Baqarah 2:148). The expression “every community faces a direction of its own” gives a similar meaning stated in al-Maidah 5:48, quoted above. Just as Muslims accept the qiblah of Jews and Christians, they also should recognize the Muslim qiblah as valid for turning towards God during ritual prayers. The Qur’?n chastises those who ridicule the Prophet of Islam for turning towards Ka’ba after praying towards Jerusalem: “The weak-minded [or the foolish, sufaha] among people will say ‘What has turned them away from the direction of prayer which they have hitherto observed?’ Say: ‘God’s is the east and the west; He guides whom He wills onto a straight way’” (al-Baqarah 2:142–43). In these and other verses, the Qur’?n warns against the danger of causing friction on the basis of differences in ritual acts. While this is an attempt to safeguard the newly established Muslim community against the accusations of the Jews and Christians of Medina, it is also a call for transcending religious and sectarian differences. The following verse makes a strong point about this: “True piety [al-birr] does not consist in turning your faces towards the east or the west. But truly pious is he who believes in God, and the Last Day; and the angels, and revelation, and the prophets; and spends his substance however much he himself may cherish it upon his near of kin, and the orphans, and the needy, and the wayfarer, and the beggars, and for the freeing of human beings from bondage; and is constant in prayer, and renders the purifying dues; and [truly pious are] they who keep their promises whenever they promise, and are patient in misfortune and hardship and in time of peril: it is they that have proved themselves true, and it is they, they who are conscious of God.” (al-Baqarah 2:177) The word al-birr, translated as virtue and righteousness, signifies a virtuous act conducted with the fear and consciousness of God. The person who has the birr is the person who is in constant vigilance and mindfulness of God.29 The Qur’?n defines true piety as having full consciousness of God, believing in his books and prophets, and doing such virtuous acts as praying, almsgiving, and helping the poor and the needy.30 Virtue requires constant vigilance, and the believers are not excepted: “[But as for you, O believers] never shall you attain to true piety [albirr] unless you spend out of what you cherish yourselves; and whatever you spend, verily God has full knowledge thereof” (al-i ‘Imran 3:92). The People of the Book are also reminded: “Do you enjoin other people to be pious while you forget your own self; and yet you recite the Book [al-kitab]” (Al-Baqarah 2:44). In addressing specific rituals, the Qur’?n does not belittle their significance but points to what is essential in them. As later Muslim scholars and especially the Sufis would elaborate, this generic rule holds true for all ritual practices. The Qur’?n insists that true piety and goodness (al-birr) are the ultimate goal of religious acts and that all communities should seek to attain it. Furthermore, vieying for piety and goodness is a solid basis for an ethics of co-existence: “ ... help one another in furthering virtue [al birr] and God consciousness, and do not help one another in furthering evil and enmity” (al-Mai’dah 5:2). Religious Tolerance and the People of the Book There are no other two religions on which the Qur’?n spends as much time as on Judaism and Christianity. Given Islam’s claim to be the last revelation and completion of the Abrahamic tradition, this should come as no surprise. A large number of verses speak about various Jewish and Christian themes. These Qur’?nic conversations concentrate, among others, on three issues. The first is the disputes among Jews and Christians about issues such as Abraham, revelation, salvation, and the hereafter. Some verses describe these disputes as futile, selfish, and ignorant (al-Baqarah 2:111), referring, at the same time, to the stiff opposition of Jewish and Christian leaders to the prophet Muhammad. The second is the political alliances which the Jews and some Christians of Medina had formed with the Meccan polytheists against the newly established Muslim community. The most severe statements in the Qur’?n and the Hadith collections against the Jews pertain to this historical fact. The only incident in the history of Islam where a particular group of Jews has been ordered to be killed is related to the violation of a treaty of political alliance between certain Jewish tribes and Muslims in Medina. The third issue is the recognition of the validity of the new revelation and the prophet Muhammad, which remains a difficult issue for Christians up to our own day. The Qur’?n brings up the disputes between Jews and Christians to indicate to them that while claiming to be heirs to the legacy of Abraham, they are engaged in destructive quarrels and petty fights. With such bitter disunity and bickering, they cannot be proper models of what Abraham stood for. The Qur’?n seems to imply that the intractable opposition of Jews and Christians of Madina to the prophet Muhammad is similar to their internal disputes and thus cannot serve as a basis for a serious dialogue: “Furthermore, the Jews assert, “The Christians have no valid ground for their beliefs,” while the Christians assert, “The Jews have no valid ground for their beliefs” and both quote the Book! Even thus, like unto what they say, have [always] spoken those who were devoid of knowledge; but it is God who will judge between them on Resurrection Day with regard to all on which they were wont to differ.” (al-Baqarah 2:113) Following this line of argumentation, the Qur’?n addresses Jews and Christians directly because they are different and more special from the polytheists, Magians, or Zoroastrians. In some cases, they are described as behaving worse than the disbelievers of Mecca. It is usually these verses that Muslim exclusivists take up as a basis for classifying the People of the Book together with the Meccan polytheists. The Qur’?n, however, does not fail to make a distinction between those who have completely turned against God and those whose hearts are filled with reverence for God among Jews and Christians. There is also a distinction between those who have betrayed the Prophet and his community and those who have honoured their promises. The following verse, for instance, is extremely harsh on the People of the Book: “Overshadowed by ignominy are they wherever they may be, save [when they bind themselves again] in a bond with God and a bond with men; for they have earned the burden of God’s condemnation, and are overshadowed by humiliation: all this [has befallen them] because they persisted in denying the truth of God’s messages and in slaying the prophets against all right: all this, because they rebelled [against God], and persisted in transgressing the bounds of what is right.” (al-i ‘Imran 3:112) This is followed by another verse which reflects the careful discernment of the Qur’?n regarding the People of the Book: “[But] they are not all alike: among the People of the Book are upright people [ummah], who recite God’s messages throughout the night, and prostrate themselves [before Him]. They believe in God and the Last Day, and enjoin the doing of what is right and forbid the doing of what is wrong, and vie with one another in doing good works: and these are among the righteous. And whatever good they do, they shall never be denied the reward thereof: for, God has full knowledge of those who are conscious of Him.” (al-i ‘Imran 3: 113–15) While the classical commentators usually read this verse as referring to Jews and Christians who converted to Islam, there is no compelling reason that we should accept it as abrogated (mansukh). In fact, it would not make “True piety [al-birr] does not consist in turning your faces towards the east or the west. But truly pious is he who believes in God, and the Last Day; and the angels, and revelation, and the prophets.” Even though the Qur’an’s harsh treatment of Jewish tribes in Medina has not been lost to the Prophet and his followers, it has not led to an anti-Semitic literature in the Islamic tradition. who say “Behold, we are Christians” come closest to feeling affection for those who believe [in this divine writ]: this is so because there are priests and monks among sense to call them the People of the Book if they had already converted to Islam. Such subtle distinctions are not hard to find in the Qur’?n. Yet in al-Maidah 5: 82:84, we find a clear favouring of Christians over Jews: “Thou wilt surely find that, of all people, the most hostile to those who believe [in this divine writ] are the Jews as well as those who are bent on ascribing divinity to aught beside God; and thou wilt surely find that, of all people, they As a number of early Muslim historians have noted, Muslims were hoping for the eventual success of the Byzantine Empire over the Persians because the former were Christian.32 Furthermore, the Christians of Medina had remained loyal to the Medinan Treaty against the Meccans, thus gaining the favour and affinity of Muslims. Commenting on the verse above, Ibn Qayyim quotes al-Zujjaj as saying that Christians are paised for they have been “less inclined towards the Meccans than the Jews.”33 The harsh assessment of the Jews is, thus, a response to the political alliance of the Jews of Medina with the Meccan polytheists and in violation of the Medinan Treaty to which we referred above. According to the treaty, the Jewish tribes in Medina and Muslims had agreed to defend each other against aggressors, i.e., the Meccans. It is clear that the prophet Muhammad was concerned to secure a strong political alliance with the Jews and Christians of Medina against the Meccans. While the Christians remained mostly loyal to the agreement and did not fight or plot against Muslims, the Meccans were able to get some prominent Jewish leaders on their side in their military campaigns against Muslims.34 Those who violated the treaty and thus betrayed the Muslim community included not only Jews but also those whom the Qur’?n calls the “hypocrites” (al-munafiqun). The Qur’?n uses an extremely harsh language against them because they claim to be part of the Muslim community while forming alliances with the Meccan polytheists. The Qur’?n is so stern on this point that the prophet Muhammad is banned from praying for their soul. Even though the Qur’?n’s harsh them, and because these are not given to arrogance. For, when they come to understand what has been bestowed from on high upon this Apostle, thou canst see their eyes overflow with tears, because they recognize something of its truth; 31 [and] they say: “O our Sustainer! We do believe; make us one, then, with all who bear witness to the truth. And how could we fail to believe in God and in whatever truth has come unto us, when we so fervently desire that our Sustainer count us among the righteous?” (al-Ma’idah 5:82–84) The “closeness” to which the verse refers is a reference to both the social and political proximity which the Christian communities of the period felt towards Muslims. The famous expedition of a group of companions of the Prophet to the Christian king of Abyssinia and the warm welcome they had received can also be seen as a factor in this clearly favourable description of Christians. treatment of Jewish tribes in Medina has not been lost to the Prophet and his followers, it has not led to an antiSemitic literature in the Islamic tradition. Since the Jewish communities, unlike Christianity, did not pose a political threat that had, at least by association, the backing of the Byzantine Empire, they were hardly part of political conflicts in later centuries. For both political and theological reasons, the great majority of Muslim polemical works in the medieval period have been directed against Christianity more than Judaism.35 The socio-political and economic structure of Muslim societies has been conducive to a largely successful integration of Jewish communities. As I mentioned above, the Jewish merchants were never ostracized for their profession or prevented from practicing it because the economic system of Muslim societies allowed greater flexibility for international trade and finance. Furthermore, the Jews in the Near East where Muslims came to rule were the indigenous communities of the area, not immigrants as they were in Western Christendom. This has given them a right of property and communal freedom that we do not see in Europe. In fact, this can be compared only to the position of Hindus after India came under Muslim rule. Finally, the ethnic composition of Muslim societies was so diverse that the Jewish communities did not have to stand out as different or “strange.”36 Even though the Qur’?n approaches Christians more favourably than Jews, it does not shy away from criticizing them for introducing a number of “inventions” or “corruption” (tahrif) into their religion. As mentioned before, there are many such criticisms the most important of which concern the nature of Jesus Christ and the Christian claim that he was the son of God. This is not the place to go into a discussion of the place of Jesus in Islam. It suffices to say, however, that the Qur’?n and the prophetic tradition reject (compare alNisa 4:171–73 and al-Ma’idah 5:72– 77) the divinity of Jesus as formulated by the later Christian doctrine. Besides theology, one specific practice for which the Qur’?n criticizes the Christians is “monasticism” (rahbaniyyah). Christians are praised for their fear and veneration of God but criticized for going to the extreme of inventing a monastic life not enjoined by God: “And thereupon We caused [other of] Our apostles to follow in their footsteps; and [in the course of time] We caused them to be followed by Jesus, the son of Mary, upon whom We bestowed the Gospel; and in the hearts of those who [truly] followed him We engendered compassion and mercy. But as for monasticism [rahbaniyyah]; We did not enjoin it upon them: they invented it themselves out of a desire for God’s goodly acceptance. But then, they did not [always] observe it as it ought to have been observed: and so We granted their recompense unto such of them as had [truly] attained to faith, whereas many of them became iniquitous.” (al-Hadid 57:27) The classical commentators interpret this verse as pointing to the harsh conditions of early Christians to protect themselves against the persecutions of the Roman rulers. Monasticism (and celibacy, we should add) could be seen as a temporary solution in The underlying principle behind the attitudes of accommodation is that the overall interests of human beings are served better in peace than in conflict. times of extreme measures but cannot be a general rule for attaining piety because religions are meant to save not just the elect but everyone. It is also important to note that the mainstream Islamic tradition does not posit any intermediaries between God and the ordinary believer. There is no need for a monastic institution to train spiritual leaders to provide religious guidance for the average person. The commentators, thus, take this opportunity to stress that Islam has come to establish a balance (wasatah) between worldly indulgence and extreme asceticism. This point is reiterated in the following verse: “And ordain Thou for us what is good in this world as well as in the life to come: behold, unto Thee have we turned in repentance!” [God] answered: “With My chastisement do I afflict whom I will but My grace overspreads everything: and so I shall confer it on those who are conscious of Me and spend in charity, and who believe in Our messages those who shall follow the [last] Apostle, the unlettered Prophet whom they shall find described in the Torah that is with them, and [later on] in the Gospel: [the Prophet] who will enjoin upon them the doing of what is right and forbid them the doing of what is wrong, and make lawful to them the good things of life and forbid them the bad things, and lift from them their burdens and the shackles that were upon them [aforetime]. Those, therefore, who shall believe in him, and honour him, and succour him, and follow the light that has been bestowed from on high through him-it is they that shall attain to a happy state.” (al-A’raf 7:156–57) While Jews and Christians are usually thought to be the People of the Book, the Qur’?n also mentions several other communities as part of the non-Islamic religious traditions under protection. The mention of “Sabians” in the following shows that the concept of the People of the Book was set to be flexible and ever-expanding from the very beginning: “Verily, those who have attained to faith, as well as those who follow the Jewish faith, and the Christians, and the Sabians37; all who believe in God and the Last Day and do righteous deeds shall have their reward with their Sustainer; and no fear need they have, and neither shall they grieve” (al-Baqarah 2:62).38 It is important to note that the status of “no fear” mentioned in the above verse legally refers to the protection of the People of the Book as part of ahl al-dhimmah. While the dhimmi status was initially given to Jews, Christians, Sabians, and Zoroastrians, its scope was later extended to include all nonMuslims living under Islam especially in the subcontinent of India.39 This is exactly what happened in India when Muhammad b. al-Qasim, the first Muslim commander to set foot on Indian soil in the eighth century, compared Hindus to Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians and declared them as part of the ahl al-dhimmah.40 This decision, which was later sanctioned by the Hanafi jurists, was a momentous event in the development of the Muslim attitude towards the religions of India. That the People of the Book were accorded a special status is not only attested by the various Qur’?nic verses but also recorded in a number of treatises signed by the prophet Muhammad after his migration to Medina in 622. The “Medinan Treatise” (sahifat al-madina), also called the “Medinan Constitution,” recognizes the Jews of Banu ‘Awf, Banu al-Najar, Banu Tha’laba, Banu Harith, and other Jewish tribes as distinct communities: “The Jews of Banu ‘Awf are a community [ummah] together with Muslims; they have their own religion, properties and lives, and Muslims their own except those who commit injustice and wrongdoing; and they only harm themselves.”41 Another treatise signed with the People of the Book of Najran reads as follows: “They [People of the Book] shall have the protection of All?h and the promise of Muhammad, the Apostle of All?h, that they shall be secured their lives, property, lands, creed, those absent and those present, their families, their churches, and all that they possess. No bishop or monk shall be displaced from his parish or monastery no priest shall be forced to abandon his priestly life. No hardships or humiliation shall be imposed on them nor shall their land be occupied by [our] army. Those who seek justice, shall have it: there will be no oppressors nor oppressed.”42 ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph of Islam, has given a similar safeguard (aman) to the people of Jerusalem when he took the city in 623: “In the name of God, the Merciful and Compassionate! This is the safeguard granted to the inhabitants of ‘Alia [Jerusalem] by the servant of God, ‘Umar, commander of the faithful. They are given protection of their persons, their churches, their crosses whether these are in good state or not and their cult in general. No constraints While we can find divergent policies of tolerance and intolerance in the Islamic religious tradition and social history, the contemporary Muslim world has to confront the challenge of religious pluralism in a way that would avoid the extremes of intolerant exclusivism on the one hand and a rootless pluralism at the expense of all orthodoxy on the other. extensive work on the People of the Book, reads it as securing the allegiance of the People of the Book to laws pertaining to them (ahkam al-millah). According to Ibn Qayyim,wahum al-saghirun means making all subjects of the state obey the law and, in the case of the People of the Book, pay the jizya.44 Despite Ibn Qayyim’s relatively will be exercised against them in the matter of religion and no harm will be done to any of them. The inhabitants of ‘Alia will have to pay the jizya in the same way as the inhabitants of other towns. It rests w
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- [The Way of Go](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-way-of-go) - Mountain monks sit playing go Over the board is the bamboo’s lucent shade No one sees them through the glittering leaves But now and then is heard the click of a stone. Po Chi (772-846) Introduction and Origins of Go Go (also known as wei-chi in China, baduk in Korea, and i-go in Japan) is an abstract strategy board game traditionally played on a wooden board inscribed with a nineteen by nineteen matrix. Game play begins with an empty board and players alternate turns placing black slate and white clamshell stones on the intersections of the squares where they remain stationary for the duration of the game unless captured and removed by the opponent. Although very sophisticated guiding principles of strategy have developed over time, there is no predetermined method of placement, leaving players to contribute stones to any area of the board, oftentimes choosing between many positions of equal value and strategic possibility. This is particularly evident at the beginning of the game, where all possibilities exist in a state of equilibrium. As the game progresses, the choice of moves becomes increasingly limited based upon the relative positions of existing stones as they gradually fill the board. The object of the game is to secure territory by surrounding empty points. To accomplish this, two fundamental strategies are employed which include connecting one’s own stones by placing them side by side after which they form a single unit, a technique that gives rise to the illusion of movement, and capturing the opponent’s stones or groups of stones by surrounding them and occupying all of the points adjacent to the targeted group. Captured stones count negatively toward the opponent’s score which is determined by the number of empty points that have been surrounded after all of the territory has been secured and the game has concluded by mutual agreement. The precise knowledge of the origins of Go is lost to antiquity. It is known to have originated in China up to 4,000 years ago, where it has traditionally been conceived as one of the four accomplishments of the cultured Chinese aristocracy, the others being painting, calligraphy, and music. Its valued intellectual and aesthetic qualities have aptly been described by a contemporary player who stated that “The unfolding of geometrical patterns, the interaction of the basic elements of line and circle, stone and wood, and the meshing of grand-scale opposing strategies make go an artful game.” Additionally, it was adopted as a salutary practice within Chan Buddhist monasteries and underwent further refinement and ceremonial perfection within the Zen culture of Japan where it was sometimes referred to as Kido or “The Way of Go.” Along with such practices as archery, gardening, and tea, the game of go was used by Buddhist monks as a direct and valuable support of the spiritual life. Rene Guénon has suggested that “games were originally something quite different from the mere profane amusements that they have become today.” Like chess, Go “is certainly one of those games in which traces of the original sacredness have remained most apparent in spite of this degradation.” This thesis has been developed very fully in Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad’s admirable treatise on The Sacred Origin of Sports and Culture. Prince Ghazi writes concerning sports, a term which he uses in its broadest possible sense to include competitive physical recreation, physical culture, martial arts, and even mental sports such as traditional boardgames, that “in general the disciplines of history, archaeology, anthropology, and literature concur that organized sports had religious origins wherever they are found in the ancient world.” Although, the precise origins of Go are unknown, evidence suggests that it evolved out of a method of divination practiced among the ancient shamanistic Shang culture which involved the casting of “chi pieces” or go stones, upon a plate or board inscribed with astrological and geomantic symbols. Divination as traditionally conceived and practiced is not the profane amusement of fortune-telling that we associate with it today. Rather, it was a sacred art and revealed method of communicating with the Divinity or lesser spiritual intelligences such as gods, beneficent spirits, or the spirits of the ancestors. In a fragment of an ancient text containing what is probably the oldest mythic reference to Go situated during the reign of the first of the golden-age kings, it speaks of a companion of the Yellow Emperor traveling within a mystic vision to the summit of a holy mountain to perform the sacred divinatory rite of Go. “Mr. Chang, musician-companion of the Yellow Emperor, assumed wings and was given the name of Teacher Hun Yai. At the summit of Chuan-nan Mountain, he played go.” Symbolic Dimensions of Go The original divinatory practice of “casting the chi pieces” probably made its initial transition into a game in the period between 1300 and 900 BC when the shamanistic Shan culture became dominated and influenced by the rationalizing tendencies and anthropocentrism of the conquering Chou. Even after the transition into a game, however, many of the basic astrological and cosmological associations were retained and such concepts remained deeply embedded in the terminology and philosophy of the game until the twentieth century. The earliest surviving statement of the philosophy of Go was written in the first century AD by the historian Pan Ku long after the initial transition had already taken place. In his essay “The Quality of Go”, he wrote “It has deep significance. The board has to be square, for it signifies the earth, and its right angles signify uprightness. The pieces are yellow and black: this distinction signifies the Yin and Yang?scattered in groups all over the board, they represent the heavenly bodies. These significances being manifest, it is up to the players themselves to make the moves, and this is connected with kingship. Following what the rules permit, both opponents are subject to them?this is the rigor of the Tao.” This early description is important because it establishes a precedent for explicating the symbolic dimensions of the game based upon a traditional canon of interpretation. Go shares many of the symbolic dimensions that may be found within chess including a terrestrial symbolism reflected in the nature of the game, a cosmological symbolism reflected in the geometric properties of the board, and a metacosmic symbolism reflected in the colors of the stones. Unlike chess pieces, the unencumbered potentiality of the go stones does not render them susceptible to an accompanying psychological symbolism, a fact of great significance with regard to the implementation of Go as an operative support for the spiritual life. The first dimension in which the symbolism of Go naturally unfolds concerns its explicit association with warfare. The game presents itself as the battle between two opposing armies who are struggling to gain control of an area by surrounding and securing its territory. Go strategy bears a direct correlation to traditional Chinese military strategy and many references have been made to these parallels within classical go manuals. An exemplary presentation of this subject from the contemporary period is Mao Xiaochun’s 36 Stratagems Applied to Go. In addition to its adoption as a cultured pastime among the aristocracy and its refinement as a spiritual art by the sacerdotal caste, go also enjoyed a significant degree of popularity among the warrior classes. A go set was commonly included among the equipment of the samurai, for instance, who would play between battles. This motif figures prominently within traditional Japanese paintings that include a depiction of the game. As early as the second world war and continuing to the present day, the study of Go has been encouraged by military officials as a means of gaining insight into the nature of military strategy within the far eastern nations. A cursory glance through Sun Tzu’s Art of War can yield many explicit parallels, including the following simple example, the signification of which is immediately evident to all who have assimilated the basic rules of the game. “The Highest realization of warfare is to attack the enemies’ plans; next is to attack their alliances; next to attack their army; and lowest is to attack their fortified cities.” Concerning the symbolism of warfare, this is identical to that of chess in that it reflects the fundamental opposition between the contending forces of good and evil wherein the angels and demons dispute the go board of the world. As Titus Burckhardt has written, “It is here that the symbolism of black and white… takes on its full value; the white army is that of light, the black army that of darkness. In a relative domain, the battle which takes place on the [board] represents, either that of two armies each of which is fighting in the name of a particular principle, or that of the spirit and of darkness in man; these are the two forms of the ‘holy war’; the ‘lesser holy war’ and the ‘greater holy war’, according to the saying of the Prophet Muhammad. One will see the relationship of the symbolism implied in the game… with the theme of the Bhagavad-Gita.” The second dimension of the symbolism of Go to be considered is that pertaining to the board itself. As Stuart Colin stated in Games of the Orient, “the board has the same cosmical significance discovered to underlie all other boards upon which games are played.” Although they possess a fundamental consonance in their connotations, the particular manner in which this symbolism is expressed differs among the various games. That of Go is to be sought in its proposed origins in the practice of divination. As previously stated, many of its original associations have been preserved even in the modern game, a situation which lends it a greater dignity and contemplative quality than might otherwise have been the case if these elements had not been retained. According to William Pinckard, “Some fundamental go terms still in common use today have an astrological meaning. In Japan, for example, the center of the board is still called tengen, ‘axis of heaven’, the eight specially marked key points near the perimeter are called hoshi, ‘stars’, the nine together making up the traditional ‘Nine Lights of Heaven’, that is, the seven stars of Ursa Major, the center of the Chinese astronomical system, and the sun and moon. In both China and Japan the four quarters of the board are named after the four directions, each correlated to one of the basic trigrams of the I Ching system. Beginning in the upper right and going clockwise, they are: Southwest (female, earth), Northwest (male. heaven), Northeast (hard, limit), and Southeast (gentle, yielding).” Combined with Pan Ku’s indication that the square form of the board signifies earth, all of these elements together reveal the go board to possess the characteristics of a cosmological mandala. Through the progression of gameplay on the board we may bear witness to the reflection of the cosmic drama unfolding within the intermediate realm conditioned by the polarity of Heaven and Earth. This fundamental polarity is reiterated and exemplified by the black and white colors of the stones which lead from cosmological associations to the consideration of a metacosmic symbolism. According to Guénon, “In the most immediate sense, the juxtaposition of white and black naturally represents light and darkness, day and night, and consequently all the pairs of opposites or of complementaries… in this respect then, we have here the exact equivalent of the Far Eastern symbol of the yin-yang.” Yang and Yin are essentially the primordial qualities of light and darkness that pervade all aspects of cosmic manifestation, yang corresponding to the spiritual or essential nature, and yin referring to that which causes attachment to substance. With regard to their cosmological associations, Guénon writes also that “yang is whatever proceeds from the nature of Heaven and yin whatever proceeds from the nature of Earth… Heaven is entirely yang and Earth entirely yin, which is tantamount to saying that Essence is pure act and Substance is pure potency. However, this applies to Heaven and Earth alone, as the two poles of universal manifestation; in all manifested things there is no yang without yin and no yin without yang, for everything by nature partakes simultaneously of both Heaven and Earth.” Inasmuch as these two primary qualities have issued from the equilibrium of the primordial Unity, contemplation of this symbolism leads beyond the cosmos to the metacosmic reality of Tai Chi. Tai Chi is the symbol of primordial equilibrium and perfection or wholeness as the first determination of the Absolute, just as Beyond-Being gives rise to Being. The ‘ten thousand things’ are brought into being by Tai Chi and conditioned by yin and yang by virtue of their entrance into manifestation within the realm of Heaven and Earth. Like the permutations of the two determinations from which the various trigrams and hexagrams of the I Ching are derived, the infinitely variable patterns of alternating black and white stones on the Go board symbolize the unfoldment of the ten thousand things from the principial unity of the Divine All-Possibility. It is perhaps possible to consider an additional dimension of symbolism of a more speculative nature. Through the symbolic properties of the traditional physical substances of the game and their arrangement, stone or earth over wood, Go constitutes a material representation of the I Ching hexagram Sheng which is composed of the trigrams Kun, the Receptive (earth) and Sun, the Gentle (wood). It literally means Pushing Upward and pertains to the image of wood growing upward out of the earth. The I Ching states concerning this image, “Within the earth, wood grows: The image of Pushing Upward. Thus the superior man of devoted character heaps up small things in order to achieve something high and great.” This hexagram is associated with the effort of the will and bears the denotation of vertical ascent or transcendence. The game of Go appears to be in full accordance with this message, especially in the context of its use as a support for the spiritual life. Perhaps no one has explained the content of this message better than Frithjof Schuon, whose sagacious words might very well serve as a commentary upon the text itself. He wrote, “The noble man is one who masters himself and loves to master himself; the base man is one who does not master himself and shrinks in horror from mastering himself. The spiritual man is one who transcends himself and loves to transcend himself; the worldly man remains horizontal and hates the vertical dimension.” Go as a Ludic Support for the Spiritual Life As previously mentioned, Go does not possess a psychological symbolism reflected in the distinctive identity, initial position, and determined movement of the playing pieces as does the game of chess. In the latter game, according to Titus Burckhardt, “If the significance of the different chessmen is transposed into the spiritual domain, the king becomes the heart, or spirit, and the other pieces the various faculties of the soul. Their movements, moreover, correspond to different ways of realizing the cosmic possibilities represented by the chessboard: there is axial movement of the ‘castles’ or war chariots, the diagonal movement of the ‘bishops’ or elephants, which follow a single colour, and the complex movement of the knights. The axial movement, which ‘cuts’ through different ‘colours’, is logical and virile, while the diagonal movement corresponds to an “existential”?and therefore feminine?continuity. The jump of the knights corresponds to intuition.” Unlike chess, the game of Go begins with an empty board and the stones are entirely homogeneous, possessing no distinctive qualities of their own, and unencumbered in their potential for placement. In principle, a stone may be played anywhere on the board and its quality is determined entirely by the judgment of the player in consideration of the relative positions of existing stones and the concomitant framework of implied threats and possibilities. As such, rather than symbolizing one of the various faculties of the soul, the go stone instead manifests the content of the soul in a direct and operative manner, revealing both the capability and interior disposition of the player at the moment of placement. This idea is represented in the idiosyncratic philosophy of Takeo Kajiwara, a contemporary professional player of the highest rank. In his manual The Direction of Play he teaches that stones are instruments of power. “Every time you place a stone on the board,” he writes, “you are exposing something of yourself. It is not just a piece of slate, shell, or plastic. You have entrusted to that stone your feelings, your individuality, your will-power, and once it is played there is no going back. Each stone carries a great responsibility on your behalf.” Taking into consideration the fact that no game, however noble, can equal the reality of life experience, these unique properties of the game of Go allow it to provide a virtual field of operation for the cultivation of the virtues, insofar as it is possible for a game to do so. The completed game serves thereby as a testimony to the presence or absence of virtue during the moment and in the context of gameplay. It is undoubtedly this characteristic that brought about its cultivation within Buddhist culture as a ludic support of the spiritual life. Mastery of Go is not limited to the acquisition of technical skill and strategic prowess predicated upon the memorization of common patterns. It also depends upon the ability to overcome deficiencies and weaknesses in the soul that affect one’s ability to make sound judgments and effective use of the stones. The nature of these weaknesses can literally be ascertained by reading the record of the game as is evidenced by many professional commentaries. As one contemporary player has observed, “The board is a mirror of the mind of the player as moments pass. When a master studies the record of a game, he can tell at what point greed overtook the pupil, when he became tired, when he fell into stupidity, and when the maid came by with the tea.” The primary vices of the Go player that must be overcome on the journey toward mastery of the game and of himself may be synthesized into a few distinct but interrelated categories including attachment, fear, impetuosity, and greed. Within the context of the game, attachment is expressed by becoming emotionally invested in a particular stone or group of stones to the detriment of the potential advancement of other positions on the board. It may be that one wishes to futilely attempt to preserve a group that cannot be made to live or simply that one is too narrowly focused on a single area of the board thereby losing sight of the development of the game as a whole. The expression of fear is particularly notable within the presence of a stronger player whose superior skill may cause one to become nervous, underestimate one’s own abilities, and to develop a passive and defensive posture, even when one has the advantage. This may lead to the unnecessary fortification of groups, over concentration of stones, and a slow development of positions. Impetuosity represents in some ways the opposite extreme to that of fear. It generally manifests in the presence of a weaker player and involves the expression of undue aggressiveness. It may cause one to exploit the inferior skill and ignorance of the weaker player, attacking his stones excessively and unnecessarily, while making moves that are in themselves poor, but which a weaker player may not be able to exploit. Impetuosity destroys the dignity of the player, the morale of the opponent, and the beauty and harmony of the game. Finally, greed is perhaps the most common vice of go players. It is rooted in acquisitiveness, the continual desire to capture more stones and accumulate more territory. It arises out of a lack of consideration for the existence and right of the other player and a false sense of needing to dominate the entire board. There is a sense in which greed derives from and contributes to all of the other vices inasmuch as one may lust after that which one cannot possess (attachment), cling tenaciously onto what one already has (fear), and unduly attempt to take what is rightfully in the possession of the opponent (impetuosity). With keen insight and wisdom, the Buddhist communities of China and Japan would certainly have recognized within this internal struggle played out upon the board, an opportunity to support the cultivation of the paramitas or ‘perfections’ of Mahayana Buddhism. According to a prevalent six-fold division, Schuon describes the paramitas as follows: “‘Charity’ (d?na), which in a way constitutes the framework or the periphery of the Mahayana, is the first of the six p?ramit?s or virtues of the Bodhisattva; ‘Wisdom’ (prajn?) is the sixth and the culmination of all the p?ramit?s. The four other virtues are as it were intermediary: these are ‘abstention’ (sh?la) ‘virility’ (v?rya), ‘patience’ (ksh?nti) and ‘contemplation’ (dhy?na); these spiritual modes amount to so many paths, at once simultaneous and successive, and any single one of them can determine a whole life without needing, or being able to exclude the daily practice of, the others. The first five p?ramit?s moreover are not really separated from the virtue of prajn?, whereof they are secondary aspects destined to con­tribute in their own way to the awakening of liberating Knowledge.” Instead of expressing attachment, one may posit detachment (shila) by treating the stones lightly, as possibilities rather than absolutes. It frequently happens during a game that a group of stones which is incapable of surviving may later be rescued and turned toward one’s advantage. Instead of expressing fear, one may posit courage (virya), and with an attitude of respectful consideration, view the presence of a formidable opponent as an opportunity to correct mistakes and learn from the demonstration of superior skill. In the opposite situation instead of expressing impetuosity and exploiting a weaker player one may practice restraint and recollectedness, positing the virtue of patience (kshanti) and thereby serving as an exemplar of dignified and beautiful play. As with its counterpart, greed, charity (dana) possesses a special significance within the game of Go. As in Mahayana Buddhism, the concept of charity or generosity in a way constitutes the ideal framework of the game for it manifests the correct attitude toward the significance of the opponent. Recognizing the necessity for the other, both may join together in the spirit of cooperative competition reflecting the dignity of kingship expressed in accordance with the rigor of the Tao as related by Pan Ku in his description of the philosophy of the game. This is a reflection of the same type of cooperative struggle described by the Quran, which admonishes us to “vie with one another in good works,” both opponents having joined forces against a common enemy, the weakness of the human soul. The experiences of gameplay do not necessarily lend themselves directly to the cultivation and expression of the fifth and sixth paramitas for these pertain to the highest degrees of realization upon the spiritual path. Nevertheless, they are represented in the symbolism and essential message that the procedure of gameplay presents to those who reflect upon it. The go game commences with an empty board signifying the transcendent void or sunyata and the transitory and illusory nature of the cosmic drama unfolding thereon is revealed when at last the stones are cleared away and only the empty board remains. In conclusion, we may state that for those who seek an enjoyable pastime to contribute an element of leisure to the daily rhythm of work, study, and prayer, the game of Go offers a viable alternative to indulgence in the profane distractions and amusements of the modern world.
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In “Word into Silence” he writes that: “The modern Christian’s mission is to resensitise our contemporaries to the presence of a spirit within themselves… Our first task, in the realisation of our own vocation and in the expansion of the kingdom among our contemporaries, is to find our own spirit because this is our lifeline with the Spirit of God… Humanity finds its own spirit fully only in the light of the One Universal Spirit.” John Main’s emphasis on personal experience and self discovery in God as well as the clear method of prayer he uncovered for Christians made Bede Griffiths call him “the most important guide in the Church today”. John Main’s own life journey is a parable of his teaching. Like in a labyrinth, his movement towards “the one thing necessary” took him on a circuitous route. That one thing for John Main was the saying of the mantra. He was born in 1926 in London of an Irish family. He was called Douglas; John was the name he took on entering the monastery. The Main family previously lived in Ballinskelligs on the western tip of Kerry. John Main’s Scottish grandfather had worked here setting up the first trans-Atlantic cable and where he met his wife, John Main’s grandmother. It is also an ancient monastic site within view of the Skellig rocks where the Celtic monks once lived and prayed. This spirit of the frontier, of adventure and new beginnings was to infuse John Main’s own monastic vision. John Main had a noticeably English manner and reserve, as well as a memorable sense of humour and exuberance he inherited from his close and fun loving family. The two sides of his character coexisted in rich paradox. When he later joined the Benedictines in London he said that if he joined an Irish monastery he would have lost his faith! Douglas joined the army in the last year of the war and worked as a radiographer in the intelligence unit. Working behind enemy lines his job was to pinpoint the exact location of enemy radio signals. Later he was to use this as an analogy for the mantra. It was a time, he said, when accuracy was becoming much more possible because of the use of quartz crystal. The mantra similarly helped one to stop drifting in prayer but tune in with precision to the wavelength of Jesus, the Word or sound of God that vibrates in us and in all creation. The mantra helps us to pick up the signal of God, the prayer of Jesus in our own hearts, the frequency that puts us in contact with the Father. It’s maybe curious how this metaphor John Main used was based on picking up enemy signals, but he was known for a rather mischievous and paradoxical sense of humour. During the war for example he was with his brothers on the roof of their house in Hampstead to watch the sunset. Down below on the street was a bus stop full of evening commuters. In a loud and clear voice he called, “Bomb! Bomb!”. When the crowd quickly scattered he was impressed by the power of one little word - like the power of the mantra to dispel distractions! One of the things John Main’s life shows is that all our experience is related to what is central. Everything that happens to us is a metaphor of who we are and why we are here. After the war Douglas Main sensed that his life experience pointed towards a vocation to religious life. He joined an Augustinian religious Order, the Cannons Regular, and went to study in Rome. However the stuffiness and misogyny he encountered there put him off. All his life Douglas was close to his mother and sisters. Many felt his temperament somewhat authoritarian but John Main was never life denying and was always open to others. Later on he was to teach that deep prayer leads to fullness of life; this was the real “religious life”, one that was open to all people. On his return from Rome he studied law at Trinity College in Dublin. One feels that he revelled in the paradox of being a very English Irishman and a Catholic in a Protestant college. The boundaries of nationality, denomination and even religious faith were never a prison of identity for John Main but a rich part of the play of life. On graduation John Main took a job with the British Colonial Service in the Far East. It was a time when colonies were being given their independence. Douglas Main would have revelled in this, politically he was always socialist and as an Irishman never sympathetic to British imperialism. He must have enjoyed the paradox of lending his skills to the process of political independence in Asia. He was sent to Malaysia. One day Douglas was sent on an official visit to thank a certain Swami Saccidananda for his work running an Ashram and Orphanage outside Kuala Lumpur. Douglas was impressed by the holiness, the energy of joy and the deeply centred nature of the monk. They got to talking about prayer: Saccidananda: “Do you pray?” Douglas: “Yes” Saccidananda: “How?” Douglas: “Well, I read a piece of Scripture, I reflect on it, ask God to speak to me through it, make some resolution and try to apply that in my life”. (Comment: This is what we would call “discursive” prayer). Saccidananda: “That is very good.” Douglas: “How do you pray?” Saccidananda: “We pray slightly differently. We don’t think, we come to an inner silence”. (Comment: And here the Swami quoted from the Upanishads): “The spirit of the One who creates the Universe dwells in the human heart and in silence is loving to all”. Douglas: “How do you come to this inner silence?” (Comment: Douglas Main found here an echo of his own faith. The maturity of his faith is shown in that he responded with a “how” not a “what”, practice not theory). Saccidananda: “It is difficult, there are distractions, the mind is like a tree full of chattering monkeys, to clear a way through the jungle we take a single word, a Mantra, and repeat it ceaselessly in our mind and heart, giving it our full attention.” Douglas: “Could you teach me as a Christian to meditate?” Saccidananda: “Certainly, it would make you a better Christian. Try to meditate every day, twice a day, half an hour in the morning, half an hour in the evening and we can meditate together at the end of every week.” (Comment: As a Christian we often see the form of prayer as restricted to a particular religion, prayer for the Swami however was a universal human response to the mystery of life. It is a testament to Douglas Main’s ability to cross boundaries – ten years before the openness of Vatican II – that he felt able and willing to take this “Hindu” practice up, presumably taking a Christian Mantra.) Douglas: “How long will this take?” Saccidananda: “As long as it takes you to say the Mantra.” Douglas: “What happens next?” Saccidananda: “There is no next. Say your mantra.” Douglas: “What about posture? What about distractions? What about insights?” Saccidananda: “Sit still. Sit upright (there is no need to sit cross legged!). Say the Mantra. Listen to it as a sound within you. Give it your full attention. Let everything else go. It will lead you into the silence of oneness with God”. Thirty years on, when teaching meditation from his own Christian tradition John Main said that he always came back to the wisdom, the simplicity, the purity of the teaching he received in the East. On his return from Malaysia, having done himself out of a job at the granting of independence, he taught International Law at Trinity College, Dublin. He enjoyed his work and friends and the cultural (especially musical) life of the city and he kept up his meditation practice. This was at a time long before the Maharishi and the Beatles had made meditation known. It was a solitary path. When he talked about it to religious friends and priests meditation was greeted with complete incomprehension, even suspicion. The fact that he persevered shows the depth to which the teaching he received had affected him. At the age of thirty five however two things happened that made him reassess life. Firstly, he fell in love. Diana Ernselsteen was a childhood friend of all the Main family, yet for Douglas it was a friendship that was blossoming into love. He asked Diana to marry him. She said yes. However later she changed her mind. John Main remembered later a moment when he and Diana were praying together in a Church in Dublin about their marriage and, he said, it seemed to dawn on Diana that it wasn’t meant to be. They remained friends throughout John Main’s life. The Main family never treated the relationship as more than a friendship but for Douglas it was a turning point. Deeper than the heartbreak of any rejection he may have felt was the realisation that he was not called to marriage. The love he felt called to would need to be expressed in another way. It was a painful moment. At the same time he was faced with another loss. The husband of his sister Yvonne was killed in the war and Douglas had helped to bring up his two nephews. He felt like a father to them and they lived close to him in Dublin. However at the age of eleven one of them developed a brain tumour. Douglas cancelled all work and stayed by the boy’s bed for two weeks until he died. These encounters with loss and death led Douglas Main to reassess the direction of his life. He realised that his meditation practice was the most important thing for him; he wanted to centre his life on that. The old sense of vocation to religious life returned and he decided to try to be a monk. Part of the letting go he felt called to was to let go of his beloved Dublin, work, family, friends, and to move back to London. At the age of thirty three he applied to join Ealing Abbey. There, at the interview with the novice master, he spoke of his meditation practice. But the words “Swami” and “Mantra” were greeted with suspicion. “This is not Christian prayer,” he was told; “You should follow the Benedictine way.” John Main later wryly observed that this meant the Jesuit way of prayer – using the imagination to pray scripture. “Imagination”, John Main was later to say (somewhat cheekily), “is the great enemy of prayer.” Still he accepted his novice masters advice wanting to commit fully to monastic life and obedience. Giving up meditation was the beginning of a long desert of prayer for the newly professed John Main. However, remembering this time in later years, he said he was grateful that he had learnt detachment from what was the most important thing for him. When he was to come back to meditation twelve years later, conscious of its Christian tradition, it was “on God’s terms not on my own.” His practice had been interrupted but he felt he had never left it. He found his life as a monk rewarding in many other ways. He was sent to Rome to study at the time of Vatican II and was greatly enthusiastic about the changes that tallied well with his adventurous, generous and life loving temperament. The Church was no longer a fortress of fixed identity but a pilgrim people journeying to God. There was a new openness to relating to the world. On his return from Rome John Main worked in the school at Ealing. However he, along with the then headmaster proposed some reforms that were considered too radical by many of the other monks – among them the opening of the school to girls, non-Catholics and children of other faiths. In the fallout John Main was sent to a sister monastery in Washington DC to do further studies and reflect. His leadership qualities though were soon evident and he was asked to become headmaster of the school there. It was right at this busy time when John Main was raising money, reorganising and running the school that there was another major turning point in his life. For years the primary focus of his prayer had been the singing of psalms and the celebration of Mass. However a young student came to visit the monastery. He had been travelling in India had got interested in meditation and was asking about Christian Mysticism. John Main was asked to advise him (he was later to comment how interesting it is that turning points of our lives often come through moments of obedience – doing something we don’t want to do but have been asked to do). Anyway John Main was busy and tried to frighten the boy off by advising him to read the seventeen century book on Benedictine spirituality “Holy Wisdom” by Augustine Baker. This profound but dense work was rarely read by the monks. To John Main’s surprise the boy came back a week later full of excitement: “This is great,” he said, “it is all about meditation, all this stuff about the Desert Fathers.” John Main felt his own spiritual impoverishment and read Baker himself. Baker led him to Cassian, and there amongst the conferences of the Desert Fathers John Main discovered the Mantra again: “Take the formula (Oh God come to my aid…) and revolve it ceaselessly in the heart so that all the riches of imagination can be let go of, so we can come with ready ease to that first of the beatitudes; blessed are the poor in spirit.” John Main began to meditate again, now conscious of the Christian tradition of silent prayer beyond thought and image. The whole experience led him to a reassessment of monastic identity. What is the particular form of education monasteries are there for? He came to realise it was to teach contemplation. After the school project at Washington was in place, he returned to Ealing and in 1974 founded a house for laymen in the grounds. This was to host the first meditation group. His vision of a contemplative renewal of monastic life was popular with many of the monks. After a very close abbatial election he was not elected Abbot and in 1977 was given permission to accept an invitation from the Archbishop of Montreal, Canada to found a monastic priory there based around meditation. Laurence Freeman, who had been at Ealing School, was later a part of the laymen community and then novice at the monastery, was to be his companion in the foundation. So again John Main crossed the Atlantic that his grandfather and the Celtic monks had looked over. Every letting go was a deeper centring on God. In Montreal he was able to experiment with his vision of a new monasticism where laypeople and monks could meditate together. Monasticism was from its beginnings with the Desert Fathers and Mothers, a movement of lay people, an alternative lifestyle based on values of silence, stillness and simplicity. The Oblate community in Montreal became a sign that these monastic values were relevant to people in many walks of life. The new monasticism would be primarily a lay monasticism. The practice of Christian Meditation was the distillation of the essential monastic spirit. In meditating every day, twice a day, people could share in the heart of what the monastic movement, which began in the fourth century, was all about - the search for God. He writes: “All of us need to find something, some principle in our lives that is absolutely reliable and worthy of our confidence. All of us feel this impulse somehow or other to make contact with this rocklike reality.” Alongside the sharing of practice, the teaching of Christian Meditation became John Main’s principal work. The early monks had transmitted their wisdom by word of mouth. John Main took his place within this oral tradition, through the weekly meditation groups at the priory, through his retreats on Meditation in England, Ireland and the U.S. and through the tape recordings of his talks distributed to a growing meditating community. The other ancient Christian form of communication was the letter and John Main began his quarterly newsletter. He was pleased that technology and telecommunications could help the spiritual path. But he always reminded his readers and listeners that the important thing was commitment. He wrote: “Meditation cannot be reduced to a commodity and the Spiritual tradition is not a supermarket to shop in or a stock market to gamble on. Because we do think in these terms however there can be a real danger that meditation is presented in terms of return and pay off… the only important thing is that your spirit lives.” John Main’s teaching on prayer was always practical. His concern was to help people into the silence of pure prayer, into accepting a state of poverty, with no thoughts, no images. This was, as Julian of Norwich put it, a condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything. He taught the way of the Mantra not as a technique but as a discipline. A technique would involve the ego trying to get something but the mantra helps to purify the heart through the letting go of desire. That was why it is important to stay with the same mantra. Rootedness leads to growth as the word moves from the mind to the heart. By saying the word we learn commitment; by listening to the sound of the word within us we learn attentiveness. These are the first steps beyond self-consciousness as we realise that it is not us who are praying but the spirit is praying within us. “Say the Mantra”, John Main says; “Until you can no longer say it”. Gradually we enter into the silence beyond the ego, but precisely because this is beyond the ego we don’t choose when to stop saying the word. There is a pernicious peace where we stop the work of meditation and try to posses the experience. Rather, John Main says, we should “enter into the experience” by saying the word continually, letting go of self-consciousness. The ideal mantra John Main recommended was the word Maranatha, meaning “Come Lord” but repeated silently interiorly as four equally stressed syllables Ma-ra-na-tha. Not only was this one of the most ancient Christian prayers, in the language Jesus spoke, but it also has a harmonic quality that helps to bring the mind to silence. Other words or short phrases could be used but he saw it as important that during the meditation one doesn’t think about the meaning or use the imagination. The use of a sacred word in an unfamiliar language, like Aramaic, helps to lessen this. Also if possible it is best to receive a mantra from a teacher so that from the beginning one practises as part of a tradition and in a spirit of self-transcendence. Distractions will always come but one simply comes back to the word, with no discouragement and, at the end, no evaluation. Meditation is a pilgrimage, the important thing is simply to be on the way, not where one is on it. In fact in meditation we are all beginners. Each time we sit down, morning and evening for our two half hours, we are beginning again. In this practice of Christian meditation John Main felt was distilled the heart of monastic spirituality; pure prayer lived out in obedience, stability and conversion of life; turning away from selfishness, finding ourselves and the whole world centred in God. This tradition of poverty of spirit, he felt, could be made accessible to people in all walks of life. Twice daily meditation and complete fidelity during those times to the sound of the Mantra was a monastic tradition well suited to our modern need for silence, stillness and simplicity. It was also true that meditation created community. A growing Oblate community and an extended world community started to share a common life inspired by a common practice. In John Main’s quarterly newsletters from Montreal he kept people connected, encouraged them to continue “on the way” and began to offer a profound Trinitarian theology of meditation. The basic fact of Christian awareness, John Main felt, was that the human consciousness of Jesus dwells within us and is in union with us. If we can be open to that then the union is consummated, is fulfilled, then we go with Jesus on his journey to the Father. This love of Father for the Son and Son for the Father is the Holy Spirit which prays within us. Therefore the prayer of Jesus, his Spirit, his life, in us, is our prayer. In meditation we give up my prayer and become one with his prayer, his journey beyond himself to the Father. That is what it means to pray in the Spirit and Truth. In this Trinitarian communion we find our full humanity by sharing in the Divine nature. In 1980, after only six years of teaching Christian meditation, and at the age of fifty-four, John Main was diagnosed with cancer. The community at Montreal had expanded into new premises, was accepting monastic novices and had opened a women’s community. John Main continued to lead the Meditation groups and keep up his correspondence with mediators around the world. Weakened by his illness many felt him to be more and more transparent to God. Faced with the vulnerability of the human condition his last talks convey more and more the urgency he felt in the communication of Christian meditation and also the gentleness whereby that practice is lived out. In one of his last talks he was asked “what was the best way to prepare for meditation?” He answered “by little acts of kindness”. It was he felt the genius of St Benedict’s rule that self-transcendence was always in the fullness of our humanity. In his last months he lived more and more completely in the present moment. When one morning he was found fallen from his bed during the night, his disciple Fr Laurence said they would laugh about it one day; John Main looked at him, smiled and said: “Why not laugh about it now?” On December 30th 1982 John Main took the last step on his pilgrimage. He died peacefully. The community he had founded had attracted people from all over the world because of the depth of its practice and teaching. In that community he had always been an icon of Christ. The more vulnerable his illness made him the more obvious the source of his inner strength became. “As we are unformed”, he said, “Christ is formed in us”. “The mystery of love”, he wrote, “is that we become what we delight to gaze upon, and so when we open our hearts to his light we become light.” John Main was often felt to be a larger than life personality. The meaning of his life certainly went beyond his death at the early age of fifty-six. He once said that “humanity is most Godlike when we give ourselves without measure; when we love, and it is without measure that God gives himself to us.” The expansiveness and generosity of his spirit showed a life rooted in God. His humour and humanity showed, as he said, that “the saint is not superhuman but fully human.” His vision of a “new lay monasticism” continues in the World Community for Christian Meditation, founded in 1991. What began as a small seed has grown into a tree, with meditation groups, retreats and seminars all over the world. That seed was the life and teaching of John Main.
- [Presence with God](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/presence-with-god) - William C. Chittick “He is with you wherever you are” (Q. 57:4). But to say that God is present with us is not the same as saying that we are present with Him. Presence with God needs to be achieved. It is the object of the spiritual quest. The whole problem is that people are
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- [Mysteries of Speech and Breath (from <em>Himitsu nenbutsu sho</em>)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/mysteries-of-speech-and-breath) - ??????????? ?? HIMITSU NENBUTSU SHO? ?????
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- [<em>Susokukan</em>—Counting the Zen Way](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/susokukan-zen-counting) - Eizan Tatsuta Susokukan, “observing the breath with numbers”, is the Japanese name of the Buddhist practice of anapanasati (in Sanskrit anapanasmriti), “mindfulness of inhalation and exhalation”. The following primer by Tatsuta Roshi is one of the most concise, popular and authorised introductions available. “Susokukan is the first step as well as the final destination of
- [What is Conservatism?](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/what-is-conservatism-2) - Titus Burckhardt The peasant is generally conservative; he is so, as it were, from experience, for he knows—but how many still know it?—that the life of nature depends on the constant self-renewal of an equilibrium of innumerable mutually interconnected forces, and that one cannot alter any element of this equilibrium without dragging the whole along
- [Mulla Sadra on the  Efficacy of Prayer](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/mulla-sadra-on-prayer) - Sayeh Meisami The relation of humility to summoning demands and the fulfilment of requests is similar to the relation between thinking and the summoning of expressions and speech. And all is emanation from above that happens upon the unification of the imagination of the praying soul and the imaginative conceptions of the heavenly souls who
- [Tolkiens Christianity Not Incidental but Central](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/tolkiens-christianity) - Bradley J. Birzer The atheists love his paganism while the fundamentalists despise it. Many of the fundamentalists, strangely, have no problem with the goddess Venus descending upon the good Christians of Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, but they fear Tolkien’s Sam’s prayers to Elbereth, queen of heaven. Click here to view the PDF. Original article at
- [Centuries of Meditation](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/centuries-of-meditation) - Thomas Traherne There is in us a world of Love to somewhat, though we know not what in the world that should be. There are invisible ways of conveyance by which some great thing doth touch our souls, and by which we tend to it. Do you not feel yourself drawn by the expectation and
- [The One Letter Sutra: A (<em>Ekakshari Sutra/Ajikan</em>)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/one-letter-sutra-ekashari-ajikan) - In Hinduism, Ekakshara, literally “the one syllable”, refers to the sacred monosyllable OM. Since the A is inherent in OM, meditation on the letter A became one of the most basic Buddhist contemplative practices, and it became particularly developed in the Japanese Shingon (Esoteric) School under the name of Ajikan. The original Sanskrit source is
- [Does Prayer Change God’s Mind?](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/does-prayer-change-gods-mind) - David Arias It seems that to affirm the unchangeability of God’s providence is to deny the efficacy of prayer. That is, to say that God’s providence is unchangeable seems to imply that petitionary prayer is a superfluous and unnecessary act which has no effect whatsoever… It’s interesting that none other than St. Thomas Aquinas offers
- [Al-Ghazali on Prayer—For Every Occasion](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/al-ghazali-on-prayer-for-every-occasion) - Abu Hamid al-Ghazali This is an excerpt from On Invocations and Supplications (Kitab al-adhkar wa-al-da‘awat), book 9 of the Revival of the Religious Sciences (Ihya ulum al-din), on “prayers for every emergent occasion”, including when entering the market, putting on a new garment, being in debt and many others. Need requires supplication, and supplication brings
- [Prayer and the Integration of the Psychic Elements](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/schuon-prayer-integration) - Frithjof Schuon Prayer in the most usual sense of the term is a practice that appears to imply an anthropomorphic and sentimental point of view: anthropomorphic because it seems to attribute to God a temporal nature and a human understanding, and sentimental because it expresses itself readily in forms pertaining to feeling. Now it is
- [The Experience of God—Illusion and Reality](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/hart-experience-of-god) - David Bentley Hart This is the final chapter from the book The Experience of God, published in 2013. If one is left unsatisfied by the logical arguments for belief in God, and instead insists upon some “experimental” or “empirical” demonstration, then one ought to be willing to attempt the sort of investigations necessary to achieve
- [Is the Matter of Metaphysics Immaterial? Yes and No](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/hamza-the-matter-of-metaphysics) - Hamza Yusuf Advanced technology and the holy grail of transhumanism (with its utopian promises of a “more perfect” humanoid) are thrust upon us as a solution, yet these are no panacea for what ails us; they bring new problems of their own. The remedy we need is wisdom (sophia, hikmah). Click here to view the
- [Aymara Dance of the Kunturis (Condors)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/aymara-dance-of-kunturis) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection This is one of the most ancient dances of the Aymara communities of the altiplano. The musicians dance in circles, some of them wearing condor feathers, as they play their traditional pan pipes of varying dimensions. The music of the Aymara, “restrained, repetitive and austerely beautiful”, plays
- [The Angel of Light and Spiritual Discernment in the  Orthodox Tradition](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/angel-of-light-and-spiritual-discernment) - Nun Macaria The knight in John Keats’ poem, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, with his fatally naive fascination for the supernatural, has much in common with today’s spiritual seeker. The knight is described as being “at-arms,” that is, prepared for battle or for some high adventure… Like the knight in John Keats’ poem, one can
- [The Great Learning (<em>Daxue</em>)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-great-learning-daxue) - One of the most ancient texts of the Confucian corpus, at the basis of Chinese society and polity through the centuries. From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides. Click here to view a PDF Or click here
- [The Self as Enemy, the Self as Divine: A Crossroads in the Development of Islamic Anthropology](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/kukkonen-self-as-enemy-self-as-divine) - Taneli Kukkonen We appear to have arrived at an impasse in our quest for self-knowledge. The divine self is elusive, inscrutable, and may well turn out to be entirely impersonal; the lower self, meanwhile, is indisputably mine, but at the same time it is mean and base and hardly worthy of attention. Where to go
- [Traditional Geometry & Architecture in Practice: Lecture & Workshop with Taimoor Khan](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/taimoor-workshop-geometric) - · In Search of the Essence of Mughal Architecture Wednesday, 12 July 2017, 6pm. High Commission for Pakistan, 36 Lowndes Square, London SW1X 8JN This illustrated talk, organised jointly with The Pakistan Society, will explore the proportional system underlying the Shish Mahal (Lahore) and the Taj Mahal (Agra), to answer a centuries-old question: what were
- [Al-Khitab al-Islami bayn al-Qawati‘ wal-Ijtihad](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/al-khitab-al-islami) - (Waraqat Tabah 3) Reproduced here by kind permission of Tabah Foundation Click here to view the PDF (Arabic)
- [Islamic Discourse: Between the Conclusive and the Variable](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/islamic-discourse-between-conclusive-and-variable) - Perhaps the most looming challenge before Islam today is to be understood. Misrepresentation on the part of international media punditry does contribute much to this dilemma, as well as a general myopia within the consciousness of Western publics regarding their own “others”; a category within which Islam, more often than not, features as the primary candidate. We would be remiss however, if we did not acknowledge the shortcomings of contemporary Muslim discourse to achieve the target of clarity. Clarity is the all too important defining factor of the contextual corridor between sender and receiver. It is the ever-elusive component of the encoding and transmission process of communications. Four considerations illustrate the gravity of this problem. First, systemic misunderstanding of Islam challenges the very well-being of Muslim populations worldwide. Muslims easily become vulnerable to official and unofficial backlash and their religious affiliation nearly becomes an indictment in itself. Second, it impedes Muslims’ potential to contribute valuably to the common good of the greater global community in which they participate. Suspicion is an inhibitor where there is a pressing need instead, for enablers. Third, Muslims believe that it is the human right of every person to experience the message and meaning of Islam. The ability of every person to make his or her own informed decision about Islam is at the essence of securing freedom of conscience. Fourth, it is this very disconnect between peoples and cultures that continues to exasperate the atmosphere of volatility that surrounds them. In the Quran we find the verse, “and We have not sent a messenger except with the tongue (lis?n) of his people”. The tongue of a people is not just the formal patterns of their language but the meanings conveyed by that language. Language is the vessel of meaning; however the conveyance of meaning calls for much more than the surface aptitudes required to pass a TOEFL examination. Two concepts intimately related to lisan (tongue), ostensibly used here for “language”, are nu?q (speech) and bay?n (expression). To engage in bay?n is to give expression to internalized meaning. It is defined in the discipline of u??l al-fiqh (Islamic legal theory) as the movement of a thing from a space of obscurity into a space of clarity. The word nu?q (speech) comes from the same triliteral root from which we derive the word man?iq, or “logic”. This common source for both implies a symbiotic relationship between language and sound intellection. A discourse that is in tune with the “tongue” of a people must be conversant with their modes of intellection. It must be recognizable to its audience; and it can only do this by being conscious of the unspoken assumptions that operate in their minds and inform their worldview. The preceding considerations can be summed up in two operating principles for effective discourse, relevance and accessibility. Relevance implies both value and significance. For a discourse to be significant it must be at once meaningful and exceptional. The importance of its content must stand out from the monotonous buzz of the herd. It cannot forfeit its integrity by replacing substance with the shallowness and distraction of cheap market “spin”. To have value is to contribute to a tangibly felt need in the lived reality of people; or to provide enrichment or augmentation to an already existent value. The first is to establish quality, the second is to quantifiably increase original or native quality. The lie of modernity and its handmaiden, progress, is to tack a notion of valuation onto naked quantity alone, proliferating at hyper-speeds in a void that has now become our post-modern condition. Accessibility means that a discourse is comprehensible to its audience. How often have we found that speech serves only to satiate a need within the speaker himself and that resonates only amongst his choir? It remains a closed and circular conversation. Accessibility means that the way in which the discourse adds value to the particular situation of its audience be immediately recognizable. The target of clarity in discourse inevitably warrants subscription to the principle of transparency. The language used to promote or advocate doctrinally held positions should lucidly reveal the moral clarity that underpins them. According to senior authorities like al-‘Izz Ibn ‘Abd al-Sal?m, the rationale at the heart of sacred law is the securing of good and the prevention of harm. How this is achieved as a morally reasoned good in the lives of every person should serve to bolster the confidence required to embrace the principle of transparency. The chronic hedging that tends to plague much of current messaging doesn’t hold up under the lens of globalization and transnational multiculturalism. For the exchange of meaning between sender and receiver to be a successful enterprise, its structure must stand on a foundation of trust. The message must engender confidence in the integrity of its own source. The challenge of competing to reach hearts and minds with powerful and ubiquitous international media machinery is daunting in the least. However, the onus of responsibility lies squarely on the shoulders of the Muslim community to fulfill their end of the communications equation. In addition to the above outlined principles, Muslims must calibrate their discourse to be in alignment with their own organic roots. These roots are eternal moral universals and spiritual aims and purposes that resonate across the continuum of time and space. They are the arbiters of authenticity and they imbue identity with life and vibrancy. These root principles and authentic meanings alone are the source of significance; everything else is just an adjective. In the monograph that follows, the eminent jurist and thinker, Shaykh Abdullah Bin Bayyah outlines the components of a sound and effective Islamic discourse, one that delivers on its purpose and fulfills its aims. He begins by enumerating the timeless constants that ground the discourse in doctrinal authenticity. Upon this is built the methodological system of theological and juristic reasoning, which provides a latitude for development, creativity, and semantic possibility, while securing continuity. This enables the discourse to embrace and engage with its contemporary moment. The author goes on to treat the qualities that must accompany a sound and grounded, yet engaged discourse, of tolerance, reconciliation, and facilitation. These are necessary components if the message is going to bring health and healing to contemporary hearts and minds. In his treatment of what might be considered an u??l of the Islamic discourse, Shaykh Bin Bayyah proceeds to demonstrate the essential factors and ready latitude inherently built into the system that deliver on the “relevancy” and “accessibility” required as the Muslim community continues to traverse new and evolving expanses of time and place. Tabah Research is honored to offer this contribution to the effort to bring sense to the perplexing nature of our times, and understanding to the diverse membership of the global community, as well as enrichment to all those who are interested in the world of ideas and inspired by the possibility of their application. Jihad Hashim Brown Director of Research Tabah Foundation Abu Dhabi – UAE About the Author Shaykh Abdullah bin al-Shaykh al-Mahfudh bin Bayyah (born 1362AH/1935CE) is currently one of the highest ranking scholars of traditional Islam. Born in Mauritania, Shaykh Abdullah was, in his youth, appointed to study legal judgments in Tunis. On returning to Mauritania he became Minister of Education and later Minister of Justice, holding several other important positions under different administrations, and eventually serving as Vice-President of the first president of Mauritania. He has also been the Vice-President of the International Union for Muslim Scholars. Shaykh Bin Bayyah is presently involved in The Islamic Fiqh Council, a Saudi-based Institute, he teaches at King Abdul Aziz University in Saudi Arabia, and he is the founder and president of the Global Center for Renewal and Guidance. His publications include: Intellectual Opinions, A Dialogue on Human Rights in Islam, Security Discourse in Islam, Terrorism: Diagnosis and Solutions, Am?l? al-Dal?l?t (U??l al-fiqh), Financial Transactions, and The Craft of Fatawa and Fiqh of Minorities. In 2009 Shaykh Bin Bayyah was ranked amongst the 50 most influential Muslims worldwide. Islamic Discourse Between the Conclusive and the Variable Shaykh Abdullah bin Bayyah The word khi??b or “discourse” follows the Arabic morphological pattern fi‘?l and is the verbal noun for the verb kha?aba, which has as its verbal noun the words khi??b and mukh??abah. It means speech directed to another party.1 This meaning is illustrated in the following Qur’anic verses, When the ignorant engage them in discourse [kh??abahum], they say “Peace!”2; Do not engage Me in discourse [l? tukh??ibn?] concerning those who have acted wrongfully3; and And We granted him wisdom and the making of distinctions in discourse [fa?l al-khi??b].4 Turning now to the technical terminology of the scholars of jurisprudence, khi??b—in the words of al-Zarkash? in al-Ba?r al-Mu???—is defined by the early scholars as speech aimed at imparting understanding to someone who is prepared for understanding. Some scholars define it as speech aimed at imparting understanding to someone irrespective of whether or not he or she is prepared for understanding.5 In the technical usage of the West, it means a verbal exposition concerning a specific subject, directed to the public. It is tantamount to a complex of verbal and written features representing an ideology. Discourse can be divided into many categories or levels. According to Foucault,6 for example, there is discourse that is changing and that which is stable. The first type of discourse is the daily habitual discourse of people, which terminates and comes to an end with the ending of its time of utterance. The second is discourse that reverberates in the lives of people and does not come to an end, like the discourse documented in sacred texts. In like fashion, they articulated the levels of discourse with reference to its subject matter, sources, import and content. Accordingly, there is religious dis- 1. Mu?ammad bin Makram Ibn Man??r, Lis?n al-‘Arab, 4th ed., 9 vols. (Beirut: D?r ??dir, 2005), 5:98. 2. q25:63. 3. q11:37. 4. q38:20. 5. Mu?ammad al-Zarkash?, al-Ba?r al-Mu??? f? U??l alFiqh, ed. ‘Abd al-Q?dir ‘Abd All?h al-‘?n?, ‘Abd al-Satt?r Ab? Ghuddah, and ‘Umar Sulaym?n al-Ashqar, 2 ed., 6 vols. (Kuweit: Wiz?rah al-Awq?f wa al-Shu’?n alIsl?miyyah, 1992), 1:126. 6. Michel Foucault, l’Ordre du discours, translated by Mu?ammad Sab?lah (Lebanon: D?r al-Tanw?r, 2007). 7. The usage of this term (thaw?bit) in Islamic writings carries with it the meaning of verified or established matters. 8. al-Zarkash?, al-Ba?r alMu??? f? U??l al-Fiqh, 1:127. course, philosophical discourse, ethical discourse, legal and historical discourse and socio-political discourse, in addition to various other types of discourse. Islamic discourse in its comprehensive sense encompasses all these aspects. The broad scope of the concept of religion and its universality that penetrates all aspects of life is not meant in the narrow ecclesiastical sense of religion juxtaposed to reason, but rather in the broad encompassing sense that regards as part of religion all human activity. This activity may be emotional, rational or behavioral, in its diverse fruitful expressions judged on the scale of values and human interest. Since this paper deals with Islamic discourse—its essence, its absolutes and matters of ijtih?d, its constants7 and variables—it should be emphasized that Islamic discourse is constructed, in essence, on the discourse of Allah Most High directed to His servants; it is a presentation of the content of divine discourse directed to humanity, whether in regard to universals or particulars, form or foundation, means or objectives. It is here that its constants and variables lie. It is known that discourse directed to humanity by Allah Most High is of two types: -- discourse that is informative [ikhb?r?] in nature, which requires belief in accordance with its contents [such as the divine discourse disclosing His essence and attributes; the universe, whether heavens, earth, angels or jinn; the Hereafter and that which is associated with it, whether Paradise, fire, judgment, the Scales, reward or retribution]; and, -- discourse that relates to the acts of accountable agents insofar as they are held accountable for them. This is known as ?ukm [or legal ruling] and is categorized into (a) discourse establishing accountability for deeds and (b) discourse establishing relationships between things, for discourse [in the form of legal rulings] can be either a prescription, a granting of choice, or asserting a relationship, according to the well known exposition of the scholars of jurisprudence.8 It thus may be said that the constants in divine discourse, whether they are informative or in the form of legal rulings, are constituted by that which is supported by certain evidence [qa?‘?]. Whereas non-constants in divine discourse are constituted by that which is supported by ijtih?d and evidence that is of a presumptive nature [?an?]. Al-Zarkash? says: In Shar? al-Ma?s?l, al-I?fah?n? states: “Of the legal rulings, there are those established by way of proofs that generate certain knowledge concerning their subject matter. This occurs in legal rulings established by way of texts supported by secondary evidences that dispel all possible conflicting interpretations and, in so doing, limit the import of the text to a single meaning. And among the legal rulings, there are those that are established by way of narrations transmitted by a limited number of narrators in each generation of its chain of narration, or by way of texts that are not supported by that which dispels all variant interpretations—these legal rulings are presumptive and not known with certainty.” He states further: “This is an unassailable truth. It arises from division of the methods of adducing evidence into those that are clear proofs and those that are merely of an indicative nature.”9 Ibn Daq?q al-‘?d is of the view that legal rulings are divided into those that are mass-transmitted [mutaw?tir], which are of decisive quality, and those that are not [transmitted] as such and, therefore, are presumptive.10 The truth of the matter is that legal rulings are divided into those that are certain and those that are presumptive. The early scholars who expressed this view include Shaykh Abu Is??q al-Shir?z? in Kit?b al-?ud?d and Ibn al-Sam‘?n? in al-Qaw??i‘.11 In order to clarify the view of al-I?fah?n? that absolute certainties arise from proofs that yield absolute certainty, it is imperative to consider briefly the nature of proofs that are absolutely certain and [proofs] that, if a discourse or legal ruling is established thereby, render that discourse or legal ruling absolutely certain. Proofs that are absolutely certain—insofar as their meaning is concerned—are those texts of the Lawgiver, whether from the Book12 or from the sunnah, that do not admit of any variant interpretation. Proofs that are absolutely certain—insofar as their authenticity is concerned—are those that are transmitted in a manner that is absolutely certain, either because they are to be found in the Noble Qur’an between its two covers, or in hadith texts that are mass-transmitted [mutaw?tir] [subject to the well known differences concerning its definition], or in express consensus [ijm?‘ ?ar??] based on evidence. A condition stipulated for all of the above is the absence of any strong opposing evidence of an authoritative nature. Yet there are proofs that come close to being absolutely certain, such as a well-circulated [mustaf??] hadith, narrated by four or more narrators in each generation of its chain, or that has otherwise become well-known. And, in the view of some scholars, [we may include] a solitary [???d] hadith that is free of any hidden defects and is found in the ?a???ayn.13 It is noted that Im?m al-?aramayn criticized in his book al-Burh?n those who held the above mentioned view concerning solitary hadiths, on the basis that error is manifestly possible even for a narrator who is trustworthy.14 Other such proofs include: general terms that are repeated [according to alSh??ib?]; universal propositions derived from the rational import of texts and are attested to by diverse proofs and a variety of textual and contextual indicators; tacit consensus unopposed by any conflicting evidence, subject to certain differences of opinion in this regard; juristic analogy where the ratio legis manifests itself more Tabah Papers? No. 3 9. Ibid., 1:124. 10. Ibid. 11. Man??r bin Mu?ammad al-Sam‘?n?, Qaw??i‘ alAdillah f? U??l al-Fiqh, ed. ‘Al? bin ‘Abb?s al-?akam? and ‘Abdull?h bin ??fi? al?akam?, 1st ed., 5 vols. (Riyadh: Maktabah al-Tawbah, 1998), 3:3. 12. sc. the Qur’an. 13. “The two rigorously authenticated ones”, meaning the hadith collections by Bukh?r? and Muslim. 14. ‘Abd al-Malik bin ‘Abd All?h al-Juwayn?, al-Burh?n f? U??l al-Fiqh, ed. ‘Abd al-‘A??m Ma?m?d al-D?b, 4th ed., 2 vols. (Egypt: D?r al-Waf?’, 1997), 1:204. 15. Sayyid? ‘Abd All?h bin Ibr?h?m al-‘Alaw? alShanq???, Nashr al-Bun?d ‘al? Mar?qi al-Su‘?d, 2 vols. (UAE: ?ab‘ah bi ishr?f alLajnah al-Mushtarikah li Nashr al-Tur?th al-Isl?m? Bayn al-Mamlakah alMaghribiyyah wa ?uk?mah Dawlah al-Im?r?t al‘Arabiyyah al-Muta?idah, n.d.), verse 654. strongly than in the source ruling itself or where the ratio legis manifests itself equally strong as in the source ruling, provided that the evidence for the source ruling is itself absolutely certain. The presence of a ratio legis is a condition [for juristic analogy to occur], and the analogy is certain if its support is certain.15 The objective of the foregoing introduction is to establish the existence of two types of discourse, but not in reference to the customary division of discourse into that which establishes accountability for deeds and that which establishes legal relations between things; rather [discourse categorized] according to the grade and value of evidence in terms of strength and weakness, clarity and ambiguity, multiplicity or singularity of its chains of transmission, or being widespread or rare. Accordingly, evidence that is strong, mass-transmitted [mutawattir], and clear, confers on its import strength, comprehensiveness, and acceptability. It raises it from the level of merely requiring action in accordance with its dictates to a level where conviction of its content becomes decidedly conclusive. This level is known as “that which is necessarily known of religion.” These, then, are the certainties that form the foundation of this religion’s edifice, its focal points and supporting structure. The foundation is faith, those matters that are treated on the same basis as faith, and those matters that relate to the requirements of faith. The supporting structure consists of the pillars that elevate the canopy of the edifice—they are the proofs of faith. After the foundation and the supporting structure, the contents of the building are of differing levels and are represented by diverse rulings of the noble Shari‘ah, forming a complete and well-organized structure, apprehending all aspects of life, addressing all exigencies, directed to various goals and objectives, consistent in all its variations, and coherent in the diversity of its objectives. The certainties of the Islamic discourse are none other than a constant reminder of the definitive fundamentals of Islam as regards belief, conduct, and social interaction. There is likely no need to mention in this regard the proofs from the Book, the sunnah, and the statements of leading scholars—all of which are well known and in circulation in various references. The objective here is merely to provide a reminder of the principal issues concerning this religion based on affirmation of divine unity and its requisites, prophethood and its imperatives, human dignity and accountability, and preservation of the fundamental necessities [?ar?r?t], so as to establish balance between this world and the Hereafter, and between the spirit and the body. Faith in the realm of the unseen does not negate the realm of the perceptible, which actually stands as proof and evidence of the realm of the unseen and is indicative thereof: Indeed, I declare an oath by that which you see and that which you do not see.16 Indeed, in the creation of the Heavens and the Earth and the alternation of night and day there are signs for those of intellect.17 The Fundamental Certainties Most of the certainties or absolutes are to be found in the part of the Qur’an revealed in Mecca in connection with principles of belief. Al-Sh??ib? states: The majority of the Meccan verses of the Qur’an seek to establish three themes, all of which may be reduced to a single theme: invitation to worship Allah Most High. The first of these three themes is affirmation of the attribute of unity to Allah, the One, the Ultimate Truth. This unfolds in diverse manners. On the one hand, there is the unqualified negation of any associate to Allah, and, on the other, there is its specific negation of the claims of disbelievers in differing contexts. These include their claim that the associates bring one closer to Allah or that an associate is a son of Allah, along with other various kinds of corrupt claims. The second is affirmation of the prophethood of the Prophet Muhammad and that he is the messenger of Allah to all of humanity, that he was truthful in what he conveyed from Allah. Similarly, this unfolds in diverse manners, such as attestation that he is truly a messenger of Allah and negation of the claims of disbelievers that he is a liar, a sorcerer, insane, or that he is instructed by another human being, and other such claims of their disbelief and obstinacy. The third is affirmation of the resurrection and the Hereafter and that they are true and not subject to doubt, [evinced] by way of clear proofs and the refutation of those who reject them, addressing all avenues open to the disbelievers to justify their rejection, and in so doing, refuting their claims in all respects by way of authoritative evidence, censuring the opponent, and bringing clarity to the matter at hand. It is these three themes that the passages of the Qur’an revealed in Mecca generally deal with. What appears at first glance to violate this general proposition can ultimately be brought within its framework. This approach can be applied to the verses that encourage compliance and instill fear of transgression, similitudes, stories, recollections of Paradise and hellfire, descriptions of the day of resurrection, and the like. Al-Sh??ib? proceeds to apply the above to surah al-Mu’min?n, saying: It commences with three concepts. The first—and this is the most relevant for present purposes—is elucida- tion of the attributes capable of acquisition by the servant of Allah, which if so 16. q69:38–9. 17. q3:190. 18. q23:1–11. Ibr?h?m bin M?s? al-Sh??ib?, al-Muw?faq?t f? U??l al-Shar?‘ah, ed. Ibr?h?m Rama??n, 6th ed., 4 in 2 vols. (Beirut: D?r alMa‘rifah, 2004), 3:377–8. 19. q55:1–3. 20. q6:162–3. acquired, results in the servant being elevated and honored by Allah. This is embodied in the words of Allah: The believers have indeed succeeded. They are those who are humble in their prayers, who turn away from worthless talk, who guard their private parts—except from their wives and those whom their right hands possess, yet those who covet anything more than that are people who transgress—who honor their trusts and contracts, who are diligent in their prayers. These are the heirs who will inherit Paradise, wherein they shall dwell forever. The second is elucidation of the origin of man’s creation and his subsequent development, based on contemplation and choice, in a manner that leaves no avenue open to denigrate those who are in this state. The third is elucidation of the manners in which the human being is provided with external support suitable for his upbringing, considerate treatment, and assistance in maintaining his means of livelihood. This is achieved by subjecting the heavens and the Earth and that which is between them to the human being. This in itself suffices as an honor and distinction.18 On the basis of what has preceded, and extrapolating from the words of Allah Most High—The Most Merciful! He taught the Qur’an. He created the human being19—we now discuss three certainties. 1. 2. 3. The Most Merciful—divinity and unity of the Divine. The Qur’an—the message and prophethood. Humanity—the focus of the divine discourse. The First Certainty: affirmation of the unadulterated unity of Allah Most High It includes such related matters as the attributes of Allah with regard to His omnipotence, divine decree, omniscience, mercy, granting of sustenance, creation, beneficence, bringing of adversity, and so forth. The discourse in this regard plays out on three levels. The First Level: discourse concerning divine unity directed to Muslims, the objective being simply to direct them to adhere strictly to the affirmation of absolute and perfect divine unity, in accordance with the words of Allah Most High: Say to them, “Indeed, my prayer, my sacrifice, my life, my death, all are for Allah, Lord of the worlds. He has no partner. By that I am commanded, and I am the first of those who submit.”20 This adherence must be free of any doubt about the cardinal beliefs of Muslims and their intentions. In the context of this discourse, it is essential to highlight two matters. The first is that the invitation to affirmation of divine unity must be linked to the principle of virtue [i?s?n], which is the twin of faith [?m?n]. This means that faith-based spiritual training—aiming to purify the soul and to elevate it to the heights of trust in Allah, contentment, worldly indifference, and love—must always be present. The second matter is action, as faith [?m?n] is constituted by both utterance and action, both worship and social interaction. This is more proximate to prophetic guidance and more distant from the type of dispute and polemics that is of no utility whatsoever. The Second Level: invitation directed to the adherents of previous divinely revealed faiths. This level constitutes a reminder to them of what is contained in their [divinely revealed] books: Say, “O People of the Book, come to a common word between us, namely that we will not worship any but Allah, we will not associate anything with him, and we will not take one another as lords, other than Allah.”21 The Messiah said, “O Children of Israel, worship Allah, my Lord and your Lord. Indeed, Allah has declared Paradise to be forbidden for those who associate partners with Allah and their final destination is the fire of Hell.”22 It is not fitting for any human being, after Allah has granted him the Book and wisdom, to say to people, “Worship me besides Allah.”23 This is a perpetual reminder that the message of divine unity is the message of all prophets and that the Prophet, upon him be blessings and peace, is simply the one who brings completion to the chain of prophets and perfection to nobility of character. It is possible in this regard to seek assistance in the content of their sacred texts, such as the statement of Jesus, upon him be peace, in the Gospel of Mark, “The first of all the commandments is: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ This is the first commandment.”24 There are other passages that occur in the Old and New Testaments with similar import. The Third Level: discourse directed to the rest of humanity and those without faiths, pursuant to the words of Allah: Say, “O Mankind, I am the messenger of Allah to all of you. It is He to whom belongs all that is in the heavens and Earth. There is no god but He. He gives life and causes death.’”25 This discourse—and every discourse—must rely on logic, knowledge, universal proofs, and the Qur’anic methodology: Were they created of nothing, or were they themselves the creators? Or did they create the heavens and the earth?26 Mu?ammad ibn Ab? Zayd al-Qayraw?n? was correct when he said in his book al-Ris?lah al-Fiqhiyyah, “[Allah] alerted man by way of the effects of His handiwork and left him without excuses on the lips of His messengers....”27 What he means is that Allah, Most Glorious and High, put in place evidences of His existence and unity, by making evident in the universe the extent of His Tabah Papers? No. 3 21. q3:64. 22. q5:72. 23. q3:79. 24. Mark 12: 29–31. 25. q7:158. 26. q52:35–6. 27. Ab? Mu?ammad ‘Abd All?h bin Ab? Zayd alQayraw?n?, al-Ris?lah al-Fiqhiyyah, ed. ?am? alH?d? and Mu?ammad Ab? al-Ajf?n, 2nd ed., (Beirut: D?r al-Gharb al-Isl?m?, 1997), 77. 17 Islamic Discourse 28. q8:42. 18 wisdom, the intricacy of His handiwork, and the manifestation of His providence. These are evidences that the intellect, with which the human being has been provided, is receptive to, as though they were words expressly uttered and fully illuminating. Man’s natural disposition is thereby awakened to longing for the Creator. Divine providence then intervenes by way of elucidating the revelation articulated on the tongues of His messengers, whom He supports with the most sublime of evidence pointing to their truthfulness. This gives rise to meanings and thoughts—in the minds of the messengers and those who came into contact with them—that compel them to believe in the veracity of the information conveyed by the messengers and the brilliance of the light carried by them. Their speech concerning the unseen is like that of a witness whose truthfulness nobody doubts and who speaks to you about a city you have never seen, yet you believe him because of your prior knowledge and experience concerning the truthfulness of his speech. Belief in Allah necessitates belief in the major pillars of Islam that have been transmitted with such frequency as to yield certainty, such as prayer, zak?h, fasting, and pilgrimage. These are certainties concerning this religion known by way of self-evident knowledge. For every one of the above-mentioned levels, there are appropriate styles and methods of discourse. Moreover, it is a discourse that renders and resolves all equivocalities and ambiguities to that of the definitive. By way of example, Jesus healing the blind and the leper, and his bringing the dead to life are to be rendered subject and referred to the definitive principle of divine unity, which dictates that all of this happens with the power of Allah Most High and with His permission. In like manner, the special privileges and the supernatural and extraordinary feats granted to the “friends of Allah” are things that exist in reality and are acceptable conceptually to Muslims, but they are rendered subject and reduced to the definitive principle of the Creator’s omnipotence, for it is He, Most Glorious, Exalted and High, who brings all of that into being and who destines it: so that those who are to perish [the disbelievers] might perish after clear evidence, and those who are to live [the believers] might live after clear evidence.28 The Second Certainty: prophethood and its imperatives The second certainty requires belief in the phenomenon of revelation, which is a divine connection and contact with the human being chosen to receive knowledge of a body of truths and to receive a message to be conveyed to humanity, this being the objective of the Creator with respect to creation. This message expounds on certain fundamentals that lie beyond the scope of reason, but that reason does not assign to the realm of the impossible. In so doing, the message introduces humanity to the Creator, Most Sublime and High, to that which is necessary pertaining to the Creator, Most Sublime is His Power, to His Shari‘ah, to the origins of the universe, to the destiny of humanity, to the affairs of the Hereafter, and to the awakening and resurrection. Indeed, scholars of science are privy only to secondary causes, as stated by Claude Bernard, the French physiologist of the nineteenth century. These then are the fundamental truths that the prophets came with. Islam emphasizes that the messages of the prophets are in their essence a single message: Verily, We have sent revelation to you [O Muhammad] as We sent revelation to N?? [Noah] and the Prophets after him....29 The messages of the prophets are attested to by their miracles. It is narrated on the authority of Abu Hurayrah, may Allah be pleased with him, that the Prophet, may the blessings and peace of Allah be upon him, said, “Every Prophet was given miracles the like of which people believed in because of their sheer force; but what I have been given is Divine Inspiration that Allah has revealed to me. So I hope that my followers will outnumber the followers of the other Prophets on the Day of Resurrection.”30 The most important proof of the truthfulness of the Prophet, the seal of prophets, may the blessings and peace of Allah be upon him, is the Veracious Qur’an, which constitutes both the message and the evidence at the same time, both the claim and its proof. It is a challenge to humanity in its form, meaning, and testimony, which, with the passage of time, have only increased in timeliness and veracity. No messenger has ever come with a Qur’an that is recited—It is nothing but revelation revealed31—protected in the hearts by memorization and in writing. The passage of time has not affected its inviolability. It extracts what is hidden innermost and penetrates to the depths of the soul. In the present age, its scientific miraculousness is evidence that it is from the Knower of the unseen and the manifest. The Creator, Most Sublime and High, has embedded the evidence of prophethood in the human being itself: And in your own selves. Do you not then see?32 This takes place by way of premonition of events outside of the normal course, resulting in precognition of reality, such as by way of dreams the occurrence of which nobody disputes, presenting events in coded form, which is then clarified by way of the events themselves or is decoded by those with knowledge of the Book. Sometimes the event in question is presented in the precise form in which it will occur. In the authentic hadith narrated by al-Bukh?r? and others, the Prophet, may the blessings and peace of Allah be upon him, alerted our attention to dreams: “Indeed, the righteous dream is one of forty-six parts of revelation.”33 The commentators of this hadith have expressed divergent views concerning the interpretation of this division [of revelation]. Some say that it refers to the Tabah Papers? No. 3 29. q4:163. 30. Muslim ibn al-?ajj?j, ?a??? Muslim, 2 vols. (Cairo: Jam‘iyyah al-Maknaz al-Isl?m?, 2000), 1:76. 31. q53:4. 32. q51:21. 33. Mu?ammad bin Ism?‘?l al-Bukh?r?, ?a??? alBukh?r?, 3 vols. (Cairo: Jam‘iyyah al-Maknaz al-Isl?m?, 2000), 3:1413; see also Zakar?y? al-Ans?r? and Mu?ammad bin Ism?‘?l al-Bukh?r?, Min?at al-B?r? bi Shar? ?a??? al-Bukh?r?, ed. Sulaym?n bin Duray‘ al‘?zim?, 1st ed., 10 vols. (Riyadh: Maktabah al-Rushd N?shir?n, 2005), 10:100; Muslim ibn al-?ajj?j, ?a??? Muslim, 2:979. 19 Islamic Discourse 34. q37:107–8. 35. q12:4. 36. q12:43. 37. Mu?ammad bin A?med al-Dhahab?, Tar?kh al-Isl?m wa Waf?y?t al-Mash?h?r wa al-‘Al?m, ed. ‘Umar ‘Abd al-Sal?m al-Tadmur?, 1st ed., (Beirut: D?r al-Kit?b al-‘Arab?, 1987), 1:32. 20 temporary cessation of prophethood prior to the revelation to Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him. Others have kept silent on the matter. It is possible, and Allah knows best, to explain it on the basis that the word “part” [in the hadith] points to the fact that prophecy comprises multiple meanings, and that dreams, to the extent that they bring to light and make manifest unseen realities, represent this small part of the manifestation of matters unseen, clarity, and truthfulness that accompanies revelation. It is an instantiation of exposure to knowledge of the unseen and truth, but one that is weak such that it does not rise to the level of clear exposure to knowledge of the unseen that accompanies prophethood. And furthermore, it is not a religious imperative that we believe in the knowledge contained in dreams, as they are open to delusion, error, and obscurity, which are not applicable to the manifestation of truths in the state of prophethood. This does not apply to the dreams of one of the prophets, as these are true, even if in coded form, such as the dream of Abraham, peace be upon him, in which he saw himself slaughtering his son. This was a trial that was to realize itself by means of a grand ram, so that this could become an established practice and means of gaining nearness to Allah Most High, in succeeding generations: And We ransomed him with a momentous sacrifice and We left this blessing for him among generations in later times.34 [Consider] also the dream of Joseph, peace be upon him: “I saw eleven planets and the sun and the moon. I saw them prostrating to me.”35 [Consider] also the dream of Daniel, a messenger of the Children of Israel, the true interpretation of which the exegetes of the People of the Book have not yet been able to perceive. As for the dreams of our Prophet, blessings and peace be upon him, with which revelation commenced, he did not see a dream-vision, except that it occurred [in the state of wakefulness] like the light of the dawn. Many dreams of persons other than the prophets have been true and accurate, such as the dream of the king of Egypt mentioned in the Qur’an, which was interpreted by Joseph, blessings and peace be upon him. [The king said]: “I see seven fat cows being consumed by seven lean cows and seven green ears of grain and others shriveled.”36 And such is the dream of M?badh?n before the calling of the Prophet, blessings and peace be upon him. He saw that fastidious camels leading Arabian horses had crossed the Tigris and had spread in their lands.37 Consider also the dream of the American president, Abraham Lincoln, who saw his assassination in a dream and documented it, after which it occurred just as he had seen in his dream. Many people have seen or heard things in their dreams that afterwards came true. Indeed, this is testimony to the nature of prophethood existing in the human being. A logical implication of prophethood is immunity from error. This negates the occurrence of lies and error in the transmission of the message and necessitates belief in the message and following the dictates thereof: [The Prophet] does not speak of his own whim. It is but revelation revealed.38 In like vein, another logical implication is that immunity from error is applicable only to prophets. If it were otherwise, there would be sources of revelation other than the prophetic source. This would be inconsistent with the special nature of the prophetic immunity and would result in the proliferation of sources of revelation. It is a cardinal principle of belief that no person’s view is accepted in opposition to the statements of the Prophet, blessings and peace be upon him, that have been verified with certainty and that are of clear and definitive meaning. For this reason, the leading scholars whose views are followed have declared themselves innocent of contradicting that which has been verified as emanating from the Prophet, blessings and peace be upon him, using terms that are powerful and conclusive, such as the statement attributed to M?lik, “Every speech is capable of being accepted and rejected, other than the speech of the owner of this grave.”39 And such is the statement of al-Sh?fi‘?, “If my view conflicts with a hadith, then cast my view against the wall.”40 And likewise is the statement of Ab? ?an?fah, “If a hadith has been verified, it is my considered view.”41 And the statement of A?mad, “Even a weak hadith is preferable to me over the views of men.”42 Another of the logical implications of prophethood and matters that complement the transmission of the message of revelation is acknowledgement of the status of the Companions of the Prophet, namely those who conveyed his message to succeeding generations and who gave effect to his commands. They are the reliable mirrors that reflect a true image of the noble prophetic message. Any effort that casts aspersions upon the Companions—the carriers of the revealed message and the trustees of revelation—is ultimately nothing more than an effort to cast aspersions upon the message itself and akin to manufacturing doubt about it. The multitude of texts of the Qur’an and hadith in praise of that small group, both those of a general and specific nature, is the best evidence that exaltation of their position of honor, upholding their sanctity, and guarding their sacred precinct enjoy distinction in this religion. Let’s consider the words the Most High: Muhammad is the messenger of Allah and those who are with him are strong against unbelievers, compassionate among each other. You see them bowing and prostrating, seeking the grace of Allah and His good pleasure. On their faces are their marks [of piety], being the traces of their prostrations. This is their similitude in the Torah. Their similitude in the Gospel is like a seed that sends forth its blade, then makes it strong. It then becomes thick and stands on its own stem, filling the sowers with wonder and delight. As a result, it fills the disbelievers with rage at them.43 38. q53:3–4. 39. Mu?ammad bin A?med al-Dhahab?, Siyar ‘Al?m al-Nubal?’, ed. Shu‘ayb al-Arn?’?? and Ibr?h?m al-Zaybaq, 11th ed., 23 vols. (Beirut: Mu’assasah al-Ris?lah N?shir?n, 2001), 10:73. 40. Ibid. 41. Mu?ammad Am?n Ibn ‘?bid?n and Mu?ammad ‘Al?’ al-D?n Afand?, ??shiyah Radd al-Mu?t?r ‘al? al-Durr al-Mukht?r: Shar? Tanw?r al-Ab??r, 3rd ed., 8 vols. (Egypt: Maktabah Mu??af? al-B?b? al-?alab?, 1984), 1:72. 42. Mu?ammad Ad?b ??li?, Lama??t f? U??l al-?ad?th, 5th ed., (Beirut: al-Maktab al-Isl?m?, 1988), 197. 43. q48:29. 44. q3:110. 45. q7:157. 46. q59:8. 47. al-Bukh?r?, ?a??? al-Bukh?r?, 2:720.; Muslim ibn al-?ajj?j, ?a??? Muslim, 2:1082. 48. Ibid., 2:1078. 49. al-Bukh?r?, ?a??? al-Bukh?r?, 2:562.; Muslim ibn al-?ajj?j, ?a??? Muslim, 2:1079. 22 And His words, Most High: You are the best of nations sent forth for the benefit of humanity;44 and, Those who believe in him, honor him and assist him...;45 and, For the poor among the Immigrants who were expelled from their homes and their property, while seeking the grace of Allah and His good pleasure and aiding Allah and His messenger. Such indeed are the sincere ones. And those before them who had homes and had adopted the faith show their affection to those who came to them in refuge and entertain no desire in their hearts for things given to the latter, rather they give them preference over themselves.46 Furthermore, let’s consider the words of the Prophet, blessing and peace be upon him, in the authentic narrations. “Do not revile my Companions. Were anyone of you to spend the like of Mount U?ud in the path of Allah, it would not be equal to a handful spent by one of my Companions, or even half of that.”47 It is narrated that Ab? Burdah reported from his father who said, “We performed the early evening prayer with the Prophet, may the blessings and peace of Allah be upon him. We then said among ourselves, ‘Let us remain seated until we have performed the night prayer with him.’ So we remained seated. He came out to us and said, ‘Are you still here?’ We said, ‘O Messenger of Allah, we performed the early evening prayer with you and then resolved among ourselves that we should remain seated until we perform the night prayer with you as well.’ He said, ‘You have done well,’ or ‘You have acted correctly.’” Ab? Burdah continued, “He then raised his head to the sky—and he used to often raise his head to the sky—and said, ‘The stars are the keepers of the heaven. When the stars go their way, that which has been threatened will befall the sky. Likewise, I am the keeper of my Companions. When I pass, that which has been threatened will befall my Companions. Likewise, my Companions are the keepers of my community. When my Companions pass, that which has been threatened will befall my community.”48 The aforementioned hadith was narrated by Muslim. Let us also consider the following words of the Prophet, blessings and peace be upon him: “A time will come upon humanity when a group of people will go out in battle. It will be said to them, ‘Is there among you anyone who saw the Messenger of Allah, may the blessings and peace of Allah be upon him?’ They will respond, ‘Yes!’ and they will be victorious. Subsequently, a latter group of people will go out in battle. It will be said to them, ‘Is there among you anyone who saw the Companions of the Messenger of Allah, may the blessings and peace of Allah be upon him?’ They will respond, ‘Yes!’ and they will be victorious. Then, yet a latter group of people will go out in battle. It will be said to them, ‘Is there among you anyone who saw the companions of the Companions of the Messenger of Allah, may the blessings and peace of Allah be upon him?’ They will respond, ‘Yes!’ and they will be victorious.”49 The aforementioned hadith was narrated by al-Bukh?r? and Muslim. There are numerous other texts that affirm the testimony [of the Companions’ illustrious status]. By reason of the foregoing, our scholars have reached consensus that the Companions enjoy precedence over all others and that the matters [of dispute] that broke out between them must be desisted from, in observation of the sanctity of the Prophet, may the blessing and peace of Allah be upon him, and the sanctity of the message, and in order to distance the Shariah from slander. In addition, historical rumors that divide the community and sow dissension, cursing, and abuse are of no benefit to the community, whether they pertain to religion or matters of this world. Neither Allah, nor His Prophet, is pleased with the state of affairs alluded to above. For this reason, they must be rendered subject to the what is definitive. By application of the same principle, the family of the Prophet, may the blessing and peace of Allah be upon him, enjoy great sanctity and utmost respect, whether they are of the Prophet’s sons, daughters, or wives. Allah Most High has indeed removed from them all impurity and has made their love the hallmark of faith and purity of soul. Indeed, Allah wants but to remove from you all contamination, O Companions of the Prophetic household, and to purify you, a complete purification.50 Al-Ta??w? spoke well in stating, “Those who speak well of the Companions of the Prophet, may the blessings and peace of Allah be upon him, his wives— women of purity—absolving them of all tarnish, and his venerated descendants exonerating them of every contamination are indeed free of hypocrisy.”51 Everything that conflicts with the position delineated above falls within the scope of the ambiguous and must be interpreted so as to be consistent with what is definitive. It is obligatory to educate the community that there is no contradiction or inconsistency between love of the household of the Prophet of Allah, may the blessings and peace of Allah be upon him, and love of his Companions; and that the community of Muhammad is innocent of those who shed the blood of the household of the Prophet of Allah, may the blessings and peace of Allah be upon him, being a small group that carries full liability for the sin that they committed. They are a community that has passed. They will have the benefit of what they earned and will carry liability for what they incurred. You will not be held accountable for what they did.52 In this regard, the discourse is on different levels in accordance with the circumstances and backgrounds of the addressees. The Third Certainty: the human being The human being is that creation whose description has reduced philosophers to perplexity. He comprises spirit, intellect, and emotion; and he has been honored by knowledge and by subjugating of all creation to him. Perhaps this is what is Tabah Papers? No. 3 50. q33:33. 51. Ibn Ab? al–‘Izz al- ?anaf? and Ab? Ja‘far bin Mu?ummad al-?a??w?, Shar? al-‘Aq?dah al?a??wiyyah, ed. A?med Mu?ammad Sh?kir, (Riyadh: Wak?lah al-?ib?‘ah wa al-Tarjamah f? alRiy?sah al-‘?mmah li Id?r?t al-Bu??th al-‘Ilmiyyah wa al-Ift?’ wa al-Da‘wah wa alIrsh?d, n.d.), 501. 52. q2:141. 53. q17:70. 54. q55:3–4. 55. q96:6–7. 56. q21:37. 57. q4:28. 58. q70:19. referred to in the following verses of the Qur’an: And We have indeed honored the children of Adam. We have carried them on land and sea. We have given them pure things in sustenance and We have favored them abundantly over much of Our creation.53 It is He who created the human being. It is He who taught him eloquence.54 The origins of the human being revert to Adam whom Allah Most High created, and into whom Allah blew of His Spirit. This was the consensus of humanity and the view of all philosophers until the age of Lamarck and Darwin. The distinction between species then became the subject of revision, and research commenced directed at identifying a new origin for the human being among the primates who share with the human being a complete set of teeth, the ability to walk erect on two legs, and greater functionality in the use of their hands. The discovery of fossils and the dictates of imagination became the points of reference for this posited origin, which has not been verified scientifically [in its true sense]. We believe in the divine revelation and we believe that it is the only authority truly qualified to speak about the origins of the human being, as this is one of the many matters that fall outside the scope of rational investigation. It is the view of some scholars that the nature of the human being has three aspects: -- The instinctive biological aspect, like that of other animals. -- The social aspect, with the human being as a social being who lives life in a society and is indeed influenced by society. -- The human aspect that aspires to the promotion and the supremacy of the transcendent realms, and is capable of coming to know the Creator and yearns for a world of values and spirituality. The human being is a composite of body and spirit. This composite represents the diverse faces of nature: the ineluctable radiant spirit and the burdensome matter with its pressing needs. Because of this complex nature, the human being is capable of overstepping limits: Indeed, the human being is prone to overstep limits, as he sees himself to be self-sufficient.55 He is also prone to act in impulsive haste: The human being was created of haste.56 And likewise, he is prone to weakness: The human being was created weak.57 Exegetes have interpreted this to mean that the human being does not resist his base desires: Indeed, the human being has been created impatient.58 Revelation places the human being in front of the mirror of reality so that he may see his image without flattery or pride. He is distinctive in his dual, yet harmonious, nature and in his unique psychological composition. He finds himself in a world that suits his nature, his needs, and his development, given his amazing constitution and unique bodily arrangement. How glorious is the Creator! He is accordingly a distinctive creation to which the universe has been subjected, this being manifested in his appointment as vicegerent: I am placing a vicegerent on Earth.59 It is also manifested in his settlement of the Earth: He brought you forth from the Earth and caused you to settle therein.60 The Earth has been prepared to attend to various human needs so as to be able to receive this human guest: He laid out the earth for all living creatures. In it there are fruits and date palms with covered spathes, and grains on leafy stems and fragrant herbs.61 The appointment of the human being as vicegerent embodies both honor and imposition of liability, as determined by the Creator in His wisdom, Most Sublime and High, to enable the human being to take responsibility for his vicegerency on Earth. Will he show gratitude or will he disbelieve? Will he reform or corrupt? The human being is an honored creation, but he is not an absolute master. The French philosopher Lamarck described the human being as God’s project on Earth. As a further manifestation of this honor, out of mercy to the human being and as a source of enjoyment for a time, Allah, Most Glorious and High, encompassed the human being with general legislative propositions that belong to the constants and certainties, in order to preserve his essence and maintain his existence. These general propositions find expression in the preservation of religion, life, intellect, progeny, and material wealth. Pursuant to the above, scholars have been able to discern a higher objective of the Shari‘ah, namely that it is directed towards realization of the interests of the servants of Allah. As articulated by al-Sh??ib?: “Every ruling of the Shari‘ah embodies a legitimate interest of the servants of Allah, whether in the short term [this life] or in the long term [the next life]. This is predicated on the institution of the Shari‘ah in the first place to preserve the interests of the servants of Allah. For this reason, it is said in a hadith, ‘The entitlement of the servants of Allah is that if they worship Him without associating any partner with him, He will not punish them.’” 62 Al-‘Izz ibn ‘Abd al-Sal?m notes, “Most of the worldly benefits and harms are known by way of the intellect, and these constitute most of the law.”63 The many entitlements of human beings, as compared with their obligations, serve their interests in their livelihood and their ultimate destination. Islamic discourse, insofar as this certainty or absolute is concerned, must draw attention to the fundamental issues concerning human beings and their definitive entitlements. It must participate with others in promoting noble human values that contribute to human coexistence, establishment of justice, avoidance of harm, and realization of interests. In so doing, it must always emphasize the origin of values and rights in Islam, being Divine Revelation that affirms the position of the human being as an honored creation. This is the exalted source that honored the human being. It is not the human being who brought rights into existence, nor is the human being an independent source of values. These are important areas that Islamic discourse must attend to. Tabah Papers? No. 3 59. q2:30. 60. q11:61. 61. q55:10–12. 62. al-Bukh?r?, ?a??? alBukh?r?, 3:1318; Muslim ibn al-?ajj?j, ?a??? Muslim, 1:35; and see al-Sh??ib?, al-Muw?faq?t f? U??l alShar?‘ah, 2:600. 63. al–‘Izz bin ‘Abd alSal?m, Qaw?‘id al-A?k?m f? Ma??li? al-An?m, ed. Naz?h Kam?l ?amm?d and ‘Uthm?n bin Jumu‘ah ?umayriyyah, 1st ed., 2 vols. (Damascus: D?r al-Qalam, 2000), 1:7. 64. al-Shanq???, Nashr alBun?d ‘al? Mar?qi al-Su‘?d, verse 543. 65. Fakhr al-D?n al-R?z?, al-Ma???l f? ‘Ilm U??l al-Fiqh, ed. ?aha J?bir al‘Alw?n?, 3 ed., 6 vols. (Beirut: Mu’assasah al-Ris?lah N?shir?n, 1997), 6:6. Matters of Ijtih?d in Islamic Discourse We indicated in the introduction that discourse can be divided into that which is certain and into that which is presumptive, based on the analysis of its evidence and the associated textual and contextual indicators. If the evidence is sufficiently strong—to the extent that it generates certain knowledge—it becomes a matter of certainty. If the evidence is weak, the matter descends to the level of presumption and sometimes to the level of speculation and conjecture. In the introduction, we also set out the two categories of proofs that relate to rulings and that facilitate the adoption of this categorization. We will now proceed to define the terms “ijtih?d” and “the subject matter of ijtih?d.” Presumptive evidences incorporate authentic narrations transmitted by an insufficient number of narrators to warrant certainty. Giving effect to these narrations is obligatory, provided there exists no authoritative opposing evidence. In the view of the majority of scholars of jurisprudence, these narrations do not generate certain knowledge, albeit that some of them entertained opposing views in this regard. It is stated: “They do not in any circumstance give rise to certain knowledge according to the majority of the illustrious scholars of jurisprudence.”64 The following are also regarded as presumptive evidences: the manifest meanings of texts [al-??hir], divergent meanings [mafh?m al-mukh?lafah], juristic analogies [al-qiy?s], unrestricted interests [al-ma??li? al-mursalah], blocking of the means to harm [sadd al-dhar?i’], tacit consensus [al-ijm?‘ al-suk?t?], an opinion of a Companion [qawl al-?a??b?], and the like. Definition and Formulation of the Technical Term Scholars have defined ijtih?d as a suitably qualified person’s exercising his utmost effort in arriving at a degree of presumption or certainty that Allah Most High’s ruling for a matter is such and such.. Al-R?z? opined: Linguistically, it is the exertion of one’s utmost effort in a deed, whatever it might be. It may be said, “He exerted his utmost effort in carrying a heavy object,” but not, “He exerted his utmost effort in carrying a date pit.” In the usage of the scholars of Islamic law, ijtih?d is the exertion of one’s utmost effort in consideration of that which will not bring any censure to the person in question for having exerted such effort in doing so. Ijtih?d is the tool used to deal with specific matters of law, and for this reason they are called “matters of ijtih?d.” The person who engages in consideration of such matters is a mujtahid. This approach is not applicable to fundamental principles.65 Al-Zarkash? states: Linguistically, it follows the morphological pattern “ifti‘?l” of the verbal noun “jahd,” which means hardship and power. This term should consequently be restricted to what involves hardship. By doing so, we exclude self-evident matters which are known from the Shari‘ah in an obvious and unmediated fashion. For while there is no doubt that they constitute laws of the Shari‘ah, there is no hardship in acquiring this type of knowledge. In the technical sense, ijtih?d is the exercise of one’s utmost effort in arriving at the ruling of the Shari‘ah with regard to a matter of action, by using various tools of legal interpretation and extrapolation. The expression “the exercise of one’s utmost effort” means that the person must sense in himself an inability to exceed the effort he has exercised, lest he be accused of negligence.66 Abu Bakr al-R?z? noted: The word “ijtih?d” is used in the Shari‘ah in three senses: First, juristic analogy. As the ratio legis does not in itself necessitate the legal ruling in question, due to the possibility of the ratio legis existing in the absence of the legal ruling, it does not give rise to certain knowledge concerning the ruling applicable to the matter in question. For this reason, it is considered to be a method of ijtih?d. Second, that which generates presumptive knowledge without the existence of a ratio legis, such as ijtih?d concerning the status of [the purity of] water, times of prayer, the direction for prayer, valuation of destroyed or damaged goods, the penalty for hunting while in i?r?m, the dowry of a woman’s peers, divorce maintenance, and so forth. Third, extrapolation using fundamental principles of jurisprudence.67 Given that entering the doors of ijtih?d is restricted to the mujtahid, whether in the absolute sense or the qualified sense, the insightful jurist who is capable of dealing with the proofs of a specific nature in a manner consistent with the higher overarching objectives of the Shari‘ah and excels in applying the above mentioned to specific circumstances, is fit to present the Islamic discourse. As said in Mar?qi al-Su‘?d: Exertion by the jurist of utmost effort to generate presumptive knowledge that such-and-such is required, by way of example.68 Tabah Papers? No. 3 66. al-Zarkash?, al-Ba?r al-Mu??? f? U??l al-Fiqh, 6:197. 67. Ibid., 6:197–8. 68. al-Shanq???, Nashr al-Bun?d ‘al? Mar?qi alSu‘?d, 2:315. 69. al-Zarkash?, al-Ba?r alMu??? f? U??l al-Fiqh, 6:227. 70. Ibn ‘?bid?n and Afand?, ??shiyah Radd al-Mu?t?r ‘al? al-Durr al-Mukht?r: Shar? Tanw?r al-Ab??r, 3:467. 71. Mu?ammad bin ‘Abd al-W??id Ibn al-Hum?m, Shar? Fat? al-Qad?r li-l-‘?jiz al-Faq?r, 9 vols. (Beirut: D?r al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyyah, n.d.), 4:89. Thus exercise of utmost effort and exertion of utmost power by the jurist is accordingly necessary. Those other than the jurist who is a mujtahid are regarded as followers, and the exertion of utmost power by a follower does not constitute ijtih?d in the specialized sense of the word. The subject matter of ijtih?d is every ruling of the Shari‘ah, whether relating to actions or reason for which a scholarly conclusion is sought in those circumstances where there exists no evidence generating certain knowledge concerning it. The reference to “ruling of the Shari‘ah” excludes rational matters [al-‘aql?], as there is only one truth in these matters. The qualification of a “given effect” refers to the deeds of the accountable human being, whether by way of acting or refraining from acting. The reference to “reason” comprises presumptive matters [al-ma?n?n?t] encountered in the discipline of jurisprudence and that form the basis for actions. The qualification “in circumstances where there exists no evidence generating certain knowledge concerning it” excludes those rulings where such evidence is available; once such evidence is obtained, it becomes prohibited to rely on presumptive processes [al-??n].69 In like vein, the Hanafi scholars have commented, “The area of application in which ijtih?d is deemed valid is restricted to circumstances in which ijtih?d does not conflict with any certain text of the Book, a sunnah that has become widespread, or scholarly consensus; since if it did conflict with any of the aforementioned in the view of the mujtahid, it would not be regarded as the proper area of application of ijtih?d. If a judge were to issue a contrary judgment on the basis of ijtih?d in these circumstances, that judgment would not be enforceable.”70 As stated in al-Fat?, “Ijtih?d is not deemed valid if there is consensus or an unambiguous text that is not in conflict with any other text in the view of the mujtahid, notwithstanding the existence of such conflict in reality.”71 The conflict referred to in the quotation from the author of al-Fat? is dealt with by scholars of the Hanafi school on the basis of one of two causes: uncertainty arising in the meaning of the text in question, or uncertainty arising in the transmission of the text. Matters of ijtih?d enjoy a correlation at the level of detail with the values of tolerance, justice, consultation, coexistence, communication, unity and diversity in the framework of the constants. This diversity is manifested by the flexibility of Islamic law, its broad scope, the variety of semantic interpretations permitted by the texts, and the broad compass of the general proofs in the context of time. All of this serves to confirm the oft-quoted expression that is certainly true: “The Shari‘ah is valid for all times and places.” This is achieved by bringing ijtih?d to bear on the ongoing link between time and the Shari‘ah, in respect of its texts, higher objectives, fundamentals, and rules. All this springs forth from two starting points [the intellect and human wellbeing], and embodies three levels of higher objectives: essentials, exigencies, and embellishments. Affirmation that there exists a broad and ample scope for ijtih?d in the Shari‘ah confers upon Islamic discourse three characteristics: ?? tolerance ?? conciliation ?? facilitation and easing of hardship This can be articulated by reference to three principal issues: tolerance of difference of opinion; conciliation with others and desisting from declaring and labeling others as
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- [The Scientist and the Saint: The limits of science and the testimony of the sages](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/chandra-scientist-and-saint) - Avinash Chandra In spite of everything offered in the spiritual supermarket, there are no shortcuts on the path. Resolution in the face of diverse obstacles and patience in times of discouragement are always necessary. The spiritual path is the work of an entire life. Click here to read a PDF extract: “Finding the Way Out
- [The 36 – Who Are They? A Kol Nidre Sermon](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-36-who-are-they) - And so, once again, we gather for Kol Nidre. Music sets the mood for this ethereal service; words maintain its pace; prayers reflect the intent of the moment; our presence here together bespeaks its importance. At no other time of the year do our people speak of one theme, with one shared sense of hope, and as if in one voice. That is the power of this evening of evenings, this Shabbat Sabbatot. As a congregation, this it the 36th time we have celebrated “Kol Nidre" together. I remember the first such evening as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. Perhaps many of you were among the 650 people who attended worship services at First Plymouth that night. The hopes and anticipation were evident; the emotions were palpable. I even remember much of that first Kol Nidre sermon -- written as it was on torn half sheets of paper with arrows pointing in all directions leading me from paragraph to paragraph. There were no office computers or even word processors in 1967. We had no copy machine, not even a correcting typewriter -- just an old electric letter arm clunker with a fussy comma key. We had no secretary yet, and I could write faster than I could type. And so, a rag-tag though well-crafted piece entitled, “To Dream the Impossible Dream" was created. Indeed, three and a half decades ago, the creation of a new synagogue was just that -- a dream, a vision -- impossible except for handful of dreamers and hardworking visionaries. And so, we now begin our 36th year. Thirty-six years! My, how time does move along. It sort of seems to flow out through the back door while we are, so to speak, watching the front. Thirty-six -- the number has a special significance. Double chai -- two times the Hebrew word for “life." A Rabbi who was good at numbers noticed that, excluding the nightly shamash, we light exactly 36 candles during the eight festival days of Chanukah: 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8=36. Coincidence?! The number has its own mystery. The Talmud says that at the very beginning of creation, God made a certain type of light that was so penetrating, so powerful, that it was only allowed to last for only 36 hours ... after which God took it away and hid it for sometime in the future. God replaced it with a weaker, merely physical aspect of that light. Adam was given a brief glimpse of that primordial light and with it was able to see from one end of the world to the other and from the beginning of time to the end of time. So, according to the Zohar, that light was the light of total understanding. The Talmud teaches that anytime the word “light" is used in Torah or in a Rabbinic text it always means knowledge and wisdom and understanding. And to finish the connection, we are also taught that the miracle of the Chanukah oil burning for eight days occurred 36 centuries after that all-powerful light of the first day of creation. Here is our number 36 again! And playfully, the midrash asks where God hid that primordial light? Where else, but in the lights of everyone’s Chanukiah. So we Jews evoke a glimmer of that supernal enlightenment each time we kindle the 36 candles of Chanukah. What a sweet thought. And to make certain that we get it, the word light -- “ohr" -- is the twenty-fifth word of the Torah, another allusion to Chanukah which occurred on the 25th day of Kislev. Oh, and naturally, the word light, ohr, occurs 36 times in Torah. As a mystical concept, the number 36 is even more intriguing. It is said that at all times there are 36 special people in the world, and that were it not for them, all of them, if even one of them was missing, the world would come to an end. The two Hebrew letters for 36 are the lamed, which is 30, and the vav, which is six. Therefore, these 36 are referred to as the Lamed-Vav Tzadikim. This widely-held belief, this most unusual Jewish concept is based on a Talmudic statement to the effect that in every generation 36 righteous “greet the Shechinah," the Divine Presence (Sanhedrin 97b; Sukkah 45b). And who, we might ask, are these righteous ones? Well, the legend maintains that they are each extremely modest and upright, often concealing their identity behind a mask of ignorance and poverty, and usually earning their livelihood by the sweat of their brow. The Lamed-Vav Tzaddikim are also called the Nistarim (concealed ones). In our folk tales, they emerge from their self-imposed concealment and, by the mystic powers, which they possess, they succeed in averting the threatened disasters of a people persecuted by the enemies that surround them. They return to their anonymity as soon as their task is accomplished, “concealing" themselves once again in a Jewish community wherein they are relatively unknown. The lamed-vavniks, scattered as they are throughout the Diaspora, have no acquaintance with one another. On very rare occasions, one of them is “discovered" by accident, in which case the secret of their identity must not be disclosed. The lamed-vavniks do not themselves know that they are one of the 36. In fact, tradition has it that should a person claim to be one of the 36, that is proof positive that he is certainly not one. Since the 36 are each exemplars of anavah, humility, having such a virtue would preclude against one’s self-proclamation of being among the special righteous. The 36 are simply too humble to believe that they are one of the 36. The question that this mystical account always raises in my mind is why are such people needed to keep the world aright? Can not the world maintain its balance out of the amalgam of seven billion people, the vast majority of whom are good? Certainly, there are exquisite souls among the faithful of all religions who exude goodness and righteousness in their daily deeds. In most religions such people are called saints or pious ones or and they are viewed as being holy -- recognized as unique and set apart. In the Catholic church such people are honored for their service to the community and for the miraculous deeds they performed or for the visions they experienced. In eastern religions, there are extraordinary teachers -- swamis, gurus, bahgwans -- who by their self-discipline and their instruction have a profound influence on their disciples. Around the world, there are shamans and healers -- medicine men and women -- pastors, priests, thinkers, scholars, survivors, care-givers, rescuers, counselors, donors of time, builders of community, charitable money people, donors of body parts even ... selfless souls who plunge into swirling rivers, dart into burning buildings, pilot choppers and tugs under the worst of circumstances -- do such awesome and fearless things as to leave us all agape. There are those who for personal or religious reasons maintain keep a constant watch against lust, greed, anger, attachment, and ego -- who in their daily life, consistently try to stay above the influence of self aggrandizement and amoral attachments. And there are those who believe in and practice daily living in peace, with love and kindness toward all, and in harmony with nature and neighbors. In Jewish folk tales, Elijah is depicted as a beggar in the streets waiting for one sweet person to look past his rags and wounds and offer him a kindness -- a drop of drink, a morsel of food, a shelter from the elements. But such is not the condition of the 36 -- the lamed-vav tzadikim. They are not saints; they are not holy people, they are not recognized or known even to themselves. They simply are what they are and in their very being, they somehow sustain the world! The story is told about a monastery on a mountain high above a small town in a rural part of Italy. The monks were hard working souls who cultivated grapes and fruits of all sorts -- who ate little and slept little and meditated the requisite nine times a day. For years, the fruits of their labors sustained their venture. They sold their grapes and fruits and used the income to plant anew and to maintain themselves and their facility. But over a short period of time, conditions changed. Young monks entered the monastery, the elders took sick or passed away. Indolence, indecision, and changing leadership eroded confidence. Arguments and insults drove wedges between the brothers. Contention replaced cooperation -- and soon the monastery was in deep trouble. Some monks left; others stayed off by themselves ... isolated and solitary. Work was done poorly now, if at all, and not in a timely fashion. What to do? The abbot fearing that the monastery might be shut down and the land sold, called upon an old friend, a rabbi from the nearby township, for advice. The rabbi came to the monastery to visit. After several days of observing and noting and investigating, the rabbi asked the abbot if he could speak to all of the monks together. “My dear friends," he began, “you are indeed in a perilous situation. There is little income. I see that you are all demoralized. I can only say that you may indeed have to close down this lovely place and go elsewhere. There is one thing that I do know, however. In a vision I was given a very clear and distinct message. I was told that one of you is the messiah!" A gasp and then a hush fell over the assembled. A cool chill of heightened awareness spread from monk to monk as eyes darted hither and yon in search of who the special one might be. Could it be the abbot? But he had been here for decades and under his watch the place had fallen apart. Yet, he had called upon the rabbi for advice, so ... perhaps?! Could it possibly be the newest monk who came here from a monastery in Perugia, or perhaps it’s the wine maker, or the novice, or the silent monk who makes the soup on Tuesdays and Fridays? Who could tell; who could say? To tell the truth, though, confronted by a quandary of immense proportions, there was a certain transformative excitement about it all. One of us is the messiah, but which? Yet if it is one of us, then we must change our approach to one another ... for who would ever want to insult or deride or discount the messiah? Immediately, the brothers began to speak in kind terms to one another. Respect, even honor was bestowed. Sharing and helping and taking turns became commonplace. Smiles erased the frowns of yesterday. The gardens and fields were now filled with tillers and sowers, who now worked with diligence as they pondered. Even the oft bland foods seemed somehow tastier. There was humming even singing as the work hours flew by, and the prayers took on a vital rhythm not previously experienced. Within a season, the crops returned to full vigor, and surprisingly, word of a new spirit in the monastery filtered down to the townspeople. A few of them made their way up the winding road to see for themselves. Their report brought more visitors and soon dozens of people were winding their way up the hill to see for themselves and, while there, to buy a jar of preserves and a bottle or two of wine ... and some of those special candles and flowers ... oh, yes, and that painting ... and this finely woven material. Before long, the monastery was a thriving concern -- far different from the depressed atmosphere that prevailed only a short time previous. The moral of the tale is obvious to us ... if not to the monks themselves. Indeed, no monk at that monastery was the messiah, but when each was treated as such by the others, the community flourished. Likewise, none of us is a lamed-vavnik ... or even a tzadik ... in the folk sense of that term, but when we treat each other as such, our community and our ventures flourish. Not just in this place of worship and of song and of learning ... but even in the workplace. Imagine what would happen if every co-worker, and manager, and boss, and CEO were to think that somewhere in the organization or in the office or in the store, some field worker, secretary, nurse, custodian, is a lamed-vavnik or a messiah, or a guru, or a saint. No one could discount someone else, or back-bite, or invent stories, or even gossip about another. And how could one even consider perverting the audit, or treating themselves to a huge interest free loan, or taking millions from a troubled company as a farewell bonus. And no one could imagine firing thousands of fellow workers as a first step solution to a corporate problem -- and no one could imagine dropping a pink slip on a co-worker who just might be one of the 36 ... two days before a holiday. Just imagine what would happen in our families if we entertained the notion that one of us had inner, spiritual talents yet to be recognized. What would happen if we treated each other all the time with dignity and nobility? That would mean no yelling and no put-downs, and no putting off chores and tasks that others rely upon. It would mean showing concern for parents at all times; it would mean not taking children for granted; it would mean letting each other share in our thoughts and feelings without fear of being discounted or embarrassed or ignored. It would nurture patience and trust and faith. The word “family" might even come to mean something other than ... obligation, stress, and car pooling. And what might happen if we treated ourselves as if we were one of the 36? We might be, you know. So long as we don’t think that we are, we are still in the running. Perhaps we might just take life a bit easier -- be less prone to criticize and over-evaluate. If we were one of the 36, why, the world rests on our shoulders. Where we go, it goes; how we act shapes it and influences the spheres. Our every little act of tolerance, tzedakah, kindness, patience, friendship ... our every commitment, each positive emotion, even a smile can change the world for the better. Do I really think so? Nah! But what if? Just suppose ... and maybe, perhaps, efsher, possibly! Or as my grandmother used to say when it came to right thoughts and actions, “Culdn’t hoirt." So what might we do if we aspired to become lamed-vavnik like? Let me share a few suggestions ... after all, it’s Yom Kippur, and what is this holy day without a suggestion or two for self-improvement? Give people more than they expect and do it cheerfully. Don't believe all you hear, spend all you have, or sleep all you want. When you say, “I love you", mean it. When you say, “I'm sorry," look the person in the eye. Believe in love. Not just romantic love, but love for causes, friends, and country. Be informed and be passionate about your ideals and values. You might get hurt, but it's the only way to live life completely. Never laugh at anyone else's dreams. People who don't have dreams don't have much. In disagreements, fight fairly. Stick to the issues; don’t get personal. Don't judge people by their relatives. We all have our genetic baggage to carry. Talk slowly but think quickly. When someone asks you a question you don't want to answer, smile and ask, “Why do you want to know?" Remember that great achievements involve great effort. Say “bless you" when you hear someone sneeze. It returns their soul to them. It also removes their embarrassment. When you lose, don't lose the lesson. Remember the three R's: Respect for self; Respect for others; Responsibility for all your actions. Don't let a little dispute injure a great friendship. When you realize you've made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it. Never lie to get out of a tricky situation. It only compounds the error. Presidents Nixon and Clinton found this out the hard way. Smile when picking up the phone. The caller will hear it in your voice. Spend a little time alone. Pray as if God cares; care as if God needs you to be the best you. In the new year, may we all live as if what we do and what we say and how we act can change the world for the better. Perhaps it will efsher? Perhaps it will.
- [<em>Tannisho</em>: Shin Buddhist Aphorisms](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/tannisho-shin-buddhist-aphorisms) - ??? ?? ?? ??????
- [Whose Objectivity? Which Neutrality? The Doomed Quest for a Neutral Vantage Point from Which to Judge Religions](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/whose-objectivity-which-neutrality) - GAVIN D'COSTA WHOSE OBJECTIVITY? WHICH NEUTRALITY? THE DOOMED QUEST FOR A NEUTRAL VANTAGE POINT FROM WHICH TO JUDGE RELIGIONS 1 There is an impasse in the discussion as to how to judge a religion other than one's own. On the one hand judging another religion by the criteria and standards of one's own tradition has become a highly problematic exercise. The metaphor used by some critics for such an approach is that of jingoistic flag-waving. Criticisms of this strategy are numerous and interdisciplinary in their nature. For instance, it is argued that such an enterprise is part and parcel of the political—economic imperialism of western (Christian) history. Such geo-political—religious imperialism is intolerable in a post-colonial age. Sociologically, anthropologically, and philosophically it has been argued that disparate traditions are quite simply incommensurable, each operating with their own rules and grammar. Hence, to judge one religion against another is like judging the goodness of an apple against a vacuum cleaner. The degree of incommensurability varies, so that at the lower end of the scale, the appropriate analogy is that of judging the goodness of apples against oranges. Such criticisms involve a range of disputed questions such as the possibility of successful translation of one language into another alien and different language, the epistemological logocentricism of western philosophical thought, and so on. I should state before proceeding that despite such criticisms I am a supporter of a nuanced form of this first strategy. I shall return to this point in due course. If, on the one hand, judging another religion by one's own is deemed problematic, the alternative has proven equally so. Here it is maintained that it is inappropriate to use criteria from one's own religion to judge another religion. One may judge another religion by that religion's criteria alone or one should desist from such a task altogether as it is conceptually impossible. However, critics point out that if one judges another religion purely by its own criteria then the whole problem of conflicting truth claims is bypassed which was in fact the reason for trying to find criteria for judgement. Judging religions by their own criteria may be helpful in some contexts, but it takes us no further in trying to arbitrate between two rival religious claims. Critics also point out that total incommensurability is self defeating and such relativism is finally conceptually indefensible. Such relativism effectively ghettoises religions by emasculating any public relevance they may claim. In response, relativising the relativisers means that those who stipulate against religions making judgements on other religions commit the very error they are opposed to by carrying out judgements on all religions. Stalemate? There are two other options. One would be to question the necessity of such a task and re-centre attention on more pressing issues such as poverty and hunger, political exploitation of women and minorities, child abuse, and the global destruction of parent earth (an inverse form of child abuse). This could be labelled the liberationist/pragmatic strategy that moves the focus away from conflicting doctrines and truth claims and tries to focus on common social and environmental problems. While the agenda is unquestionably urgent, such a pragmatic strategy does not really circumvent the problem. Questions of 'justice' and 'virtue' are involved in addressing such social and moral problems, and inevitably critiques of a tradition other than one's own, as well as one's own, will be required in trying to eradicate 'child abuse' or 'exploitation' of women. Hence, such a strategy meets the same difficulty, for most religions circumscribe their world and thereby define the activities that can and should go on within those boundaries. Religions are not just doctrinal entities, but traditions which fuse and hold together doctrine, practice, liturgy, ritual and so on. Philosophically, such an emphasis on morality as the uncontroversial bridge to avoid the impasse described above stems from an impoverished form of Enlightenment natural ethics which assumes incontestable universal moral norms that would be adhered to by all sensible persons.1 It should also be said that such a pragmatic approach is sometimes suggested by those who are frankly indifferent to religions and essentially wish to impose a humanistic agenda homogeneously upon all religions. So what of the fourth option which could deliver us from this impasse ? This strategy is subtle and interesting and in limited respects a variant on the above. It is also deceptively straightforward. It is the path of neutrality. Find neutral, commonly acceptable criteria which could not sensibly be rejected by any thinking adherent of any religious tradition. Apply these criteria and one will find a way through the impasse and provide a basis for judging true from false religions. Utopian? Just such a strategy has been suggested by two philosophers of religion: Keith Ward and Harold Netland in A Vision to Pursue and Dissonant Voices respectively.2 Ward and Netland could not, of course, 1 See J. Milbank,' The end of dialogue', in G. D'Costa, ed., Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered (New York: Orbis, 1990), pp. 174—91. 2 K. Ward, A Vision to Pursue. Beyond the Crisis in Christianity (London: SCM, 1991); H. Netland, refer to each other's work, but one might expect from both of them a consensus on criteria, or at least an agreement in principle with each other's criteria. It would be less fair to expect agreement on the outcome of the application of their criteria for this of course would be quite a complicated task. However, when we turn to their two books we find something surprising, although perhaps quite predictable. Not only are their criteria very different, but Ward suggests all religions would achieve worthwhile scores and thereby supports a form of pluralism (p. igif), while Netland on the other hand suggests that Christianity alone ' satisfies the requirements of all the... criteria' (p. 193) and hence, alone amongst the traditions, is true. Such an outcome should alert us to the inherent problem in such allegedly neutral strategies. What I wish to do is critically examine each of their proposals to show that such strategies are futile. In so doing, I will be implicitly arguing for a version of the first position outlined above. I also hope to show the truth of two axioms. The first is that in relation to the increased specificity of an alleged neutral proposal its neutrality diminishes. The second is that in relation to the decreased specificity of an alleged neutral proposal its usefulness diminishes. The underlying logic of these two axioms is that whatever criteria are specified they are always and necessarily tradition specific. T o give them the status of tradition-transcending robs them of the specificity that ensures their critical cutting edge. And the degree to which they have a critical cutting edge, the more they are rendered tradition specific so they cannot be deemed neutral and capable of acceptance by all sensible persons. The implication of this claim would be that by definition any claim to break the impasse by means of the neutrality route is doomed to failure because it is illusory. II Harold Netland's proposals are advanced in an interesting defence of Christian 'exclusivism' (there is no salvation outside faith in Christ). I do not wish to discuss Netland's book here but am only concerned with his allegedly universally acceptable and binding proposals for determining the truth or falsity of competing religious worldviews.3 Netland's proposals come after a convincing and robust criticism against relativist strategies (mainly Hick and Knitter but he would probably add Ward to his list) and less convincing criticisms offideiststrategies. He is dissatisfied with both for their inability to settle questions of truth. He notes that his proposals are not exhaustive and in need of further explication (p. 183), but what he offers is sufficient for discussion. He advances eight principles (P), which are dependent Dissonant Voices Religious Pluralism and the Question of Truth (Leicester: Apollos/Michigan: W . B. Eerdmanns, 1991). Subsequent references will cite page numbers in the main text. 3 For a discussion of other issues in the book, see my review forthcoming in Religion, 1992. on two prior definitions (D) of religion. I quote from his summary (pp. D i: p is a defining belief of R if and only if being an active participant in good standing within the religious community of R entails acceptance of p. D2 : A religion R is true if and only if all of its denning beliefs are true; if any of its defining beliefs are false, then R is false. P i : If a defining belief p of a religion R is self-contradictory then p is false. P2: If two or more denning beliefs of R are mutually contradictory at least one of them must be false. P3: If a defining belief p of R is self-defeating it cannot reasonably be accepted as true. P4: If the defining beliefs of R are not coherent in the sense of providing a unified perspective of the world, then R cannot plausibly be regarded as true. P5: Any religious worldview which is unable to account for fundamental phenomena associated with a religious orientation or which cannot provide adequate answers to central questions in religion should not be accepted as true. P6: If a defining belief p of R contradicts well-established conclusions in other domains, and if R cannot justify doing so, then p should be rejected as probably false. P7: If a defining belief p of R depends upon a belief in another domain (e.g. history) which there is good reason to reject as false, then there is good reason to reject p as probably false. P8: If one or more defining beliefs of R are incompatible with widely accepted and well-established moral values and principles; or if R includes among its essential practices or rites activities which are incompatible with basic moral values and practices, then there is good reason for rejecting R as false. P9: If the defining beliefs of R entail the denial of the objectivity of basic moral values and principles; or if they entail the denial of the objective distinction between right and wrong, good and evil, then there is good reason for rejecting R as false. Pio: If R is unable to provide adequate answers to basic questions about the phenomenon of moral awareness this provides good reason for rejecting R as false. Before turning to the proposals, it should be noted that it seems odd for an evangelical Christian like Netland, who insists that faith in Christ is required for salvation, to propose such a scheme. It would appear that his exclusivist claim should in fact be that salvation is only granted to those who accept his ten principles and two definitions, for he writes that ' I should state that the reason I believe one is justified in accepting the Christian faith as true is because it is the only worldview that satisfies the requirements of all the above criteria' (p. 193, my emphases) not apparently, because of who Jesus was and who his community proclaimed him to be. The truth of revelation is subject to the truth of the ten principles and two definitions! But let us turn to his proposals. Netland acknowledges that regarding his definition D i (p is a defining belief of R if and only if being an active participant in good standing within the religious community of R entails acceptance of p) there is a difficulty in that religions heatedly debate what beliefs precisely constitute 'defining beliefs', but he does not think this problematic in terms of the overall logic of his proposals. However, it may be argued that it is for the following reasons. Firstly, precisely because within any one religion there is considerable debate as to what its defining beliefs may be, it is spurious to suggest a cohesive and unified referent to the term ' religion'. In this respect there are many Christianities and many Buddhisms, both now and in times past, so that in principle the application of the evaluating criteria would have to be applied to every possible manifestation of every possible religious tradition before Netland's claim that 'the [sic] Christian faith...is the only worldview that satisfied the requirements of all the above criteria' (p. 93) could be seen to be true. While he prefaces this claim that 'although this cannot be argued here' I would maintain that while such a task is in principle possible, in practice it would be virtually impossible. It would require a posteriori studies using Netland's principles which to my knowledge has not even been started, let alone suggesting that it could be achieved by a single person in a single lifetime. Hence, while this does not jeopardize Netland's overall aim in principle, it suggests a misplaced confidence in his claiming Christianity to be the winner, on such terms, of the judging competition. Furthermore, while Netland tends to reify religion into a single unified substance, the interesting philosophical and theological factor is precisely the phenomena of change and transformation within religious tradition. William Christian Snr has shown very clearly that besides holding defining beliefs, religious persons also have the mechanisms by which they control, establish and discern defining beliefs and may in one period change what counts as a defining belief for very good theological or philosophical reasons, without thereby changing ordenying the 'same' religious adherence.4 The point about this was that even within a unified denomination we can see that there are mechanisms by which it can demote 'defining beliefs' to the status of peripheral beliefs without necessary self-contradiction. Hence, D2 could be rendered tautologous in stipulating that 'A region R is true if and only if all of its defining beliefs are true; if any of its defining beliefs are false, then R is false.' Historically, short of changing religion, in times of credibility crisis regarding a defining belief, religious thinkers would tend to relegate that belief in status, rather than hold it as a defining belief with self-consciousness of its error. Again, this does not bear immediately on the question of neutral criteria, but suggests the difficulty with embarking on any evaluating exercise outside of a tradition-specific starting-point. Finally, what if the defining beliefs of a religion were avowedly fideistic or relativist and such were their subsequent definitions of'truth'? In practice, relativism seems to be quite a recent phenomenon amongst liberal western 4 W. Christian, Doctrines of Religious Communities. A Philosophical Study (Yale University Press, 1987). educated members of religions, but fideism has a distinguished pedigree within different traditions. Fideistic predestination, for example, is evident in Madhava's theology and in Augustine's later thought. This raises the difficulty of the very definition of religion being non-neutral and acceptable to all, for Netland has concealed in his proposal an unstated D3: that is, 'Truth is propositional and realist and religions can only define themselves in this way'. Hence, what masquerades as an apparently neutral definition of religion is in fact a prescriptive evaluation of what constitutes genuine true religion, before we even get to the principles which are supposed to perform precisely the task of discerning genuine true religion. This is hardly a promising start. Let us now turn to the principles that Netland offers and for the moment grant that the project of defining religion is trouble-free. Netland's first and second principles, which rely on notions of identity, non-contradiction and excluded middle, are a promising start for literate, speculative, self-reflective traditions. (I'm not sure the Azande would subscribe to entering this scheme so that they could be evaluated.) I think that here Netland genuinely isolates tradition-transcending principles which would be acceptable to many literate, speculative, self-reflecting persons in different religions. But without looking at the way in which such principles are applied and used from within a specific tradition, they do not really help in settling disputes over truth, except in discerning muddles. Take two examples. If we apply Pi and P2 (if a defining belief p of a religion R is self-contradictory then p is false; and if two or more defining beliefs of R are mutually contradictory at least one of them must be false) to a Zen koan, 'listen to the sound of one hand clapping', a koan which is essential as a means to realizing satori, Netland would rule Zen out because such a statement is meaningless in his terms. But Zen Buddhists accept such rules of logic only to show that satori transcends logical conceptuality and definition. A Madhyamika Buddhist such as Nagarjuna, who also accepts such rules of logic only to show why no logical system can be held, would also be disqualified by Netland. In fact, Netland may also end up dismissing certain scientists for claiming that light is both a wave and not a wave, or an Einstein for suggesting that the speed at which we observe an object travelling would be both the same and different, depending on our observational position. The problem here is that these principles do not help in the task of evaluation. One must observe the ways in which they are used within different communities, where such principles may be accepted but are subordinated to more fundamental truths of revelation by which they are regulated. So that while conversation between Netland, Nagarjuna and Einstein could be possible in accepting the validity of the principle of identity, non-contradiction and excluded middle, the way in which they would each utilize and understand logic would be quite different, yet internally consistent and defensible. Netland is partly aware of this for he notes that some would say that the notions of nirvana, satori and the Trinity are all contradictory and adds ' whether any of these doctrines is indeed self-contradictory is of course a separate and complex question' (p. 184). But is it a separate question? I think Netland here moves too quickly, for whether they are indeed self-contradictory is established by the way that a specific tradition regards and utilizes these principles. Isolating the principles outside of a particular context does not really get us very far. Recall my axioms: in relation to the increased specificity of an alleged neutral proposal its neutrality diminishes and secondly, in relation to the decreased specificity of an alleged neutral proposal its usefulness diminishes. The latter might be applied to P i and P2 without claiming that they are entirely without merit, although one must acknowledge their limited provenance, namely literate, speculative, self-reflecting persons within religions and their limited provenance, namely subordination to truths of revelation or meditative experience. Of P3 (if a defining belief p of R is self-defeating it cannot reasonably be accepted as true) it may be observed that it amounts to no more than Pi, for 'self-defeating' is by Netland's own definition tantamount to self-contradiction. He writes of self-defeating statements that they 'cannot be true because they provide the grounds for their own refutation' (p. 184) and the example he gives, that of thorough-going relativism being self-refuting, is obviously an example of self-contradiction. P 4 (if the defining beliefs of R are not coherent in the sense of providing a unified perspective on the world, then R cannot plausibly be regarded as true) amounts to coherence within a religious system and as with Pi and P2 Netland does, I believe, isolate a tradition-transcending criterion which would be acceptable to most literate, speculative, self-reflecting persons within different religions. A s h e notes himself, 'coherence of a worldview in and of itself is not sufficient to guarantee truth of a worldview, but lack of coherence does provide good reason for its rejection' (p. 186). It should also be noted that the notions of coherence may vary as we will see below in relation to the notion of 'adequacy'. P5 seems to amount to a tautologous criterion for judgement, for it dismisses a religion which is' unable to account for fundamental phenomena associated with religious orientation' and one 'which cannot provide adequate answers to central questions in religion'. The reason for suggesting tautology here is that 'fundamental phenomena' are not something self evident to any neutral on-looker who can then judge between different explanations of these same phenomena and then choose the best. Rather, religious world views actually define and select what they perceive to be fundamental phenomena and their very power lies in the answers they give to the type of question they perceive. Take for example the central way in which the question of God is not seen as necessary for enlightenment by the Buddha and does not need to feature in the notion of dukkha, its cause and the means to remove it. The 'fundamental phenomena' here are radically and differently constructed from those perceived by a Richard Swinburne who in suffering sees the problem of evil because of a belief in a loving God, and must then 'answer' this problem by defending a good and loving God. While Buddhists and Christians share the same physical world it would pre- judge a whole range of questions to suggest they interpret/experience and experience/interpret the world in a common way, implying common fundamental phenomena or even a sense of what counts as an ' adequate' answer to very different questions. Adequacy, for example, is intrinsically a theological and philosophical notion highly dependent on the tradition within which the term is used. For instance, certain Christian critics of free-will theodicies (adequate answers to the question of evil in the face of a loving God, a non-question for a Buddhist) will find the free-will defence entirely inadequate on the grounds that the attempted justification of suffering is unChristian. Such a position is advanced by Kenneth Surin.5 Now defenders of the free-will argument like Swinburne can argue endlessly, but such critics as Surin will a priori refuse their overall vision for they have, one might say, incommensurable criteria of adequacy. Critics may try and show why such defences are internally problematic, as does Surin, but ultimately they have different senses of 'adequacy', such that Swinburne will be satisfied with a rationally plausible answer while Surin requires that the answer, if 'adequate', must satisfy the child being burnt to death in the ovens of Auschwitz. Again, Netland is aware of such problems for he writes that' there is not always agreement concerning just what phenomena fall within the reference range of a religious worldview and what constitutes a satisfactory answer to the basic questions of religion. This fact, however, does not call into question the legitimacy of the criterion itself but simply indicates the difficulty of applying it to particular religious world views' (p. 187). But this final sentence avoids the problem, as I have tried to show, for this criterion does not actually mean anything without the specification that Netland seems to think is an entirely separate question. Netland further perpetuates the kind of essentialism about 'religion', the 'world' and 'common questions' in a manner that is quite ahistorical in assuming such cohesive, reified and unitary entities. P6 to P1 o begin to bear features of ' thick' description where tradition specific characteristics are much more obvious and unmask the alleged neutrality of the proposals. P6 and P7 use 'well-established conclusions in other domains', such as science, history and archaeology, upon which to judge the claims of religion, either in the case of direct contradiction (P6) or dependency (P7). The difference between P6 and P7 could be a difference of degree rather than of kind. But that is not relevant, for more importantly 5 K. Surin, Theology and the Problem of Evil (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). Netland situates his criteria very clearly in a specific tradition. Netland's neutrality is that of the enlightened western secularist where there is a distinct separation between theological 'science' and the historical, scientific and archaeological sciences, each one given sovereign reign within its own field and ever increasingly the latter group given sovereign reign over religious territory. But such presuppositions are very tradition specific. Admittedly with the internationalization of western secular culture many societies and religions are going through some similar fragmentationary processes, although it must be noted, they react very differently. For example, in some Islamic thought there is no autonomy granted to secular sciences in the way presupposed by Netland such that religious truth is determined and controlled by secular truths. The same could be said for some forms of Chinese and early Indian thought where 'scientific theories' were actually part of religious worldviews, for example in the evolutionary framework of Samkhya-Yoga where Netland's distinction between science and religion would not make sense, let alone be applicable. And one can also find resurgent within some forms of Christianity a strong resistance to such fragmentation coming from both conservative evangelicals, who oppose scientific theories of evolution, and from radical post-modernists, who oppose scientific notions of history.6 Here again, I am not suggesting that Netland's criterion is entirely unhelpful, but that without tradition-specific specification it is unuseable, and insofar as it can be used, betrays its neutrality. P8 and Pg are perhaps the most blatantly non-neutral and given my first axiom that in relation to the increased specificity of an alleged neutral proposals its neutrality diminishes, it is not surprising that these principles are the ones which might take us on some distance in actually carrying out a process of judgement. P8 states: ' If one or more defining beliefs of R are incompatible with widely accepted and well-established moral values and principles; or if R includes among its essential practices or rites activities which are incompatible with basic moral values and practices, then there is good reason for rejecting R as false.' This unashamedly privileges western secular tastes and sensibilities in deeming religions true in accordance with their conformity to current notions of good taste and decency. Netland seems unaware of the huge and questionable set of assumptions implicit in this criterion. Firstly, he is guilty of the now consistent danger of' essentialism'; assuming some homogeneous coherence and consensus on moral values, principles and practices. But this begs the question as to which society will Netland turn to find this alleged consensus: the Azande, the Aztec, the Crusader Christians of the middle ages, Tibetan Buddhism before the entry of the Chinese, present-day Saudi Arabia, present-day England, present-day Chicago, or where? And when he has chosen that society, which group's 6 See for example regarding the latter, John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, morality is he to take as normative, and what about the plurality of moral values, principles and practices that he will inevitably find? Strangely, Netland seems to ignore such intractable difficulties, but rather cites examples of this allegedly neutral common morality:' Thus, a religious world view which includes child sacrifice or cannibalism as an essential rite or adopts as a basic tenet the inherent superiority of whites over blacks should, for this reason, be rejected as probably false' (p. 190). These are a curious set of examples, because in present day Chicago and England it would seem that public morality as a whole accepts as a basic moral value the right to choose what the Roman Catholic Church views as 'child sacrifice': abortion. And in certain parts of Protestant Northern Ireland, there are still leaflets circulated where the communion rite of the Catholic mass is seen as cannibalism and 'God's vicar on Earth' as 'Satan's representative'. The point I am making is this. There are no sets of basic moral values which are neutral and acceptable to all people, and as soon as one tries to specify some their historical and tradition-specific nature becomes evident. Prohibition on suicide in one tradition amounts to martyrdom in another, avoiding meat only on a Friday in one tradition amounts to a six-day species genocide in the eyes of another. My view does not in itself exclude the possibility of overlap, family resemblances, and so on. However, I would question the possibility that there is a homogeneous neutral publicly acceptable morality. Furthermore, if such an entity were found there seems to be no good reason to advance such a criterion as deciding the truth or falsity of a religion. For nearly all religious traditions the logic operates in the reverse direction. For example, in some forms ofJudaism, Islam and Christianity, good and bad are defined from the basis of revelation and certain streams of privileged tradition stemming from that revelation, and this has then often been the basis for criticising the societies in which Jews, Christians and Muslims then find themselves. Netland's P8 suggests a reverse logic which is difficult to defend historically. P9 has especially interesting results for its specifies that ' if the defining beliefs of R entail the denial of the objectivity of basic moral values and principles; or if they entail the denial of the objective distinction between right and wrong, good and evil, then there is good reason for rejecting R as false'. Here, more than almost anywhere else, the tradition-specific nature of Netland's proposals becomes evident. He gives no grounds for assuming that it is universally acceptable that such a realist view of ethics is the case, or why it is uncontroversial that there is an objective distinction between right/ wrong, good/evil. This obvious weakness would allow those groups who do not agree with these assumptions to question (quite rightly given Netland's project) whether such proposals are objective neutral criteria for evaluating religions. One can imagine an Advaitin specifying that any religion that viewed the distinction between evil/good as an objective one could not be true because it undermines the absolute undifferentiated nature of Brahman, which is of course beyond the provisional duality of good and evil. Netland would no doubt reply that this was rather loading the dice. But oddly,he does the same with a curious air of innocence. Hence, he concludes that a strong case can be made for the view that Advaita Vedanta Hinduism and Zen Buddhism insofar as they make a fundamental ontological distinction between levels of reality and truth and maintain that the highest Reality and Truth is absolutely undifferentiated unity, allowing no distinctions whatever are incompatible with moral objectivity. It is hard to see how Advaita Vedanta or Zen can accommodate an objective distinction between good and evil, right and wrong (p. 190). and hence they are probably false religions. It is also clear that such a proposal would be far from acceptable to most Advaitins or Zen Buddhists. Needless to say, the battlefield over the question is entirely misconstrued by Netland. He wins, so to speak, on very loaded and pre-judged terms which settle the question of religious truth before it has actually been discussed properly. This hardly overcomes the impasse regarding questions of conflicting truth claims, but rather propounds an answer of neutral criteria which we have seen to be far from neutral. Little need be said about Pio (if R is unable to provide adequate answers to basic questions about the phenomenon of moral awareness, this provides good reason for rejecting R as false.) As with my criticisms of P5, it must be urged that the notion of ' adequacy' is far from clear and involves strong theological and philosophical judgements as to what it constitutes. And as with my criticisms of P5, it must also be asked whether there is any agreed phenomenon of' moral awareness' or whether Netland simply once again creates essences out of a complex multiform phenomenon. Zen Buddhists clearly think that they do provide 'adequate answers' and that the 'inadequate ' answers are given by theists (who are dualists) like Netland and their notions of adequacy are not derived from classical logic, but from the basic experience of satori, which conceptually defies the norms of classical logic. If Netland's attempt to frame neutral criteria by which to judge religions is deeply problematic, as I hope to have shown, will Ward's fare any better? The logic of my criticisms suggests that the answer must be ' no' for the two axioms have so far proven true: in relation to the increased specificity of an alleged neutral proposal its neutrality diminishes and that in relation to the decreased specificity of an alleged neutral proposal its usefulness diminishes. Ill Keith Ward's proposals are advanced in the context of his vision of Christianity in the twenty first century. He follows in the tradition of John Hick's pluralism, adopting a Unitarian Christology and wishing to forge peaceful and harmonious relations between religions by means of overcoming exclusivist Christologies. As with Netland's book, I am concerned solely to assess his proposed neutral criteria by which to judge religions.7 Ward suggests that there are'certain common features of being human' (p. 178) such that it will be possible to specify ' the criteria of excellence which are appropriate to human beings and the nature of the goal which is proper to humanity as such' (p. 179). Hence Ward wishes to establish that there 'is a set of fundamental values which are given by the very nature of human being itself, and which are not merely conventional or matters of arbitrary and wholly subjective preference' (p. 179). Once more, we see a curious logic whereby religions will be told what constitutes their truthfulness in terms of some foundational Archimedes point outside of all religious traditions. This Archimedian point is that of a Kantian form of natural theology. Ward, like Netland, criticises relativist and fideist positions and sees the way out of the impasse regarding conflicting truth claims in the provision of universal criteria. These are established by conditions for the possibility of reflectively using the concept of 'value'. This allegedly avoids the difficulties of dealing with the very different types of values held, but probes deeper, into the transcendental arguments from the notion of value. Ward notes analogies here with Kant's transcendental arguments for the possibility of scientific and mathematical knowledge. But this analogy should alert us to two possible dangers. Firstly, that in specifying general conditions for being able to hold values nothing specific is said about the content of values and their possible conflicts, which is ultimately the issue at stake. The point is not that every one has and is able to make truth claims, but rather that the truth claims themselves, if taken seriously, often conflict. Second, Kant operates within a very specific tradition and the history of philosophy since testifies to the controversy as to whether he had attained for pure and practical reason the transcending role he claimed for it. There are strong philosophical counter-traditions questioning the entire Kantian project which is germane for indicating the problem of any alleged neutral starting point.8 What is Ward's argument? I hope I convey it correctly for at times in his text the different steps and stages are not always clear. Firstly, he argues that the notion of 'value' presupposes preference and choice, and that value,if it is worthy of being sought, must be an intrinsically worthwhile state of consciousness. Secondly, he argues that 'happiness' is a basic value which admittedly 'does not show what sort of conscious state happiness is' (p. 182), and that such happiness can be found in different ways, although one must qualify it by stating that it ' is always wrong to cause sorrow or suffering, in 7 See my review of Ward in The Journal of Beliefs and Values, 1992. 8 See for example, A. Maclntyre, After Virtue. A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edn (London: Duckworth, the absence of further justifying factors' (p. 182). Thirdly, to seek to make choices to attain happiness, a further basic value is presupposed: that of knowledge. Hence, with qualifications, it can be said that it 'is an unequivocally good thing to have the capacity to know what can be chosen and how best to achieve it' (p. 184). Knowledge is not simply a grasp of the facts, but a 'deep sensitivity to and appreciation of beauty and order and a compassionate empathy with the sufferings of all creatures' and involves 'an understanding of the nature of things and the explanation for their existence, so far as this is available' (p. 184). Fourthly, choice, happiness, and knowledge presuppose freedom to make such choices. Ward summarises his argument thus: ' if I value anything at all, I have a good reason to value the realization of intrinsically satisfying conscious states, the capacity of knowing which states are actual and possible, of reasoning about how to obtain them, and of being free to realize them. These basic values are presupposed by the analysis of value in terms of rational preference' (p. 186). In order to render this as a universally applicable truth, Ward adds a fifth value, which he calls 'justice; which simply reminds us that whatever is a basic value for us is one for anyone like us in the relevant aspects' (p. 186), meaning that if pursuing the attainment of values is good for x, and all factors being equal for y, then justice requires that it is good for y similarly to pursue the attainment of values. In keeping with the Kantian transcendental nature of the argument, it should be noted that all Ward has provided (if his argument is correct) are certain formal, rather than material, elements constitutive of human beings as value seeking. Realizing intrinsically satisfying conscious states, knowing about such states, being able to know how to obtain them and being free to do so, are all formal properties of moral agents, specifying nothing whatsoever about the contents of the moral vision they hold. But Ward goes on to say that in so much as these conditions hold, one can claim to have arrived at an 'autonomous', 'objective' and 'absolute' 'standard or test for the acceptability of values. Any values which frustrate or destroy any of the set of basic values are less acceptable than values which, in a particular context, can be seen as encouraging the realization of the set of basic values' (p. 187). But can material choices actually effect the formal conditions required for making choices? Is Ward guilty of a category confusion? I think that he is guilty because what he calls ' the set of basic values' are not actually material choices available, but the conditions for making any material choices. If it is otherwise, then these cannot be transcendental conditions for value-seeking that Ward claims them to be. Precisely because the 'basic set of values' are conditions for choice-making and value-seeking they cannot specify the material contents of choice-making and value-seeking. Hence, they can hardly apply as criteria for granting truthfulness to material choices, but only as stating the necessary conditions for material choices. In fact it should be noted that even the way in which Ward has specified the transcendental conditions of value seeking human beings is not neutral. For instance, he presupposes some very tradition specific notions of rationality and knowledge. Rationality is defined as 'the capacity to discern the true nature of things and the deepest patterns of intelligibility in the world' (p. 184), a definition which smacks of traditional theistic natural theology. What of the Nagarjunas of this world, who far from noting that the nature of things constitutes deep patterns of intelligibility in the world, note rather that nothing within this world is properly intelligible and therefore nothing within this world is properly satisfying? The same could be said for Sankara's Advaita Vedanta, for on the ultimate level of truth the world is actually unintelligible (anirvicanya) and has no proper status (maya). A similar criticism could be advanced regarding Ward's definition of knowledge which requires an 'appreciation of beauty and order', an aspect of deep illusion according to most Buddhists. And similarly, for Ward's concession that while happiness can admittedly be found in different ways, he would qualify it by saying it 'is always wrong to cause sorrow or suffering, in the absence of further justifying factors' (p. 102). But the notions of 'sorrow' and 'suffering' are in danger of being essentialised (a la Netland), for surely such terms are actually defined and have their meaning within tradition-specific contexts, not in a general and universal sense as implied by Ward? Suffering and sorrow, for a Buddhist, constitute the marks of dukkha and are part of the nature of empirical existence, whereas within certain forms of Christianity they are not essential to empirical existence and exist as a result of sin. Hence, at one level to be freed of the illusion of God as an essential being is to be freed from suffering and sorrow (within Buddhism), while entirely the opposite could be the case with Christianity. The list of differing constructions and construals given to this term could be multiplied and the point I am making is simple. I wish to stress that there is no neutral language and concepts and hence, even within Ward's formal definition, there is no neutrality. But let us for the moment grant Ward's argument a potential coherence to see how he further slips from stating common formal requirements to equating these with common material goals, compounding his category mistake. Having rejected any seeking of values that destroys those absolute values which presuppose the conditions for seeking value, Ward goes on to distinguish between being merely human (being capable of pursuing these values) and being fully human (realising these values as fully as possible) (p. 188). So where does religion enter the picture? Ward's answer is that the religions all share a common 'structure' which consists 'in a maximal instantiation of the five basic values' (p. 189). But at this level of generality Ward's criteria do not really take us very far in resolving any conflicts concerning ' maximal instantiation', for herein lies the problem of conflicting truth claims, and he seems to partially recognize this when he adds ' and one can see how different faiths interpret such a maximal case in different ways' (p. 189). This amounts to saying that all religions have in common is a desire to achieve a way of life in which adherents are fulfilled and of course this is not saying very much regarding the evaluation of what counts as fulfilling or not. How, for instance, is martyrdom discerned as authentic or inauthentic in the cases of St Peter, the Jonestown disciples, and the followers of Hizballah (the Party of God) ?9 All persons in the above cases may fully believe that they are achieving a ' maximal instantiation' of pursuing that which is most valuable. It is at this point that Ward most clearly jumps the tracks and introduces a concealed assumption that actually negates the thrust of his argument from neutrality. He begins to argue that while different faiths may interpret maximal cases in different ways, the differences 'are subtle differences of interpretation' (p. 189) and have a commonality of content; that is 'a turning-away from selfishness by relating individuals to a supreme objective value which is their ultimate goal' (p. 188). Or again, he says 'there is agreement on the need to move from self towards a supreme objective value and an agreement on the sort of value this will be which forms a deeper structure underlying particular differences of interpretation' (p. 190). But this is surely a classical case of a category mistake; the confusion of the categories of form and content. Ward simply jumps from assuming a common structure (a movement towards a supreme objective value) to conflating that structure with content, and therefore a common goal. Hence, rather than attempting a solution to the problem, Ward dissolves it by not taking conflicting claims seriously. It is worth quoting at length the following passage which demonstrates this: It might be better to see the different faiths, not as in radical opposition but as having a range of agreed values, but varying ways of interpreting them in the light of a developing understanding of the world. There is an important sense in which differing faiths are engaged in a common pursuit of supreme value, though they conceive this in diverse ways. The theist will seek to transcend self by achieving a conscious relationship to God which enables her to share and reflect the supreme perfections of God. She seeks to make her will one with the divine will. The Buddhist seeks to transcend selfish desire, to make her nature one with the Buddha nature. The Vedantin seeks to realize her self as one with the Self of all, unlimited being, consciousness and bliss. Is there so much difference here? Are the deep agreements not more important that the countless unsettlable disputes which litter the libraries of professional dogmatists? (p. 190). Presuming ' professional dogmatists' is a term of abuse, I must plead guilty to being such a character, for it seems to me that the reverse of what Ward observes is the case. There seems to be very deep disagreements of content, 9 See the useful essay by M. Kramer, 'The moral logic of Hizballah', in W. Reich, ed., Origins of Terrorism (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 131-60. even if there is a commonality of structure within different religions. For example (if one can generalize for the moment) the Christian's entire morality and pursuit of supreme value is based on difference and participation, difference from God but finally participation in his love, charity and goodness. Difference, distinction and participation are all upheld as ontological categories by means of the doctrine of the Trinity. The Advaitin on the other hand is entirely orientated towards unity without difference and oneness without duality: the 'experience' of anubhava in which Brahman is realized as the sole existent, one without a second. Not only is the goal different, but so is the entire basis of morality and what counts as the ultimate truth for the Christian and Advaitin. And Ramanuja and Madhva, as Vedantins, certainly felt that the errors of Sankara were serious enough to condemn his teachings, to criticise his false understanding of Brahman and thereby the basis of Sankara's ethics. Without even drawing the Buddhist in at this point, and the differences between different schools of Buddhism are considerable, the 'countless unsettlable disputes' are far from insignificant. It seems that the deep structure actually testifies to something very different from what Ward sees. Despite various commonalities in formal structure, and perhaps commonalities in values at varying levels of theory and practice, at a fundamental level there are substantial ontological differences that cannot be dissolved. This it should be recalled is the purpose of the exercise: to adjudicate between such differences. But Ward's strategy is to relegate such differences to 'subtle differences of interpretation' and one suddenly realizes that the transcendental argument for the condition of value-seeking has dropped entirely out of sight. And this is not insignificant. Ward's allegedly neutral path of adjudication is, it seems to me, independent of the conclusions which he draws for two basic reasons. The first is that he commits a category mistake in applying his argument. From a similarity of formal structure, he assumes a common goal. Secondly, the criteria are not in fact neutral for Ward has already decided earlier in the book (and has begun to do so in his earlier work: Images of Eternity, 1987) that religions present 'iconic' visions, where 'iconic' plays a similar function toJohn Hick's category of 'myth'; that is, something is 'revealed' but it cannot be held to be an absolute truth and it must always be open to correction and transformation. Hence, disputes between the ultimate nature of reality can always be relegated to complementary perspectives and not finally taken seriously at all. It is curious that those wishing better relationships between religions and who are anxious to dispose of exclusivist claims, end up inadvertently not respecting the integrity of the different traditions and the seriousness and absoluteness of their claims and thereby erect a new exclusivism.10 10 See my analysis of John Hick in these terms in 'Taking Other Religions Seriously: Some Ironies in the Current Debate on a Christian Theology of Religions', The Thomist, LIV, 3 (1990), 519-30; and also G. Loughlin, 'Prefacing Pluralism: John Hick and the Mastery of Religion', Modem Theology, vn, 1 (1990), 29-56. IV I have endeavoured to achieve certain limited goals. Firstly, I have tried to show that the impasse in the problem of conflicting truth claims cannot be met by means of advancing neutral criteria for adjudicating between religions. As has been demonstrated by my examination of Ward and Netland, it can be argued that in relation to the increased specificity of an alleged neutral proposal its neutrality diminishes and secondly, in relation to the decreased specificity of an alleged neutral proposal its usefulness diminishes. In Netland's case we saw that his criteria were either so underspecified as to be incapable of the task, or so overspecified to be obvious forms of traditionspecific (at least theistic) criteria that they could not count as performing the task they were set up to perform. In Ward's case we saw that his criteria were far from neutral and when they actually achieve results in application, they only did so by changing their nature through a category mistake. Where does this leave us in the impasse regarding conflicting truth claims? Slightly better off I think, in avoiding certain options. In arguing implicitly that one cannot start from other than a tradition-specific starting point I hope to have shown the necessity for pursuing the question along the avenues set out in the first of the options outlined at the beginning of the paper. However, it remains to be shown how one can profitably counter the various objections to such an approach and to argue that this is in fact the only credible way in which to judge religions other than one's own.
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- [The Lord's Prayer (Audio)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-lords-prayer-audio) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection The Lord's Prayer (also called the Pater Noster or “Our Father”) is a central prayer in Christianity, part of the liturgy and also part of the daily personal devotions of most Christians, who would usually recite it in their mother languages. It first appears in the New
- [Language, Mind, and Reality](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/language-mind-and-reality) - Benjamin Lee Whorf A very unusual article, written by one of the most influential modern linguists during the last year of his life. On the simplest cultural level, a mantram is merely an incantation of primitive magic, such as the crudest cultures have. In the high culture it may have a different, very intellectual meaning,
- [The Mysteries of the Greek Alphabet](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/mysteries-of-greek-alphabet) - Mysteria litterarum The following is an English translation of a 14th cent. Sahidic Coptic text that was published (with translation and notes) by Adolphe Hebbelynck in Le Muséon vol. 19 (1900) in three sections: pp. 5-36, 105-136 and 259-300 and in vol. 20 (1901) in two sections: pp. 5-33 and 369-415, together with 3 plates. This translation will also appear in 5 parts, following Hebbelynck's arrangement.1 My translation is based solely on the Coptic text published by Hebbelynck. Since he does not provide an Arabic version, I rely on Hebbelynck's notes, supplied to him by the well- known scholar of Christian Arabic, Jacques Forget. Forget dismissed the Arabic text as poor, faulty and sometimes difficult to understand. The text is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, where it bears the designation Huntington 393. The catalogue entry says that it is a codex bombycinus (silk paper) of 118 folios and was written by Atasios in 1109 AM (1393 AD). It was brought back to the West by Robert Huntington, a 17th cent. Anglican cleric who was chaplain to the Levant Company at Aleppo for eleven years and who collected much written material while he was there, and passed either by sale or donation to the Bodleian towards the end of the 17th cent. Huntington had the singular privilege of being able to inform the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of Mount Sinai, Johannes Lascaris, that there was such a thing as the Church of England. There was always a playful element in the pictogram writing of earlier stages of Egyptian able to convey multiple meanings, as for example with the relatively common word imj-r3 'overseer'. The literal meaning of the phrase is 'what is in the mouth', which made it 1 Cordula Bandt, Der Traktat "Vom Mysterium der Buchstaben". Kritischer Text mit Einführung, Übersetzung und Anmerkungen. Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur, 162. ( 2007). possible for Egyptians to 'economize' the writing by using the sign for 'tongue'. This playfulness was extended in the Ptolemaic period (when the Pharaohs were of non- Egyptian origin), where subtle modifications of words and names were used by Egyptian intellectuals to convey multiple messages, e.g. the phrase mj r' 'like Re (sun god) could be written using the sign for 'cat' (mj) with the sun disk on its head, producing the message that the sun god could also be perceived as a feline creature. This in turn could be an allusion to one of the Eye of Re stories in a New Kingdom (c. 1550-1085 BC) text known as the Book of the Heavenly Cow, in which Re unleashes Sakhmet, the lioness goddess, against humanity for their disobedience.2 The ability to express more than one meaning visually may be one of the reasons why Egyptians never abandoned pictograms when writing texts intended largely for public display in what they themselves called mdw ntr 'divine words' (hieroglyphs). Among the many scholars to have studied Huntington 393 was E. Amélineau, who pointed out that the name of the writer was not atase but apa seba. The question then presented itself: was this Sabas, who founded several monasteries in Palestine in the 5th cent. ? Hebbelynck believes that the Coptic is a translation from someone whose first language might have been Hebrew or Syriac, but he does not say why. On p. 12 of the text the writer refers to himself as xecnos 'gentile'. Part Four of the text mentions the Arabic alphabet, which would make a 5th-6th cent. composition date more or less impossible. However, this part may be a later addition to an earlier composition. Letter mysticism is of course known in the letters of Pachomius, of which there are Coptic Greek and Latin versions. The Latin text was made by Jerome, who reports in his Preface to the Rules of Pachomius (Pat. Lat. 23 p.65) that Pachomius had learned the mysticae linguae scientiam, along with several others, from an angel so that they could communicate with each other without fear of being understood by others.3 A relatively modern variant of this sort of numerological mysticism tells of a young soldier who used a pack of playing cards as his 'bible, prayer book and almanac': the ace is One God, the deuce the Father and Son, the three the Trinity, etc. The earliest known reference ?See, for example, W. Kelly Simpson The Literature of Ancient Egypt (2003) pp. 289ff. For a detailed study of the Pachomian writing system, but one that does not help significantly with understanding the meaning of the system, see Hans Quecke Die Briefe Pachoms (1975). to it is from 17624 and, though it is without title, it is often known as The Soldier's Bible, Prayer Book and Almanac. Such was the enduring popularity of the tale that it was 'rewritten' in 1948 in the USA and recorded by several popular music stars. The page numbers in brackets are those of the manuscript. ?4 Mary Bacon's World. A farmer's wife in eighteenth-century Hampshire (Threshold Press, 2010). 3 In the name of the Father, the Son and Holy Spirit, one God. A discourse uttered by Apa Seba, the presbyter and anchorite, concerning the mystery of God that is in the letters of the alphabet, which none of the ancient philosophers was able to reveal. (3) In truth, my brothers, it is fitting for us (the blessing in all things)5 for each one of us who believe in Christ to hear this mystery which is concealed in the letters of the alphabet, lest we fall in idolatry or blasphemy, but rather persevere6 in the example of wisdom. The beginning of the proclamation of this mystery. He said as follows It once happened to me as I was praying steadfastly to God in the desert, one day I took in my hands the Book of the Apocalypse seen by blessed John the Theologos on Patmos. I was reading it until I came to the passage where Christ said to John: I am the alpha and the ômega. And again, a second and third time, he says: I am the alpha and the ômega. When I (4) heard these things, I became aware in my heart immediately of that other word of the Gospel of the Lord, saying: Not a single iota or single point will pass until all these things happen.7 I quickly became aware that there was a divine mystery in the letters of the alphabet and this was revealed to us. And yet, without any doubt, I believed in Christ, the one who says: Ask, and it will be given to you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks will receive. He who seeks will find and he who knocks, it will be opened to him.8 Then I begged his goodness continuously to enlighten my mind about the secret mystery of the letters in the alphabet. And his great and indescribable goodness is forever for the worthy and (5) unworthy together. As he received the plea of the Ninivites and Manasses, the adulterous woman, the tax collector, the thief on the right hand of the cross and a multitude of other sinners, he listened to them in his great goodness, so also he considered it worthy to receive the plea of my sinful self. And as he knows knows and bears witness alone, he is the one who comes to judge the world. For the mystery, it is not from man we have known it or learned of it, but the one who gave speech to the ass of Balaam when he saw the angel of God. Now he, not for my sake9 but 5 6 7 8 9 This seems to be the meaning, but the text as it stands is literally: 'not because of mine of virtue' 4 ?Syntactically this phrase is out of place, so I have parenthesized it There is no verb here, but I have followed Hebbelynck's example and supplied one. Apoc. 1,8: 21,6 and 22,13 Mt 7, 7ff. for the sake of building the holy church, he sent his holy angel and opened the eyes of my soul and enlightened me. I saw myself as if I were in ecstasy. (6) I saw myself one evening as if I were standing on Mount Sinai, the place where the law of God came into being and the revelation of the nature of the world to Moses from God. In fear I saw the power of a ruler to which many people were singing, from whom emanates the light to become wise, as he alone knows. I heard the revelation of the letters and their nature and was taught by him and I also wrote them. The one who believes therefore what you say is wise. The one who is unbelieving10 will receive the portion of unbelievers and he will be judged with them on the true judgement day. The teacher, who does not need teaching teaches us about that mystery hidden since eternity, the letters of the alphabet, saying as follows. (7) A word of God These letters are called 'elements', not because they are composed of elements as the vain pagan philosophers think (God forbid !)11, but, because of their form, the elements of the creation of the world are in them when they are written.12 One has the form of heaven and earth. Another has been written to represent heaven and earth. Another to represent earth and water. Another to represent the abyss and darkness. Another the wind and water. Another signifies the form of light. Another represents the firmament of heaven. Another shows the separation of the water above from the water below. Another represents the revelation of the earth and the gathering of the waters in it. (8) And another one represents plants. Another fruit-bearing trees. Another the beacon light. Another has the sun and moon in it. Another is an image of their position in heaven, as we will show forthwith, God willing, as 10 The first verb is Greek, the second Coptic. 11 Coptic equivalent of the common expression which m3?4 g?noito. There is a negative particle after 'composed' that has to be omitted in the interest of sense, unless it is understood as a reinforcing negative. 12 The syntax is loose, so it is difficult to be certain if this is the right understanding. ?5 we have seen them and heard them from God. Chapter Two The mystery is of this sort. It was a divine plan to use Greek letters for writing before the idolatry of pagans, so that unwillingly they would submit to the worship of God and confess it. For each hand or right hand of a godless Greek idolater, if he writes with it the form of the letters, without wanting or agreeing, he has gladly confessed and written of his own free will that the world is not godless and uncreated, as was thought by the godless Greeks (9) who say this, but that God exists, and from the beginning; he created heaven, earth, sea, all the things we see and do not see of creation; that the earth was invisible and unprepared; and what a truth it is, the divine scripture of Moses, which says, 'There was darkness on the abyss' and also 'The divine spirit is coming upon13 the water and 'God is the demiurge14 of the light, separating the light from the dark (10)15 and again 'At his command the earth came to be suspended above the water.' And what is there for me say about creation ? For that is not all. There is also the creator of all these things who says: I am the alpha and the omega. And in this alphabet, the things which are thought to be of slight importance, resided the mystery hidden from the beginning of the world. The number16 of the form which is in it teaches us the descent to earth of God the Logos (11)17 from heaven, and the time when he migrated to us, and the establishment of the Church by him. And that is not all. But there is also his suffering on the Cross to save us. And through him we have become justified and received santification. And not only those upon the earth have received his grace, but also those in hell have enjoyed the presence of Christ18. He went and evangelized those in captivity in that place. He rose from the dead and went up to heaven. He sent the Paraclete 13 The Bohairic OT reads 'was going'. 14 This word has an interesting range of meanings, from one who works for the public good to the creator of the visible world. 15 At the top of the page is the following: I Is yS A (10 Jesus Christ 1). 16 Hebbelynck maintains that this is the 'episêmon', a letter belonging to the earlier stages of Greek writing that survived only as the number 6. Known as a digamma (phonetically an approximant) , it corresponded to the Hebrew 'waw', which was associated with the Second Coming and the start of a new era cf. Pat. Gr. IX 368ff. 17 At the top of the page, facing the text at the top of p. 10: B US CS IA (2 Son of God 11). 18 I am inclined to see here elements of belief illustrated in New Kingdom royal tombs, where the solar journey in the underworld is an important feature of tomb iconography. For the term 'parousia' as a way of understanding the Pharaonic concept of nfrw cf. R. Hanning Großes Handwörterbuch Ägyptisch-Deutsch (1995) p. 409, where he describes it as the bodily presence of a divinity. ?6 to us. The Gospel he preached in the whole world, and this will endure until the end. This treasure, that is each of the letters,19 teaches us that Christ is a duality, that is, man and god at the same time, which means 'he is he'20. And that he is a sign appearing as the 'episêmon'. And that he is life and the life-giver. He is the Lord. He is also the Ecclesiast of truth who has assembled together the holy Church of the faithful and he is immortal. He is eternal. He is the support and help. He is the beacon and the truth. He is the sanctification and the custodian of all. He is also the beginning and the end. He is the true lawgiver and all that is beautiful and all that is good. he teaches us about the word of the Trinity by means of a strange argument using remarkable letters. From the (12) days of Adam and Enoch God more or less21 prefigured the mystery of Christ and the holy Church through these Greek letters. He made them into an instrument of salvation for us gentiles who have believed in Christ, the one who says: I am the alpha and the ômega. Now, before the exposition, we have to give the interpretation of the remainder of the questions into which we have been initiated concerning the mysteries in the alphabet. They are called 'elements', that is each of the letters, as we said before. Chapter Three Among them are twenty-two letters, apart from the xi and the psi, added by philosophers at the end. In this way, I am speaking of twenty-two letters: they correspond to the number of the twenty-two works made by God in the creation, which are as follows. The first: the first heaven. The second: the earth below the abyss. (13) The third: the water on the face of the earth and below it. The fourth: the other earth, which is the void. The fifth: the spirit on the face of water, which is the air. The sixth: the darkness upon the face of the abyss. The seventh: the light that is called fire. The eighth: the firmament called sky. 19 The language is relatively unorthodox here, but I think this is the meaning. 20 Presumably by implication 'and no-one else'. 21 A non-literal translation of two Greek adverbs rarely used in combination: syedwn and tayh ?7 The ninth: the separation of the two waters, above the firmament and below it. The tenth: the emergence of the earth from the depths of the water. The eleventh: the appearance of plants upon the face of the earth. The twelfth: fruit-bearing trees with seeds on them. The 13th:22 all beacons that bring light. The fourteenth: the sun and the moon. The fifteenth: their emplacement in the firmament of heaven. The sixteenth: the fish in the waters. The seventeenth: the birds of the air. The eighteenth: all sea creatures that are large and those in the waters. (14) The nineteenth: all the animals. The twentieth: all the poisonous reptiles The twenty-first: all the beasts upn the earth. The twenty-second: man of reason, the perfection of the entire world. These are the works which God that came into being in the creation of the world, twenty- two of them. For this reason there are twenty-two books counted in the Old Testament by the Jews.23 For this reason, twenty-two thousand cattle were slaughtered by Solomon in dedicating the Temple. God accomplished twenty-two works in the creation from the beginning, revealing the mystery of divine economy24 of Christ's salvation, that is the twenty-two incredible works. But those who were worthy in his plan25 saw them, and they are: The first: sending of Gabriel to the Virgin. The second: the descent from heaven of the Divine Logos. The third: the entry into the virginal womb in an ineffable way and his (15) incarnation in it without the seed of man. The fourth: the period of nine months of her pregnancy. The fifth: the immaculate and indestructible birth.26 The sixth: the growth in age of the body of God. 22 Written as letters with numerical value. 23 The number quoted by several Christian writers, the earliest of whom was Melito of Sardis, cited by Eusebius Historia Ecclesiastica 4. 26. 14 24 The Greek word used in oikoumenh, 'inhabited world', but later on, p. 16 of the manuscript, it is clear that oikonomia has to be understood. Hebbelynck has no note here. 25 Gk. xupocesis. Hebbelynck simply translates the sense intended 'ceux qui ont été dignes d'être ses disciples'. 26 This seems to refer specifically to the divine birth and there is no obvious reference to the Immaculate Conception, perhaps because the doctrine did not have much currency in the Eastern Church. It may be significant that it was not officially incorporated into Western Catholic dogma until 1854. ?8 The seventh: the legal circumcision of his flesh.27 The eighth: the glorious baptism which he received at his own wish. The ninth: the witness of the Father from heaven, saying: This is my beloved son. The tenth: the descent of the incorporeal Holy Spirit. The eleventh: the war of Christ in the desert against the devil during his forty day fast, when he overcame the devil, as victory is his at all times. The twelfth: the miracles he performed, each surpassing the other. The thirteenth: the way in which he transformed himself in an immutable form. The fourteenth: the salvific sufferings at his own wish on the Cross. The fifteenth: the life-giving death of the immortal one. The sixteenth: his being laid28 in the tomb. The seventeenth: the descent to hell [and] to bring up the souls of the saints. The eighteenth: the despoiling of hell to save (16) those in that place. The nineteenth: his holy resurrection from the dead after three days. The twentieth: his ascent to heaven. The twenty-first: his sitting at the right hand of his Father on high. I am talking about the humanity when he assumed it.29 The twenty-second: his descent from heaven in his second coming to judge the living and the dead. So, it has become clear that the twenty-two works in the economy of Christ and the twenty- two works of God in the creation are the model of each other, like the twenty-two letters of the alphabet, as we have already said. And of them, the letters, we find seven that are voiced: alpha, ei, hêta iôta, ou, he and ô.30 They are called vowels, because in the writing of each one of them they give a voice. And there are fifteen letters that are unvoiced: bêta, gamma, delta, zêta, thêta, kappa, laula,31 me, ne pi, rô, syma, tau, phi. chi. And these are called (17) voiceless because they do not complete the entirety of a sound in writing. But those letters are seven only that have a voice, because God created seven things, whch 27 Luke 2, 21. 28 Hebbelynck has a note on this construction, but fails to point out that it is identical to the construction a few lines earlier. The construction has been identified ( Crum Coptic Dictionary 819b) as a valid alternative to the more common one. 29 This sounds like a reference to some Christological problem, which as a non-theologian I would not wish to tackle. 30 The vowels are written in the margin, and is clear that 'he' stands for 'upsilon'. 31 The Coptic name for 'lambda'. ?9 are as follows. The first: the angels. The second: the soul of reason, with a spiritual voice outside the body. The third: man with a voice and body. The fourth: birds of the air that have a voice. The fifth: all the beasts that have a voice. The sixth: reptiles that have a voice. The seventh: all the animals that have a voice. Two of those we have mentioned are creatures of reason, without a body, simple, invisible and immortal. that is the nature of the angels and the intellectual soul. They represent the invisible Father and the immaterial Holy Spirit. One is also synthetic, with a voice that is human, both mortal and immortal like Christ.
- [À propos du tracé directeur de l’instrument à corde](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/breton-trace) - Luc Breton L’art du Trait dans le compagnonnage a un caractère d’«aventure» spirituelle qui s’avèrera fructueuse ou non… car son usage en montrera les qualités ou les défauts: une cathédrale au tracé régulateur correct selon les critères traditionnels sera belle de sa participation à la splendeur incréée… un instrument bien dessiné sonnera d’un son ineffable
- [The Sword of the Spirit: The Making of an Orthodox Rosary](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/sword-orthodox-rosary) - D.M. Deed “Take, brother, the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God, for continual prayer to Jesus; for thou must always have the Name of the Lord Jesus in mind, in heart and on thy lips.” Click here to view the PDF. Or click here to read the HTML text at Studies
- [A Biography of Abu l-Hasan al-Shadhili](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/honerkamp-shadhili-manaqib-intro) - A Biography of Abû l-Hasan al-Shâdhilî Dating from the Fourteenth Century Kenneth Honerkamp The greater part of what we know of the life and teachings of Abû l-Hasan al-Shâdhilî (654/1258), founder of the Shâdhilî Sufi Order is drawn from two primary biographical works. Latâif al-minan 1 by Ibn ‘Atâ’ Allâh of Alexandria (709/1287) and Durrat al-asrâr wa tuhfatu al-abrâr 2 by Ibn Muhammad b. Abû al-Qâsim al-Himyarî, known as Ibn al-Sabbâgh (fl. 720/1320).3 Later biographies tend to be works of compilation drawn from these two primary sources.4 It was therefore with intense interest that I encountered the reference by Paul Nwyia in Ibn ‘Abbâd de Ronda to another primary source on the life of Abû l-Hasan al- Shâdhilî located in the Qarawîyîn Library of Fez, Morocco.5 I was in Fez at the time, doing research for the critical edition of the Major Collection of the Letters (al-Rasâ’il al-kubrâ) 6 of Ibn ‘Abbâd of Ronda and was able to acquire a copy of this precious manuscript.7 The following article is a brief introduction to this manuscript.8 1 Published numerous times in Cairo. This work has recently been translated into French under the title, La Sagesse des maîtres soufis by E. Geoffroy (1998). 2 Published in Tunis in 1887. Another edition that is extremely flawed has recently been published in Cairo. This work has also been translated into English under the title The Mystical Teachings of al-Shadhili, by E. Douglas (1993). 3 Muhammad al-‘Arabî b. Yusûf al-Fâsî cites Abd al-Nûr’s Manâqib of Imâm al-Shâdhilî in conjunction with Latâif al-minan and Durrat al-asrâr in his Mirât al-mahâsin min akhbâr al-shaykh Abî al-Mahâsin, 2003, p. 258. 4 This is not to exclude the existence of other primary sources such as Risâlat Safî al-Dîn ibn Abî al-Mansûr ibn Zâfir, ed. and trans. D. Gril, 1986, p. 78, Zînat al-nawâzir wa tuhfat al-khawâtir by the disciple of Ibn ‘Ata’ Allâh, Râfi‘ Ibn Shâfi‘ (presented by D. Gril in Alexandria at the conference: La Voie Soufie des Shâdhilîs) or Ibn al-Mulaqqin, Tabaqât al-awlîyâ’, 1973, p. 458-459. These works, however, tend to entail brief biographical entries that lack detail. The other works of the Order, such as the Hikam, and al-Tanwîr fî isqât al-tadbîr, Ibn ‘Ayyâd, Mafâkhir al-‘ilîya also provide insights into the teachings of the early Order, but are more doctrinal than biographical. 5 P. Nwyia, 1961, p. 21. 6 Forthcoming from Dar el-Machreq, Beirut, in 2004. 7 I owe a great debt of gratitude to my friend, Dr. Ezzidine Kharchafi, of the Center for Andalusian Studies and Research in Chefchaouan, Morocco for sending me a photocopy of the manuscript. I had initially worked from a handwritten copy of the original. 8I have completed an annotated critical edition of the text that will appear soon in the Annales Islamologiques de l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale (IFAO, Cairo). ???1 1 The Manuscript Number: Qarawîyîn ms. 492/4 (12 pages, fol. 59r - 72v) 9 Microfilm: number: 1462 Title: Taqyîd fî tarjamat ahwâl al-shaykh Abî l-Hasan ‘Alî bin ‘Abd Allah al-shahîr bi l- Shâdhilî (The Record of the Biography and Spiritual States of Abû l-Hasan al-Shâdhilî) 10 Author: Abû Muhammad ‘Abd an-Nûr al-‘Imrânî (b. 685/1286) Description: Each page is 21 cm x 26 cm of thirty lines per page, approximately twelve words a line with a wide margin. It was written in Maghribi script with colored section headings on poor quality paper. The copyist is Muhammad b. Muhammad b. al-Raffâs al-Husayn. The manuscript is undated, but paper, style, and the fact that the compilation was bequeathed to the library as a religious endowment (tahbîs) by Sultan Mulay ‘Abd Allâh in 1156/1743-44 indicate that is was written some time before the 18th century, most probably in the 16th or 17th centuries. This manuscript is in lamentable condition. Damage from humidity has caused the ink to spread across most pages and the margins, badly worm-eaten, have been reduced in binding. All this has made the editing of this manuscript a difficult task; certain passages are in fact unreadable, as the facsimile of the first page will attest. The Tunisian edition of Durrat al-asrâr, where parallel narratives occurred, was most helpful in filling in some of the damaged portions. To date I have found no mention of this manuscript in the bibliographies of manuscript collections that I have accessed.11 The Author ‘Abd al-Nûr al-‘Imrânî is cited in many of the biographies dealing with the scholars of Fez.12 He was influential in introducing the teachings of Sufism and particularly those of the Shâdhilî Order within the circles of the jurists (fuqahâ’) of fourteenth century Merinid Fez. We are fortunate to have the accounts of two people who knew him personally, his student Yahyâ al-Sarrâj (d. 803/1401) 13 and Ibn al-Sakkâk (d. 818/1415).14 These accounts by those who knew him portray ‘Abd al-Nûr as a central figure within both the circles of the scholars and those of the aspirants to the path of Sufism (fuqarâ’). It is of note that both Yahyâ and Ibn al-Sakkâk were also closely associated with Ibn ‘Abbâd of Ronda (1332/1390) 15 as friends 9 Fahrasat makhtûtât Khizânat al-Qarawîyîn, ed. Muhammad al-‘Âbid al-Fâsî, 1979, 1/459. 10 This is more a description of the manuscript made by the editor of the catalog than an actual title. I will refer to the manuscript in this paper as Manâqib Abî al-Hasan al-Shâdhilî. 11 I owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Nelly Amri of the University of Manouba, Tunis. She consulted the Bibliothèque Nationale de Tunis for a second copy of this manuscript but found nothing. 12 Jadhwat al-iqtibâs, Rabat, 1974, p. 448; Kifâyat al-muhtâj, ed. Muhammad Mutî‘, Rabat, 2000, 1/304; Salwat al-anfâs, ed. Muhammad b. Ja‘far al-Kittânî, lithograph Fez, 3/305. 13 Yahyâ b. Ahmad b. Muhammad b. Hasan al-Sarrâj al-Nafzî al-Himyirî al-Fâsî: Jadhwat al-iqtibâs, 539; Kifâyat al-muhtâj, 2/273; Salwat al-anfâs, 2/143-144. 14 Jadhwat al-iqtibâs, 238; Nayl al-Ibjihâj, 284; Kitâyat al-muhtâj, 1/118-19; Salwat al-anfâs, 2/144-46. 15 See note 3 of “Ibn ‘Abbâd, modèle de la Shâdhiliyya” in the present volume for biographical sources for Ibn ??2 and disciples.16 ‘Abd al-Nûr had instructed Ibn ‘Abbâd in Arabic grammar and al-Muwattâ’, and it is most likely that he had been instrumental in introducing Ibn ‘Abbâd to the teachings of Abû l-Hasan al-Shâdhilî through the Manâqib. Yahyâ writes of ‘Abd al-Nûr: “He was our venerated mentor (shaykhunâ), a man of the lineage of the Prophet. He was a judge and a teacher, a distinguished scholar and one who gave the Friday sermon. He had an integral knowledge of fiqh, and among the foremost of the people of sound judgement [in civil affairs] (ahl al-shûrâ). His pen was more eloquent than his tongue. He bore a commitment to the path of Sufism (tarîqat al- qawm), and a love of those affiliated to it. He was easily moved to tears and had a great love for people committed to a life of piety.”17 Ibn al-Sakkâk is the first Moroccan author to mention by name the tarîqa Shâdhilîya in Morocco, he was also the first to ascribe the appellation of shâdhilî to Ibn ‘Abbâd. His book, Kitâb al-Asâlib,18 is an exposition of the essential principle, as Ibn al-Sakkâk perceived it, of Islamic spirituality: the abandonment of all claims to strength or personal capability (atabarri min al-hawl wa al-quwwa). In the sixth and last of his asâlîb (fol. 107r.-129v.) he affirms the centrality of this principle to the teachings of the tarîqa Shâdhilîya. In this chapter he cites the works and saying of venerable masters of the shâdhilî path, among them we find ‘Abd al-Nûr al-‘Imrânî mentioned. “Among the last to compose [a work] on the excellence of the master [Abû l- Hasan al-Shâdhilî] and who collected a portion of his teachings on the divine realities (haqâ’iq) was the discerning scholar (al-‘âlim al-muhaqqaq) Sayyidî ‘Abd al-Nûr—leader of the aspirants on the path (ra’îs al-fuqarâ’), foremost among the people of legal judgement (muqaddam arbâb al-futyâ), established in the way of [Imâm] Mâlik.... Let anyone who wishes to ascertain something of the lofty station of this spiritual pole (qutb) [Abû l-Hasan] ... study the book compiled by that discerning scholar [‘Abd al-Nûr].”19 We can ascertain from the above passages that ‘Abd al-Nûr’s erudition went beyond the domain of fiqh. His interests in Sufism would bring him in 745/1345, at the age of sixty, to travel to Tunis to seek out the disciples of Abû l-Hasan al-Shâdhilî. There he met and narrated extensively from Abû al-‘Abbâs Ahmad al-Jâmî, who had frequented a number of direct disciples Abû l-Hasan al-Shâdhilî. From al-Jâmî he collected the stories, sayings and ahzâb (litanies) of the Tarîqa and brought them back to Fez in his work: Manâqib Abî al-Hasan al- Shâdhilî. ‘Abbâd. 16 Yahyâ was the recipient of the greater portion of the correspondence that comprises the two collections of the letters of Ibn ‘Abbâb, the greater and the lesser, it was at the request of Yahyâ that Ibn ‘Abbâd wrote the commentary of the Hikam of Ibn ‘Atâ’ Allâh. 17 Kifâyat al-muhtâj from the Fahrasat Yahyâ al-Sarrâj, p. 304. 18 Uslûb min-al-kalâm ‘alâ lâ hawla wa-la quwwata illa billâh (known as Kitâb al-Asâlîb) Ms. Escorial no. 384/ 3, 914/1508, fol. 59 r-133v. See Nwiya, 1961, p. 16-22 for an overview of this work. 19 Kitâb al-Asâlîb, fol. 108 r. ??3 The Text: Manâqib Abî l-Hasan al-Shâdhilî The Manâqib begins in the traditional manner with a short preamble in which the author cites his name, gives praise to God and asks for blessing upon the Prophet. He then sets down the reason for writing the book: his intention to narrate the accounts of the spiritual states of Abû l-Hasan al-Shâdhilî that he had gathered during his sojourn in Tunis from those who had known the disciples of Abû l-Hasan himself. The major narrator of these accounts is Abû al-‘Abbâs Ahmad al-Murâdî, known as al- Jâmî who, although he had not been a direct disciple of al-Shâdhilî, had frequented the early disciples. Abû al-‘Abbâs narrates from Abû ‘Abd-Allah [Muhammad] Ibn Sultân and his brother Abû al-‘Azâ’im Mâdî b. Sultân (718/1318).20 Other disciples of Abû l-Hasan mentioned in the narratives are Abû Muhammad ‘Abd Allâh al-Habîbî,21 his first disciple in Tunis, and Abû ‘Abd Allâh al-Qazdîrî. The majority of the narratives are however from Abû ‘Abd-Allah Ibn Sultân. ‘Abd al-Nûr affirms his source, in the style of the faqîh, stating that, “When I ascribe a narration directly to Abû l-Hasan, without mention of a chain (sanad), it is as I have heard it from Abû al-‘Abbâs who has narrated it to me from Sayyidî Abû ‘Abd Allâh b. Sultân (Manâqib fol. 59r). In his introduction ‘Abd al-Nûr affords us a precious insight into the process of collecting the narratives and his commitment to transmitting the accounts he was receiving in as accurate a manner as possible. This passage also shows that the disciples in Tunis had written records of the early teachings of Abû l-Hasan. ‘Abd al-Nûr writes: “He [Abû al-‘Abbâs] would dictate to me during numerous sessions (majâlis) those reports which were pertinent to the topics we were discussing. Then God inspired me to write it down. So he would dictate to me after each discourse. Such it was that at times I would reread his recitation to him after having written it down, verifying it [with him]. Praise to God. (Manâqib fol. 60v)” Index of Chapters 22 Chapter One: His lineage, his early instruction and initiation by Shaykh ‘Abd al-Salâm 20 Abû al-‘Azâ’im Mâdî b. Sultân is mentioned in the first chapter of Durrat al-asrâr eleven times, he was among the first and most dedicated disciples of Abû l-Hasan. Ibn al-Sabbâgh draws on him extensively for the early biographical accounts of al-Shâdhilî. Mâdî b. Sultân was 116 years old when he died in Tunis, Durrat al- asrâr, p. 176. 21 His full name was [Abû Muhammad] ‘Abd Allâh b. [Salâma] al-Habîbî, Durrat al-asrâr, 8. al-Habîbî appears in the Rasâ’il al-Kubrâ, litho. Fez, 33 in which Ibn ‘Abbâd relates a vision of Abû l-Hasan from the Manâqib. 22 Durrat al-asrâr has five chapters. 1) His noble lineage and his initiation by Ibn Mashîsh; 2) Extracts of his letters; 3) His litanies and supplications, his invocations and personal prayers; 4) His visions, teachings treating Sufism, divine reality (haqîqa) and advice to his disciples; 5) His death and his spiritual heir Abû al-‘Abbâs al- Mursî. ??4 Ibn Mashîsh (d. 622/1225) on Mount ‘Alam and some of the sayings of Ibn Mashîsh. (fol. 60v- 61v) Chapter Two: His arrival in Ifriqîya and some of the miracles that occurred there and accounts of his elevated states related to his blindness. (fol. 61v- 63r) Chapter Three: His teachings testifying to his exalted station. (fol. 63v - 68v) Chapter Four: Extracts from his letters to his disciples. (fol. 68v- 71v) Chapter Five: His litanies, invocations and supplications. (fol. 71v- 72v) Chapter Six: The virtues of his companions. (incomplete) 23 A Summary Analysis of the Contents of the Manâqib The Manâqib of Imâm al-Shâdhilî is an orderly arrangement of narrative traditions collected by ‘Abd al-Nûr in Tunis in 745/1345. These traditions include the miracles, visions, intimate discourses with God and teachings of Abû al-Hasan al-Shâdhilî. These narrative traditions, from a variety of perspectives, impart authenticity to the nascent Shâdhilî order of Tunis and testify to the stature of the founder of the order within the hierarchy of Islamic spirituality. They emphasize, on the one hand, the divine favors bestowed upon Imâm al- Shâdhilî in the form of visions of the Prophet and intimate discourse with God, while affirming the order’s spiritual and intellectual continuity with the themes of traditional Sufism. Chapter one (fol. 60v- 61v – sections 1-7) 24 deals with the origins of the Shâdhilî order from the initial indecision of Abû l-Hasan as an aspirant of the path to his meeting with Shaykh ‘Abd al-Salâm Ibn Mashîsh. As a youth Abû l-Hasan was hesitating between living the life of an ascetic in the wilderness in order to give himself up totally to worship and invocation, or to return to the towns and settlements to be in the company of the scholars and the righteous. When he heard of a saintly man living in seclusion on Mount ‘Alam in the North of Morocco he hastened to meet him and his life changed. Even as he approached the cave of Ibn Mashîsh he heard from within, “O God, there are people who ask You to give them power over your creatures, and You give them that. But I, O God, beg You to turn Your creatures from me so that I may have no refuge except in You. (60v; Durrat al-asrâr, 7/11)” 25 23 The author did not in fact complete this initial arrangement of the chapters. Chapter Five contains only one litany, Chapter Six: “The virtues of his companions,” is but a title heading and was never completed. 24 I have separated the text into seventy-one sections of unequal length in accordance with specific narrative traditions or subject matter. The nature of the text lends itself well to this treatment and facilitates an analysis of the text making a comparison of the narrations of the Manâqib with the other biographies of Abû l-Hasan; Durrat al-asrâr and Latâ’if al-minan an easier task. 25 See The Mystical Teachings of al-Shâdhilî, p. 18. In my translations of narratives from the Manâqib that are 5 ?? The next morning, when he greeted his teacher to be, he asked him of his state (kayf al-hâl), to which Ibn Mashîsh responded, “I complain unto God about the coolness of contentment and submission (bard al-ridâ wa al-taslîm) just as you complain unto Him about the heat of self-direction and choice (harr al-tadbîr wa al-ikhtiyâr). (60v)” 26 When Abû l-Hasan asked how the master could complain of the “coolness of contentment and submission, the shaykh replied, “Because, I fear that their sweetness will distract me from God.” These seminal teachings of Ibn Mashîsh would, through Abû l-Hasan, become the foundational precepts of the Shâdhilî path. The emphasis on the transformation of consciousness to inward and outward God-centeredness, contentment with God in all states, and the inner withdrawal from creation in prosperity and adversity are all prefigured in the discourses narrated in this chapter of the Manâqib. In this chapter Ibn Mashîsh foretells his student’s eventual move to North Africa (Ifrîqîya) where he will become known by the name of al-Shâdhilî and the eminent spiritual station he will eventually inherit from Ibn Mashîsh himself. Abû l-Hasan relates that in a dream, he saw his master standing near the Divine Throne, when he tells him this in the morning Ibn Mashîsh replies, “O ‘Alî, it was not me you saw, it was the station you will inherit from me.” The parting words of advice and admonition that Ibn Mashîsh gives his disciple before he departs for Tunis serve as a fitting end to this first chapter of the Manâqib.27 “O ‘Alî, God is God, and men are men. Keep your tongue from mentioning them and your heart from imitating their ways. Be assiduous in the fulfillment of the mandatory practices of the religion and protect your bodily members from forbidden things. In you the role of sainthood will have reached fruition. Only admonish others to the degree that is obligatory upon you. And say, “O God, give me repose from their mention [of me] and from any obstacles arising from them. Deliver me from their evil. Let Your bounty suffice me from [having to seek] their bounty, and protect me among them by Your special grace. Verily, You have power over all things.” (60v; Durrat al-asrâr also cited in Durrat al-asrâr I will follow the folio reference from the Manâqib with the page and line from the Tunisian edition. In order to facilitate access to more extensive English translations of these citations, I will cite referents from The Mystical Teachings of al-Shâdhilî. All translations in this chapter, however, unless otherwise stated, are my own. 26 See La Sagesse des Maîtres Soufis for the translation of this passage, p. 102-103. 27 These two passages reflect the five principles that Ahmed Zarrûq (846/1442- 899/1494) would eventually formulate as the foundations of the Shâdhilî Order in his The Principles of the Path and the Foundations of the Truth (Usûl al-tarîqah wa usus al-haqîqah) 1. Godwariness inwardly and outwardly 2. Accordance with sunna in speech and deed 3. Withdrawal from creation, in prosperity and adversity 4. Contentment with God in scarcity and plenty 5. Turning to God in joy and sorrow ?Ibn ‘Ayyâd, al-Mafâkhir al-‘iliyya, Caire, 1315/1898, p. 94-96. ?6 5/15 )” 28 Ibn Mashîsh also said “O ‘Alî, flee from men’s benevolence more than you flee from their malevolence. Because their benevolence will afflict your heart, while their evil will only afflict your body, and it is better that the body be afflicted than the heart. (60v; Durrat al-asrâr 94/10)” 29 Chapter Two (fol. 61v- 63v – sections 8-38) treats the arrival of Abû l-Hasan in Tunis. Two themes are central to this chapter: the visions, intimate discourses, and miracles of the Shaykh and the affirmation and definition of his role as a spiritual master and as the Qutb. The greater part of these visions are of the Prophet, who orders him down from Mount Zaghwân to take up his role as a teacher among the people, and who provides him, through intimate discourse, with the counsel and insights that illuminate his teachings with prophetic light. In all, this chapter includes twenty narratives treating visions of angels, the Divine Throne, the mysterious Khidr, other prophets, and the Companions, such as ‘Umar and Abû Bakr al-Siddîq. Throughout these narratives the role of Abû l-Hasan within the spiritual hierarchy of sainthood (walâya) is touched upon again and again. One long narrative treats the fifteen signs by which one may recognize the Pole (qutb) 30 another, reminiscent of the Mi‘râj, introduces Abû l-Hasan’s vision of the Highest Heaven (‘Illiyûn) and his direct discourse with God.31 In another, when asked of his own spiritual master he responded: “For a long time I was attached to the Shaykh Abû Muhammad ibn Mashîsh, but now I am swimming in ten seas: five of the descendants of Adam and five of angelic beings (rûhânîyîn). The descendants of Adam are the Prophet, may the peace and blessings of God be upon him, and the four Caliphs after him; the spiritual beings are Jibrîl, Mikâ‘il, Isrâfîl, ‘Azrâ’îl, and the Spirit. (62r; Durrat al-asrâr 111/13)” 32 He also related “When God rent the veil [of manifestation] from me, I said, “O God, veil Yourself from me as You have veiled Yourself from Your creation.” To which God replied, “If you asked me in the manner Moses, My spokesman (kalîmî), asked me, or like Jesus, My spirit (rûhî), asked or Muhammad, My attribute (sifatî), I would not veil Myself from you; rather ask Me to strengthen you.” So I asked Him to strengthen me, and now by God, were He to be veiled from me for the blink of an eye I would die.” (62r) 28 My thanks to Michael Fitzgerald, I have drawn extensively on his translations of the about sections from his, as yet unpublished critical edition and translation of, Ibn ‘Ajîba’s Commentary of the Taslîya of Ibn Mashîsh . Also see The Mystical Teachings of al-Shadhili, p. 16. 29 The Mystical Teachings of al-Shadhili, p. 137. 30 This passage has been translated in both La Sagesse des Maîtres, p. 106, and in The Mystical Teachings of al- Shadhili, p. 108. 31 Ibid., p.161. 32 Ibid., p. 157. See also E. Geoffroy, 1998, p. 89. ??7 He also related that, “The animals in the wilderness derive sustenance from me, the fish in the sea derive sustenance from me and the French derive substance from me.” (62r) Concerning his companions he said: “Khadir said to me, “O ‘Alî I will be there for your companions after you.” To which I replied, “No, I will be there for my companions, both the living and the dead.” (63r) He also related of his role as a spiritual master: “Whoever desires the exalted ranks of this world and the next (dârayn), let them retire with me for two breaths (nafasayn), and whoever retires with me for two breaths, I will grant protection in both worlds.” (62v) He also said of his role with his companions: “Anyone of my companions who has not reach his [destined] spiritual station I will bring him there.” (63r) Of his companions to come he said: “I have companions born of men and women that have not yet been created, their spirits (arwâhuhum) have already made the pact with me (bâya‘nî).” (63r) Chapter two concludes with a warning as to the deceptive nature of the ego-self (nafs) and an admonition to be ever vigilant over one’s thoughts, inclinations, and inner attitudes. This final narration, presented as an intimate discourse: “It was said to me (qîla lî),” concisely delineates the two-fold response to the flawed nature of the nafs which has long been associated with the methodology of the Shâdhilîya path. Give the nafs no respite; either outwardly or inwardly. Outwardly restrain it within the bounds of the Qur’ân and Sunna; inwardly, do not be distracted, remain focused upon divine unity (mushâhada tawhîdîya). Shaykh Abû l-Hasan concluded the narrative saying: “Arm yourself with ritual purification, fasting, prayer, dhikr, reciting the Qur’ân and renouncing all claims to strength and power and you will be safe. Should you be overwhelmed, take faith as your fortress, and if you are overcome surrender the affair to God. Remain steadfast with divine unity (tawhîd), faith, and the love of God. Drown the mundane world in the ocean of Tawhîd before it drowns you. (63r; Durrat al-asrâr 121/18)” 33 Chapter Three (fol. 63v- 68r – sections 39-68) is the longest chapter in the Manâqib. It entails an eclectic array of topics ranging from advice and counsel for initiates and the nature of the path and journeying (sulûk) itself, to short aphorisms. Many of the narratives are representative of the speculative discourse that has always marked the Shâdhilîya tradition. Discourses on the nature of knowledge (ma‘rifa) and sainthood, complimented with Quranic ?33 For full translation of this narrative see The Mystical Teachings of al-Shadhili, p.171-172. ?8 exegeses and hadith commentary, have always been important elements of the teachings of Shaykh Abû l-Hasan. Much of the discourse is a marked by a propensity to categorize and classify in accordance with traditional Islamic legal thought, to which Shaykh Abû l-Hasan, as a figure well established in the erudition of his times, was no stranger. In the first narrative of this chapter the Shaykh discusses the four-fold nature of the path to God and the spiritual typology of each aspirant upon these paths along with the degree upon which each is founded and fruit of each of the four. He states: “The most direct path to God is founded upon four things. He who accomplishes them [all] is one of the true mystics, well-versed in the secrets of reality (siddiqîn muhaqqiqîn). He who accomplishes three of them is one of the friends of God (walî) who have been drawn near to Him. He who accomplishes two of them is one of the firmly believing martyrs (shuhadâ’). He who accomplishes one of them is one of the upright servants of God. The first of these four is remembrance (dhikr), the degree (bisât) 34 of which is righteous works, and the fruit of which is illumination. The second is meditation (tafakkur), the degree of which is perseverance, and the fruit of which is knowledge (‘ilm). The third is spiritual poverty (faqr) the degree of which is thankfulness, and the fruit of which is an increase in it. The fourth is love (hubb), the degree of which is disdain for the world and those of it, and the fruit of which is union with the beloved. (63v; Durrat al-asrâr 71/13)” 35 This chapter systematically treats the nature of knowledge from the belief in the oneness of God of the commonality, to al-ma‘rifa al-‘uzmâ in which the attributes of the “knower” attains equality with those of his “known.” The longest discourse in the Manâqib appears in this chapter and elucidates the inherent relationship between the spiritual states of the aspirants and the degrees of knowledge of God they have attained. - Four categories of knowledge (ma‘rifa) (65r) Knowledge of the commonality (al-‘awâmm) Knowledge of the elect (al-khawâss) Knowledge of the elect among the elect (khawâss al-khawâss) Supreme knowledge (al- ma‘rifa al-‘uzmâ) This chapter also includes a long discussion of the degrees of knowledge of the scholars, ascetics and the elect (65v-66v; Durrat al-asrâr 132-36) 36 Central to this systematic treatment of knowledge, its degrees and states, was how the various degrees of knowledge resonated within the scheme of the journey to God itself. The heart of this chapter is thus a systematic discussion of the nature of the journey to God and the 34 Shaykh al-Shâdhilî employs the word bisât frequently, the word refers to a carpet or a mat that one sits upon. Within the framework of his teachings however, the word is a metaphor for a degree, station or stable state, as when he refers to the bisât al-murâqaba or the state of meditation. I have thus translated bisât as degree. 35 Translation, E. Douglas, with some variants, The Mystical Teachings of al-Shadhili, p. 109. 36 Ibid., p. 186-191. ??9 typologies of the journeyers, whether devotees (‘ibâd), ascetics (zuhhâd), scholars, veracious ones (siqiqqîn), or friends of God (awliyâ’). These discussions contextualize and portray the spiritual journey as a multi-faceted hierarchy of varying paths and journeyers that intrinsically mirror to the multi-faceted nature of divine reality itself. Among the discourses dealing with the path to God are the following: - The four principles of the path (63v; Durrat al-asrâr 79/16 – 80/13) 37 - The four paths to God: (64r) The path of the righteous (sâlihîn) The path of the scholars (‘ulamâ’) The path of the friends of God (awliyâ’) The path of the veracious ones (siqiqqîn) - The four types of aspirants, their foundations (usûl) and states: (64r) Devotees (‘ibâd) Ascetics (zuhhâd,) Friends of God (awliyâ’) Veracious ones (siddîqîn) Walâya as the fruit of the path to God corresponds to the highest degree of experiential knowledge of God, ma‘rifa. The walî as a journeyer and a vehicle of ma‘rifa exemplified the highest aspirations of the path for other journeyers. The walî, as an exemplar and spiritual master, was thus central to the process of the actualization of the knowledge of God. In effect the exemplar was the goal of the aspirant and the seal of authenticity of the path itself, for by their very comportment they reflected essential unity on the individual level with all saints, on the one hand, and with the inherent unity of Divine Reality on the other. Walâya was a central concept to the teachings of the Shâdhilîya from the earliest times it is thus no surprise to find that the Manâqib offers new insights into the place of the walî within the spiritual hierarchy of Islamic mysticism and his role within Islamic society. On the subject of walî and the portion people share in him (huzûz al-khalq ‘alâ al-walî) Shaykh al-Shâdhilî said; “People hold a share (hazz) in the walî in four things. For the commonality it is the presence of blessings (baraka); the portion of the elect among the commonality - the devotees and ascetics - is the revealing of miracles; the portion of the scholars is [exegetic] mastery and eloquence in Qur’ânic verses; and the portion of the friends of God from him is governance of the spiritual surroundings through unveiling (al- ishrâf bi-l-kashf ‘alâ al-ihâtâ) - meaning that he speaks of fundamental and ultimate truths (al-awwaliyât wa al-akhiriyât).” He then continues his narrative with further elucidation of the state of the walî saying: ?10 “Why do you ponder [the state of] the walî? If you say, “The outer aspect [of things] gives clear indication,” I would say, “It is greater [than you imagine], the dust or even the least of his words on traditional views of divine unity (tawhîd) would suffice you. The Law outwardly conceals him. If you ask him of subtleties of journeying (raqâ’iq), he will efface them for you with subtleties of divine realities (daqâ’iq). If you ask him of people (al-khalq), he will efface them for you in Divine Truth (al-Haqq) and cause you to turn from them in disdain.” (64v-65r) Complimentary to the systematic treatment of the greater part of narratives in this chapter are the many aphorisms (hikam) that accent the themes or topics of the narratives in a more direct and intuitive manner. I will cite here a several of the hikam of Shaykh al-Shâdhilî. Regarding experiential knowledge he said, “Knowledge derived from evidence (dalîl) and logical proof (burhân) is the knowledge of the blind. Knowledge of the prophets and siddiqûn is the knowledge of witnessing (shuhûd) and true vision (‘iyân). God Most Exalted has said: The heart did not give the lie to what it saw. Do you then cast doubt on what it saw?” [Sûrat al-Najm, 11]. (67v) He also related concerning the knowledge of the inner secret (al-sirr), “One who does not see everything from his inner secret (sirr) as a delusion (sarâb), deception and confusion are their dwelling place.” (67v) He said of the certainty of the veracious believer, “The certainty of the veracious believer would only increase were all those who dwelled on the earth to belie him; and were they to affirm him in the truth he would only become more soundly established.” (68r) He also said, “I lost all hope of benefiting myself (nafsî) by my own means, how can I not lose hope of receiving benefit from others? I anticipate God’s benefits for others, shall I not anticipate it for myself?” (67v; Durrat al-asrâr, 93/13) 38 He also said, “If others call out to Him from the carpet (bisât) of obedience, [you should] call out to Him from the carpet of disobedience.” (67v) To conclude this over view of Chapter Three I will cite a narration that does not appear in the other collections that I am familiar with. In this narrative Shaykh al-Shâdhilî discusses the four universes and the reciprocal manner in which they resonate within manifestation. Shaykh Abû l-Hasan said: “The universes are four in number: solid bodies (ajsâm kathîfa), the universe of subtle bodies (ajsâm latîfa), the universe of translucent spirits (arwâh shafîfa), and the universe of mysterious secrets (asrâr gharîba). When the solid bodies are isolated unto themsleves they form the inanimate world, solid and subtle bodies when brought together with translucent spirits result in human beings, and when these three with the mysterious secrets are mingled 37 Ibid., p.118. 38 Ibid., p. 136. ??11 they become a prophet or a siddîq. If it is a prophet he is given command of the community (al-umma) and if he is a friend of God (al-walî) he is given command over spiritual secrets (al-asrâr).” (67v) Chapter Four (fol. 68v- 71v) contains extracts of three letters written by Shaykh al- Shâdhilî to his disciples. The two longest letters, one to Abû Yahyâ al-Mahjûb (Jamîl al- Habîbî) (D.A. 25-26) and the other to Letter to Abû l-Hasan ‘Alî Ibn Makhlûf (D.A. 29-38), appear in Durrat al-asrâr and have appeared in translation.39 The second letter (68v) to the best of my knowledge has not appeared in print. It treats walâya and the attributes of the awliyâ’, “If you see them from the point of view of human beings you see human attributes; if you see them from the point of view of the Truth (al-Haqq) you see the attributes of God and his magnificence.” These three letters treat in a more discursive manner the general the themes dealt with in Chapter Three. Chapter Five (fol. 71v- 72v) is the final chapter of the Manâqib. At the beginning of the chapter ‘Abd al-Nûr informs us that he intends to narrate the litanies, invocations and supplications of Shaykh Abû l-Hasan as dictated to him by Abû al-‘Abbâs al-Jâmî. It appears, however, that this chapter was not completed for it consists of but one short litany.40 The litany ‘Abd al-Nûr cites entitled the Hizb al-Kabîr, however, is problematic. Ibn Sabbâgh cites the same hizb as a short preamble to the Hizb al-Kabîr (D.A 41-44). This preamble is also known as the Hizb al-Âyât.41 ‘Abd al-Halîm Mahmûd has clarified this apparent case of “mistaken identity” by noting that this hizb may have been recited as a preamble by Abû l- Hasan al-Shâdhilî when time permitted, otherwise the recitation of the Hizb al-Kabîr began from verse 111 from Surat al-Tawba.42 ‘Abd al-Nûr must have been aware of this, for despite the abbreviated form of the Hizb in the Manâqib we know that he was considered a key figure in the chain of transmission of the complete Hizb al-Kabîr within the shâdhilî circles of Fez. Several works of the early Shâdhilîya of Fez make mention of ‘Abd al-Nûr as a transmitter of the Hizb al-Kabîr. Muhammad al-‘Arabî b. Yûsuf al-Fâsî (d. 1052/1643) mentions the existence of three chains of transmission of the Hizb in Fez: those of ‘Abd al- Nûr, Ibn Sabbâgh and that of Ibn ‘Abbâd which he relates was the most prevalent in Fez.43 Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Rahmân al-Fâsî (d. 1134 /1722) in his Fahrasa 44 mentions a narrative 39 Ibid. p. 41-42 and p. 46-65. 40 It is also possible that this manuscript is incomplete, the colophon at the end of the manuscript (fol. 72v) however indicates that the scribe was also under the impression that this was the end of the composition. 41 Abd al-Halîm Mahmûd, al-Madrasa al-shâdhilîya al-hadîtha, Cairo, n.d p. 184-190. 42 Ibid., p. 184. The Hizb Kabîr was also known as Hizb idhâ jâ’aka. 43 Mir‘ât al-mahâsin, ed. al-Sharîf M. H. al-Kittâni, Casablanca, 2003, p. 134. 44 Al-Minah al-bâdîya fî al-asâlîb al-‘âlîya, Ms. cited by P. Nwyia, 1961, p. 54. ??12 chain that connects Ibn ‘Abbâd to the textual tradition of Imâm al-Shâdhilî through ‘Abd al- Nûr, Abû al-‘Abbâs al-Jâmî, Abû and ‘Abd Allâh b. Sultân; this is the chain of the Manâqib. The Critical Edition In my critical edition of the The Manâqib Abî al-Hasan al-Shâdhilî I separated the text into seventy-one sections of unequal length in accordance with specific narrative traditions or subject matter. The nature of the text lends itself well to this treatment and facilitates an analysis of the text and the comparison of the citations of the Manâqib with the other biographies of Abû l-Hasan; Durrat al-asrâr and Latâ’if al-minan an easier task. Ibn al- Sabbâgh had had direct access to the disciples of Shaykh Shâdhilî in Tunis, particularly Mâdî b. Sultân. ‘Abd al-Nûr, twenty to twenty five years after Ibn Sabbâgh, however, had access to a representative of the order who was a disciple of Abû ‘Abd Allâh b. Sultan and his brother Mâdî b. Sultân. The two texts are therefore quite similar and tend to parallel each other in many ways. Ibn Sabbâgh, however, had not exhausted the Tunisian tradition of the Shâdhilîya. In the Manâqib we have a wealth of new material and a key to a more in-depth understanding of the Tunisian branch of the early Shâdhilîya. Of the seventy-one sections of the Manâqib there are thirty-four narrations and one letter that do not occur in either Durrat al-asrâr or the Latâ’if al-minan.45 In the eventual critical Arabic edition of the Manâqib I will note the parallel narratives from Durrat al-asrâr where I am aware of similarity. It should be held in mind, however, that even in the parallel narratives important variants often occur, at times serving as interpretation, clarification or of linguistic interest. Conclusion A cursory overview of the Manâqib of ‘Abd al-Nûr al-‘Imranî and subsequent references to it from traditional Moroccan sources have led me to the following conclusions regarding the text and the manner in which it has augmented our knowledge of the Shâdhilîya Order. 1) The text provides 34 previously unpublished narratives and one letter of Abû l-Hasan al-Shâdhilî. 2) The similarities between this text with that of Ibn Sabbâgh, composed independently some 25 years earlier, indicate the existence of an integral written tradition of the Tunisian branch of the Shâdhilîya. 3) The specific chain of transmission of the Manâqib allows us to identify a portion of ?45 There is little in the Manâqib that parallels Latâ’if al-minan. ?13 the citations of Ibn Sabbâgh as belonging to the Tunisian branch of the order. Ibn Sabbâgh, after the biographical citations of the first chapter does not usually ascribe his citations to specific narrators. 4) There are references in later works to ‘Abd al-Nûr and the Manâqib that confirm an early link between Fez and the Tunisian branch of the Shâdhilîya.46 5) Ibn ‘Abbâd appears to have played an axial role between Tunisian and Egyptian Shâdhilî Orders. He was a student of ‘Abd al-Nûr on the one hand and the person who popularized the works of Ibn ‘Atâ’Allâh in Fez on the other. Thus Ibn ‘Abbâd became the figure who best exemplified shâdhilî teachings in both its traditions. Ahmed Zarrûq said of Ibn ‘Abbâd that, “The substance (zubda) of its teachings are found in the letters [The Lesser and Greater Collections] and his commentary on the Hikam.”47 Bibliography Al-Fâsî Muhammad al-‘Arabî b. Yusûf, 2003, Mir‘ât al-mahâsin, ed. al-Sharîf M. H. al- Kittâni, Casablanca, p. 134. Cornell V., 1998, Realm of the Saint, Austin. Douglas E., 1993, The Mystical Teachings of al-Shadhili, New York. Fitzgerald M., 1983, Ibn ‘Ajîba’s Commentary of the Taslîya of Ibn Mashîsh, Marrakesh, Morocco. Geoffroy E., 1998, La Sagesse des maîtres soufis, Paris. Gril D. (ed. and trans.), 1986, Risâlat Safî al-Dîn ibn Abî al-Mansûr ibn Zâfir, Cairo. Ibn ‘Ayyâd, 1315/1898, al-Mafâkhir al-‘iliyya, Cairo. Nwyia P., 1961, Ibn ‘Abbâd de Ronda, Beirut. ?46 V. Cornell confirms this link from an early time between Tunis, Fez and Tlemcen in Realm of the Saint, Austin, 1998, p. 153-154. 47 A. Zarrûq, ‘Uddat al-murîd al-Sâdiq, Rabat, Ministry of Islamic Affairs, 1998, p. 432.
- [Instructions for the Cook (Tenzo Kyokun)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/instructions-cook-tenzo-kyokun) - From ancient times communities of the practice of the Way of Awake Awareness have had six office holders1 who, as disciples of the Buddha, guide the activities of Awakening2 the community. Amongst these, the tenzo bears the responsibility of caring for the community's meals. The Zen Monastic Standards 3 states, "The tenzo functions as the one who makes offerings with reverence to the monks." Since ancient times this office has been held by realized monks who have the mind of the Way 4 or by senior disciples who have roused the Way-seeking mind. This work requires exerting the Way.6 Those entrusted with this work but who lack the Way-seeking mind will only cause and endure hardship despite all their efforts. The Zen Monastic Standards states, "Putting the mind of the Way to work, serve carefully varied meals appropriate to each occasion and thus allow everyone to practice without hindrance." 7 In times past such great masters as Guishan Lingyou,8 Dongshan Shouchu, and others have served in this post. Although this is a matter of preparing and serving meals, the tenzo is not just "the cook." When I was in Song China , during spare moments I enquired of many elder monks who had served in the various offices11 about their experience. Their words to me were from the bone and marrow12 of the Awakened Ancestors who, having attained the Way, have passed it through the ages. We should carefully study the Zen Monastic Standards to understand the responsibility of the tenzo and also carefully consider the words of these senior monks. The cycle of one day and night begins following the noon meal.13 At this time the tenzo should go to the administrator and assistant administrator 14 and procure the rice, vegetables, and other ingredients for the next day's morning 15 and noon meals. Having received these things, you must care for them as you would the pupils of your own eyes. 16 Thus Zen Master Baoning Renyong 17 said, "Care for the monastery's materials 18 as if they were your eyes." The tenzo handles all food with respect, as if it were for the emperor; both cooked and uncooked food should be cared for in this way. Following this, all of the officers gather in the kitchen building in order to carefully consider the next day's meals with regard to flavourings, vegetables to be used, and the kind of rice-gruel. The Zen Monastic Standards states, "In deciding the morning and noon meals, the amount of food and number of dishes, the tenzo should consult the other officers. The six officers are the administrator, assistant administrator, treasurer, disciplinarian, tenzo, and head caretaker. After the menu is decided post it on boards by the abbot's residence19 and the study hall."20 Following this the morning gruel may be prepared. Do not just leave washing the rice or preparing the vegetables to others but use your own hands, your own eyes, your own sincerity. Do not fragment your attention21 but see what each moment calls for; 22 if you take care of just one thing then you will be careless of the ?????????????????????? ?other. Do not miss the opportunity of offering even a single drop into the ocean of merit or a grain atop the mountain of the roots of beneficial activity.23 The Zen Monastic Standards states, "If the six flavours 24 are not in harmony and three virtues25 are lacking, then the tenzo is not truly serving the community." Be careful of sand when you wash the rice, be careful of the rice when you throw out the sand. Take continuous care and the three virtues will be naturally complete and the six flavours harmonious. Xuefeng26 once practiced as tenzo under Zen Master Dongshan.27 Once when he was washing rice, Dongshan said, "Do you wash the sand away from the rice, or the rice away from the sand?" Xuefeng said, "I wash them both away together." Dongshan said, "Then what will the community eat?" Xuefeng overturned the washing bowl. Dongshan said, "You should go and study with someone else. Soon."28 Senior students, from ancient times, always practiced with the mind which finds the Way and so how can we of later generations not do the same? Those of old tell us, "For the tenzo, the mind which finds the Way actualizes itself through working with rolled up sleeves."29 You yourself should examine the rice and sand so that rice is not thrown out with sand. The Zen Monastic Standards states, "In preparing the food, the tenzo is responsible for examining it to ensure that it is clean." Do not waste grains of rice when draining off the rinsing water. In olden times a cloth bag was used as a filter when draining the rinse water. When the rice is placed in the iron cooking pot, take care of it so that rats do not fall into it or idlers just hang around poking at it. After cooking the vegetables for the morning meal and before preparing rice and soup for the noon meal bring together the rice pots and other utensils and make sure that everything is well-ordered and clean. Put whatever goes to a high place in a high place and whatever goes to a low place in a low place so that, high and low, everything settles in the place appropriate for it. 30 Chopsticks for vegetables, ladles, and all other tools should be chosen with great care, cleaned thoroughly, and placed well. After this, begin work on the coming day's meals. Remove any weevils, lentils, husks, sand, and pebbles carefully. While you are selecting the rice and vegetables, the tenzo's assistants should chant the sutras to the shining being of the hearth. 31 When preparing the vegetables or ingredients for the soup which have been received from the office 32 do not disparage the quantity or quality but instead handle everything with great care. Do not despair or complain about the quantity of the materials. Throughout the day and night, practice the coming and going of things as arising in the mind, the mind turning and displaying itself as things. Put together the ingredients for the morning meal before midnight and begin cooking after midnight.33 After the morning meal, clean the rice cooking pots and soup pots for the noon meal. The tenzo should always be present at the sink when the rice is being soaked and the water measured. Watching with clear eyes, ensure that not a single grain is wasted. Washing ??????????? ?it well, place it in the pots, make a fire, and boil it. An old teacher said, "Regard the cooking pot as your own head, the water your own life-blood." Place the cooked rice in bamboo baskets in summer and wooden serving buckets in winter and set these out on trays. While the rice is boiling, cook the soup and vegetables. The tenzo supervises this personally. This is true whether the tenzo works alone or has assistants to tend the fire or prepare the utensils. Recently, Zen monasteries have developed positions such as rice-cook and soup-cook 34 who work under the tenzo. The tenzo is always responsible for whatever is done. In olden times the tenzo did everything without any assistance. In preparing food never view it from the perspective of usual mind or on the basis of feeling- tones. Taking up a blade of grass erect magnificent monasteries,35 turn the Wheel of Reality within a grain of dust. If you only have wild grasses with which to make a broth, do not disdain them. If you have ingredients for a creamy soup do not be delighted. Where there is no attachment, there can be no aversion. Do not be careless with poor ingredients and do not depend on fine ingredients to do your work for you but work with everything with the same sincerity. If you do not do so then it is like changing your behaviour according to the status of the person you meet; this is not how a student of the Way is. Strengthen your resolve and work whole-heartedly to surpass the monks of old and be even more thorough than those who have come before you. Do this by trying to make as fine a soup for a few cents 36 as the ancients could make a coarse broth for the same amount. The difficulty is that present and the past are separated by a gulf as great as between sky and earth and no one now can be compared to those of ancient times. However, through complete practice of seeing the nature of things37 you will be able to find a way. If this isn't clear to you it is because your thoughts speed about like a wild horse and feeling-tones careen about like a monkey in the trees. Let the monkey and horse step back and be seen clearly and the gap is closed naturally.38 In this way, turn things while being turned by them. Clarify and harmonize your life without losing the single Eye which sees the context or the two eyes which recognize the details.39 Taking up a vegetable leaf manifests the Buddha's sixteen-foot golden body;40 take up the sixteen-foot golden body and display it as a vegetable leaf. This is the power of functioning freely as the awakening activity which benefits all beings. Having prepared the food, put everything where it belongs. Do not miss any detail. When the drum sounds or the bells are struck, follow the assembly for morning zazen and in the evening 41 go to the Master's quarters to receive teachings. When you return to the kitchen, 42 count the number of monks present in the Monks' Hall; 43 try closing your eyes. Don't forget about the senior monks and retired elders in their own quarters or those who are sick. Take into account any new arrivals in the entry hall 44 or anyone who is on leave. Don't forget anyone. If you have any questions consult the officers, the heads of the various halls, or the head monk. When this is done, calculate just how much food to prepare: for each grain of rice needed, supply one grain. One portion can be divided into two halves, or into thirds or fourths. If two people tend to each want a half-serving, then count this as the quantity for a single full serving. You must know the difference that adding or subtracting one serving would make to the whole. ??????????? ???If the assembly eats one grain of rice from Luling,45 the tenzo is the monk Guishan.46 In serving a grain of that rice, the tenzo sees the assembly become the ox. The ox swallows Guishan. Guishan herds the ox. Are your measurements right or are they off? Have those you consulted been correct in their counting? Review this as best as you can and then direct the kitchen accordingly. This practice of effort after effort, day after day, should not be forgotten. When a patron visits the monastery and makes a donation for the noon meal, discuss this with the other officers. This is the tradition of Zen monasteries. Other offerings to be distributed should also be discussed with the other officers. In this way, the responsibilities of others are not disrupted nor your own neglected. When the meal is ready and set out on trays, at noon and morning put on the wrap robe, 47 spread your bowing mat, 48 offer incense and do nine great bows in the direction of the Monks' Hall. When this is done, send out the food. Day and night, the work for preparing the meals must be done without wasting a moment. If you do this and everything that you do whole-heartedly, this nourishes the seeds of Awakening and brings ease and joy to the practice of the community. Although the Buddha's Teachings have been heard for a long time in Japan , I have never heard of any one speaking or writing about how food should be prepared within the monastic community as an expression of the Teachings, let alone such details as offering nine bows before sending forth the food. As a consequence, we Japanese have taken no more consideration of how food should be prepared in a monastic context than have birds or animals. This is cause for regret, especially since there is no reason for this to be so. When I was staying at Tiantong-jingde-si,49 a monk named Lu from Qingyuan fu50 held the post of tenzo. Once, following the noon meal I was walking along the eastern covered walkway towards a sub-temple called Chaoran Hut 51 when I came upon him in front of the Buddha Hall 52 drying mushrooms in the sun. He had a bamboo stick in his hand and no hat covering his head. The heat of the sun was blazing on the paving stones. It looked very painful; his back was bent like a bow and his eyebrows were as white as the feathers of a crane. I went up to the tenzo and asked, "How long have you been a monk?" ??????"Sixty-eight years," he said. "Why don't you have an assistant do this for you?" "Other people are not me." "Venerable sir, I can see how you follow the Way53 now when the sun is so hot?" "If not now, when?" through your work. But still, why do this ?There was nothing else to say. As I continued on my way along the eastern corridor I was moved by how important the work of the tenzo is. ?In May of 1223 54 I was staying aboard the ship at Qingyuan. Once I was speaking with the ?captain when a monk about sixty years of age came aboard to buy mushrooms from the ships Japanese merchants. I asked him to have tea with me and asked where he was from. He was the tenzo from Ayuwang shan.55 He said, "I come from Xishu 56 but it is now forty years since I've left there and I am now sixty- one. I have practiced in several monasteries. When the Venerable Daoquan became abbot at Guyun temple57 of Ayuwang I went there but just idled the time away, not knowing what I was doing.58 Fortunately, I was appointed tenzo last year when the summer Training Period ended. 59 Tomorrow is May 5th60 but I don't have anything special offerings for the monks so I thought I'd make a nice noodle soup for them. We didn't have any mushrooms so I came here to give the monks something from the ten directions." "When did you leave Ayuwangshan?" I asked. "After the noon meal." "How far is it from here?" "Around twelve miles."61 "When are you going back to the monastery?" "As soon as I've bought the mushrooms." I said, "As we have had the unexpected opportunity to meet and talk like this today, I would like you to stay a while longer and allow me to offer Zen Master tenzo a meal." "Oh, I'm sorry, but I just can't. If I am not there to prepare tomorrow's meal it won't go well." "But surely someone else in the monastery knows how to cook? If you're not there it can't make that much difference to everyone." "I have been given this responsibility in my old age and it is this old man's practice. How can I leave to others what I should do myself? As well, when I left I didn't ask for permission to be gone overnight." "Venerable sir, why put yourself to the difficulty of working as a cook in your old age? Why not just do zazen and study the koan of the ancient masters?" The tenzo laughed for a long time and then he said, "My foreign friend, it seems you don't really understand practice or the words 62 of the ancients." Hearing this elder monk's words I felt ashamed and surprised. I asked, "What is practice? What are words?" The tenzo said, "Keep asking and penetrate this question and then you will be someone who understands." But I didn't know what he was talking about and so the tenzo said, "If you don't understand then come and see me at Ayuwang shan some time. We'll talk about the meaning of words." Having said this, he stood up and said, "It'll be getting dark soon. I'd best hurry." And he left. ?????????In July of the same year I was staying63 at Tiantongshan when the tenzo of Ayuwang shan ?came to see me and said, "After the summer Training Period is over I'm going to retire as tenzo and go back to my native region. I heard from a fellow monk that you were here and so I came to see how you were making out." I was overjoyed. I served him tea as we sat down to talk. When I brought up our discussion on the ship about words and practice, the tenzo said, "If you want to understand words you must look into what words are. If you want to practice, you must understand what practice is." I asked, "What are words?" The tenzo said, "One, two, three, four, five." I asked again, "What is practice?" "Everywhere, nothing is hidden."64 We talked about many other things but I won't go into that now. Suffice it to say that without this tenzo's kind help I would not have had any understanding of words or of practice. When I told my late teacher Myozen 65 about this he was very pleased. Later I found a verse that Xuedou66 wrote for a disciple: One, seven, three, five. What you search for cannot be grasped. As the night deepens, the moon brightens over the ocean. The black dragon's jewel is found in every wave. Looking for the moon, it is here in this wave and the next. What the tenzo said is expressed here in Xuedou's verse as well. Then it was even clearer to me that the tenzo was truly a person of the Way. Before I knew one, two three, four, five; now I know six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Monks, you and those to follow must understand practice and words through this and from that. Exert yourself in this way and you will practice the single true taste of Zen beyond words, 67 undivided into the poisonous five flavours. 68 Then you will be able to prepare food for the monastic community properly. There are many old stories we can hear and present examples of monks training as tenzo. A great many teachings concern this because it is the heart of the Way. Even if you become the Abbot of a monastery, you should have this same understanding. The Zen Monastic Standards states, "Prepare each meal with each detail kept clear so that there will be enough. Make sure that the four offerings of food, clothing, bedding, and medicine 69 are adequate just as the Generous One offered to his disciples the merit of twenty years of his lifetime. We ourselves live today within the light of that gift because the energy of even a white ?????? ??hair between his brows 70 is inexhaustible." It also says, "Just think about how to best serve the assembly without being hindered by thoughts of povertyy. If your mind is limitless, you enjoy limitlessness." This is how the abbot serves the assembly. In preparing food, it is essential to be sincere and to respect each ingredient regardless of how coarse or fine it is. There is the example of the old woman who gained great merit through offering water in which she had rinsed rice to the Thus Come.71 And of King Asoka creating roots of wholesomeness through offering half a mango to a monastery as he lay dying.72 As a result of this he realized the deathless in his next life. Even the grandest offering to the Buddha, if insincere, is worth less than the smallest sincere offering in bringing about a connection with awakening. 73 This is how human beings should conduct themselves. A rich buttery soup 74 is not better as such than a broth of wild herbs. 75 In handling and preparing wild herbs, do so as you would the ingredients for a rich feast, wholeheartedly, sincerely, clearly. When you serve the monastic assembly, they and you should taste only the flavour of the Ocean of Reality , the Ocean of unobscured Awake Awareness, not whether or not the soup is creamy or made only of wild herbs. In nourishing the seeds of living in the Way rich food and wild grass are not separate. There is the old saying, "The mouth of a monk is like a furnace." 76 Bear this in mind. Wild grasses can nourish the seeds of Buddha 77 and bring forth the buds of the Way.78 Do not regard them lightly. A teacher must be able to use a blade of wild grass to benefit humans and shining beings. Do not discriminate between the faults or virtues of the monks or whether they are senior or junior. You do not even know where you stand, so how can you put others into categories. Judging others from within the boundaries of your own opinions, how could you be anything other than wrong? Although there are differences between seniors and juniors, all are equally members of the assembly.79 Those who had many faults yesterday may be correct and clear today. Who can judge "sacred" from "common." The Zen Monastic Standards states, "Whether foolish or wise, the fact that one trains as a monk provides for others a gift that penetrates everywhere." If you stand beyond opinions of right and wrong, you bring forth the practice of actualizing unsurpassable Awakening. If you do not, you take a wrong step and miss what's there.80 The bones and marrow of the ancients was just the exertion of such practice and those monks who train as tenzo in the future realize the bones and marrow of the Way only through just such exertion. The monastic rules set forth by great Master Baizhang 81 must always be maintained. After I returned to Japan I stayed at Kennin-ji82 for around two years. They had the office of tenzo there but it was only nominal because no one actually carried out the real activity of this training post. They did not understand it as the activity of Awake Awareness so how could they have been able to use it to express the Way? Truly, it was very sad. The tenzo there had never encountered a living one who could use the office of tenzo as the functioning of Awake Awareness and so he carelessly idled away, breaking the standards of practice. I watched the tenzo there quite closely. He never actually worked at preparing the morning and evening meals but just ordered about some rough servants, lacking in intelligence and heart, leaving to them all the tasks whether important or not. He never checked on whether they were working well or not, as if it would be shameful to do so like peeping into the private quarters of a neighbouring woman. He just hung about in his own rooms, reading sutras or chanting when he wasn't lying down or chatting. Months would go by before he would even ???????????? ?come close to a pot, let alone buy utensils or make out a menu. He did not understand that these activities are the exertion of Awareness. The practice of donning the wrap robe and offering nine bows before sending out the food was something he would never have even dreamed of; it just wouldn't have occurred to him. As he himself did not understand the office of tenzo, when it came time for him to teach a novice 83 how to carry out the office what understanding could be passed on? It was very regrettable. Although one might have the fortune to hold this post, if one is without the mind which uncovers the Way and fails to meet with one who has the virtue of the Way, it is like returning empty-handed after climbing a mountain of treasure or entering an ocean of jewels. Although you might not have the mind which uncovers the Way, if you meet one manifesting the True Person84 you can then practice and unfold the Way. Or, even if you cannot meet with one who is the display of the True Person, by yourself deeply arousing the seeking for the Way, you can begin the Way. If you lack both of these, what is the point? In the many monasteries of the mountains of Song China that I have seen, the monks holding the various offices train in these posts for a year at a time, each of them in each moment practicing by three standards. Firstly, to benefit others benefits yourself. Second, make every effort to maintain and renew the monastic environment. Third, follow the standards set forth by the examples of excellent practitioners of past and present and come to stand with them. You should understand that foolish people hold their practice as if it belonged to someone else, wise people practice with everyone as themselves. An ancient teacher85 said, Two-thirds of your life has passed without clarifying who you are. Eating your life, muddling about in this and that, you don't even turn when called on. Pathetic. From this verse we can see that if you have not met a true teacher, you will just follow the lead of your tendencies. And this is pathetic. It's like the story of the foolish son who leaves his parent's home with the family treasure and then throws it away on a dung heap. 86 Do not waste your opportunity as that man did. Considering those who in the past made good use of their training as tenzo, we can see that their virtues were equal to those of their office. The great Daigu 87 woke up while training as tenzo and Dongshan Shouchou's "Three pounds of flax," occurred while he was tenzo. 88 The only thing of value is the realization of the Way, the only time that is precious is each moment of realizing the Way. Examples of those who long for the Way are many. There is the story of a child offering the Buddha a handful of sand as a great treasure.89 Another is of someone who made images of the Buddha and had reverence for them and thus had great benefit follow them. 90 How much more benefit must there be in fulfilling the office of tenzo through actualizing its possibilities as ???????? ?have those excellent ones who have practiced before us? When we train in any of the offices of the monastery we should do so with a joyful heart, a motherly heart, a vast heart. A "joyful heart" rejoices and recognizes meaning. You should consider that were you to be born in the realm of the shining beings you would be absorbed in indulgence with the qualities of that realm so that you would not rouse the recognition of uncovering the Way and so have no opportunity to practice. And so how could you use cooking as an offering to the Three Jewels? Nothing is more excellent than the Three Jewels of the Buddha, the Teachings, and the Community of those who practice and realize the Way. Neither being the king of gods nor a world ruler can even compare with the Three Jewels. The Zen Monastic Standards states, "The monastic community is the most excellent of all things because those who live thus live beyond the narrowness of social fabrications." Not only do we have the fortune of being born as human beings but also of being able to cook meals to be offered to the Three Jewels. We should rejoice and be grateful for this. We can also reflect on how our lives would be were we to have been born in the realms of hell beings, hungry ghosts, animals, or jealous gods. How difficult our lives would be in those four situations or if we had been born in any of the eight adverse conditions. We would not then be able to practice together with the strength of a monastic community even should it occur to us to aspire to it, let alone be able to offer food to the Three Jewels with our own hands. Instead our bodies and minds would be bound within the limits of those circumstances, merely vessels of contraction. This life we live is a life of rejoicing, this body a body of joy which can be used to present offerings to the Three Jewels. It arises through the merits of eons and using it thus its merit extends endlessly. I hope that you will work and cook in this way, using this body which is the fruition of thousands of lifetimes and births to create limitless benefit for numberless beings. To understand this opportunity is a joyous heart because even if you had been born a ruler of the world the merit of your actions would merely disperse like foam, like sparks. A "motherly heart" is a heart which maintains the Three Jewels as a parent cares for a child. A parent raises a child with deep love, regardless of poverty or difficulties. Their hearts cannot be understood by another; only a parent can understand it. A parent protects their child from heat or cold before worrying about whether they themselves are hot or cold. This kind of care can only be understood by those who have given rise to it and realized only by those who practice it. This, brought to its fullest, is how you must care for water and rice, as though they were your own children. The Great Master Sakyamuni offered to us the final twenty years of his own lifetime to protect us through these days of decline. What is this other than the exertion of this "parental heart"? The Thus Come One did not do this hoping to get something out of it but sheerly out of munificence. ?????? ?"Vast heart" is like a great expanse of ocean or a towering mountain. It views everything from the most inclusive and broadest perspective. This vast heart does not regard a gram as too light or five kilos as too heavy. It does not follow the sounds of spring or try to nest in a spring garden; it does not darken with the colours of autumn. See the changes of the seasons as all one movement, understand light and heavy in relation to each other within a view which includes both. When you write or study the character "vast, this is how you should understand its meaning. If the tenzo at Jiashan had not thus studied the word "vast," he could not have woken up Elder Fu by laughing at him. If Zen Master Guishan had not understand the word "vast," he would not have blown on dead firewood three times. If the monk Dongshan had not understood the word "vast," he could not have taught the monk through his expression, "Three pounds of flax." All of these and other great masters through the ages have studied the meaning of "vast" or "great" not only though the word for it but through all of the events and activities of their lives. Thus they lived as a great shout of freedom through presenting the Great Matter, penetrating the Great Question, training great disciples and in this way bringing it all forth to us. The abbot, senior officers and staff, and all monks should always maintain these three hearts or understandings. Written in the spring of 1237 for those of coming generations who will practice the Way by Dogen, abbot of Kosho-(Horin-)ji.
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- [The Life of Swami Ramdas](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-life-of-swami-ramdas) - INTRODUCTION TO THE 1998 EDITION THE LIFE OF SWAMI RAMDAS It was during my student days that I first came across the writings of an interesting Indian spiritual teacher called Swami Ramdas. Reading his articles in various periodicals became one of my favorite pastimes. His lucid explanations, devoid as they are of philosophical and rhetorical hocus-pocus, resulted in my gradually acquiring a new outlook on life, and his direct and devotional approach to the Absolute rekindled my flagging interest in religion. Great was my joy when I heard in 1954 that the distinguished Swami was going to give some talks in Colombo (Sri Lanka) where I was studying at that time. Naturally I seized this golden opportunity of seeing him in the flesh and savoring the sight of his holy face. I was influenced by the Hindu belief that the darshan or the mere act of seeing a spiritual master and being in his presence is itself a blessing, regardless of whether one actually comprehends his message. Such a darshan is regarded as a factor that furthers one’s spiritual progress. Therefore I attended a crowded meeting in which Ramdas was going to speak. On this occasion I was accompanied by a friend who was an atheist. The tall bald-headed sage was seated on a dais. His upright and noble bearing bespoke confidence and inner peace. His large ears and prominent nose harmonized with his roundish face. Spotlessly dressed in white Indian clothes and clean-shaven, Ramdas radiated love and happiness from the very core of his being. I felt very comfortable and as it were bathed in the affection which emanated from him when I was in his presence. It was an emotion I shared with many of the others who were present. His all- embracing love endeared him to his disciples who affectionately addressed him as “Papa.” He was wearing glasses, which subtly enhanced his venerable and professorial appearance. xxix The Essential Swami Ramdas Sometimes he looked serious or solemn but whenever he smiled or laughed, which he frequently did, the eyes of Ramdas sparkled cheerfully and his face assumed an expression of innocence and childlike simplicity. Ramdas was sur­ rounded by numerous disciples and admirers, who were gazing at him with awe. He spoke English so fluently that listen­ ing to him was a sheer pleasure. Occasionally he would crack a joke or tell an instructional anecdote. His talk was punctuated with many references to Ram (i.e. God). He assured the audience that God can be realized by the constant repetition of His name. My atheist friend became very restless and com­ plained: “I can’t continue listening to all this nonsense!” I held his hand and whispered: “Please be patient! A God- realized man can’t help talking about God, can he? Ramdas is true to his name because ‘Ram’ means ‘God’ and ‘das’ stands for ‘servant.’ Servant of God—what an appropriate name!” My friend was so furious with me that he sighed with disgust and walked out of the lecture hall. Revered as one of the greatest saints and spiritual teachers of modern times, Ramdas was born on April 10th 1884 in Hosdrug (Kerala, India). The boy was given the name Vittalrao. The extraordinary luster in his eyes was so striking that it was generally regarded as the most remarkable thing about Vittalrao. Such eyes often bespeak brightness of mind and in fact a wandering sannyasin foretold a brilliant future for the boy. Concerning this rare light in his eyes, years later Ramdas modestly remarked: “This may mean anything or nothing.” His father, Balakrishnarao, began his career by working as a clerk for the government. Balakrishnarao’s large family consisted of his wife and their thirteen children. Vittalrao, their sixth child, wrote appreciatively about his parents: “This divine couple, by their ideal life of householders, held up before the world an example as to how life in the world could be made supremely blessed and glorious. Selfless service at home and of the guests that poured into their house, was the keynote of their lives.” xxx Introduction Vittalrao disliked the discipline of school life and “the so- called education of those days.” His spirit yearned for freedom and adventure. Often he played truant. He not only distanced himself from school but also from arithmetic which was his pet aversion. He used to draw caricatures of his teachers in the classroom. From his teachers he received the most cruel chastisement although he loved them and his school­ mates. He was punished even at home. Full of pranks and mis­ chief, he preferred climbing trees to attending school. How he enjoyed hopping from branch to branch in a monkey-like manner! How he amused himself by somersaulting continuously before a merchant who used to reward him with pieces of jaggery1 ! His childhood was evidently an interesting blend of happy moments and trying experiences. The religious atmosphere of his home was particularly suitable for the development of his soul—his grandfather’s regular puja, the singing of saints’ songs by his grandmother, the devotions and prayers of his father, his mother’s daily japa and the reading of the Puranas by an aunt. Between the ages of six and ten he was drawn towards trees, solitary spots and vast spaces. Like Wordsworth he was a child of nature. One of his favorite haunts was the old dilapidated fort of Hosdrug. The cool shade of the trees there and its silence was for him an elevating environment. Inside this fort was an ancient temple. He used to hover around this temple in a state of abstraction under the spell of nature’s serenity. During his childhood there was not in Vittalrao the least ambition for any worldly position or reward. It is significant that he already had the makings of a sannyasin. He loved children and wished to remain one throughout his life. His favorite hobby was draw­ ing pictures of persons and objects, which he was able to do because of an inborn talent for art. He also liked modeling with clay. 1 A coarse, dark sugar, especially that made from the sap of East Indian palm trees. xxxi The Essential Swami Ramdas When Vittalrao was sent to Mangalore for his higher studies, although his indifference to school education still continued, there now grew in him a thirst for general knowledge, gained either from day to day experience or by reading books. He passed no examinations during the period of his primary and secondary education. He eschewed all games and scarcely mixed with the other boys, though his classmates and teach­ ers had some affection for him. Neither did he read the text­ books nor attend classes regularly. He spent his time as a voracious reader of books from his school library. He developed a liking for English literature and read the works of the great masters with the result that quite early in life he achieved a high degree of proficiency in English. He was a good conversationalist and a raconteur with a fine sense of humor. Even in later life he would raise roars of laughter in his listeners through his keen sense of the comic. What appealed to him was not the serious side of life but the lighter. He was however by no means a superficial person. Another conspicuous early trait of his was a spirit of independence which enabled him to have his own distinct outlook on life. Both during his childhood and during his youth he did not care much what clothes he wore or how he wore them. He was so unconventional that he became indifferent to his external appearance. Throughout his life he remained extremely simple in his tastes and attitudes. Vittalrao next joined the Christian High School at Udipi. It is hardly surprising that he failed the matriculation exami­ nation; thereafter he returned home where, in his own words, he “enlisted himself to the sublime profession of idleness!” For a time he immersed himself in the activities of the Amateur Drama Society in which he played a prominent part. Vittalrao played a minor part in Shakespeare’s King John; later when he played the role of a clown in another play he brought down the house; finally, in a drama dealing with the life of Shivaji he acted the part of Samarth Ramdas, the great Maharashtrian saint and guru of Shivaji. xxxii Introduction The time spent in school was not altogether wasted because it enabled him to become intimately acquainted with the Bible. He made the following observation about his own religious evolution: “The old Bible of the Christians, and the ancient religion of the Hindus in several parts of it, depicted God as a God of retribution, who cursed those who acted contrary to His commands. Ramdas knew the power of the bhakti cult of the Hindus and the teachings of Buddha and Christ. All these presented before us a God who is compassion, kind­ ness, and forgiveness. To trust Him means to be entitled to His grace, and this Grace frees us from all hate, anger, and lust and converts us into His likeness. Ramdas had now begun to understand dearly the meaning and purpose of human life. This great ideal of God as love fired his heart and was slowly influencing his life.” In his writings, as in the above-mentioned quotation, Swami Ramdas refers to himself as “Ramdas” instead of “I.” He always speaks of himself in the third person. On many occasions he has mentioned that Ram and Ramdas are actually one because he has realized his oneness with Ram. Vittalrao’s parents sent him to the Madras Arts School where he studied drawing and engraving. As he was fond of art he progressed remarkably well there. Afterwards he went to Bombay where he studied textile manufacturing in the Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute. His reminiscences of this period are interesting: “God’s ways are inscrutable. The sub­ ject in which he had great interest and for which he had great love was given up and he had come to Bombay to study another subject for which he had absolutely no liking. Still three years were spent, not with the object of gaining any pass or dis­ tinction in the Institute training, but in studying life in close grips, studying men with intimate touch and association, read­ ing books from libraries which could provide any and every kind of book on any and every conceivable subject. He saw life in its highest heights and in its lowest depths.” During the first two years of his stay in Bombay, Vittalrao lived with his best friend, Vadiraj, an employee in a German xxxiii The Essential Swami Ramdas dye firm. Vadiraj looked after him with tender loving care. Vittalrao reciprocated his friend’s love with the same ardor. Theirs was a platonic relationship. Vittalrao has stated “Ramdas has seen brother loving brother, mother loving her sons, and friend loving a friend, but the love which this friend bore for Ramdas was something very rare. It can be compared to all the love of these three persons and much more. There was not a day when he returned from his office without a great longing to see Ramdas.... Whenever he got anything for him­ self, he would also get the same for Ramdas.” Vittalrao has also left us a moving description of his beloved friend’s demise and how this loss caused him much sadness: “... the friend who was all love and kindness to him and under whose loving care and affection Ramdas spent his years in Bombay, had a severe attack of typhoid. His mother, two wives and some other friends were in his house at the time. When his condition began to deteriorate, he did not wish that any of his relations should go to his room except Ramdas and the doctor. Medicines and food were given to him by Ramdas as he would not accept them from the hands of others. Ramdas used to be with him almost the whole day. He stopped going to the Institute during these days. Till then Ramdas had not been near any person at the last stage when life was going out of the body. Ramdas did not leave the friend’s bedside and he saw how gradually the disease was gaining the upper hand and wringing out his life.... When death claimed the friend, Ramdas’ heart was agitated with great sorrow. He started crying like a child which had lost its mother. In fact, some years later he lost his mother, but the pain of that loss was not as severe as this.... The impression which this sad event left on him deepened his indifferent attitude towards the high aims and ambitions of this transitory earthly life. When circumstances force the soul to turn to its immortal, changeless existence, full of light, peace, and joy, it gets now and again glimpses of this supreme state, just as one gets flashes of light from the sun for a brief period whenever the clouds that cover it pass on.” This heart-rending experience xxxiv Introduction was an important landmark in the path leading towards his eventual spiritual Liberation: it turned his attention from the ephemeral to the eternal. It was through his friend Vadiraj that he gained access to a library containing the great treasures of English literature. He continued reading widely, beginning with historical works and then changing over to poetry. Some of the poets whom he greatly admired were Shakespeare, Goldsmith, Byron, Browning, Cowper, Wordsworth, Shelley, Southey, Tennyson, and Keats. Next, he read the works of Burke, Carlyle, Ruskin, Schopenhauer and Emerson. He read them with great avidity but “could not find any suitable principles on which life could be safely founded though they did provoke thought and kindle an enquiry after Truth.” One senses a certain disappointment in Vittalrao: it was not mere intellectual stimulation that he was seeking but something else—a sound philosophy of life perhaps—which he had so far failed to find in books. It was then that he discovered the publications of the Rationalists’ Press Association of America. After reading the works of Ernst Haeckel, Grant Allen and others “the faith created and nourished during his childhood vanished at a sweep, and he turned into a skeptic. He felt that whatever he had read or heard from the scriptures about God and His worship, belonged to mental hallucinations. God was merely an idea conceived in the human brain. In reality there was no God; Nature alone caused all movements, and the two had no relationship or connection with each other. Ramdas remembers the expression often used in this regard—‘a fortuitous con­ course of atoms.’ Everything happens by chance and there is no such thing as an immanent and overruling power that guides the destinies of all things. The scientific manner in which the Rationalists sought to prove that God did not exist, dashed his faith in God to pieces.... It is no doubt easy to slip from faith in God to atheism; the path being downward and slippery, the time taken for the change is short and quick.” He continued his reading, which included the Greek philosophers, Roman orators, German and French dramatists, xxxv The Essential Swami Ramdas American and English humorists, and books on crime and detection. His religious faith had almost disappeared but it revived when he came across the works of Swami Vivekananda, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Swami Rama Tirtha. This renewed faith took deep root in him but in a different form because the ceremonial and ritualistic aspects of religion no longer appealed to him. “His ideal was a spiritual life built upon a sure and pure foundation of a strictly moral life and action. The idea of caste and creed vanished from his mind. He believed in a God who is the father of all members of the human race. God is universal, the divine source of all that exists. His heart bent before such a God.” From now onwards he concentrated on the Hindu and Christian scriptures and when he read a translation of the Bhagavad Gita it was for him a spellbinding experience. All this extensive reading was at the expense of his studies at the Institute! Although he had been treating his studies with indifference, he managed to pass the final examination by studying intensely for a month or two prior to it. Thereupon Vittalrao obtained his diploma in textile manufacture. Vittalrao was resolutely against marriage when a matrimonial proposal was first made to him. But in 1908 at the age of twenty-four, after some hesitation, he married Rukmabai, a cultured and religious lady, because he did not want to dis­ please his parents who had arranged the union, especially his sick and bedridden mother. He viewed the institution of marriage from a spiritual standpoint: “Marriage is considered to be a sacrament. It is to bring about the union of two souls so that they can walk hand in hand, as it were, on the path that leads to Divinity. But this significance is nowadays completely absent in the alliance of the two persons brought about by the ceremony or ritual of wedlock. In Ramdas’ case the marriage was not a success as he fully expected it. But that life gave him an experience which was needed for the complete understanding of life and its implications. Just as the harmonious xxxvi Introduction mingling of two souls provides us with opportunities to realize the beauty of life, so also the constant friction between two souls removes all the dross that covers the soul so that it may appear in all its nakedness before the Great Being from whom it has manifested.” Vittalrao now entered an unsettled phase in his life. His checkered career consisted of short periods of employment which were interspersed with longer periods when he was out of work. When his elder brother started a handloom and soap- making business in Madras, Vittalrao helped him a great deal, although his training in textile manufacture was more appropriate for a power-driven cotton mill. For a short time he secured employment as a spinning master in a cotton mill at Gulbarga. He lost this job when the management of the mill changed hands. It is an interesting fact that adverse circumstances did not depress him; on the contrary, he tended to become more optimistic. Life is full of challenges and he was willing to accept them cheerfully. He regarded the movement of life as a huge joke: whatever happened, favorable or unfavorable, he gladly accepted it, seeing it as the lila of the Lord. This attitude prevailed throughout his life, even prior to his spiritual metamorphosis, which will be described later in this account. Wherever he worked, Vittalrao was appreciated by his superiors, subordinates and colleagues for he was efficient and painstaking. He also desired to help the less privileged workers. Once when Vittalrao was holding the position of spinning master in a mill at Gadag, a certain disciplinary action that he took against a worker resulted in some of them wanting to assault him as he left the mill in the evening. Although some of the assistants warned him of their violent intentions, he ignored these warnings, and walked towards the gate where he confronted a group of workers who were armed with sticks. He simply smiled and remained unruffled and they did not attack him! xxxvii The Essential Swami Ramdas Next he worked in a mill at Quilon, where he was later promoted to the position of manager. The mill was in dire financial straits. There he was badly off for he did not get the full salary that was his due. He was so hard-pressed for money that he had to close down his own house and send his wife back to Mangalore. One Sunday when Vittalrao was alone in his office, a fitter who had not received his wages for several months, stood at the entrance to his office with a large knife and threatened that unless his wages were given immediately he would not allow Vittalrao to leave the place. Vittalrao not only told the desperate man that he was prepared to fight his way out but he also brandished a heavy rosewood ruler. This attitude quite surprised the fitter who, noticing Vittalrao’s grim determination, fled in fear. Vittalrao was a brave person who did not mind facing dangers and risking his own life. Five years after Vittalrao’s half-hearted marriage his daughter Ramabai was born. His professional career, like his domestic life, was not without troubles and he was sometimes out of work. When he was employed at a waste mill in Madras for a period of two years the mill’s proprietor cheated Vittalrao, who was deprived of more than half his salary. Whenever Vittalrao pressed for his money, the dishonest proprietor would say “Brother, God will give; God will give” but the Almighty failed to provide it! Next he got a job as a spinning master in the Coimbatore Spinning Mills whither he moved with his wife and child. The European managers of the mill became displeased when he championed the cause of his subordinates, especially that of the mill-hands. During this period the death of his beloved mother was an event that affected him very deeply. He had to rush to Hosdrug for the funeral. When he returned to Coimbatore he was asked to quit his job. He was again in search of employment, soon after the emotional crisis caused by the loss of someone so near and dear. On one occasion Vittalrao found work in a mill owned by an irascible old man who was given to using violent and abusive language. None of his employees escaped his verbal xxxviii Introduction attacks. Vittalrao’s contract was only for a period of four months. When Vittalrao warned his boss that his violent words would not be tolerated even for a moment, within two months of his commencing work the proprietor paid his full salary for the stipulated term and dismissed him. This incident illus­ trates Vittalrao’s daring and his sturdy independence. At a time when he was filled with disgust because of the need to look for employment every now and again, he received an invitation from his father-in-law at Mangalore to join him in his cloth business. The offer was accepted towards the end of 1917. Their commercial partnership foundered before long because Vittalrao disliked the chicanery and sub­ terfuge usually associated with trade. Inside a room he started dyeing and printing saris. When his wife was critically ill with a severe attack of smallpox, Vittalrao knelt before a photo of Sri Pandurangashram Swamiji of Chitrapur Math, Shirali, and prayed for her recovery. Tears rolled down his cheeks as he prayed and he experienced a certain peacefulness of mind. From that moment the patient’s condition began to improve and she was soon back to normal. This experience resulted in an important change in Vittalrao. He became increasingly religious and would talk only of God and the teachings of the saints. He would also pour out his heart, especially to his elder brother Sitaramrao who was also devotionally inclined. His business expanded and flourished and the two brothers cooperated to establish the firm Sri Sitaram Vittal Co. Later their brother Narsingrao also joined the enterprise as a partner. The goods produced by this company were highly appreciated and even won a gold medal at an exhibition. But the business seemed doomed to disaster: the wages paid to his workmen were too high; members of staff received frequent increments; the profits were canceled out by the overheads; there was no capital to back up the firm or reserves to draw on in times of financial hardship. Vittalrao was generous to a fault and he lacked the calculating shrewdness that is characteristic of many a successful businessman. xxxix The Essential Swami Ramdas Adversity was his constant companion. Not only was his business deteriorating but his wife had become a chronic asthmatic. Such misfortunes were counterbalanced by the joy of caring for his only child. He loved his daughter with all his heart, taking her to school in the mornings and bringing her back in the afternoons, playing games with her and answering all her questions. But before long this love for his only off­ spring was going to be superseded by his universal vision—his own child and all other children would be viewed with the same all-embracing love, unblemished by any feeling of par­ tiality or discrimination whatsoever. He spent an hour every evening at the house of his brother Sitaramrao with whose children he would participate in the communal singing of hymns before an image of Sri Krishna. During the bhajan he would experience a state of ecstasy. He also began studying anew the teachings of Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, Swami Rama Tirtha and other classics such as Yoga Vasishtha. These pursuits quickened his spiritual evolution. This was the time when Vittalrao began the spiritual practice of frequently repeating “Ram”—the sacred name of the Lord. It was a sadhana that brought him much peace and happiness. His business was faring so badly that creditors were insisting on the settlement of their dues. Only a miracle could save him from financial ruin. Then, providentially a prosperous lawyer turned up at Vittalrao’s house and offered to be his business partner. This person had recently given up his practice at the Bar in response to Mahatma Gandhi’s call to boycott the courts. Such was Vittalrao’s honesty that he did not withhold any information from him concerning the penurious state of the company’s affairs. The lawyer not only became a partner in the firm but also liquidated all its debts and even invested a large sum of money in new machinery for the production of khaddar. At a time when fortune was at last beginning to smile on his business enterprise, Vittalrao did not cash in on his luck to become rich or accumulate capital as indeed many a normal xl Introduction entrepreneur would have done. Instead his mind was turning increasingly towards the Supreme Being whose name he kept on repeating continuously, even during the greater part of the night. He gave up taking his night meal and his lifestyle became austere. Neither his alarmed wife nor his daughter succeeded in dissuading him from following this new course of life. He strongly felt that it was God who had chosen this particular path for him. An important stage in his spiritual growth was reached when he received spiritual initiation from his own father. How Vittalrao’s unshakeable trust in Ram sustained him during this time is best described in his In Quest of God: For nearly a year, Ramdas struggled on in a world full of cares, anxieties and pains. It was a period of terrible stress and restlessness—all of his own making. In this utterly help­ less condition, full of misery, “Where is relief? Where is rest?” was the heart’s cry of Ramdas. The cry was heard, and from the Great Void came the voice “Despair not! Trust Me and thou shalt be free!”—and this was the voice of Ram. These encouraging words of Ram proved like a plank thrown towards a man struggling for very life in the stormy waves of a raging sea. The great assurance soothed the aching heart of helpless Ramdas, like gentle rain on thirst­ ing earth. Thenceforward, a part of the time that was formerly totally devoted to worldly affairs was taken up for the meditation of Ram who, for that period, gave him real peace and relief. Gradually, love for Ram—the Giver of peace—increased. The more Ramdas meditated on and uttered His name the greater the relief and joy he felt. Nights, which are free from worldly duties were, in course of time, utilized for Ram bhajan with scarcely one or two hours’ rest. His devotion for Ram progressed by leaps and bounds. During the day, when cares and anxieties were besetting him due to monetary and other troubles, Ram was coming to his aid in unexpected ways. So, whenever free from worldly duties—be the period ever so small—he would meditate on Ram and utter His name. Walking in the streets he would be uttering, “Ram, Ram.” Ramdas was now losing attraction xli The Essential Swami Ramdas for the objects of the world. Sleep, except for one or two hours in the night, was given up for the sake of Ram. Fineries in clothes and dress were replaced by coarse khaddar. Bed was substituted by a bare mat. Food, first two meals were reduced to one meal a day and after some time this too was given up for plantains and boiled potatoes—chilies and salt were totally eschewed. No taste but for Ram; meditation of Ram continued apace. It encroached upon the hours of the day and the so-called worldly duties. At this stage one day, Ramdas’ father came to him, sent by Ram, and calling him aside, gave him the upadesh of Ram mantram—“Sri Ram, Jai Ram, Jai Jai Ram!” assuring him that if he repeated this mantram at all times, Ram would give him eternal happiness. This initiation from the father—who has thereafter been looked upon by Ramdas as gurudev—hastened on the aspirant in his spiritual progress. Off and on he was prompted by Ram to read the teachings of Sri Krishna-the Bhagavad Gita, Buddha-Light of Asia, Jesus Christ-New Testament, Mahatma Gandhi-Young India and Ethical Religion. The young plant of bhakti in Ram was thus nurtured in the electric atmosphere created by the influence of these great men on the mind of humble Ramdas. It was at this time that it slowly dawned upon his mind that Ram was the only Reality and all else was false. Whilst desires for the enjoyment of worldly things were fast falling off, the consideration of me and mine was also wearing out. The sense of possession and relationship was vanishing. All thought, all mind, all heart, all soul was concentrated on Ram, Ram covering up and absorbing everything. From time immemorial men and women from the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere have forsaken their worldly pos­ sessions to find God or Truth. They have endured tremendous hardships and privations in the course of their spiritual quest. Of the countless thousands who renounced the world only a few like the Buddha, Mahavira and Ramana Maharshi in modern times were conspicuously successful but many never seemed to accomplish anything. It was towards this well- trodden spiritual path that Vittalrao was moving. xlii Introduction He was becoming more and more ascetical. Dressed sim­ ply in a dhoti and a collarless shirt as well as a white cap, he happily walked the streets, constantly repeating the sweet and sacred mantra “OM. Sri Ram, Jai Ram, Jai Jai Ram.” (Interestingly enough, Ramdas had prefixed “OM” to the mantra given to him by his father. Ramdas was much attached to Swami Rama Tirtha whose mantra was OM—the primary or original sound from God.) Outwardly he was thin and pale but inside he was in a state of ecstasy on account of this ceaseless chanting. After rising at four o’clock in the morning he would have a bath and there­ after meditate until about seven. Such was his austerity that he ate only when he experienced pangs of hunger. Anxious relations of Vittalrao, who were naturally concerned about his well-being, tried to dissuade him from a life of self-mortification but he remained adamant. Steeped though he was in religious devotion, this zealous­ ness was certainly not at the expense of his daily duties for he conscientiously attended to his work at the weaving establishment. Devotion to the Deity had the effect of softening his heart, so he treated his workmen kindly and regarded his sub­ ordinates as his equals. He felt great compassion for those in pain. When, for instance, he once saw a carter mercilessly beating the bullocks he begged the man not to strike these poor dumb animals but his words were ignored. Vittalrao had to run away from the scene for he could not bear to see such cruelty. He advised his wife and daughter never to injure or cause any harm to any creature. He was vaguely conscious that the time was fast drawing nigh when he would renounce everything but he did not know how or exactly when this would happen. He was eagerly awaiting the severance of all his earthly ties and his subsequent merging with the Divine. The factors that induced Vittalrao to renounce the world and dedicate himself to Ram have been described in his In Quest of God: xliii The Essential Swami Ramdas So, one night while engaged in drinking in the sweetness of His name, Ramdas was made to think in the following strain: “O Ram, when Thy slave finds Thee at once so powerful and so loving, and that he who trusts Thee can be sure of true peace and happiness, why should he not throw himself entirely on Thy mercy, which can only be possible by giving up everything he called ‘mine’? Thou art all in all to Thy slave. Thou art the sole Protector in the world. Men are deluded when they declare, ‘I do this, I do that. This is mine—That is mine.’ All, O Ram, is Thine, and all things are done by Thee alone. Thy slave’s one prayer to Thee is to take him under Thy complete guidance and remove his ‘I’­ ness.” This prayer was heard. Ramdas’ heart heaved a deep sigh. A hazy desire to renounce all and wander over the earth in the garb of a mendicant—in quest of Ram—wafted over his mind. Now Ram prompted him to open at random the book Light of Asia which was before him at the time. His eyes rested upon the pages wherein is described the great renunciation of Buddha, who says: For now the hour is come when I should quit This golden prison, where my heart lives caged, To find the Truth; which henceforth I will seek, For all men’s sake, until the truth be found. Then Ramdas similarly opened the New Testament and lighted upon the following definite words of Jesus Christ: And everyone that hath forsaken houses or brethren, or sisters, or father or mother or wife or children or lands for my name’s sake, shall receive a hundredfold and shall inherit everlasting life. Then again he was actuated in the same way to refer to the Bhagavad Gita—and he read the following sloka: Abandoning all duties come to Me alone for shelter, sorrow not, I will liberate thee from all sins. xliv 27-12-22 Yours affectionately —P. Vittalrao Introduction Ram had thus spoken out through the words of these three great avatars—Buddha, Christ and Krishna—and all of them pointed to the same path—renunciation. At once Ramdas made up his mind to give up for the sake of Ram, all that he till then hugged to his bosom as his own, and leave the samsaric world. During this period, he was very simple in his dress which consisted of a piece of cloth covering the upper part of the body and another wound round the lower part. Next day, he got two clothes of this kind dyed in gerrua or red ochre, and the same night wrote two letters—one to his wife whom Ram had made him look upon for sometime past as his sister—and another to a kind friend whom Ram had brought in touch with Ramdas for his deliverance from debts. The resolution was made. At five o’clock in the morning he bade farewell to a world for which he had lost all attraction and in which he could find nothing to call his own. The body, the mind, the soul—all were laid at the feet of Ram—that Eternal Being, full of love and full of mercy. He wrote his wife a touching letter in which there are references to “Rame” which is the pet name of his daughter Ramabai: Dear Sister, You are to me only a sister in future. Sri Ram, at whose feet I have surrendered myself entirely has called me away from the past sphere of life. I go forth a beggar into the wide world chanting the sweet Name of Sri Ram. You know I have no ambition in life except to struggle for the attainment of Sri Ram’s Grace and love. To that aim alone I ded­ icate the rest of my life and suffer for it—suffer to any extent. We may not meet again—at least as husband and wife. Walk always in the path of God and truth, and make Rame do the same. Don’t give up the spinning-wheel. It will give you peace and happiness. Let Rame also work it. Sri Ram’s blessings on you and Rame. He protects you both. xlv The Essential Swami Ramdas On December 27th 1922 whilst still a young man of 38 he severed all his worldly ties and became a religious mendicant, turning his back on the comforts of hearth and home and preferring instead the humility and insecurity of a homeless life. After bathing in the sacred Kaveri River at Srirangam, he cast his white clothes into the waters as an offering and wore the simple orange-colored clothes of a renunciate. Next, he prayed to Ram: O Ram! O Love infinite—Protector of all the worlds! It is by Thy wish alone that Thy humble slave has been induced to adopt sannyas. In Thy name alone, O Ram, he has given up samsara, and cut asunder all bonds, all ties. O Ram, bless Thy poor devotee with Thy grace. May Ramdas be endued with strength, courage and faith to carry out in Thy name, Ram, the following vows and bear all trials and all kinds of privations that may beset the path of a sannyasi in his passage through the rough and perilous life of a mendicant: 1. This life be henceforth entirely consecrated to meditation and the service of Sri Ram. 2. Strict celibacy be observed, looking upon all women as mothers. 3. The body be maintained and fed upon the food procured by bhiksha or on what was offered as alms. From now onwards Vittalrao is called Ramdas or “Servant of God”: it is a singularly appropriate name for it marks his spiritual rebirth. This inner regeneration filled him with extreme happiness. Freed of the past with all its problems and sorrows, Ramdas described the consequent state of bliss in these words: The thrills of a new birth, a new life, filled with the sweet love of Ram, were felt. A peace came upon the struggling soul of Ramdas. The turmoil ceased. Ram’s own hands seemed to have touched the head of his slave—Ram blessed. O tears, flow on, for the mere joy of deliverance! xlvi Introduction Sorrow, anxiety and care—all vanished, never to return. Glory be to Ram! In 1923 Ramdas had the privilege of seeing Ramana Maharshi and being in personal contact with this great saint for about five minutes. This memorable meeting proved to be a turning point in the life of Ramdas as he himself gratefully acknowledged in his The Divine Life: Ramdas thinks it will not be inappropriate to recall here his own experiences ... at Tiruvannamalai, and to describe how, by having darshan of Sri Ramana Maharshi, he was prepared for the Universal Vision he had a few days afterwards on the sacred Arunachala Hill. It came about in this way. Soon after Ramdas had the sagun darshan of God in the form of Sri Krishna, he left Mangalore, as prompted by the Lord, and went about wandering from place to place. In the course of these wanderings, God in His own mysterious way took Ramdas to Tiruvannamalai. Ramdas’ condition those days was like that of a child, waiting always for the mother’s guidance. He had absolutely no sankalpas or plans of any sort. So when a Tamilian sadhu asked Ramdas to accompany him to Tiruvannamalai, Ramdas readily obeyed and simply followed the sadhu. The latter took him to Sri Ramana Maharshi. The very sight of the Maharshi left an indelible impression on Ramdas. Ramana Maharshi stands for nirgu­ na Brahman and Universal Vision. So he poured into Ramdas, the necessary power and grace to obtain this vision. When Sri Ramana intently gazed on Ramdas and the eyes of both met, Ramdas felt He was pouring into him His spiritual power and grace in abundance, so much so that Ramdas was thrilled, as His divine light shone on his mind, heart and soul. Sri Ramana’s eyes always radiated a splendor, which was simply unique and irresistible—a splendor mingled with infinite tenderness, compassion and mercy. The few minutes that Ramdas spent in His holy company meant a momentous impetus in his spiritual career. xlvii The Essential Swami Ramdas After obtaining Maharshi’s darshan, Ramdas went up the Arunachala Hill and remained there in a cave. During his stay in the cave, Ramdas was chanting Ram mantra day and night. He had absolutely no sleep and for food he used to take only a small quantity of boiled rice, which he himself prepared out of the alms he got. After twenty days’ stay in the cave, in the above manner, one morning Ramdas’ eyes were filled with a strange dazzling light and he realized the Presence of the Divine everywhere. This new vision of the Universal gave him such waves of ecstatic Bliss that he start­ ed running about here and there on the hill, embracing trees and rocks, shouting in joy “This is my Ram, this is my Ram!” He could not resist the rising ecstasy. This was his first experience of Universal Vision. As a wandering mendicant Ramdas went to all parts of India. He had a large number of followers who were fascinated by his life and teachings. Posterity is indebted to him because he has fortunately left detailed descriptions of his travels and experiences, which have been published as two books entitled In Quest of God and In the Vision of God. A feeling of triumphant ecstasy pervades much of the poetry of Ramdas: O Ram, I see Thy form on every side; In all the worlds Thy light and glory abide. O Ram, Thou art the sun that shines on high; Thou art the moon and stars that deck the sky. O Ram, Thou art the life that fills all space, And sets the whirling universe in its race. O Ram, I see in hills Thy form divine, In waters vast that flow and wave and shine. O Ram, I see Thy light in jungles wild, In trees and plants and verdure mild. O Ram, all life reflects Thy godly light, Thou art all in all—Love, Bliss and Might. –OM– xlviii Introduction Is there any connoisseur of devotional literature who would not like to savor the poetry of Ramdas and find spiritual sustenance therein? Poems, by Ramdas, consists of the bulk of his poems which were composed at different times for The Vision, an international monthly dedicated to “Universal Love and Service,” which was founded by Ramdas in October 1933 and personally edited by him during the first two years. In a letter to a Western devotee he stated that “Ramdas’ spiritual experiences have reached such a stage that he can hardly give expression to them. However in the poems in The Vision from month to month, he is struggling to give utterance to them.” His lyrical lines are the sweet outpourings of a heart that is inseparably linked to the Divine. From the far corners of the globe people flocked to the feet of Ramdas, seeking his fatherly advice on the problems of life in general and spiritual matters in particular. Many also chose to correspond with Ramdas and his written answers to questions have been published in 2 volumes entitled Letters of Swami Ramdas. He certainly had the gift of lucid exposition. An extract from a letter written in 1928 illustrates the kind of spiritual guidance he provided: Ours is to remain ever in complete surrender to Him. He does everything for our best. No condition is miserable for us, if we put full faith in this truth. Kings and potentates are unhappy in spite of their wealth and external glory, because of their lack of faith in the beneficent providence of God. The Almighty Lord of the worlds seated in our hearts is the sole doer. We are mere puppets. Let Him make us dance as He wills. Ours is not to question why. Difficulties and worries are not due to outside causes. They are due to a mind not surrendered up to God. The world tour that was undertaken by Ramdas, lasting from August 1954 until January 1955, was one of the high­ lights of his later years. All his speeches and talks during these travels, including his answers to questions, were first published xlix The Essential Swami Ramdas in 10 volumes by Anandashram. The following extract is from a famous speech by Ramdas delivered in Bombay on the eve of his departure to Europe: It was thirty years ago that Ramdas was first taken up by God and made to do everything as He willed. From that time onwards, Ramdas has been going round India, propagating the message of love and peace to all people who come in contact with him. But now it is His will that Ramdas should go outside India and move about in the world so that he can meet more of His manifestations in order that he may see in them also the same Beloved One he sees here, and has been seeing all along during his tours in different parts of India. Now, the object of his going to foreign countries, as willed by the Divine—Ramdas uses the word “foreign” as it is a common usage, but in fact there is nothing foreign to him as the whole world is his home—is to propagate the ideal of Universal Love and Service. Ramdas can spread this message only in one way; and that is by beholding his Beloved in all, so that his love may flow out and inundate the entire world, removing all man-made distinctions and enabling us all to stand united as one world family. It is one Truth that pervades everywhere and all humanity is the expression of that Truth. Ramdas is going abroad to show all how it is possible to achieve this exalted experience. Everyone must realize that the Divine is within him. Papa’s foremost disciple was Mother Krishnabai who first came into contact with him in 1928. At that time she was eagerly searching for a guru. The shocking news of her hus­ band’s sudden death, leaving her and her two sons behind, filled this poor widow with sorrow. It was a major crisis in her life. She was deeply affected by the thought that she could not be present at her husband’s bedside during his last moments. Her spiritual progress was so rapid that in 1930 Mother Krishnabai realized her oneness with the Absolute. Thereafter she dedicated her entire life to the service of Papa and his mis­ sion. She played a very important role in the founding of the l Introduction Anandashram at Kanhangad, which was inaugurated on May 15th 1931. When she accompanied Papa on his world tour in 1954, many friends and devotees felt they had been blessed by the experience of meeting them personally. After Papa’s mahasamadhi she guided the affairs of the ashram and minis­ tered to Papa’s worldwide spiritual family until her own mahasamadhi on February 12th 1989. Mother Krishnabai’s autobiography, entitled Guru’s Grace, describes her ordeals and years of struggle as well as her meet­ ing with Papa, which culminated in her realization of the Supreme. This book was rendered into English by Papa him­ self from the Kannada. It was his last literary legacy to the world. Papa paid many tributes to her remarkable qualities in his Introduction to this work. “Krishnabai’s life presents,” he wrote, “a practical illustration of how an individual can live a life of spontaneous and intense activity while ever fixed in the Divine Consciousness born of complete self-surrender.” This autobiography is unusual in that it is addressed entirely to Papa and all the persons mentioned in it are regarded as Papa himself in different forms. The following passage from the autobiography is representative of the spirit of surrender and devotion that is characteristic of this book: O love-incarnate Papa! Wherever we went, thousands of people used to come to you for darshan. As their hearts were filled with great love and devotion for you, the moment they had your darshan their hairs would stand on end and tears of joy would flow down their eyes. Some devotees, finding you in their homes, were so transported with joy that they forgot their bodies and sat still without knowing what to do. Papa’s numerous discourses and conversations as well as his pithy and sparkling answers to questions in India and else­ where were faithfully recorded by Swami Satchidananda. These have been published in several volumes, notably Ramdas Speaks, Ramdas’ Talks and The Gospel of Swami Ramdas. These invaluable books are a source of inspiration to spiritual aspirants. Swami Satchidananda was very intimately associated with Papa from 1947 to 1963. For a time he served Papa as his secretary. He also looked after him with loving care: massaging Papa’s body, applying medicated oil on his head and legs, giving him insulin injections (Papa was a diabetic and a rheumatic), shaving him and even preparing roti (home-made wheat bread) for Papa. A man who selflessly dedicated his life to Papa, the Swami is today the Managing Trustee of Anandashram. It was Papa’s 80th year. On the evening of July 25th 1963 he had a severe heart attack. He felt a choking sensation. He was collapsing, but his two closest disciples, Mother Krishnabai and Swami Satchidananda, managed to take him to his cot. While lying down there, he would suddenly sit up, chanting “Hari, Hari, Hari Ram.” With the name of God on his lips Papa breathed his last. With all his mind and heart Papa had adored the sheer sound of the Divine name and it is significant that he even chanted it when he was sinking fast. The devotees were stunned and heartbroken by the sudden­ness of the end. Placed on a perfumed bed of fragrant flowers, Papa’s body lay in state. Those present were quick to notice that the saint’s face had a certain serene and sublime radiance. Friends and devotees poured in and offered flowers, sandalwood and incense. People gathered to pay their last homage
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Part II, “Spiritual Ascent,” comprises six sections, dealing with stages along the path of transcendence, culminating in the attainment of “Liberation,” moksa or mukti; these stages emerge as points of reference from the various writings of Shankara on the question of the “ultimate value” (nihsreyasa), referred to also as Enlightenment or simply Knowledge (jñana). Part III, “Existential ‘Return,’” will examine the most important aspects of the “return” to normal modes of awareness in the world of phenomena, after the experience of Liberation has been attained by the one now designated jivan­ mukta—the soul liberated in this life. The sources used for this chapter consist in translations from the works of Shankara; in selecting the books for this study, priority was given to those works which modern scholarship has established beyond doubt to have been written by Shankara: The Thousand Teachings (Upadesa Sahasri)—his principal independent doctrinal treatise; translations from his commentaries on the Upanisads, Brahma Sutras and other scriptures, drawing in particular from the excellent and comprehensive set of translations by A.J. Alston in six volumes, A Samkara Source-Book. Other works such as Self-Knowledge (Atma­ bodha) and The Crest Jewel of Discrimination (Vivekachudamani), attributed to Shankara by the Advaitin tradition—but not having the same degree of scholarly authentication—have also been used, insofar as these works form part of the “Shankarian” spiritual legacy within the tradition and, as such, warrant attention from an analysis such as this, which is concerned more with the doctrinal perspective associated with Shankara within Hinduism, than with the historical personage of that name. For ease of reference, the following system will be used: the book from which the citation is taken will be indicated by a key word in the title, with the page or, where appropriate, the chapter and verse, following it. Full details of the titles are found in the bibliography. Absolute: Samkara on the Absolute. Vol. I of A Samkara Source-Book, trans. A.J. Alston. Atma-bodha (A): Self-Knowledge (Atma-Bodha), trans. Swami Nikhilananda. 1 Paths to Transcendence Atma-bodha (B): Atma-bodha, trans. “Raphael.” Creation: Samkara on the Creation. Vol. II of A Samkara Source-Book, trans. A.J. Alston. Discipleship: Samkara on Discipleship. Vol. V of A Samkara Source-Book, trans. A.J. Alston. Enlightenment: Samkara on Enlightenment. Vol. VI of A Samkara Source-Book, trans. A.J. Alston. Gita: The Bhagavad Gita, with the Commentary of Sri Sankaracharya, trans. Alladi Mahadeva Sastry. Karika: The Mandukyopanisad, with Gaudapada’s Karika and Sankara’s Commentary, trans. Swami Nikhilananda. Reality: Direct Experience of Reality, Verses from Aparokshanubhuti, trans. Hari Prasad Shastri. Soul: Samkara on the Soul. Vol. III of A Samkara Source-Book, trans. A.J. Alston. Upadesa (A): The Thousand Teachings (Upadesa Sahasri), trans. A.J. Alston. Upadesa (B): A Thousand Teachings—Upadesa Sahasri, trans. Swami Jagadananda. Vivekachudamani: Vivekachudamani, trans. Swami Madhavananda. Part I: Doctrine of the Transcendent Absolute 1. Designations and Definitions of the Absolute The first question that needs to be asked is whether the transcendent Absolute is in any way conceivable, in such a manner that one can speak of the “concept” thereof. If, as is maintained by Shankara, the Absolute is “That from which words fall back,” that which ignorance (avidya) alone would attempt to define,1 then what function is served by the variety of names by which the Absolute is referred to—Brahman, Atman, Om, Turiya? Certainly, Shankara asserts that from the viewpoint of ignorance (avidya), the Absolute is inexplicable—anirukta (Absolute, 177). The attribution of “name and form” (nama-rupa) to the Absolute is, likewise, the result of ignorance. Name and form, like the erroneous conception of a snake in place of a rope, are destroyed when knowledge dawns; “hence the Absolute cannot be designated by any name, nor can it assume any form” (Absolute, 87). Intrinsic knowledge of the Absolute can be acquired, but solely from the paramarthika perspective, that is, the viewpoint from the Absolute itself; while from the viewpoint of the relative, the vyavaharika perspective, the Absolute can only be viewed under the conditions of name and form. This distinction between the paramarthika and the vyavaharika perspectives is of the utmost importance, not just in respect of doctrinal formulations, but, as will be seen throughout this chapter, in respect of central ontological aspects of spiritual realization. 1 Shankara cites this text many times; it appears both in the Taittiriya Upanisad, II.4 and in the Brhidaranyaka Upanisad, II.iii.6. 2 Shankara: Tat tvam asi In answer to the question: is the Absolute Self designated by the name Atman, Shankara replies: No it is not. . . . When the word Atman is used . . . to denote the inmost Self (PratyagAtman) . . . its function is to deny that the body or any other empirically knowable factor is the Self and to designate what is left as real, even though it cannot be expressed in words (Absolute, 144). This answer points to the apophatic nature of all designations and definitions concerning the Absolute; to “define” something in Hindu logic (as in Western logic) means primarily to mark it off from other objects, thus to isolate it; definition (laksana) is thus different from characterization (visesana), that is, positively identifying the attributes which characterize a particular object. Thus, to say that the Absolute “is defined as Reality, Knowledge, Infinity” (Satyam-Jñanam- Anantam), as it is in the Taittiriya Upanisad on which Shankara comments, means that the adjectives are “being used primarily not to characterize the Absolute positively but simply to mark it off from all else” (Absolute, 178). Each element negates the non-transcendent dimensions that are implicit or conceivable in one or both of the other elements: to say that the Absolute is “Reality” means that its being “never fails,” in contrast to the forms of things which, being modifications, are existent at one time, only to “fail” at some other time; since, however, this may imply that the Absolute is a non-conscious material cause, the term Knowledge is included in the definition and this serves to cancel any such false notion; and then, since Knowledge may be mistaken for an empirical attribute of the intellect, it too needs to be conditioned—qua definition—by the term Infinity, as this negates any possibility of that bifurcation into subject and object which constitutes the necessary condition for empirical knowledge. Infinity is said to “characterize the Absolute by negating finitude,” whereas “the terms ‘Reality’ and ‘Knowledge’ characterize the Absolute (even if inadequately) by investing it with their own positive meanings” (Absolute, 182). These “positive meanings” must still be understood from an apophatic viewpoint, in accordance with a central dialectical principle concerning knowledge of the Absolute, namely the double negation, neti, neti—“not thus, not thus.”2 Shankara illustrates this indirect manner of indicating the nature of the Absolute by means of a story about an idiot who was told that he was not a man; perturbed, he asked someone else the question: “What am I?” This person showed the idiot the classes of different beings, from minerals and plants upwards, explaining that he was none of them, and finally said: “So you are not anything that is not a man”: “[T]he Veda proceeds in the same way as the one who showed the idiot that he was not a ‘not-man.’ It says ‘not thus, not thus,’ and says no more” (Absolute, 143). 2 This text figures prominently in the Brhidaranyaka Upanisad, at II.iii.6, III.ix.26, IV.ii.4, and IV.iv.22. It should also be noted that we do not follow Alston’s translation of avidya as “nescience,” but rather use the more appropriate English word “ignorance.” 3 Paths to Transcendence For Shankara, communicable meaning is restricted within the following categories: genus, action, quality, and relation. Since the Absolute transcends these categories—it does not belong to any genus, performs no action, has no quality, and enters into no relation with “another” apart from itself—it “cannot be expressed by any word”: [T]he Absolute is artificially referred to with the help of superimposed name, form, and action, and spoken of in exactly the way we refer to objects of perception. . . . But if the desire is to express the true nature of the Absolute, void of all external adjuncts and particularities, then it cannot be described by any positive means whatever. The only possible procedure then is to refer to it through a comprehensive denial of whatever positive characteristics have been attributed to it in previous teachings and to say “not thus, not thus” (Absolute, 141). Because the Absolute is only indirectly designated by terms that must themselves be negated, it can take on, albeit extrinsically, other “definitions,” the most important of these being the well known Sat-Chit-Ananda, which has been translated as “Being-Consciousness-Bliss,” by Alston, who notes that although this definition is not found in any of the works deemed by modern scholarship to be undeniably by Shankara, it is found in the writings of Suresvara, his direct disciple (Absolute, 170), and figures prominently in two works attributed to Shankara by the tradition of Advaita Vedanta, namely Atma-bodha and Vivekachudamani.3 Despite the fact that modern scholarship no longer regards these as authentic works of Shankara, they are so closely woven into the spiritual heritage of Shankara that any analysis of his perspective which fails to consider these works would be incomplete. Moreover, the term Sat-Chit-Ananda is so closely identified with his perspective that, in terms of the tradition of Advaita, one cannot pass lightly over this designation of the Absolute. That beyond which there is nothing . . . the inmost Self of all, free from differentiation . . . the Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute (Vivekachudamani, 263). Realize that to be Brahman which is Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute, which is non-dual and infinite, eternal and One (Atma-bodha (A), 56). The apophatic logic of the double negation must now be applied to the term. Firstly, to say Sat, Being or Reality, is to refer to That which is not non-being or nothingness, on the one hand; on the other hand, it designates transcendent Being, “that which is” as opposed to “things that are.” Chit, or Consciousness, refers to That which is not non-conscious, on the one hand; and on the other, it designates transcendent Consciousness, as opposed to contents or objects of consciousness; and likewise Ananda refers to That which is not susceptible to suffering or deprivation, on the one hand; and on the other, it designates 3 The translators of these works translate the formula as “Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute.” This is a less satisfactory translation, for reasons that will be clear from the discussion on Being in the next section. 4 Shankara: Tat tvam asi transcendent Bliss or Bliss as such, as opposed to such and such an experience of bliss; to Bliss which cannot not be, as opposed to blissful experience that is contingent on worldly circumstances. In this application of the double negation, the first neti operates so as to negate the direct opposite of the term, thereby indicating in a relatively direct manner the intrinsic nature or quality intended by it; whilst the second neti acts as the denial of any commensurability with what appears, from the viewpoint of avidya, to be similar to that quality, thereby indicating indirectly the transcendent degree proper to the quality here in question. Therefore the first negation is intended to direct awareness towards these three internal “modes” of the Absolute, whilst the second negation eliminates any traces of relativity that may appear to pertain to these modes when conceived on the plane of differentiated existence; thus, while a relative subject has the property of empirical awareness and enjoys an object of experience that is blissful, the Absolute Subject is at once transcendent Being-Consciousness-Bliss, in absolute non-differentiation, indivisibility, and non-duality. The notion of the Absolute as Sat will be discussed further in the next section, which deals with Being in more detail; at this point the concern is to probe further into the manner of indicating or designating provisionally the nature of the Absolute. To say, then, that the Absolute is Being-Consciousness-Bliss gives some provisional idea of the nature of the Absolute even while indicating the incommensurability between that idea and the reality alluded to. It can readily be seen that the principal purpose of the negation is to eliminate those attributes that have been superimposed upon the Absolute; the superimposition (adhyaropa) itself is seen to be a necessary starting point for thought on the Absolute, since, by means of endowing it with concrete characteristics, awareness is oriented towards something which truly “is,” however faulty may be the initial conception thereof. Only subsequently is this being revealed in its true light, divested of all limitative attributes. At first, the sacred texts speak of the “false form” of the Absolute, “set up by adjuncts and fancifully referred to as if it had knowable qualities, in the words, ‘with hands and feet everywhere.’ For there is the saying of those who know the tradition (sampradaya-vid), ‘That which cannot be expressed is expressed through false attribution and subsequent denial (adhyaropa-apavada)’” (Absolute, 147-148). All attributes and names of the Absolute, then, are so many symbols, with the character of an upaya, a “saving stratagem” or a provisional means of “conveying the symbolized” (Absolute, 145). When, for example, the Absolute is endowed with the attribute of spatial location, as when scripture refers to the “place” of Brahman, Shankara writes that the implicit purpose behind such an upaya can be formulated thus: “First let me put them on the right path, and then I will gradually be able to bring them round to the final truth afterwards” (Enlightenment, 22). It is important at this point to dwell a little on the term upadhi, the “particular limiting adjunct.” It refers to that through which any determinate name, form, attribute, or conception is applied to the Absolute; it is said to be “set up by ignorance,” because it depends upon an initial differentiation, and thus implicitly negates all that which is not encompassed by the particular adjunct in question; an adjunct which is thus to be clearly distinguished from the non-dual Reality. Strictly speaking it is an illusory limitation superimposed on the object which it is supposed to reveal. It is therefore to be negated by neti, neti, in order to make possible the revelation of the real underlying substratum—that on which the superimposition takes place. The upadhi, according to one revealing etymology is “that which, standing near (upa) anything, imparts (adhadati) to it (the appearance of) its own qualities” (Creation, 3). This brings out clearly the distinction between the pure Absolute and all distinct attributes of the Absolute: the attribute as such is not only “other” than the object of the attribution, but it also “colors” that object according to the nature of the attribute; thus, anything that is objectively attributed to the Absolute is both a means of indicating the reality of the Absolute and simultaneously a veil over its true nature: In so far as the Self has an element of “this” (objective characteristic) it is different from itself, and a characteristic of itself. . . . It is as in the case of the man with the cow (Upadesa (A), II, 6.5). The man who possesses a cow may be distinguished as “such and such, possessor of the cow,” but the cow serves only to indicate the particular man in question, it does not define the man’s essential nature: the man is utterly other than that possession which identifies him as a particular man. Analogously, no aspect of the Absolute that is definable and distinguishable in objective terms can be equated with the Absolute; the very act of positing a “this” involves an irreducible alterity: “this” is a distinguishing feature of the object to be known, and thus “other than” it. In reality, “nothing different from Me can exist so as to belong to Me” (Upadesa (A), II, 8.4).4 To speak of Brahman as possessing the attributes of “Lordship,” such as omnipotence, justice, omniscience, and so on, is both true and false: true if what is in question is the “lower” or “lesser” Absolute, Apara Brahman, but false if it is the “higher” Absolute, Para Brahman (Enlightenment, 61-62); this same distinction is found expressed as Brahma saguna and Brahma nirguna, the first relating to the Absolute as endowed with qualities, the second relating to the Absolute insofar as it transcends all qualities. When the Absolute is spoken of as being the “performer of all actions” and as knowing all things, “we are speaking of it as associated with adjuncts. In its true state without adjuncts it is indescribable, partless, pure, and without empirical attributes” (Upadesa (A), II, 15.29). It may be objected here that the Advaita principle is violated: there is one Absolute that is associated with relativity and another that is not. But this objection would be valid only if it were established that the Absolute undergoes real modification by virtue of its “association” with the adjuncts; only then 4 This is Shankara “speaking” from the perspective of the Self, a mode of expression assuming the paramarthika perspective, and employed frequently by Shankara throughout his writings, doctrinal as well as exegetical. would there be a fundamental dualism constituted by the adjunctless Absolute, on the one hand, and the Absolute associated with adjuncts, on the other. Such a dualism, however, is precluded for Shankara by the fact that no such modification takes place in reality, since the “association” in question is but an appearance, an illusory projection of the Real which cannot, qua illusion, constitute any element or “pole,” such as could allow of an irreducible duo-dimensionality of the Absolute: [T]he Lordship, omniscience, and omnipotence of the Lord exist relative to the limitations and distinctions of ignorance only, and in reality there can be no practice of rulership or omniscience on the part of the Self, in which all distinctions remain eternally negated in knowledge (Creation, 66). This does not deny the relative reality of the divine attributes themselves nor does it deny that the attributes do indeed pertain to the One Absolute; that the Absolute is the omnipotent Creator and the omniscient Witness is affirmed as a reality that is mediated through the upadhis and received by all created beings. These attributes are the forms in which the One relates to the world, and for as long as worldly experience holds; what Shankara does deny is the ultimate metaphysical reality of this whole domain of relations and distinctions, “set up by ignorance”: the One appears as many in relation to a world that is itself illusory. Thus: [N]on-duality which is the Supreme reality appears manifold through Maya, like the one moon appearing as many to one with defective eye-sight. . . . This manifold is not real, for Atman is without any part. . . . (It) cannot in any manner admit of distinction excepting through Maya (Karika, III, 19). This Maya-sakti, or power of illusion, is the “seed of the production of the world” (Creation, 65); now the Lord, as Brahma saguna or Apara Brahma is at one and the same time the source of Maya and also included within it. Thus we have Shankara distinguishing the lesser Absolute by reference to its relationship with the vasanas, residual impressions deriving from past action: In so far as it consists of impressions arising from activity amongst the elements, it is omniscient and omnipotent and open to conception by the mind. Being here of the nature of action, its factors and results, it is the basis of all activity and experience (Absolute, 148-149). This seems to make, not only the subjective conception of the Lord, but also its objective being, subject to the rhythms of samsaric existence; but this is only true “in so far as it consists of ” vasanas: the truth is that the reality of the Lord is not exhausted by that dimension in which it participates in samsara; therefore its omniscience and omnipotence, while exercised in the world, also and necessarily transcend the world, even if it is to the “lesser” Absolute that these attributes, affirmed as such, pertain. The reason for asserting that the Lord is both engaged within Maya and transcendent vis-à-vis Maya is twofold: firstly, as implied in the discussion above, the Lord qua Creator is, intrinsically and by virtue of its essential substance, nothing other than the Absolute; it is the Absolute and nothing else that extrinsically takes on the appearance of relativity in order to rule over it, as Lord, precisely: “That which we designate as the Creator of the Universe is the Absolute . . .” (Creation, 7, emphasis added). The second reason for saying that the Lord is both in Maya and transcendent vis-à-vis Maya is the following: the Lord is referred to as the “Inner Controller” of the Cosmos, and, more significantly, as the conscious agent responsible not just for purposefully creating the visible and invisible worlds, but also for distributing the “fruits” of all action, karmic and ritual; Shankara emphatically opposes the idea of the Purva-Mimamsakas that action carries the principle of the distribution of its fruit within itself, without any need for an external controlling agency. In a colorful, descriptive passage that reminds one of the teleological argument for the existence of God in scholastic theology, he asserts: This world could never have been fashioned even by the cleverest of human artificers. It includes gods, celestial musicians, . . . demons, departed spirits, goblins, and other strange beings. It includes the heavens, the sky and the earth, the sun, the moon, the planets and the stars, abodes and materials for the widest imaginable range of living beings. . . . It could only proceed under the control of one who knew the merit and demerit of all the experiencers in all their variety. Hence we conclude that it must have some conscious artificer, just as we do in the case of houses, palaces, chariots, couches, and the like (Creation, 49). In other words, the Lord is not simply a subjective construct of the individual sunk in ignorance, even though it is only through ignorance that the Absolute is viewed in its Apara form. The Lord exists fully and really only as the Absolute, nirguna; but as saguna, He is also an objective reality vis-à-vis the world over which He rules, a reality which is conditioned extrinsically by this very relationship and thus by the “dream” which this world is. But this dream is not crudely equatable with the imagination of the individual: “The Self . . . Himself imagines Himself in Himself as having the distinctions to be described below (i.e., the cosmic elements)” (Creation, 223). Whatever the individual proceeds to imagine about the nature of the Absolute can only take place because, “First of all the Lord imagines the individual soul” (Creation, 225). Further considerations on the relationships between the individual, the Lord, and the Self will be forthcoming in the next part of this chapter. At present, further elaboration on the distinction between the lesser and higher Absolute is necessary, and the following section addresses this question in the light of the mode of Being proper to the transcendent Absolute. 2. Being and Transcendence The Absolute is first known as Being when apprehended through the (provisional) notion of Being set up by its external adjuncts, and is afterwards known as (pure) Being in its capacity as the Self, void of external adjuncts. . . . It is only to one who has already apprehended it in the form of Being that the Self manifests in its true transcendent form (Absolute 130) [parentheses by the translator, Alston]. One can understand more clearly the relativity of this “form of Being” in contradistinction to That which transcends it and which may be provisionally referred to as “Beyond-Being,” by dialectically applying the tool of the double negation to this mode of thinking about the Absolute. Firstly, one cannot say that the “transcendent form” of the Absolute, Brahma nirguna, is deprived of being or reality: it is therefore “not nothing,” this constituting the first neti. The second neti consists in the denial that it can be regarded as identical with Being when Being is conceived as the unmanifest Principle of all manifested beings. Regarding the first negation, in terms of which Brahma nirguna must be seen as positively endowed with being, it should be noted that the positive attribution of being to the Self, however metaphysically inadequate this may be in the first instance, is the necessary prerequisite for grasping the Absolute in its “transcendent form” as Beyond-Being, this being an instance of the principle of adhyaropa-apavada, noted above. The Absolute, then, must be understood to be real—and thus to “be”—even while it is divested of the relativity entailed by the attribution of Being to it, remembering that whatever is an attribute of the Absolute is not the Absolute, and that, by being attributed to it, Being necessarily constitutes an attribute of it. One now needs to understand more clearly the notion of the relativity of Being. Commenting on the text “All this was Sat in the beginning,” Shankara writes that the Being in question is . . . that which contains within it the seed or cause (of creation). . . . [T]he Brahman that is indicated by the words Sat and Prana is not the one who is free from its attribute of being the seed or cause of all beings. . . . [T]he Sruti also declares, “It is neither Sat nor Asat (non-being).”. . . [T]he Absolute Brahman, dissociated from its causal attribute, has been indicated in such Sruti passages as, “It is beyond the unmanifested, which is higher than the manifested.” “He is causeless and is the substratum of the external (effect) and the internal (cause)” (Karika, I, 6[2]). Sat can but be Brahman inasmuch as no element in the causal chain of being can be divorced from the one Reality, that of Brahman; but the converse does not hold: Brahman is not reducible to Sat. Only when associated with the “attribute of being the seed or cause of all beings” can one equate Brahman with Being; the same Brahman, when “dissociated from its causal attribute” is beyond the relativity of Being, also referred to here as the Unmanifest; this Unmanifest, though “higher than the manifested” is nonetheless a relativity as it is conditioned by the fact that it stands in a relationship of causality in relation to the domain of manifestation. To cause something to exist necessarily entails sharing with that thing a common attribute, namely, existence itself: “If the Self were affirmed to exist, such existence would be transient, as it would not be different in kind from the existence of a pot” (Absolute, 134). This is why Brahman is declared to be neither Being nor non-Being: it is “beyond” Being, this term indicating in a paradoxical fashion that transcendent non-causal Reality which, encompassing all things by virtue of containing within itself the ultimate cause of all beings, is nonetheless not identifiable with 5 Mandukya Upanisad, sruti 7. Paths to Transcendence that cause or its effects, but stands unsullied by any “trace of the development of manifestation (prapañcha-upasama).”5 Another significant aspect of the relativity of Being lies in its relationship with action: “Karya or effect is that which is done . . . which has the characteristic of result. Karana or the cause, is that which acts, i.e., it is the state in which the effect remains latent” (Karika, I, 7[11]). Despite the fact that Being is immutable relative to its manifested effects, it is in turn the first “actor” insofar as it is the immediate cause of those things which are “done,” that is, its manifested effects; Being is therefore tantamount to act, movement, change, hence to relativity, when considered in relation to the non-causal and non-acting “Beyond-Being,” Brahma nirguna. Constituting the ontological basis for the process of cosmic deployment, Being is also the first, necessary step in the unfolding of Maya­ sakti, the power of illusion that simultaneously manifests and veils the Real. Elsewhere, Shankara refers to Being “as associated with action” in contrast to the pure Absolute which is nirbija-rupa, the “seedless form,” the seed in question being that of action (Soul, 161). The spiritual dynamics by which the world is reduced to being “not other than Brahman” will be addressed in Part III; at this point, it is important to clarify the doctrinal perspective on the world as illusion, as corollary to the principle that the Absolute alone is real, and to expand on the question of what is meant by saying that the world is “unreal.” Though it is experienced, and though it is serviceable in relativity, this world, which contradicts itself in successive moments is unreal like a dream (Reality, 56). The fact of ordinary experience in the world is not denied; it does possess a degree of reality, albeit relative, but for which it would not be “serviceable”; this experience, however, is inextricably bound up with a world that is said to contradict itself in successive moments, by which is meant: it is continuously changing, perpetually in motion, each moment’s particular concatenation of circumstances differing from, and thus “contradicting,” that of the next moment. That which is of a permanently self-contradictory nature cannot be said to truly exist: as soon as existence is ascribed to “it” the entity in question has changed, “contradicting” itself, so undermining that (apparent) existence which formerly obtained; this process repeating itself indefinitely, it becomes absurd to talk of the real existence of such an entity. Instead, the ontological status of worldly experience is likened to that of the dream-world: it appears to be real for as long as one is dreaming, but, upon awakening, it is grasped in its true nature as “appearance”; the dream-world dissolves and, from the perspective of the waking subject, never “was,” in reality. Thus, this world with all its manifold contents appears to be real only from the vyavaharika perspective, which is itself proportioned to the relative degree of reality proper to the world, and this degree in turn is conditioned, on the one hand by avidya, and on the other, by the very finitude and finality of the world, which not only contradicts itself in successive moments but also comes to a definitive end: like a dream, the world is doomed to extinction, to “be” no more, and whatever is not existent at one time cannot be said to be truly existent at any other: “That which is non-existent at the beginning and in the end is necessarily so in the middle” (Karika, II, 6). Two further angles of vision from which the world is grasped as illusory may now be explored: those opened up by the “rope-snake” and the “jar-clay” analogies. In Advaita Vedanta, the rope-snake analogy is one of the most frequently employed means of pointing to the exclusive reality of the Absolute, non-dual Brahman in contrast to the illusory nature of the manifold phenomena of the world. This manifold, being only a false imagination, like the snake in the rope, does not really exist. . . . The snake imagined in the rope . . . does not really exist and therefore does not disappear through correct understanding (Karika, II, 7[17]). When a rope in the dark is mistaken for a snake, there is a real object that is present and an imagined object that is absent: the snake as such is absent, but “it” is present insofar as it is in truth a rope: that object to which the name and form of a snake are ascribed is in reality a rope. When the rope is perceived, no formerly existent entity, “snake,” can be said to have ceased to exist: only the erroneous perception ceases, the illusion disappears; the substratum on which the conception of “snakehood” was imposed stands self-evident. Likewise, the world of multiplicity is an illusion, deriving from ignorance; it is superimposed upon the Absolute, veiling its true nature for so long as it, in the manner of an upadhi, imparts the quality of its own nature to that on which it is superimposed, whereas in reality it is that substratum that provides the ontological foundation for the superimposition, thus imparting to it whatever “reality” it can be said to possess; only when it is “seen through,” can it be assimilated to its substance.6 Thus: “the snake imagined in the rope is real when seen as the rope” (Karika, III, 29). But to see through the world thus and grasp its substratum, one must first be able to distinguish the one from the other: [W]hen the rope and the snake for which it was formerly mistaken in the dark have once been distinguished, the snake disappears into the rope and . . . never again emerges (Soul, 167). Discrimination between the world and Brahman, between the relative and the Absolute, between the phenomenal many and the transcendent One—this discrimination, despite being itself a mode of distinction, is the prerequisite for overcoming all distinction; for no sooner is the rope distinguished from the snake, than the snake “disappears into the rope,” the superimposed image is 6 It is useful to recall here the etymology of the word “substance”: that which “stands below.” reduced to its substratum; the world is grasped as being “non-different” from Brahman, one understands that “all is Atman.” These points will be elaborated further in Parts II and III, dealing with the realization of transcendence. Another key image which is used to help in the understanding of the relation between the Real and the illusory is that of the jar-clay relationship; it should be noted, however, that such a relationship subsists, or appears to exist, only from the viewpoint of ignorance, the Real being devoid of relations, since there is no “other” to which it could possibly relate. When the true nature of clay is known, a jar does not exist apart from the clay (Karika, IV, 25). [E]very effect is unreal because it is not perceived as distinct from its cause (Gita, II, 16). Because the effects are in truth not distinct from their cause, they cannot be real as effects, but can be called real exclusively insofar as they are that cause; the jar as such is a modification of clay in both nominal and existential terms, in other words, it is clay taking on a particular nama-rupa, name and form. One cannot perceive any jar without at the same time perceiving clay, so that the jar has no reality without clay; it possesses no distinct reality on its own account. It is this ultimate absence of distinction that establishes, in doctrinal terms at least, the illusory nature of the world considered in itself: whatever is distinct from the non-dual Absolute must be an illusion, since reality is the exclusive preserve of the Absolute. On the other hand, from an inclusive point of view, non-duality also means that the world, albeit multiple in appearance, must also be that same non-dual Reality, insofar as it is absolutely non-distinguishable from its substratum: in the measure that it is so distinguished, by means of nama-rupa, in that very measure it is illusory. The final unifying vision consists in seeing all things “in” the transcendent One, and that One in all things; it is realized fully only by the jivan-mukta, the one “delivered in this life,” “who sees Me . . . in all beings, and who sees Brahma the Creator and all other beings in Me” (Gita, VI, 30). It is to the realization of this vision, its requirements, modalities, and consequences, that Part II is addressed. Part II: The Spiritual Ascent This part of the chapter will address the process by which the consciousness within the jivatman (individual soul) realizes its true identity as Brahman, the realization of this identity constituting mukti, or moksa—“Liberation,” the highest attainment possible to man in this world; this is the Nihsreyasa, the supreme value, upon realization of which, all that needs to be done has been done (krta-krtya). Before examining the nature of this transcendent attainment, it is important to establish certain non-transcendent points of reference in order that one can situate the transcendence a contrario, as it were; the understanding of what constitutes transcendent realization requires one to know what it is that is being transcended. This epistemological approach, proceeding on the assumption of an experiential ascent from the lower degrees of being and consciousness to the transcendent level, accords with the basic ontological structure envisioned by Shankara: All this world consists of a hierarchy of more and more subtle and comprehensive effects which stand as the material causes of whatever is grosser. And knowledge of this hierarchy leads to the notion of Being as its support (Absolute, 129). Whatever is closer to the material pole is less subtle and comprehensive than its principial cause; and the closer this cause is to the summit of the hierarchy, the more consciousness and reality it possesses—the summit itself, the Absolute, being unconditioned Consciousness and Reality. The process of realization can thus be analyzed in terms of a mirror-image of this ontology: what is objectively conceived as “higher” in the ontological chain of causality will be seen subjectively as “deeper” in the process of realization of the Self. However, Shankara does affirm that in principle no such ascent in stages is necessary for supreme realization. It can take place instantaneously on the basis of just one hearing of the sacred texts affirming the identity between the essence of the soul and the Absolute. For this reason one should begin with an examination of the role of Scripture in the realization of the Self and then proceed with an assessment of the hierarchical stages along the path to that realization. After the section on Scripture will come five sections dealing with: action, ritual, meditation, concentration, and Liberation. 1. The Role of Scripture Given the fact that the Absolute is “that from which words fall back,” it may seem strange to observe the importance Shankara gives to the part played by Scripture—a set of “words,” at first sight—in relation to realization of the Absolute. Bearing in mind that for Shankara this realization consists in knowledge of the Absolute and nothing else—leaving aside for now the nature and ontological degree of that knowledge—the following assertion shows how central a role Shankara ascribes to Scripture: the Absolute, he says, “can only be known through the authority of Revelation” (Absolute, 146). What this means is that not only does Scripture provide the only objective means for supplying valid doctrinal knowledge of the Absolute, but also that key sentences of Scripture have the capacity to impart immediate enlightenment, this being conditional upon the readiness of the hearer. In the view of the non- dualist, the primary purpose of the Veda is to “put an end to the distinctions imagined through ignorance” (Enlightenment, 96), this being the manner in which it can be said to “communicate” that which is strictly inexpressible. All the Upanisadic texts without exception are deemed to be concerned, directly or indirectly, with the establishment of one truth, namely, “That thou art” (Tat tvam asi); and the function of this cardinal text, in turn, is “to end the conviction that one is the individual soul, competent for agency and empirical experience in the realm of illusory modifications” (Enlightenment, 110). In answer to the question of how an abstract sentence, addressed to the mind, hence the not-self, could result in “concrete” Self-realization, Shankara says that, while it is true that all sentences regarding the “not-self” yield only abstract knowledge, “it is not so with sentences about the inmost Self, for there are exceptions, as in the case of the man who realized he was the tenth” (Upadesa (A), II, 18.202). We shall see the relevance of this reference to the “tenth” in a moment. The impact of sentences affirming the Self is infinitely greater than that of any sentences relating to the not-self, because knowledge of the Self preexists any accidental vehicle by which this knowledge may be extrinsically communicated; this knowledge is one with the very being of the individual soul, who is in reality nothing but the indivisible Self; but it is a knowledge which has become hidden by the veil of individuality, and thus by the “mutual super-imposition of the Self and the not-self called ignorance” (Absolute, 95). This mutual superimposition can be summed up as follows: first the Self is superimposed on the not-self, that is, the individual mind, senses, and body, so that this compound of relativities is falsely regarded as “myself”; then this compound is imposed on the Self, so that the unique and universal Subject is falsely regarded as having the objective characteristics of a particular individual and relative subject with a body and soul, resulting in an anthropomorphic conception of the Absolute. The sentence affirming the true nature of the Self, by dispelling this mutual superimposition born of ignorance, awakens the jiva to his true identity as the Self, knowledge of which he is not so much taught as reminded. This is the meaning of the reference to the “tenth”: the man who counted only nine others, and was perplexed because there were originally ten in the group, instantaneously realizes, upon being reminded, that he is himself the tenth. Analogously, in the last analysis, it is preexisting knowledge of the Self that constitutes the basis for the revelatory power of Scripture; it is not the case that Scripture imparts or teaches a truth of which one is a priori ignorant. Thus one finds Shankara asserting: Indeed the Self is unknown (aprasiddha) to nobody. And the Scripture which is the final authority gains its authoritativeness regarding the Self as serving only to eliminate the super-imposition of the attributes alien to Him, but not as revealing what has been altogether unknown (Gita, II, 18). If it is the true aim and transcendent function of Scripture to eliminate all false notions of alterity and differentiation, Shankara has to account for the existence of so many references in the texts to the different worlds in which rebirth takes place, according to degrees of merit and different kinds of ritual activity, all of which appears bound up with diversity, and thus with the non-self. If the Self is alone worthy of realization, and if all other aspirations are necessarily directed to transient states and “perishable regions,” why does Scripture appear to encourage these aspirations? The question is put by the disciple to the teacher in the first part of the Upadesa Sahasri, and the following answer is given: The Veda removes gradually the ignorance of him who does not know how to obtain what he desires and prevent what he does not desire. . . . Then afterwards it eradicates ignorance proper, which is vision of difference and which is the source of transmigratory life (Upadesa (A) I, 1.42). What Shankara appears to be saying here is that the individual who is plunged in ignorance, seeking to avoid the painful and to enjoy the pleasurable, and doing so on the plane of outward manifestation—such a person would not be able to immediately grasp either the truth or the relevance of the doctrine of the Self. In seeking the desirable, however, he is in fact seeking the absolute bliss of the Self, and to the extent that he avoids the undesirable, he distances himself from the more painful illusions attendant upon identification with the not-self. Therefore Scripture, in the manner of an upaya, operates within a framework that is immediately intelligible for such an individual, and orients his mode of consciousness and being in an upward direction in such wise that the goal which was previously regarded as absolutely desirable in itself gradually comes to be seen as a stage on the path leading to the highest goal—realization of the Self. This “gradual removal” of ignorance can thus be seen as a response to the need to compromise with the limited conceptions of the average individual, for whom the world and the ego appear as concrete and real, whilst the supra- individual, unconditioned Self appears as an abstraction. To invert this picture immediately—so Shankara seems implicitly to be saying—would be ineffective; rather, emphasis should in the first instance be placed upon a diverse conception of the posthumous states—reducible in fact to a duality, the desirable and undesirable—which, while illusory from the viewpoint of the Self, nonetheless corresponds to a lived reality for those bound by relativity. It is therefore legitimate to speak of an ascending hierarchy of “degrees,” within the realm of illusion, leading up to, and being finally consummated by, the reality of supreme Self-consciousness; the outward aspect of the degree in question being the particular “abode” within the heavenly pleroma, and its internal counterpart corresponding to the “weakening of ignorance” in such a manner that, as he approaches the inward reality of consciousness of the Self, the individual can figuratively be said to “enter” a more elevated world. This application of eschatological doctrine to states of consciousness on the earthly plane does not deny the objective posthumous reality of these “abodes,” but rather assimilates the principles in question according to the perspective implied by Shankara in the above quotation: “transmigration” is just as real now as it is after human death, being constituted by the very diversity of means and ends, in contrast to that which transcends all transmigratory existence, the immutable Self. As seen above, such an evaluative framework in regard to Scripture is only partially founded upon the scriptural elements themselves; since the Self as one’s immanent reality is already known “ontologically,” even if obscured existentially, once this knowledge has been awoken, one is in a position to evaluate and interpret Scripture on the basis of a recognition of those essential elements which accord with consciousness of the Self, realization of which constitutes the highest aim of Scripture. It is clear from this that Scripture alone is not adduced in support of this evaluation of Scripture: rather, it is consciousness of the Self, the very source and end of Scripture, that sheds light both upon the direct references to the nature of the Self, and those indirect references, in which a diversity of means and ends are mentioned, apparently contradicting the unity of the Self, but which in reality have realization of the Self as the ultimate aim; and it is this aim or summit which confers value on all that which leads to it. Turning now to focus more directly on the cardinal text, “That is the Absolute; That thou art,” one hearing of this sentence, as mentioned earlier, is deemed sufficient in principle to enlighten the fully prepared disciple who is able to “attain immediate experience of the fact that his Self is the Absolute” (Enlightenment, 114). This “immediate experience” arises only in the case of those whose spiritual receptivity is perfect, such that there is no barrier either in the intelligence or the character that impedes the dawn of Self-realization or Liberation, moksa: [T]hose gifted persons who are not afflicted by any ignorance, doubt, or erroneous knowledge to obstruct the comprehension of the meaning of the words can have direct knowledge of the meaning of the sentence when it is heard only once (Enlightenment, 115-116). Such disciples have the “immediate experience,” and not just the conceptual understanding, that the word “That” refers to the transcendent Absolute, Brahma nirguna, which is designated provisionally as “the Real, Knowledge, the Infinite, . . . Consciousness, and Bliss” (Enlightenment, 114); and that the “thou” refers to the inmost Self “that which is distinguishable from all other elements in the empirical personality, from the body onward . . . discovered to be pure Consciousness” (Enlightenment, 115). The sentence that expresses the real identity between the transcendentally conceived Absolute and the immanently realized Self is endowed with a realizatory power not simply because of its theurgic power, divine origin, and sacramental nature, but also because of the relationship between its meaning and the very being of the soul who hears it: it directly expresses the highest truth, which is consubstantial with the deepest ontological dimension of the jiva. Just as it was seen earlier that the Absolute comprises within itself the elements Being and Consciousness in an absolutely undifferentiated manner, each element being distinguishable from the other only on the plane of relativity, so these two elements of the soul are indistinguishable at its inmost center, and are bifurcated in appearance only at the surface, that is, at the level of its phenomenal mode of existence. The truth expressed by the sentence is thus one with the innermost identity of the soul, and has the power to actualize the virtual consciousness of this identity, for those souls in the requisite state of spiritual receptivity. Since, however, the overwhelming majority of those seeking enlightenment do not have the capacity to realize the Self upon the first hearing of the text, the question of the spiritual discipline required for enhancing receptivity to this realization assumes great importance. It is to this discipline that the analysis now proceeds, beginning with the realm of action. 2. Action Realization of the Self is attained through knowledge, and this strictly implies the transcending of action and the realm within which it operates. One can identify an objective and a subjective reason for this being the case in Shankara’s perspective. Objectively, action must be transcended because of the definitive conditions proper to its functioning, and subjectively, it must be transcended because it constitutes the dynamic by which ignorance is perpetuated through the vicious cycle of karma. As regards the objective factor, an examination of the basis of action indicates that it consists in the triad of “knowledge-knower-known”; the knower in question is by definition the false self, the empirical ego, the agent setting in motion the intelligential and sensible instruments of knowledge, the knowledge registered by these instruments being thus wholly relative; the known is the object desired, to which the action is oriented. The “factors” of action are: the agent; the body; the organs; the vital energy; and the divine power over them (Discipleship, 3-8). Action thus defined can in no wise result in transcendent knowledge; built into action is an insurmountable barrier to realization, a barrier constituted by the very prerequisites for action itself. It is evident from this summary that the category “action” covers more than simply physical movement; it is intimately related to cognition and it is this link which reveals the subjective dimension of the limitations of action: “Action is incompatible with metaphysical knowledge since it occurs to the accompaniment of ego-feeling” (Upadesa (A), II, 1.12). According to Shankara, action fosters the twin-illusion that “I am the one doing the action” and “let this be mine”; the first entrenches the false idea that one’s identity resides in the empirical agent, this being a manner of intensifying the superimposition of the Self onto the not-self, while the second, by ascribing to the Self empirical attributes, superimposes the not-self onto the Self, which is thus subject to qualifications, and is thereby reduced to the “lesser Absolute,” or “Absolute with qualities,” Brahma saguna as opposed to the Absolute that transcends all qualities, Brahma nirguna. The Self, then, is not subject to modification; once the nature of the Self is understood, and is identified as one’s own identity, the limitative notion of individual agency is eliminated once and for all; now, it is from the perspective of this realization that Shankara is able to relegate the whole realm of action to illusion: if Self-realization entails the transcending of action, then the renunciation of action must be a prerequisite for that realization: [H]ow can there be the notions “agent” and “enjoyer” again when once there is the realization “I am the real”? Therefore metaphysical knowledge cannot require or receive support from action (Upadesa (A), II, 1.20). Since realization—which means in this context “making real” or effective the fact that “I am the real”—eliminates the basis on which the individual is bound by the illusion of being an active agent, it naturally follows that action cannot be a means of realization; action cannot, in other words, lead to the attainment of a state that reveals action to be illusory; just as in the snake-rope image, one cannot attain to the knowledge of the reality of the rope by continuing to act on the basis of the fear of its being a snake. Realization of the Self is described as “deliverance” or “liberation”; it must be stressed here that it is from the realm of samsara—of indefinite births, deaths, and rebirths—that the jivan-mukta is delivered, in this life. Samsaric existence is woven out of ignorance, the false identification with the body-mind complex; those who persist in this error, and who take their finite selves as well as the outside world to which these selves relate, as the sole reality, denying “the existence of a world beyond,” are said to be “born again and again, and come again and again into my power, into the power of death”: That is, they remain involved in the unbroken chain of suffering constituted by birth, death, and the other hardships of transmigratory existence. That is exactly the condition of the very great majority of the people (Discipleship, 11-12). Transmigration is said to be beginningless, it cannot be said to have begun at any particular point in time because that point must have been the result of the fruition of the karma that preceded it, and so on; the fruits of karma in the form of merit and demerit are earned through action—taken in its widest sense, including cognition, as seen above—and this action qua bondage arises on the basis of the false identification with the body-mind complex. And this shows that the total cessation of transmigratory existence can only occur through devotion to the path of knowledge, associated with the renunciation of all action (Discipleship, 8). It is only knowledge that liberates one from the chains of samsara, of conditioned existence, but the knowledge in question is of a completely different order from what is conventionally regarded as knowledge: A cognition of the mind is an act that can be referred to by a verb and is characterized by change. It is referred to metaphorically as “knowledge” because it ends with an apparent manifestation of knowledge as its result (Upadesa (A) I, 2.77). In other words, no cognition, insofar as it can be characterized as an act, can be equated with real knowledge, but only with an apparent manifestation thereof; ignorance may be weakened by certain types of action, as will be seen below, but they cannot eradicate it, since ignorance is itself the result of previous merit and demerit arising out of action. To say “action” is thus to say “perpetuation of ignorance.” Work leads to purification of the mind, not to perception of the Reality. The realization of Truth is brought about by discrimination and not by ten millions of acts (Vivekachudamani, 11). Deliverance or Liberation cannot be reduced to being an effect of an act since action is a mode of conditioned existence: the freedom from conditioned existence implied by Deliverance would then become dependent on a mode of that very level of existence for its own attainment. The emphasis placed on the liberating power of transcendent knowledge by Shankara leads to the expression of certain antinomian ideas, the intention behind which is to establish, with the utmost rigor, the incommensurability between the realm of action—involving change, alterity, transience, and illusion—and the realization of the Self, immutable, non-dual, eternal, and unconditionally real. An example of this antinomianism is the following, from his commentary on the Bhagavad Gita: Even dharma is a sin—in the case of him who seeks liberation—inasmuch as it causes bondage (Gita, IV, 21). The double qualification here is important: only for the mumuksu, the one seeking liberation, can dharma ever constitute a sin—and this, only in the measure that it causes bondage to action and not insofar as dharma is performed in a disinterested manner. Only in relation to the quest for the highest realization can any lesser goal be regarded as a sin. There is a distinction here between those who perform their duty in a spirit of renunciation and those who do so in a spirit of attachment. But within the first category there is a further division: there is the one who renounces action because he “sees inaction in action,” being disinterested in the whole realm of action, knowing it as illusion; this type of renunciate is “higher” in relation to the renunciate who offers all actions to Isvara in the faith that “I act for His sake”. . . . The result of actions so done is only purity of mind and nothing else (Gita, V, 10). This may be interpreted as follows: to act for the sake of the Lord, conceived as the “other” may be a selfless mode of action, but insofar as it is still invested with significance by the agent, and inasmuch as it is conditioned by its reference to the acting Lord, thus Brahma saguna and not the actionless Brahma nirguna— for these two reasons such action still pertains to the realm of the not-self. It may be “self-less,” taking the relative ego as the self in question, but it still falls short of the requirements for the path of supreme Self-realization. However, the attainment of “purity of mind,” despite being the highest result of action, can also be said to constitute a prerequisite for pursuing the path of transcendence; therefore one must take into account that inward quality pertaining to outward action which leads to and cultivates purity of mind, namely virtue. Shankara makes it abundantly clear that without virtue, liberating knowledge cannot be realized. The very first sutra of the Atma-bodha makes it clear that a high degree of virtue is the prerequisite even for receiving the doctrine of the Self: “This Atmabodha is being composed for those who, seeking Liberation, have been purified from evil by constant austerities and have reached calm and peacefulness” (Atma-bodha (B), 1). This emphasis upon virtue—being purified from evil—is repeated in the Upadesa Sahasri, where Shankara writes that the knowledge of Brahman should only be given to “him whose mind has been pacified, who has controlled his senses and is freed from all defects, who has practiced the duties enjoined by the scriptures and is possessed of good qualities, who is always obedient to the teacher and aspires after Liberation and nothing else” (Upadesa (B), II, 16.72). The essential virtues must already be present in the soul of the disciple, in some degree at least, as a prior condition for the teaching of the higher knowledge. But the teacher must continue to give, as part of the spiritual discipline, “sound instruction” on the central virtues, which are laid down at Bhagavad Gita, XIII, 7-12, and among which one can identify as essentially moral conditions, as opposed to intellectual conditions, the following: humility, modesty, innocence, patience, uprightness, service of the teacher, purity, steadfastness, self-control, detachment, absence of egoism, equanimity, and devotion to the Lord. Commenting on Krishna’s phrase “this is declared to be knowledge” (where “this” refers to all the preceding qualities), Shankara writes: These attributes . . . are declared to be knowledge because they are conducive to knowledge. What is opposed to this—viz. pride, hypocrisy, cruelty, impatience, insincerity and the like—is ignorance, which should be known and avoided as tending to the perpetuation of samsara (Gita, XIII, 11). One can see that for Shankara morality cannot be divorced from the highest truth, even if the two elements pertain to incommensurable orders of reality. Knowledge relating to the Self infinitely transcends the domain within which morality operates, that is, the outward world on the one hand, and the relative self, the jivatman, on the other; but there is nevertheless a crucial relationship between knowledge and virtue: not only is virtue a necessary condition for receiving doctrinal instruction, it is also described as a means to the attainment of knowledge: the teacher “should thoroughly impress upon the disciple qualities like humility, which are the means of knowledge” (Upadesa (B), I, 1.5, emphasis added). The slightest trace of pride—attachment to the illusory ego—not only “perpetuates samsara,” it is also a form of ignorance, vice being understood here not just as an evil in its own right, but also as a veil over the truth; pride is not simply immoral, it is also an intellectual dysfunction. The virtue of humility, on the other hand, is not exhausted by its purely moral dimension; it has in addition and above all a truly intellectual function. Humility can thus be understood as a moral quality which prefigures that total extinction of the individual that is entailed by realization of the Self; it is a manner of being that conforms with the highest truth, and which, for that very reason, enhances receptivity to it. Moreover, without humility, there is the ever-present danger that knowledge will be misappropriated by the individual, rather than serving to reveal the supra-individual Self: He who knows that the Consciousness of the Self never ceases to exist, and that It is never an agent, and also gives up the egoism that he is a Knower of Brahman, is a (real) Knower of the Self. Others are not so (Upadesa (B) II, 12.13). In other words, true consciousness of the Self demands that the ego must not take pride in this knowledge, for the knowledge in question is thereby undermined by the very illusion which it is supposed to eradicate, namely, the ego as a self-subsistent entity; further, it is an absurdity for the ego to pride itself upon knowing “something,” as it were outside itself, for then that very duality belies the claim to unitive consciousness; it is only the Self that knows itself. The highest attainment for the ego, in relation to the “experience” of the Self, is extinction in the very bosom of unitive consciousness (a subject to be addressed below). This extinction is prefigured in all the essential virtues, which are also regarded as, on the one hand, preparations and preconditions for this consciousness, and on the other hand, as guarantees that the doctrine will not lead to pride—the intensification of illusory existence apart from the Self—but will r
- [Shema Yisrael](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/shema) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection Shema Yisrael (or Sh’ma Yisrael or just Shema) (Hebrew: “Hear, [O] Israel”) are the first two words of a section of the Torah that is essential to the morning and evening Jewish prayer services. The first verse encapsulates the monotheistic essence of Judaism: “Hear, O Israel: the
- [Conversation on Islam & the Qur’an](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/conversation-islam-quran) - Karen Armstrong, John Esposito & Joseph Lumbard A video recording from “A Norwegian Evening Understanding the Quran & Islam”, organized by Samtiden in 2017. Samtiden is a political and literary magazine of Norway founded in 1890. https://youtu.be/kAdbzY4nPhM?t=1494
- [The Celestial Gardener](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/hani-celestial-gardener) - Jean Hani A chapter from Divine Craftsmanship: Preliminaries to a Spirituality of Work Before becoming, like many other things in the modern world, a simple utility, a “green space”, or purely an amusement, the garden, along with the house and the temple, was always considered by civilized peoples to be an image of the world.
- [The Song of the Sibyl](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-song-of-the-sibyl) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection El Cant de la Sibil·la is a liturgical chant of Apocalyptic contents, which has been performed at churches of Majorca, Sardinia and Catalunya on Christmas Eve nearly uninterrruptedly since medieval times. It has been declared a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO.
- [Thomas Merton & Sufism—Gray Henry Lecture](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/merton-sufism-lecture) - Virginia Gray Henry Monday 17 July, 7:30–9pm Venue: The Essex Unitarian Church 112 Palace Gardens Terrace Kensington London W8 4RT Thomas Merton was a 20th century spiritual seeker, a monk who became known throughout the world for his spiritual writings. At one point in his life he was graced with an epiphany. The term he
- [Anekantavada and Ahimsa—Many-sidedness and Peace](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/anekantavada-ahimsa) - Alok Tandon The blindmen and the elephant—a story found in the works of Mallisena, a 13th c. Jain acharya. Anekantavada is to be contrasted with ekantavada which stands for a definite categorically asserted philosophic position. But aneka ‘many’ is not diametrically opposite to eka ‘one’, for many includes one. Different ekantavadas may thus be only
- [My Father’s God](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/needleman-my-fathers-god) - Jacob Needleman We present here the first chapter of Prof. Needleman’s What Is God? It does not matter whether we deny or affirm the existence of what the conventional world calls God. What matters is only that we are deeply and authentically concerned with questions of ultimate reality and ultimate value. It only matters that
- [Wisdom of the Colombian Mamos](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/wisdom-of-the-colombian-mamos) - Glimpses at the South-American Arhuaco worldview and tradition of wisdom. The Mamos are seers, clairvoyants, telepathists, clairaudients; they can foretell the time, and have in their own memory all that has happened through the centuries. It is as if someone talked to them. Click here to read a brief selection of texts, or click here
- [Fifty-four Years as an Athonite Pilgrim: Then and Now](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/ware-athonite-pilgrim) - Metropolitan Kallistos Ware Silence, stillness, hesychia, is a fundamental gift of Athos. It seems that the reading and chanting of priests and monks in the endless rhythm of their day and nightly rituals is no more than a thin fringe of a limitless ocean of silence. This silence, this stillness, is far more than a
- [Sacred Art in Today’s World](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/sacred-art-in-todays-world) - Emma Clark My experience of teaching for 25 years in an art school has demonstrated how frustrated and lost students feel when they attend an art school which no longer teaches techniques and skills, let alone meaning in art. True sacred art may help us to know ourselves on a deeper level, to help us
- [“Progress” in Retrospect](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/progress-ir) - Wolfgang Smith The fall of Adam is not only a primordial act which antedates history as such, but it is also something which comes to pass again and again in the course of human events. It is re-enacted on a smaller or larger scale wherever men opt for what is contingent and ephemeral in place
- [<em>The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology</em>, by Wolfgang Smith](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/regenerating-science) - Regenerating Science Through Metaphysics Wolfgang Smith, Foreword by Jean Borella, The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology: Contemporary Science in Light of Tradition Reviewed by Marilyn Prever Is boredom and meaninglessness the price we have to pay for the blessings of scientific progress? Yes, says Wolfgang Smith, unless we can effect the regeneration of science itself — from subatomic physics all the way up to the big picture, cosmology — by putting it back on the right metaphysical foundation. Nobody does scientific research in a vacuum; it is shaped by, and shapes, the culture around it. The picture of reality that we think has been “discovered by science” owes more than we realize to the philosophy it was built on. There is nobody quite like Dr. Smith. Some scientists tinker with philosophy, and some philosophers specialize in the philosophy of science, but here is a man of high achievement in both fields: a physicist and research mathematician whose work in aerodynamics laid the groundwork for the solution of the re-entry problem, and also a philosopher rooted in the classical realism of the Aristotelian/Thomist synthesis as well as in Buddhist and Vedantic thought. This, his fourth full-length book, builds on the work of two of his others: Cosmos and Transcendence: Breaking Through the Barrier of Scientistic Belief (1984), and The Quantum Enigma: Finding the Hidden Key (1995). In the former, he liberates us from some dangerous philosophical dogmas disguised as science, tracing them back to their roots in Descartes’ “bifurcationism,” which leaves us in a position where “the soul has no windows.” (In my opinion, two of the chapters, “Lost Horizons” and “‘Progress’ in Retrospect” ought to be made up into leaflets and airdropped like CARE packages over our Ivy League universities.) The Quantum Enigma is a ground-breaking solution to the “quantum reality problem” which eliminates the paradoxes (though not the mystery!) of the bewildering world of quantum physics without any ad hoc hypotheses. (If you can read a description of the famed “double slit experiment” and go on with your life without being bothered by it, don’t read Wolfgang Smith; just go back to sleep.) He accomplishes this feat by integrating the latest observations of modern physics into the ancient Perennial Philosophy, the traditional metaphysical wisdom of mankind. The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology continues from where The Quantum Enigma leaves off. It’s a collection of articles published between 1997 and 2002, revised and unified, explaining this new approach and then expanding it into the realm of modern cosmology... insofar as such a thing exists! The trouble is, we hardly have a cosmology anymore, only a cosmography. Our universe is too small; we get off at the first floor, thinking there are no storeys above. Smith’s main thesis is that we moderns, in rejecting the traditional understanding of the cosmos in favor of some form of reductionism, and turning science (really, an ideology called scientism) into a religion, have not only lost a priceless heritage of truth, but have even prevented ourselves from understanding science, especially the new discoveries whose meaning is so puzzling as long as our hidden philosophical premises remain unexamined. And yet this very fact indicates that science itself may be pointing the way to the correction of scientism. The book invites us to join him in exploring the new world opened up when the latest scientific discoveries are illuminated by almost forgotten ideas, such as Aristotle’s hylomorphism, or by Dr. Smith’s brand-new and crucial ontological distinction between the “physical” and the “corporeal” worlds. The book begins and ends with essays that put his ideas into a wider cultural context: an Introduction outlining the principles of the traditional wisdom, and a chapter called “Science and the Restoration of Culture” which would be required reading for anyone applying for a job in education or government if we lived in a just society. Or even a sane one. In between, there is an intellectual feast: I hardly know where to begin. He ranges from physics and astronomy to biology and information theory. Some of the articles will be of help to Christians seeking to harmonize Biblical and Patristic teachings with modern science (Dr. Smith is a Roman Catholic). If you look at the Index, which is actually an index of names, you will find the most diverse collection of thinkers imaginable: everyone from Max Planck to Dante Alighieri, from Vivekananda to Alfred North Whitehead to Suhrawardi. Here are some sample chapters: · “InterpretingAnthropicCoincidence”maintains thatthe debate onthe‘anthropic principle’ has been distorted by a hidden philosophical assumption shared by both theists and naturalists: the old philosophy of atomism, which goes back to Democritus and Lucretius, and which is scientifically untenable since the quantum revolution. · “The Pitfall of Astrophysical Cosmology”suggests thattheold distinction between celestial and terrestrial substances may have something to it after all. · “CelestialCorporeality”explores the possibilityof non-material bodies, findinga common thread in the New Testament, the Upanishads, medieval alchemy, Jacob Boehme’s theosophy, and the Lorentz transformations of relativity theory. · Thereis a chaptercalled, believe itornot,“The Status of Geocentrism”,whichtakes a fresh look at a controversy most people didn’t even know was a controversy. Copernicus, Galileo, St. Robert Bellarmine, and Albert Einstein all contribute to this one. · “Intelligent Design and Vertical Causation” builds on the work of Behe, Dembski, and other biologists and mathematicians exploring the new evidence for “irreducible complexity” in living organisms. C.S. Lewis would have loved Smith’s books. In The Abolition of Man he expresses his distrust of the spirit of modern science, likening many of its practitioners to Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, who made a pact with the devil: “There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the“wisdom”ofearlierages....Themodernscientificmovement...wasborninan unhealthy neighborhood and at an inauspicious hour. Its triumphs may have been too rapid and purchased at too high a price: reconsideration, and something like repentance, may be required. “Is it, then, possible to imagine a new Natural Philosophy...? I hardly know what I am asking for.... The regenerate science which I have in mind would not do even to minerals and vegetables what modern science threatens to do to man himself. When it explained it would not explain away. When it spoke of the parts it would remember the whole.” Professor Lewis, meet Wolfgang Smith: he’s working on it.
- [<em>Adastra</em> — To the Stars](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/adastra-to-the-stars) - Frithjof Schuon A sample selection of one of the many poetry volumes published by Schuon in his later years, read by himself in the original German, with text and English translation. Adastra Die Burg · The Fortress Verbindung · Association Gerechtigkeit · Justice Der Schleier · The Veil Die Laute · The Lute Originally published
- [The Abrahamic Archetype](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-abrahamic-archetype) - by Samuel Zinner. Co-published with Archetype ISBN 978-1-901383-41-6 To buy this publication through Amazon click here This is a Matheson Trust Publication, click here to view other Matheson Trust Publications.
- [<em>Kintsugi</em>](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/kintsugi) - Kintsugi, “to patch with gold”, is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold lacquer. It is the traditional, Zen-related craft of the “broken and perfect”, of recognizing and bringing out the beauty in broken things. Follow this link for a brief video on the contemporary practice of Kintsugi. Click here to view the
- [Double-Entry Accounting and Confession](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/double-entry-accounting-and-confession) - James Aho Business chronicling and penitential confession both were expressions of a late medieval project in moral improvement. Each involved the “casting of accounts,” the first to an auditor; the second to the Auditor (God). Click here to view the PDF. Excerpts from Confession and Bookkeeping: The Religious, Moral, and Rhetorical Roots of Modern Accounting,
- [Frithjof Schuon and René Guénon](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/frithjof-schuon-and-rene-guenon) - Martin Lings at the Temenos Academy This lecture is a personal response from Martin Lings, who was closely associated with both Frithjof Schuon and René Guénon. This is an important introduction and commentary on the significance of these two important contributors to the elaboration of the Sophia Perennis in our times. Click here to download –
- [Collected Poems](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/collected-poems) - Martin Lings Collected Poems by Martin Lings is available from Archetype. All audio files in this section are in MP3 format. The Muse Click here to download, 1:22 (0.7MB) The Legend of Seyis and Halcyon Click here to download, 7:54 (3.8MB) The South Wind Click here to download, 1:28 (1.4MB) The Birds Click here to download, 1:28 (1.4MB) Epithalamion Click here
- [O Gladsome Light (<em>Phos Hilaron</em>)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/o-gladsome-light-phos-hilaron) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection Also translated as “O Joyful Light” or “Hail, gladdening Light”, this is the earliest known Christian hymn recorded outside of the Bible that is still in use today. Writing in the 4th century, Saint Basil called it “one of our oldest and most beloved hymns”. It is
- [The Symbolism of the Ark: Universal Symbolism of the Receptacle of Divine Immanence](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-symbolism-of-the-ark) - by Timothy Scott. Co-published with Fons Vitae ISBN 978-1-891785-36-8 Click here to view an extract To buy this publication through Amazon click here This is a Matheson Trust Publication, click here to view other Matheson Trust Publications.
- [The Origin of the Buddha Image & Elements of Buddhist Iconography](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-origin-of-the-buddha-image) - by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. ISBN 978-1887752800 Co-published with Fons Vitae Click here to view an extract To buy this publication through Amazon click here This is a Matheson Trust Publication, click here to view other Matheson Trust Publications.
- [Prayer, Preaching, and Reproof](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/prayer-preaching-and-reproof) - Chapter 5 of Pillar of Prayer: Guidance in Contemplative Prayer, Sacred Study, and the Spiritual Life, from the Baal Shem Tov and His Circle Aubrey L. Glazer (Editor) Menachem Kallus (Translator) Fons Vitae, Sept. 2011 ISBN-13: 978-1891785795 This excerpt reproduced here by The Matheson Trust with kind permission from the authors and the publisher. Chapter 5 Prayer, Preaching, and Reproof # 65–66.20 65. Praying with the Cosmos 66. Preaching Reproof, and Prayer 66.1 Uniting with Oth- ers by Discerning Commonality 66.1.1 The Contemplative Practice of Teaching Torah in Public 66.2 Two Aspects of the Elevating Functions of the Tzaddiq 66.3 For One’s Word Do Be Accorded the Force of Deed—Seven Levels in the Emergence of Sacred Speech 66.4 Self-Observation to Determine One’s Present State 66.5 Rebuke out of Love versus Self-Serving Rebuke; and a Parable 66.51 The Hypocrisy of the Evil Inclination 66.6 The Fellowship of All Creation 66.7 Each Individual Is the Center of the Cosmos 66.8 Silence in the Face of Disparagement 66.9 Equanimity 66.10 Humbleness Draws the Divine Ef- fluence 66.11 Total Absorption in Kavvanot 66.12 Familiarize Yourself with All Things 66.12.1 The Human Being Is a Microcosm 66.12.2 The Human Being Is a Microcosm II 66.12.3 A Tzaddiq Can Raise the Generation Only by Facing His/Her Inner-Adversary 66.12.31 Facing the Inner Adversary 66.12.4 The True Nature of Mosheh’s Humility, and His Sense of Responsibility 66.12.41—The True Nature of Mosheh’s Humility II 66.12.5 The Souls of the All-Encompassing Tzaddiqim Transcend Time 66.13 Despondency as a Form of Pride 66.20 How to Pray in Solitude and Be Accounted as if One Prayed with the Congregation 65. prAying wiTh The cosmos Intend, in your prayer, that you are arousing the letters whereby the heavens and the earth, and all creatures, both the higher and the lower, and all realms were created. This being so when you recite your prayers and praises [to Divinity], you are saying them together with all the worlds and all creatures, because you are arousing the source of the inner life of all creatures, and are praying with [the inner energy of] all of them and raising all of them up—those of heaven and those of the earth— through this intention. By this means, the spiritual elite who pray with Kavvanah also arouse the inner “letters” of those of lesser stature so that they too can pray with more Kavvanah and enthusiasm, and can better themselves. The Ba‘al Shem Tov revealed this to his disciples and said: “You must pray even for the sake of the flying chirping bird.” Also when one employs words of Torah for the sake of reproof, this type of Kavvanah is useful so as to raise [the spiritual state of] one’s audience. He repeated this teaching often.315 66. preAching reproof, And prAyer I heard in this the name of the Maggid R. M?nachem Mendel [of Bar]: When preach- ing words of reproof to your congregation, be careful to connect yourself first, with His blessed Name. Then consciously connect with, and unify the congregation. 315. BP # 80; Darkhey Tzedeq # 39. And see below, # 67.2. 58 Include yourself with them, realizing that the leaders of the generation and the congregation they serve are of the same soul-root.316 When you do this, the Lord will be with you and you will be successful in rising together with them, cleaving to His blessed Name. This is as the Zohar states [2:128a]: “Meritorious is one who holds the hand of the blameworthy”—one holds their hand to raise them up. In this way one already accomplishes something merely by preaching reproof to the people of Israel. . . . I also heard words to this effect with reference to prayer, in order to raise up the consciousness of the generation.317 66.1 Uniting with Others by Discerning Commonality I heard in the name of my teacher [the Besht] o.b.e.m. regarding how one unites with one’s companion so as to raise him or her up. If one can find a feature com- mon in both oneself and one’s companion, then one can be bound so as to raise the person, through [the exegetic principle of] G?zerah Shavah.318 However, if they see themselves as two opposites, such elevation is not possible. And [Eccl. 10:12] the words of the wise are gracious.319 66.1.1 The Contemplative Practice of Teaching Torah in Public When one teaches Torah to other people, one should first bind one’s thoughts together with the presence of the hearers to the blessed Creator, realizing that everyone draws life only from His effluence. And one should consider that she or he is speaking these words only for the sake of the blessed holy One, in order to please His Spirit. It is not I who am saying these words before my colleagues, lest I be affected by external praise or blame. All this, from the Besht.320 66.2 Two Aspects of the Elevating Functions of the Tzaddiq I heard from my teacher and grandfather [the Besht] o.b.e.m. that all the spiritual ascensions of the person are made possible through the righteous leaders of the generation—whether these be the refinement of one’s moral attributes, or one’s speech. All of these are elevated by the Tzaddiq. In this there are two aspects: those that the Tzaddiq elevates by means of prayer and Torah study, and those that the Tzaddiq can elevate only by means of mundane speech. This is as the Talmud comments on the verse [Ps. 1:3] “and his leaves shall not wither”; that it refers to the mundane speech of sages, which is also worthy of scrutiny [BT Sukkah fol. 21b]. They may seem, on the outside, to be empty words, but actually, by the mundane conversation of the Tzaddiq with such a person, he or she is elevated, as I heard 316. See below, # 66.12.2, from BT ‘Arakhin fol. 17a. 317. BP # 81; TYY fol. 66c, 137a. 318. Derivation based on similitude of expression, and see below, # 101.3 near note 714. 319. Besht Torah, Parashat ‘Eqev, # 72; ZP fol. 26d. 320. Besht Torah, Parashat Va’Etchannan # 41, from Hanhagot Y?sharot fol. 15a. 59 Prayer, Preaching, and Reproof The Pillar of Prayer from my teacher and grandfather o.b.e.m. But not everyone merits to be able to comport oneself in this way, as he explained with regard to the Mishnah [BT K?tubbot 13a]:321 “If he saw her conversing with a man in the marketplace.”322 66.3 For One’s Word Do Be Accorded the Force of Deed—Seven Levels in the Emergence of Sacred Speech In the Midrash [Tanchumah’ Lev. beginning] we read [Ps. 103:20]: “Bless the Lord, you angels of His, you of mighty potency who perform His bidding, who hearken to the voice of His word.” This is to say, that one ought to cultivate the practice whereby one’s words are accounted as action. In other words, when you want to speak, you should have your words go through seven levels. First you need to be in the state of understanding—to consider how to speak. Then the words need to pass through the levels of love and awe,323 and then through beauty324—so as to intend to emerge whole. Then the letters become combined and display themselves in their desire for self-expression so as to be spoken in this particular way. For this, the way of victory325 must manifest—that those particular letters [phonemes] overcome other kinds of phonetic expression. Then the way of acclamation326 is achieved. And so, the way of foundation327 is achieved when your thoughts are connected with your words. Then such speech is called “the foundation.”328 Then the word emerges through the mouth—and this is Malkhut, the lower manifestation. You need to manifest this practice so that your words will be accounted as actions.329 321. Besht Torah, Parashat ‘Eqev, # 70 ZP fol. 77a, where we read: [The Besht provided an explanation of] “If he saw her conversing with some- ‘one’ [‘im ’echad] in the marketplace” (BT K?tubbot 13a) and (an explanation of) the Mishnah (BT Shabbat 73a): “These are the principle forbidden forms of labor (on Shabbat); forty minus one”: I heard from my teacher (the Besht) o.b.e.m., that there are forms of unification (with the Divine) that one enacts through speech—be it the speech of Torah and prayer, or even the mundane speech of the marketplace. For even with these one can unite with the one to whom one is talking and raise up each one, in accordance the person’s level. Some are elevated through Torah, and some through plain speech, which is also composed of the twenty-two letters” (and see below, # 148.2). And see Besht Torah, Parashat B?re’shit # 110, from ’Or hagGanuz Parashat P?qudey, where we read: “Even when speaking with someone in the market, one’s words must contain the love and awe (of God), for words are composed of the twenty-two letters; as the Besht regarding the Mishnah (BT K?tubbot 13a), “If he saw her conversing with some- ‘one’ [‘im ’echad] in the marketplace”— that it is proper that one’s speech with another be unified for the One.” And see below, the teaching immediately following, and # 80.4. 322. Besht Torah, Parashat ‘Eqev, # 69; DME Parashat M?tzora‘. 323. Love and awe=’ahava v?yir’ah=Chesed and G?vurah. 324. Tif’eret. 325. Netzach. 326. Hod. 327. Y?sod. 328. As in Tzaddiq y?sod ’Olam. 329. Besht Torah, Parashat VayYiqra’ # 3; KShT fol. 22b, LY 17a. 60 66.4 Self-Observation to Determine One’s Present State “Judge your fellow righteously” [Lev. 19:15]—Our sages have stated [BT ’Avot 4:1]: “One is wise, who learns from every person.” This is because one who is wise recognizes his or her own faults, whereas a fool recognizes only the faults of others and berates them, but does not realize his or her own shortcomings. Indeed, each person has the capacity of self-knowledge, if she or her so desires, and as Rabbenu Tam stated in his Sefer hayYashar, this is essential [in one’s service to God]. It is also indicated in the Zohar’s section of the Hekhalot—the Heavenly Palaces.330 There is the Palace of Merit, in the Pure Divine Chambers [Hekhalot], and corresponding to this in the realm of impurity, in the Palace of Undeservedness. The difference between them is that in the Palace of Merit, when a person is being judged, all who are present begin by pronouncing his or her merits, and transform the interpretations of any contrary claims accordingly, so that even an evil person might be found to be righteous. Not so in the Q?lippot’s Palace of Undeserving, where with regard to anyone, they begin by pronouncing one’s shortcomings. This being the case, anyone can know his or her level in the immediate present: if you are judging other people meritoriously, then you are in the state of holiness, where the Palace of Merit abides,331 whereas if you are in a vindictive state of mind, then you are in a state of impurity.332 This is also the meaning of [BT ’Avot 2:4] “Do not judge the other person until you reach his or her state.”333 66.5 Rebuke out of Love versus Self-Serving Rebuke; and a Parable “Do not hate your brother in your heart; rebuke—rebuke your fellow and do not bear sin on his account” [Lev. 19:17]. Scholars who lead the people and rebuke them in public places need to take heed when offering ethical reproof; that they feel love for those who they are reproving and that this be offered from the side of love, as a father chastises his son early in his development [Prov. 13:24], and as it is written [Prov. 3:12], “God reproves those whom God loves,” and there are many other such verses that indicate this. However, as I heard from my teacher [the Besht], about those who, heaven forefend, want to further their own careers through the business of rebuke, offering it for the sake of livelihood, for example, and not for the sake of Heaven, arousing the audience by the rhetorical flair of the voice, as in the verse [Ps. 42:4], “My tears 330. Zohar 2:244b–268b; and for the section discussed here, see fol. 251a–b, and see also Zohar vol. 2 fol. 6b. 331. See the Lurianic Zohar haRaqia‘ fol. 68b, where we read that the Sh?khinah abides in the Palace of Merit, and from there, She rises higher with the purified sparks into the Palace of Love, the place of union. And see Zohar 2 fol. 261 a–b. 332. See ibid. fol. 73a–b. 333. Besht Torah, Parashat Q?doshim # 6; KP fol. 16c. 61 Prayer, Preaching, and Reproof The Pillar of Prayer have been my bread. . . .”334 These tears actually arouse the power of negativity on high, and bring about strife between Israel and their Father in Heaven; as I al- luded to once, when explaining the verse [Num. 21:6]: “And God sent the vipers, the burning serpents, . . . ” that there are two types of preachers. This is also illustrated by a parable that I heard from my teacher: A king sent his only son away, removing him from his presence, and then sent two of his ser- vants [to report on the prince’s doings]. One of them returned, offering the king a disparaging report. The second one, while reporting the same facts, expressed sorrow over the plight of the king and his son, the prince having been sent away for such a long time—so long that he even forgot the comportments of the court; and all who once held him in high esteem now demeaned him. By the means of the second report, the king was filled with compassion.335 Similarly, there are those who speak publicly of Israel’s disgraces, and—heaven forefend—arouse thereby the prosecution of the primal serpent, as is written [Lev. 17:9]: “And God sent the vipers, the burning serpents”—because these preachers burn by the poison issuing from their mouths! For if they offer rebuke for selfish and ulterior mo- tives, then their mouths and their hearts are not of one accord. Their intent is for monetary gain, but they say that they are doing it for God’s honor, may His Name be blessed; and heaven forefend, they may be causing the further perpetration of evil. In addition, they evoke the embarrassment of their fellows, but not their own. Also, in that it is written [Lev. 17:9]: “Do not bear sin on his account,” such preachers remove themselves from the general community! In truth, the preacher must include himself in the rebuke being offered, as I once explained [paraphrasing Lev. ibid.], “Rebuke [yourself, when] you rebuke336 your fellow, [and thereby you will] not bear sin on his account.”337 66.51 The Hypocrisy of the Evil Inclination “And unto you is its desire, but you can rule over it” [Gen. 4:7]: I heard from my teacher regarding the Talmudic discussion [BT Shabbat 75a]: “One who slaughters [on Shabbat] is liable on account of dyeing338 . . . as well as on account of having taken a life.” This refers to the Evil Inclination, who will be brought to judgment in the future-time [BT Sukkah 52a]. Although [he may claim] “I was created to do the job that I did!” he will, however, be rebuffed due to the fact that he sometimes 334. In other words, one earns “one’s bread” by means of the theatrical (and hypocritical) tears of the preacher. 335. And decided to reunite with his son, and “rehabilitate” him. 336. The verse reads hokheach tokhiach—a seemingly unnecessary repetition—“rebuke, you should rebuke.” 337. Besht Torah, Parashat Q?ldoshim # 14; TYY fol. 103a–b. 338. Tzovea’—dyeing—for the spilt blood is absorbed and invariably casts its dye. 62 disguised himself as the good-inclination.339 Thus, the “world-executioner”340 is liable because he cast himself with false dye,341 and thereby was [sometimes] suc- cessful in taking someone’s soul.342 66.6 The Fellowship of All Creation Do not say to yourself, “I am greater than my companion, for I serve with greater adhesion [D?vequt] to God.” This is because, like all other creatures, you were created for the sake of serving the Creator. And God gave a particular measure of intelligence to your companion, just as you were granted particular capacities. Indeed, why should one regard oneself as more worthy than a worm! For the worm also serves the Creator with all of its strength and capacity. And in the end, the person is also merely [consumed by] vermin, as King David declared [Ps. 22:7]: “I am a worm, and not a man.” For had the Creator not granted you greater capacity, you, too, would be able to serve Him just as a worm. And one may not be even as worthy as a worm, let alone a human being. Consider that you and all other creatures of the world, both great and small, are all companions, all having been created by God, and that all have the capacities bestowed upon them by God. This should always be in your mind.343 66.7 Each Individual Is the Center of the Cosmos I heard in the name of my teacher [the Besht], a particularly all-encompassing teaching: “If you would talk disparagingly of any creature or human being, then speak disparagingly of yourself; and if you would speak high praise regarding any person, then speak higher praise regarding the blessed Name.344 And [Eccl. 10:12] the words of the wise are gracious.” Although these words are self-evident, it is proper that when I mention the matter, I provide its reason. Once I explained the verse [Ps. 16] “I place God before 339. I.e., he engaged in hypocrisy—which in Hebrew slang is called a Tzavua’—one who is “falsely colored.” 340. A euphemism for the Evil Inclination, based on BT Babba’ Batra’ fol. 16a. 341. See KP fol. 12b (quoted in MMH B?re’shit # 128), where RYY quotes a teaching from his father-in-law, R. Chayyim of Sanz (the leader of the Kabbalistic Kloiz of Brody), where we read: “If you want to express an opinion in the public square for the sake of Heaven, first seclude yourself in your room and scrutinize your intention”—and see above # 44.9. 342. Besht Torah, Parashat B?re’shit # 147; BPY fol. 127a. 343. Besht Torah, Parashat M?tzora‘ # 9; Hanhagot Y?sharot 14a. I would like to dedicate this chapter to the memory of Ya‘aqov son of ’Avraham and Leah Sand, who was taken from this world before his time—in honor of whose Bar Mitzva I translated at least ten teachings in this anthology, including this one, some years ago. 344. See Heschel-Dresner, Circle of the Ba‘al Shem Tov, the monograph: “R. Nachman of Kosow: Companion of the Ba‘al Shem,” p. 129 and note 79, where we find a similar teaching in the name of R. Nachman of Kosov. But see below, note 346 and reference there. 63 Prayer, Preaching, and Reproof The Pillar of Prayer me always” as referring also to aspects of the world that are in opposition345 to the service of the Divine—such as the waste of one’s time, not studying Torah or pray- ing, or observing something unseemly in one’s companion. In such circumstances, activate your conceptual awareness in the faith that everything is from God, and that all is for your own ultimate good—and that this [experience is given to you] so that you discern how to rectify and improve your own deeds. For I have heard an important principle from R. Nachman,346 that no effacing experience would confound one: Esteem yourself to the point of regarding the entire world as created just for you. But if you were to be alone in the world, you would think of yourself as a trustworthy, straightforward, gracious, and righteous person. Whereas by seeing something unseemly in your companion, you are thereby enabled to realize that347 you must have something of this within yourself.348 Therefore, any disparagement you feel toward your friend, apply it first to yourself. By doing this, you fulfill the Mitzvah [Lev. 19:18] “Love your neighbor as yourself,” an essential principle that relates to the entire Torah.349 The opposite applies in the accounting of praise. Apply all the praise to the One whose Name is blessed,350 as the verse attests [Job 41:3], “Who has preceded Me that I be indebted? Whatever is under heaven is mine,” and the verse [Ps. 51:17]: “God, open my lips. . . .” This being the case, the praise of all people belongs to Him, may His Name be blessed.351 66.8 Silence in the Face of Disparagement Another general rule: if people disparage you on account of your service of prayer or other worthy matters, do not reply—even to say good things—so as not to ar- gue nor show pride. For these [attitudes and activities] cause distraction from the Presence of the blessed Name. So too, did our sages proclaim,352 “The silence of the person [in the face of rebuke or ridicule] brings one to humility.”353 66.9 Equanimity The Ba‘al Shem Tov said that if a person has no ulterior motives, all things being considered as equal to him or her, such a one will certainly attain to all levels—of 345. The word l?negdi in the above-mentioned verse bears the connotation “before me” as well as “in opposition to.” 346. Of Kosov [? see below # 143.2 and notes]—that enables one to proceed in the practice of constant contemplation, which was the practice of the aforementioned colleague of the Besht. 347. The fact that you are able to recognize it implies that. . . . 348. See below, # 143.1–2. 349. See Midrash B?re’shit Rabbah 24:7. 350. See above, # 66.6. 351. Besht Torah, Parashat M?tzora‘ # 10; TYY fol. 33a. 352. Re’shit Chokhmah, Gate of Humility, chapter 3. 353. Besht Torah, Parashat M?tzora‘ # 11; Hanhagot Yesharot 12a. 64 which humility is the greatest. And humility even without pure motive is greater than rebuke with pure motive as indicated [in BT ’Arakhin fol. 16b].354 66.10 Humbleness Draws the Divine Effluence It is said [Prov. 12:9], “Better a servant of low esteem than one who is honored but who lacks bread.” For there is no greater sign of the sincerity of the individual’s service to the Creator than in being aware of one’s own shortcomings. Such a per- son can be a sincere servant to Him who is blessed—as opposed to one who holds himself in high esteem but has no “bread”; i.e., no Divine effluence.355 66.12 Familiarize Yourself with All Things Familiarize yourself with pride, but do not be proud; and with anger, but do not become angry. This is because each individual needs to become whole in all the Divine attributes, which include both judgment and compassion.356 66.12.1 The Human Being Is a Microcosm The human being is a microcosm containing Mosheh and ’Aharon as well as the Egyptians. The wholly developed person is one who has the clear knowledgeable consciousness to be able to connect with all of the levels manifesting in his or her generation, raising them and uniting them with their roots, while also uniting himself or herself with them. Such a one is called “Mosheh” who contains in his person his entire generation. And she or he is called Da‘at--Consciousness, and her generation is called “the conscious generation.” By contrast, the evil person is called “immature”—one who does not possess awareness.357 66.12.2 The Human Being Is a Microcosm II The entire world is one whole Person with one face, in the secret of358 World-Year- Person,359 and what is within the individual is also reflected in the whole. Just as with regard to the individual there is form and matter, so too, with regard to a city, or to the land in which one lives. The “heads” of the nation constitute the “form” 354. Besht Torah, Parashat M?tzora‘ # 12; Hanhagot Y?sharot 14b. This teaching, however, seems to be contradicted by many other teachings of the Besht, in which he asserts that “false humility” is a ruse of the evil-inclination that disables the person from reaching his or her full potential (for example, # 104.2). See, however, # 101.2, whereby we may perhaps distinguish between “false humility” and “humility with impure motive.” 355. Besht Torah, Parashat M?tzora‘ # 13; TzRV fol. 14a. 356. Besht Torah, Parashat M?tzora‘ # 15; LY fol. 15c. 357. Besht Torah, Parashat Sh?mot # 19; TYY fol. 12b. 358. The shared dimensions of the microcosm and macrocosm, expressed in the three-fold space-time-person. 359. Sefer Y?tzirah, chapter 3, Mishnah 6ff—i.e., the outer world of the heavenly orbs; the passage of time; and the individual consciousness. 65 Prayer, Preaching, and Reproof The Pillar of Prayer and soul of the people of the generation, and the masses of people are like the material manifestations of the form. It is because of this that the Sages said regard- ing the verse [Ps. 24:6—see BT ‘Arachin fol. 17a] “This is the generation of those who seek Him [ze dor dor?shav]”—every generation and its spokespeople—meaning that there is a reciprocal relation with regard to the level of each generation and that of its leaders, just as there is a correspondence between the purity and clarity of the soul in relation to the body. And if the soul is obstructed, then the body is even more so—and so too, in the opposite direction. Thus with regard to Mosheh, who was the embodied manifestation of Knowl- edge, his generation was called “the Generation of Knowledge.” And this principle is operative in every generation. Because of this, one who wants to rectify the generation needs first to rectify himself or herself, so as to make spiritual forms from one’s materiality.360 Thereby, automatically, all those who are included within the person [who exhibits such qualities of leadership] will be aroused through such purification, toward their own repentance. And it would be easy to rectify them, once they themselves would transform their own materiality to conscious form. And as I mentioned elsewhere, regarding the Talmudic statement [BT ‘Arachin fol. 16b] “I wonder if anyone in the generation is able to receive rebuke”—if you want to rebuke the masses and cannot recognize and include yourself in this rebuke, then your rebuke will have no effect.361 66.12.3 A Tzaddiq Can Raise the Generation Only by Facing His/Her Inner- Adversary A saying of the Besht: Mosheh, peace be upon him, was accused of everything evil that Bil‘am had ever done. This phenomenon is the case, for as long as the Sh?khinah has not risen to the level that She will manifest at the time of the coming of the Righteous Redeemer—may it be soon in our day, Amen; which will be the time when all the obscurations will be completely annulled and [Isa. 25:8] “death shall be swallowed in eternal victory.” Until such a time, all of the risings of the Divine Presence are effected only by means of the thoughts of worthy people. And worthy persons cannot rise up to their own roots except through [facing their in- ner] adversaries—which appear to the mind as negative thought. And the person who is roused on that account, to return to the blessed Creator, returns to his or her own roots.362 360. Matter is recognized only by the forms it manifests as, thus, self-awareness implies seeing the forms of one’s material manifestations. 361. Besht Torah, Parashat VayYishlach; TYY fol. 100a. And see above note 181 on # 41.4. 362. Besht Torah, Parashat Qorach # 2; P?ri ha’Aretz Parashat Mattot. 66 66.12.31 Facing the Inner Adversary We read in the Talmud [BT Yoma’ fol. 86b]: “What is required so that one may be regarded as a master of repentance? That one face the same circumstances:363 the same woman,364 the same season, the same timeframe, and the same place.” [Re- garding this,] I heard in the name of R. Yisra’el Ba‘al Shem o.b.m., who said that he had heard it asked in the Heavenly Academy: How can this be? When the man went initially to illicitly transgress with the woman, he went with an audacious attitude, arousing his lust until he transgressed. But now, upon having repented, when he comes to “the same woman . . .” he proceeds with a modestly bowed head, in order to despise the transgression. If this is so, how can a person ever achieve complete repentance?365 And the answer he heard in the Heavenly Academy was that [such a one]366 is actually permitted to enter into the earlier frame of mind367 and overcome the inclination from within, without transgressing the Divine Will; and with this, the person’s sin is removed and one’s shortcoming is forgiven.368 66.12.4 The True Nature of Mosheh’s Humility, and His Sense of Responsibility “And now, if you would only bear their sin—! But if not, pray blot me out of the record that You have written” [Ex. 32:32]: I heard in the name of my teacher, the well-known rabbi, the holy lamp of light, the Ba‘al Shem Tov, of blessed memory, who asked the following question: “Is it in keeping with Mosheh’s attribute of 363. As when she or he first transgressed. 364. See Zohar Chai, vol. 5 fol. 214c, where he says that this principle applies not only to sexual impropriety, but also for any other transgression, such as slander, theft, etc. 365. So as to be regarded as a “master of repentance.” 366. A person who intends to overcome the evil inclination. 367. That brought one to transgression. 368. Besht Torah, Parashat Nitztzavim # 7—Sefer R. Yevi on Psalm 36. There, the principle discussed here is applied to a Talmudic story about R. Shim‘on ben Laqish (who started his adult life as a brigand and then repented and became one of the most important Talmudic sages). See Besht Torah B?re’shit # 156–157 and MMH Parashat B?re’shit note 138, from Zohar Chai, vol. 5 fol. 214c re Gittin 47a: “Reysh Laqish once sold himself to the Lydians. He took with him a bag with a stone in it, because, he said, it is a known fact that on the last day they grant any request (of the man they are about to kill) in order that he may forgive them his murder. On the last day they said to him, What would you like? He replied: I want you to let me tie your arms and seat you in a row and give each one of you a blow and a half with my bottle. He bound them and seated them, and gave each of them a blow with his bag, which stunned him. [One of them] ground his teeth at him. Are you laughing at me? he said. I have still half a bag left for you. So he killed them all and made off. . . .” This is interpreted by the Besht as referring to the fact that after a person achieves nonattachment by means of austerities, and thus was able to concentrate more efficiently and attain a higher spiritual status, one must then overcome the attachment to self-importance, due to one’s sense of accomplishment. This will in turn enable one to gauge for oneself the extent to which one may proceed in this practice, which carries with it the dangerous possibility of self-deception and of falling into transgression. 67 Prayer, Preaching, and Reproof The Pillar of Prayer humbleness, that he declares ‘blot me out,’ as if to say—that369 his death would be sufficient atonement for that grievous sin!? He, o.b.m., answered as follows: We need to understand the nature of the quality of Mosheh’s modesty, peace be upon him. We can readily understand the humility of ordinary people. It is due to having become clear to the person that she or he is similar to those people who clearly do not have much relative value. But Mosheh our teacher, peace be upon him, the very embodiment of the presence of consciousness—the one about whom it can clearly be said, that he possesses self-awareness, the root-soul of each and every Israelite, and the general repository of the innate value of each individual; all of these being what it is, which constitute the great value of his own soul as the realized totality of all the souls of Israel, as it is said [M?khilta B?shallach 9]: “One woman in Egypt gave birth to 600,000 in one belly—this refers to our teacher Mosheh. This being so, what is the meaning of Mosheh’s humbleness?!” Indeed, it is by this very realization itself that Mosheh was able to hold himself in humility. For our sages have said [BT Shavu‘ot 39a], “All of Israel are mutually responsible [‘arevim]”—this is because they are intermixed [m ?’uravim], and have one common root.370 [The Besht continued]: Accordingly, when a positive arousal of energy from the good inclination toward holiness comes into the world, this arousal affects each and every one of Israel, working within each person in accordance with his or her level. The Tzaddiq is intensely awakened to the service of the Divine, with great holiness and powerful love. One who is a lesser Tzaddiq is not aroused to such an extent, but is somewhat awakened. Even an absolutely wicked person is aroused to have a thought of repentance, however fleeting—and indeed, it may be possible that this awakening would lead such a one to complete T ?shuvah! The opposite is also true. If an arousal of energy from the evil inclination comes into the world, it also reaches and affects each and every person. The wicked person is led astray by this in a major way, and acts accordingly; and even the Tzaddiq succumbs to a fleeting thought. Therefore, when we observe that evil is enacted by the wicked, we may speculate as to who is to blame. We can say that the Tzaddiq 369. He regards himself as so important that. . . . 370. In this connection it is worth quoting another teaching of the Besht derived from an important early source (see above, # 60, and below, # 95.2 and 140.2) regarding mutual respon- sibility in the relationship between Israel and the nations. See Besht Torah, Parashat B?re’shit # 120, taken from Sefer R. Yevi (in Brooklyn 1994 ed. fol. 58a), Parashat vayYeshev: “‘And the Lord God commanded humanity . . .’ (Gen. 2:16)—The Talmud (BT Sanhedrin, 56a) derives the Seven Noahide Laws (from this verse). And I heard in the name of R. Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov, that regard- ing these Seven Mitzvot of the Noahides, Israel bears the responsibility of a guarantor (‘arevim), on the part of the Nations of the world; see Besht Torah B?re’shit # 120.” This accords well with several pronouncements by the Besht and his circle that exhibit a more universal attitude toward non-Jews, as I have discussed elsewhere. For now, see TYY 4a, where Israel and the Nations together, are described as the “One Whole Macrocosm” [’Adam’Echad Shalem]; and see below #148.51 and notes. 68 is liable, for she or he, too, entertained a negative thought, and perhaps, had she or he from the beginning been vigilant enough, she or he could have been able to neutralize the negative power in it, so that the wicked person would not have come to transgression. Or we can say, the wicked one is responsible because he or she actually trans- gressed as soon as the thought was entertained, making it so that the Tzaddiq did not have the power to neutralize the negativity. This, then, was the substance of Mosheh’s humility. Whenever he saw something unseemly in Israel, he would place the blame on himself and think that most likely it was he who was at fault. This is why he said, “Blot me out . . . ”—because he accounted himself to blame, and not them. Therefore, His Blessedness answered him [Ex. 32:33]: “Whoever has sinned against Me, he or she (alone) . . . ” 371—meaning, Before Him, it is known who was responsible [in this case]—this concludes his gracious holy words, o.b.m.372 66.12.41—The True Nature of Mosheh’s Humility II “And God spoke to Mosheh face to face” [Ex. 33:11]—It is written [Prov. 27:20], “As in water face answers to face, so the heart of one person answers to the other.” In the name of the Ba‘al Shem Tov, his soul in the arcane heights: When a person stands near water, his shadow looms large on the water. And when the person bends over to the water, the shadow [which becomes a reflection] becomes smaller—and the more he or she bends over and moves closer to the water, the smaller the reflec- tion becomes, so that if he or she places her face on the water then the reflection in the water will precisely correspond to the face. So too, it is with the heart of one person to the other. If one considers himself great, with self-importance, then his companion will consider himself in the same way. And if he regards himself humbly before his friend, so too, will his friend be humble toward him. And when they can no longer decrease their image of self-importance, they will indeed be with each other as equals. This is the meaning of the verse, “And God spoke to Mosheh face to face just as a person would speak to his friend”—i.e., corresponding to the degree of genuine humbleness that one manifests toward a friend, so too, will the friend react in kind, so that they become equal and really face each other. This was the case with Mosheh, who humbled himself before the blessed Creator, and so too, did the Creator humble Himself so-to-speak vis-à-vis Mosheh, and conversed with him face to face. So it was, that the “face” of God became like a reflection of the face of Mosheh. This is a level that no one but Mosheh was able to attain, because Mosheh was the perfect human manifestation of pure consciousness. ’Or HaChokhmah VayYaqhel; Ki Tissa’ # 15 371. Shall I erase. 372. Besht Torah, Parashat Ki Tissa’ # 9; Divrey Mosheh Sh?mini. 69 Prayer, Preaching, and Reproof The Pillar of Prayer 66.12.5 The Souls of the All-Encompassing Tzaddiqim Transcend Time “And I shall remember My covenant with Ya‘aqov and also My covenant with Yitzchaq . . .” [Lev. 26:42]. From the Besht, remembered for eternal life, regarding why we mention the merit of specifically these [Tzaddiqim] but not, say, of R?’uven or Shim‘on, and so on, even though they too were perfectly righteous. And so too, do we find in the Zohar that the souls of some Tana’im such as R. Hamnuna’ Sabba’ came to teach R. Shim‘on, whereas this was not so regarding all the saints mentioned in the Zohar.373 The Besht explained that when a Tzaddiq during his life served Divinity and prayed constantly for the sake of the entire generation, then after such a one’s demise, he or she continues with this mode of service and rectifies the coming generations by teaching them Torah. This is as the Zohar374 recounts regarding Mosheh, that his soul is present for all generations within each sage and Tzaddiq because during his lifetime he was willing to give up his life for his entire gen- eration. This was also the case with ’Avraham, Yitzchaq, and Ya‘aqov and their like. Therefore, their cosmic repair continues for all generations,375 whereas with Tzaddiqim who served God mainly to rectify themselves, their merit and service do not directly extend to all other generations.376 66.13 Despondency as a Form of Pride In the name of the Ba‘al Shem Tov o.b.m.: Any person is able to attain to all the levels reached by the sages of the Mishnah and the Talmud. It is only one’s pride that does not allow one to reach them. And despondency [over lack of spiritual achievement] is also caused by pride, for a person thinks: “One with my great spiri- tual capacity and importance ought to be more enthusiastic in Divine service.”377 66.20 How to Pray in Solitude and Be Accounted as if One Prayed with the Congregation I heard from my teacher [the Besht] the meaning of [BT ’Avot 1:6 & 16]: “Make for yourself a ‘Rav.’”378 This means connect yourself with “the multitude,” as in [Gen. 50:20] “to sustain the multitude of the nation” [l?Hachayot ‘Am Rav]. This is to say, 373. This teaching is derivable from various Lurianic sources. See Sha‘ar hayYichudim fol. 3b–c, and Sha‘ar Ruach haqQodesh fol. 13a and 28a, and see Sha‘ar Ma’amarey Rashbi fol. 12b–d, where we read that there are Tzaddiqim who are permanently aligned with the Divine throne, and the Sh?khinah never appears without them. These Tzaddiqim are the ones who during their lifetimes were constantly striving to “unite the part with the whole.” 374. See Tiqquney hazZohar fol. 114a. 375. See Sefer hagGilgulim, chapter 4, fol. 6b7a, and Sha‘ar hagGilgulim, chapter 36, p. 312. 376. Besht Torah, Parashat B?chuqqotay # 12; ’Or hagGanuz latzTzaddiqim, Parashat Ki Teitze. 377. Besht Torah, Parashat M?tzora‘ # 7; Hanhagot in Sefer Tol?dot ’Aharon. 378. Bearing the connotations of both “a teacher” and “a multitude.” 70 when you are compelled to pray in solitude, realize that there are many wayfarers who pray alone, or land-leasers living in isolated areas.379 Unite with them. This is also the meaning of [BT ’Avot 1:6] “acquire for yourself a companion”; thereby, one will be able to [ibid.] “account each person as meritorious.”380 Through this form of connection, many individuals come together to be accounted as a congregation, and on account of the prayers of the many [Job 36:5; and see BT B?rakhot fol. 8a],“God is mighty, and will not despise [them].” Thus, the multitude of individuals is favor- ably judged. So too, when you are repenting, connect yourself in a like manner. The wise will hear and add further conclusions.381 379. It is likely that RYY had in mind R. Nachman of Kosov, a colleague of the Besht and the leader of a pietist group in Kutov, who earned his livelihood as a traveling farm-tax collector and grain dealer. See in Heschel-Dresner, Circle of the Ba‘al Shem Tov, the monograph: “R. Nachman of Kosow: Companion of the Ba‘al Shem” p. 118 ff. 380. For how else can one remain in companionship. 381. MMH # 55 on BP # 81; TYY fol. 95c.
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Rather Plato's writings—in which, according to the famous Seventh Letter, he never revealed his full doctrine, it should always be remembered—need to be considered in the context of the living Greek spiritual tradition in which Plato was born and in which he participated throughout his life. This is nowhere more evident than in the Timaeus which otherwise remains opaque and mysterious in many parts. The central agent of the Platonic cosmology is the craftsman creator god, the Demiurge. Of this character the modern commentators have little that is penetrating to say. A type of orthodoxy was established by Solmsen who argued that the Demiurge is a conception unique to Plato and, in the final analysis, one of Plato's most stunningly original contributions to the history of ideas. But when we remember that Plato was not, as a lot of twentieth century scholarship seemed to think, an Oxford don, or a "speculative philosopher" in the modern mold, but a pious Athenian pagan of noble birth, the source of his conception of the Demiurge becomes obvious: it has been modelled on the mythological figure of Hephaestus, the blacksmith/craftsman god of the Athenian religion whose cultus was celebrated on the Acropolis. The identification is most evident in passages where the Platonic craftsman god "forges" aspects of the cosmos in his "workshop" and where Plato resorts to the language of metallurgy to describe his Demiurge's activities. The long monologue on creation by Timaeus of Locri is replete with the language of crafts, but above all of those of the crafts of fire, Hephaestus being the fire god among Olympians. The religious and mythological background to the Timaeus is signalled in the early sections of the dialogue and in its companion dialogue, the Critias. Hephaestus is mentioned by name, along with Athene and Gaia. These are the tutelary deities of Athens whose rites and mysteries were celebrated on the Acropolis and in the broader cult of the Attic region. As an Athenian, a son of the Attic soil, they are Plato's own gods. Solmsen and others only ever consider Plato among philosophers, and among philosophers they can find no forerunner to Plato's Demiurge. It is only when we appreciate Plato in his full native context that the model becomes obvious. This in turn illuminates the mythology of Hephaestus. The Platonic Demiurge recasts the Olympian fire god so that we must understand his mythology in cosmogonic and cosmological terms. Thus his crafting of the extraordinary Shield of Achilles in Homer's Iliad must be understood as an act of cosmogony, and his binding together of Aphrodite and Ares, Love and Strife, in the Odyssey, must similarly be seen as a cosmological symbolism. In over 2000 years of voluminous commentary on the Timaeus only the Neoplatonists seem to have appreciated this. But the specific aspect of Hephaestian mythology upon which Plato draws in the Timaeus is the Athenian/Attic cultus which the god shares with Athene and Gaia. The setting of the work is a visitation to Athens by an illustrious Pythagorean from Southern Italy on the Panathenaea, the great festival of Athene, the most sacred festival in the Athenian calendar and, consequently, the occasion of the most hallowed rites in the temples of the Acropolis. This is the real key to understanding the Timaeus: its full context is that, as the Pythagorean speaks, giving his account of creation, the Panatheanea, great New Year and birth festival of the Athenians, along with its mysterious rituals, is being celebrated throughout the city and in particular in the Temples of the Acropolis. The intent of the work then becomes clear. It is a philosophical—or more explicitly, Pythagorean—exposition of the inner dimensions of the Attic religion, its secrets and mysteries. It becomes plain that Plato has brought his Pythagorean speaker to Athens to reveal certain inner aspects of the festival on which he discourses to Socrates and others. From what else we know of Plato's life—he was the greatest mind of a disgruntled generation of aristocrats who went into self-exile after the execution of Socrates—it is fair to assume that he was unhappy about the spiritual and civil decline of his times and so imports a Pythagorean to newly inform the Athenians of the deeper meanings of their own feasts and rites. But it would be wrong to regard Plato as in any way a radical reformer. His purpose is to rectify. According to traditional accounts, during his self-exile he visited Egypt, Southern Italy and other strongholds of traditional wisdom. In the Timaeus he brings these old contacts to Athens on the occasion of the cities' most sacred rites. The portrait of the Demiurge is not in any way a bold new innovation in the history of ideas: it is a development—in the mode of the philosopher-poets—of the Hephaestean mythologem in its fullness—a drawing out, not a new departure. Plato proposes returning to the roots of the Athenian religion in order to revivify it in the intellectual idiom of his day. It is important to recall that, despite the drama of the trial and death of Socrates, all the evidence tells us that Plato remained a patriotic, pious Athenian to the end of his life, and it is well to remember that his Academy had no resemblance to a modern, secular university, but was a registered thiasos, officially integrated into the state religion of the city, was situated in a olive grove sacred to Athene herself and conducted rites and sacrifices according to tradition and law. The Platonic enterprise was to articulate the Greek tradition in and to the times, a deeply traditional and conservative endeavour, not to subvert or overthrow it with innovations. The particular mythology and religious cult that Plato wants his visiting Pythagorean to illuminate with a renewed profundity is the autochthony cult to which the Athenians and the people of Attica laid claim. The Athenian boast was that they, of all Greeks, were children of the Attic soil, natives, aboriginal in the fullest sense, born from the soil of the land just like the plants and the trees. In Plato's time, in the context of Athenian mercantile colonialism, this boast carried the extra implication that other Greeks should submit to Athenian authority and power. That Plato has a Magna Grecian from "well- governed Locri" in Athens to discourse on the true or inner meanings of the Athenian's own festival is, then, counter-colonial. Plato is concerned to refill the forms of the Athenian religion with understandings from the periphery of the Greek world, in contrast to the exploitation and subsequent emptying of those forms into a purely exoteric, imperialist ideology. Athene and Poseidon (the other deity whose rites were celebrated on the Acropolis) were Air and Water deities respectively, and had become emblematic of Athenian naval might, the wind and waves that carry Athenian merchandise afar. During the procession that accompanied the Panathenea the citizens of Athens hauled a ship draped in a woven peplos as a sail around the streets of the city and up the steep slopes of the Acropolis to the Temples of the cities' gods. In Plato's Athens, this represented the twin powers of Athene and Poseidon, the cloth of the weaving goddess, the ship of the sea god, who championed the cities' empire through unmatched naval strength. Timaeus of Western Locri, a small Greek outpost on the foot of the Italian peninsula, is in Athens on the Panathenea to tell his hosts that the rites and symbols of the festival are about something far more profound. In particular, the boast of autochthony has a deeper, spiritual and cosmological dimension beyond being merely a device of ethnic chauvinism. Autochthony is the subject of the most sacrosanct secrets of the Acropolis cult and it is Plato's purpose to restore understandings of its deepest and therefore most universal significance. The great secret of the Acropolis cult has been preserved by the Church Fathers in their assault on pagan religion. Despite every claim to her virginity, they tell us, the goddess Athene had in fact secretly been the bride of Hephaestus, and she had had a son by the fire god, the solar serpent-child Erechtheus, ancestor of the Athenians, in whose honour Athenian children were given a golden, serpentine necklace at birth. The fact of Athene's motherhood, however, was only known to the priests and priestesses of the cultus and was otherwise covered over by a story that made Athene not the mother but the foster- mother of the solar child. In this story, the amorous fire god accosts the virgin goddess who successfully repells him but not before the god ejaculates his fiery seed upon her leg. Athene then wipes the semen with a tuft of wool and, throwing it to the earth, impregnates the earth-goddess Gaia. It is then Gaia who gives birth to the solar child—who therefore is autochthonous, born from the soil—and Athene, victorious in her virginity, adopts and nurtures the son as his foster-mother. It is a myth of surrogate motherhood. The Athenians habitually regarded themselves as earthborn and Athene as their foster-mother and patroness, but this Athenian patriotic mythology was centred on the ambivalence of surrogacy and on hiding the "secret motherhood" of supposedly virgin Athene. The Roman Vesta cult was a duplication of the Acropolis fire cult but while in the Roman derivative we find a virgin priesthood, in Athens the virgin goddess Athene was attended by married priestesses, guardians of the virgin's "secret". Various aspects of the rituals of the Acropolis enacted or symbolically alluded to this "secret". In essence, all of this is a variation on the primeval Sky-fire-god's nuptial with the Earth mother, with Athene as an air and cloud goddess—thus the tufts of wool—distributing the Sky-god's seed. We see here the most primitive motifs of Attic agricultural mythology. A yet more basic configuration is simply Sun-Moon-Earth, with the Sun as the fire god, Gaia the Earth goddess and Athene the dual-natured moon goddess who rules over the winds and rains. This mythology is transposed into a philosophical elemental cosmology in Timaeus of Locri's exposition on the Panathenea. The mode of transposition is plain. The citizens of Athens, we are told, are the children of Hephaestus and Gaia. In Timaeus' contribution to the "feast of discourse"—it is actually his purpose to bring the first human beings into creation as part of an ensemble of speeches with epic scope—this becomes the doctrine that Fire and Earth are the primeval elements. Now that which is created is of necessity corporeal, and also visible and tangible. And nothing is visible where there is no fire, or tangible which has no solidity, and nothing is solid without earth. Wherefore also the God in the beginning of creation made the body of the universe to consist of fire and earth. In the Athenian mythology Hephaestus and Gaia are the primeval parents. Timaeus then informs his Athenian listeners that Fire and Earth are the primeval constituents of creation in a direct parallel. But he then explains that there must be a middle term between these two poles, and for structural, mathematical reasons, this third term must itself be dual in nature: But two things cannot be rightly put together without a third; there must be some bond of union between them. And the fairest bond is that which makes the most complete fusion of itself and the things which it combines; and proportion is best adapted to effect such a union. For whenever in any three numbers, whether cube or square, there is a mean, which is to the last term what the first term is to it; and again, when the mean is to the first term as the last term is to the mean--then the mean becoming first and last, and the first and last both becoming means, they will all of them of necessity come to be the same, and having become the same with one another will be all one. If the universal frame had been created a surface only and having no depth, a single mean would have sufficed to bind together itself and the other terms; but now, as the world must be solid, and solid bodies are always compacted not by one mean but by two, God placed water and air in the mean between fire and earth, and made them to have the same proportion so far as was possible (as fire is to air so is air to water, and as air is to water so is water to earth); and thus he bound and put together a visible and tangible heaven. Thus Timaeus gives us the classical and ancient arrangement of the four elements, arranged in order of rarity to density: fire, air, water, earth. To Athenian ears, already alert to the Hephaestus/Gaia = Fire/Earth equation, the further identification of Air and Water as Athene and Poseidon is obvious, if not explicit, and just as obvious that the remarkably masculine character of their goddess, like the dark and light of the moon, is a manifestation of the same duality of the middle term. Timaeus' exposition of the elements then becomes an illumination of the inner dimensions of what this pious, Athenian mythology is actually about; its true content is a sacred understanding of the origins and nature of the cosmos, from its metaphysical roots to its most basic physical components. Moreover, the four element theory characteristic of the Sicilian and Southern Italian philosophers and the doctrines of proportions enunciated by the Pythagorean sages of those regions is revealed as only another way of describing those things which the rites of the Acropolis enact in ritual and myth. In the "feast of discourse" the Athenians contribute myth and legend and pious gestures: the Locrian brings philosophical illumination to this. This is how the teachings of the Timaeus should be understood, namely against a mythological and ritualistic background much of which is only alluded to in the text. But the more we understand of this mythological and ritualistic background the more the cosmology of Timaeus is itself illuminated to modern readers. An example of this is Timaeus' description of the mysterious "Receptacle of Becoming" which the speaker himself admits is difficult to describe and which readers invariably find opaque and confounding. Timaeus has several attempts at defining this "Receptacle", employing numerous analogies, none of which seem particularly illuminating. The Receptacle is compared to a mother, firstly, but then to a nurse, and then, on a completely different tack, to the metal gold. Modern commentators will explain that Plato was himself confused about this, since these analogies seem arbitrary and contradictory, as if the author is struggling with an idea that is only half formed. But the source and also the coherence of this conception becomes evident when the text is considered in its Athenian, mythological context. While the Demiurge is modelled on Hephaestus, the perfectly passive Receptacle is analogous to Gea, and we suddenly recognize in Timaeus' descriptions of the Receptacle allusions to her cult and mythos. She is the passive, maternal womb that receives the divine seed, who gives birth to the children of the soil and thereafter nurtures them on her bounty. The interplay of mother-nurse is the cultic ambiguity of Gea-Athene in surrogate motherhood. In a parallel use of symbols, Timaeus at one point describes the human brain as ploughland surrounded by a stone fence (the skull) in which the Demiurge sows divine, celestial seeds. The source of the gold analogy applied to the Receptacle also becomes clear: it is to be understood as an emblem of autochthony, for the autochthons are Hesiod's Golden Race, as Plato tells us in the Republic, and metallic gold is the solar seeds of the Golden Race slowly incubating in the womb of the Earth. The background to these otherwise odd aspects of Timaeus' exposition is again the Athenian autochthony cult. This is also the key to understanding Timaeus' descriptions of human anatomy and physiology that, in fact, occupy the larger part of the text. One must remember that it is the primordial autocthon that he is describing, the original plant-man and solar child, Erectheus. This is why, for instance, Timaeus gives no account of the reproductive system until the very end, at which point the genitals are added to the primal man as a type of afterthought and as a consequence of generational decay. The original man was not yet touched by animal reproduction but was autochthonous, born directly from the soil (the Receptacle) from golden seeds in the manner of vegetation. In this respect it must be understood that Timaeus is not describing an actual but an archetypal anatomy and, in this, anatomical analogies with such things as a "winnowing basket"—a cult object in the Attic Mysteries—provide the relevant clues. It is in these sections of the text that we find Timaeus comparing the human form to an upside down tree. Such an analogy only makes sense in the context of the cult of the primal plant-man. Timaeus draws out, in a philosophical mode, a body of cosmological science that describes the inner dimensions of the Athenian/Attic manifestation of Greek religion. Finally, a further and still more crucial thing to realise about this aspect of the Timaeus monologue—which in literary terms is deeply sonorous and incantatory in places—is that it is being recited on the Athenian New Year and is itself a ritual invocation of a new cosmic order. In traditional reckonings, where the year is a symbol of the All, the New Year is the day of creation, and thus it is the appropriate occasion for a dissertation such as the Locrian's. But in the plan of speeches set forward for us, it is his task to speak first and to bring the cosmos into creation "by his words, so to speak" and from the cosmos bring forth the primeval citizens of Socrates' ideal state, namely an idealized, antedeluvian Athens, which citizens will populate the speeches later in the programme. Timaeus is not just to describe the creation, his words are to bring the creation into being. This is an age-old, shamanic pattern; in the rites of the New Year the speaker calls or sings the cosmos into creation, being Demiurge to his own tale. The New Year is to the solar cycle what the Day of Creation is to the cosmic cycle. Speaking on the New Year, Timaeus is to call the primordial humans into being just as the Demiurge had done on the day of Creation. This, of course, introduces resonant parallelisms that remove the Timaeus from the status of just an ordinary text as author and god are assimilated into the same function and creation and text become parallel, as Timaeus himself hints when he describes the atomic level of his cosmos by analogy with letters and syllables. It will be found, in fact, that the text itself is isomorphic to the proportions of the human form, as the French scholar Reme Braque discovered, and so is, literally, an embodiment of the very things it describes. In these ways the Timaeus behaves very much as a sacred text in the fullest sense—having a microcosmic completeness and adequacy—which indeed it is, but to a religion that is now defunct. The Locrian's purpose was nevertheless to revivify universal meanings beyond the particulars of the Athenian predicament and consequently the text's array of symbols is so primordial and fundamental that it has remained an unsurpassed account of traditional cosmological doctrines. To understand those doctrines we merely need to appreciate its proper mythological and ritualistic background.
- [That Beauty Is a State](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/coomaraswamy-beauty-state) - ?It is very generally held that natural objects such as human beings, animals or landscapes, and artificial objects such as factories, textiles or works of intentional art, can be classified as beautifulor ugly. And yetno general principleofclassification has ever been found: and that which seems to be beautiful to one is described as ugly by another. In the words of Plato "Everyone chooses his love out of the objects of beauty according to his own taste." To take, for example, the human type: every race, and to some extent every individual, has an unique ideal. Nor can we hope forafinalagreement: wecannot expectthe Europeant opreferthe Mongolian features,nor the MongoliantheEuropean. Of course, it is very easy for each to maintain the absolute value of his own taste and to speak of other types as ugly; just as the hero of chivalry maintains by force of arms that his own beloved isfarmore beautiful thananyother. Inlikemanner thevarious sects maintain the absolute value of their own ethics. But it is clear that such claims are nothing more than statements of prejudice, for who is to decide which racial ideal or which morality is "best" ? It is a little too easy to decide that our own is best ; we are at the most entitled to believe it the best for us. This relativity is nowhere better suggested than in the classic saying attributed to Majnun, when it was pointed out to him that the world at large regarded his Laila as far from beautiful. "To see the beauty of Laila," he said, "requires the eyes of Majnun." It is the same with works of art. Different artists are inspired by different objects ; what is attractive and stimulating to one is depressing and unattractive to another, and the choice also varies fromr acetoraceandepochtoepoch. As to the appreciation of such works, it is the same; for men in general admire only such works as by education or temperament they are predisposed to admire. To enterintothespirit of an unfamiliarartdemandsa greater effort than most are willing to make. The classic scholar starts convinced that the art of Greece has never been equalled or surpassed, and never will be ; there are many who think, like Michelangelo, that because Italian painting is good, therefore good painting is Italian. There are many who never yet felt the beauty of Egyptian sculpture or Chinese or Indian painting or music: that they have also the hardihood to deny their beauty, however, proves nothing. It is also possible to forget that certain works are beautiful: the eighteenth century had thus forgotten the beauty of Gothic sculpture and primitive Italian painting, and the memory of their beauty was only restored by a great effort in the course of the nineteenth. There may also exist natural objects or works of art which humanity only very slowly learns to regard as in any way beautiful; the western aesthetic appreciation of desert and mountain scenery, for example, is no older than the nineteenth century; and it is notorious that artists of the highest rank are oftennotunderstood tilllongaftertheirdeath. So thatthemore we consider the variety of human election, the more we must admit the relativity of taste. And yet there remain philosophers firmly convinced that an absolute Beauty (rasa)[Rasa, rasavant and rasika are the principal terms of Indian aesthetics, explained in the preceding chapter.] exists, just as others maintain the conceptions of absolute Goodness and absolute Truth. The lovers of God identify these absolutes with Him (or It) and maintain that He can only be known as perfect Beauty, Love and Truth. It is also widely held that the true critic (rasika) is able to decide which works of art are beautiful (rasavant) and which arenot; orinsimpler words, to distinguishworksof genuineart fromthosethat have no claimtobeso described. Atthesame time we must admit the relativity of taste, and the fact that all gods (devas and Isvaras) are modelled after the likeness of men. It remains, then, to resolve the seeming contradictions. This is only to be accomplished by the use of more exact terminology. So far have I spoken of 'beauty' without defining my meaning, and have used one word to express a multiplicity of ideas. But we do not mean the same thing when we speak of a beautiful girl anda beautiful poem; itwillbestill more obviousthatwemean two different things, if we speak of beautiful weather and a beautifulpicture. In pointoffact,the conceptionof beautyandtheadjective "beautiful" belong exclusively to aesthetic and should only beusedin aesthetic judgment. We seldommakeanysuch judgments when we speak of natural objects as beautiful; we generally mean that such objects as we call beautiful are congenial to us, practicallyorethically. Too often wepretendtojudgea work of art in the same way, calling it beautiful if it represents some form or activity of which we heartily approve, or if it attracts us by the tenderness or gaiety of its colour, the sweetness of its sounds or the charm of its movement. But when we thus pass judgment on the dance in accordance with our sympathetic attitude towards the dancer's charm or skill, or the meaning of the dance, we ought not to use the language of pure aesthetic. Only when we judge a work of art aesthetically may we speak of the presence or absence of beauty, we may call the work rasavant or otherwise; but when we judge it from the standpoint of activity, practical or ethical, we ought to use a corresponding terminology, calling the picture, song or actor "lovely," that is to say lovable, or otherwise, the action "noble," the colour "brilliant," the gesture "graceful," or otherwise, and soforth. Anditwillbeseenthatindoing thiswearenotreally judging the work of art as such, but only the material and the separate parts of which it is made, the activities they represent, or the feelings they express. Of course^ when we come to choose such works of art to live with, there is no reason why we should not allow the sympathetic andethicalconsiderationsto influenceour judgment. Why should the ascetic invite annoyance by hanging in his cell some representation of the nude, or the general select a lullaby to be performedupontheeveof battle? When every ascetic and every soldier has become an artist there will be no more need for works ofart: inthemeanwhile ethical selectionof some kindisallowableand necessary. Butinthis selectionwe mustclearlyunderstand what we are doing, if we would avoid an infinity of error, culminating in that type of sentimentality which regards the useful, the stimulating and the moral elements in works of art as the essential. We ought not to forget that he who plays the villain of the piece may be a greater artist than he who plays the hero. Forbeauty—in the profoundwordsof Millet—doesnot arise from the subject of a work of art, but from the necessity that has been felt of representing that subject. We should only speak of a work of art as good or bad with reference to its aesthetic quality ; only the subject and the material of the work are entangled in relativity. In other words, to say ?THAT BEAUTY IS A STATE 4I that a work of art is more or less beautiful, or rasavant, is to define the extent to which it is a work of art, rather than a mere illustration. However important the element of sympathetic magic in such a work may be, however important its practical applications, it is not in these that its beauty consists. What, then, is Beauty, what is rasa, what is it that entitles us tospeakofdiversworksasbeautifulorrasavantf Whatisthis sole quality which the most dissimilar works of art possess in common? Let us recall the history of a work of art. There is (1) an aesthetic intuition on the part of the original artist,—the poet or creator; then (2) the internal expression of this intuition, —the true creation or vision of beauty, (3) the indication of this by external signs (language) for the purpose of communication, —the technical activity ; and finally, (4) the resulting stimulation of the critic or rasika to reproduction of the original intuition, or of some approximation to it. The source of the original intuition may, as we have seen, be anyaspectoflifewhatsoever. Toonecreatorthescalesofafish suggest a rhythmical design, another is moved by certain landscapes, a third elects to speak of hovels, a fourth to sing of palaces, a fifth may express the idea that all things are enlinked, enlaced and enamoured in terms of the General Dance, or he may express the same idea equally vividly by saying that "not a sparrowfallstothegroundwithoutourFather'sknowledge." Every artist discovers beauty, and every critic finds it again when he tastes of the same experience through the medium of the external signs. But where is this beauty? We have seen that it cannot besaidtoexistincertainthingsandnotinothers. Itmaythen beclaimedthatbeautyexistseverywhere; andthisIdonotdeny, though I prefer the clearer statement that it may be discovered anywhere. If it could be said to exist everywhere in a material and intrinsic sense, we could pursue it with our cameras and scales, after the fashion of the experimental psychologists: but if we did so, we should only achieve a certain acquaintance with average taste—we should not discover a means of distinguishing formsthatarebeautifulfromformsthatareugly. Beautycan never thus be measured, for it does not exist apart from the artist himself, and the rasika who enters into his experience.^ 1 Cf. "The secret of art lies in the artist himself"—Kuo Jo Hsu, (12th century), quoted in The Kokka, No. 244. All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it. Did you think it was in the white or grey stone? or the lines of the arches and cornices? All music is what awakes in you when you are reminded of it by the instruments, It is not the violins and the cornets . . . nor the score of the baritone singer It is nearer and further than they.^ When every sympathetic consideration has been excluded, however, there still remains a pragmatic value in the classification of worksofartasbeautifulorugly. Butwhatpreciselydowe meanbythese designationsasappliedtoobjects? Intheworks called beautiful we recognize a correspondence of theme and expression, content and form: while in those called ugly we find thecontentandformatvariance. Intimeandspace,however, the correspondence never amounts to an identity: it is our own activity, in the presence of the work of art, which completes the ideal relation, and it is in this sense that beauty is what we "do to" a work of art rather than a quality present in the object. With reference to the object, then "more" or "less" beautiful will imply a greater or less correspondence between content and form, and this is all that we can say of the object as such: or in other words, art is good that is good of its kind. In the stricter sense of completed internal oesthetic activity, however, beauty is absolute and cannot have degrees. The vision of beauty is spontaneous, in just the same sense as the inward light of the lover (bhakta). It is a state of grace that cannot be achieved by deliberate effort; though perhaps we can remove hindrances to its manifestation, for there are many witnesses that the secret of all art is to be found in self-forgetfulness.^ And weknowthat thisstateofgraceisnotachieved in the pursuit of pleasure; the hedonists have their reward, but they are in bondage to loveliness, while the artist is free in beauty. It is further to be observed that when we speak seriously of works of art as beautiful, meaning that they are truly works of art, valued as such apart from subject, association, or technical charm, we still speak elliptically. We mean that the external signs—poems, pictures, dances, and so forth are effective reminders. iWalt Whitman. 2 E. G. Riciotto Canudo : "It is certain that the secret of all art . . . lies in the faculty of self-oblivion" (Music as a Religion of the Future). ?We maysaythat theypossess significantform. But this can only mean that they possess that kind of form which reminds usofbeauty, andawakensinus aestheticemotion. The nearest explanation of significant form should be such form as exhibits the inner relations of things; or, after Hsieh Ho, "which reveals the rhythm of the spirit in the gestures of living things." All such works as possess significant form arelinguistic; and,if we remember this, we shall not fall into the error of those who advocate the use of language for language's sake, nor shall we confuse the significant forms, or their logical meaning or moral value, with the beauty of which they remind us. Let us insist, however, that the concept of beauty has originated with the philosopher, not with the artist: he has been ever concerned with saying clearly what had to be said. In all ages of creation the artist has been in love with his particular subject when it is not so, we see that his work is not 'felt'—he has never set out to achieve the Beautiful, in the strict aesthetic sense, and to have this aim is to invite disaster, as one who should seek to fly without wings. It is not to the artist that one should say the subject is immaterial: thatisforthephilosophertosaytothephilistinewhodislikes a work of art for no other reason than that he dislikes it. The true critic (rasika) perceives the beauty of which the artist has exhibited the signs. It is not necessary that the critic should appreciate the artist's meaning—every work of art is a kamadhenu, yielding many meanings—for he knows without reasoning whether or not the work is beautiful, before the mind beginstoquestionwhatitis"about." Hinduwriterssaythatthe capacity to feel beauty (to taste rasa) cannot be acquired by study,butistherewardofmeritgainedinapastlife; formany good men and would-be historians of art have never perceived it. The poet is bom, not made ; but so also is the rasika, whose genius differs in degree, not in kind, from that of the original artist. In western phraseology we should express this by saying thatexperiencecanonlybeboughtbyexperience; opinionsmust beearned. Wegainandfeelnothingmerelywhenwetakeiton authoritythatanyparticularworksarebeautiful. Itisfarbetter to be honest, and to admit that perhaps we cannot see their beauty. Adaymaycomewhenweshallbebetterprepared. The critic, as soon as he becomes an exponent, has to prove his case; and he cannot do this by any process of argument, but only bycreating a new workofart, thecriticism. His audience, catching the gleam at second-hand—but still the same gleam, for there is only one—has then the opportunity to approach the original work a second time, more reverently. When I say that works of art are reminders, and the activity of the critic is one of reproduction, I suggest that the vision of even the original artist may be rather a discovery than a creation. If beauty awaits discovery everywhere, that is to say that it waits upon our recollection (in the sufi sense and in Wordsworth's) : in aesthetic contemplation as in love and knowledge, we momentarily recover the unity of our being released from individuality. There are no degrees of beauty; the most complex and the simplest expression remind us of one and the same state. The sonata cannot be more beautiful than the simplest lyric, nor the painting than the drawing, merely because of their greater elaboration. Civilized art isnotmorebeautifulthan savageart,merely because of its possibly more attractive ethos. A mathematical analogy is found if we consider large and small circles; these differ onlyintheircontent, notintheircircularity. Inthesame way, there cannotbeany continuous progressinart. Immediately a given intuition has attained to perfectly clear expression, it remains only to multiply and repeat thisexpression. This repetition may be desirable for many reasons, but it almost invariably involves a gradual decadence, because we soon begin to take the experience forgranted. The vitality of a tradition persistsonly so long as it is fed by intensityofimagination. What wemean by creative art, however, has no necessary connection with novelty of subject, though that is not excluded. Creative art is art that reveals beauty where we should have otherwise overlooked it, or moreclearlythan wehaveyetreceived. Beauty is sometimes overlooked just because certain expressions have become what we call "hackneyed"; then the creative artist dealing with the same subject restores our memory. The artist is challenged to reveal the beauty of all experiences, new and old. Many have rightly insisted that the beauty of a work of art is independent of its subject, and truly, the humility of art, which finds its inspiration everywhere, is identical with the humility of Love, which regards alike a dog and a Brahman—and of Science, to which the lowest form is as significant as the highest. And this is possible, because it is one and the same undivided all. "If a beauteous form we view, 'Tis His reflection shining through." It will now be seen in what sense we are justified in speaking of Absolute Beauty, and in identifying this beauty with God. We do not imply by this that God (who is without parts) has a lovely form which can be the object of knowledge; but that in so far as we see and feel beauty, we see and are one with Him. That God is the first artist does not mean that He created forms, which might not have been lovely had the hand of the potter slipped: but that every natural object is an immediate realization of His being. This creativeactivityis comparable withaesthetic expression in its non-volitional character; no element of choice enters into that world of imagination and eternity, but there is always perfect identity of intuition-expression, soul and body. The human artist who discovers beauty here or there is the ideal guru of Kabir, who "reveals the Supreme Spirit wherever the mind attaches itself."
- [Walking as a Sacred Duty](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/walking-as-a-sacred-duty) - Theological Transformation of Social Reality in Early Hasidism Elliot R. Wolfson Enoch was a cobbler and “with every stitch that he made with his awl in the leather he would bless God with a complete heart and with perfect intention, and thereby cause the blessing to flow upon the emanated Metatron.” Click here to view
- [Notes on “Spirituality”](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/notes-on-spirituality) - Notes on “Spirituality” Harry Oldmeadow Outside tradition there can assuredly be found some relative truths... but outside tradition there does not exist a doctrine that catalyzes absolute truth and transmits liberating notions concerning total reality Frithjof Schuon 1 “Spirituality” has become a rather fashionable catch-word, recently appropriated by all manner of people, many of whom are disillusioned with the sterile paradigms of the mechanistic, hyper-rationalistic, materialistic and utilitarian worldview which characterises modernity but who are also often hostile to traditional religious forms which might provide the necessary antidotes. “Spirituality” stands as a banner under which some of the richness and complexity of human consciousness and experience can be rescued from various physiological and psychological reductionisms. While one might well sympathize with these efforts to combat what William Blake called the “Single Vision” of scientism it must be said at the outset that much of the present-day discussion of “spirituality” really amounts to a kind of sentimental indulgence in which the word itself can be made to mean almost anything — more often than not referring to some kind of vaguely-defined inner life or experience. If the term is to be at all useful we must establish a provisional definition of “spirituality” and make a few remarks about its relation to religion, outside of which the whole notion makes little sense. “Spirituality” might be conceptualised in many ways. Here is one: spirituality is both a mode of understanding Reality, one in which we recognize the Spirit within us, “the immortal spark of God’s Being, eternally living in the depths of man’s soul”,2 and a mode of being wherein we conform ourselves to that Reality. Further, one might say that spirituality is the domain of human experience in which a transmutation of the soul leads, depending on the vocabulary at hand, to God, to the Self, to Nirvana. A Hindu swami asked to sum up the message of Hinduism replied this way: “God Is; God can be realized; to realize God is the supreme end of human life; God can be realised in many ways.” Whilst this kind of formulation poses problems for some religious perspectives it might here stand as a signpost to the spiritual life in general. Vincit Omnia Veritas I,2 3 Implicit in the idea that spirituality concerns both understanding and being are the parallel notions of a doctrine (an account of Reality in both its absolute and relative “dimensions”) and a path (a spiritual method, provided by religious forms, whereby one might live in accordance with the Will of Heaven). One of the myriad problems surrounding many contemporary attitudes to “spirituality” is that the doctrine of an Ultimate Reality (by whatever name—the Absolute, God, Allah, Atman-Brahman, Nirvana/Sunyata, the Tao, Wakan-Tanka) and the elaboration of a spiritual method attuned to our relationship therewith, are left out of the picture altogether! What we are offered instead is a notion of “spirituality” as some kind of subjective inner state, a kind of “warm fuzzy glow”, sometimes harnessed to formulations such as “the kingdom of Heaven is within you” — as if by these words Christ meant that the kingdom of Heaven is of a psychological order! This is all of a piece with the notion that “spirituality” is a private affair, and that the spiritual life can be fashioned out of the subjective resources of the individual in question. Some of the factors which, over several centuries, have conspired to create a climate in which such ideas could take root include the rebellion against all authority, the cult of the individual, the humanistic prejudice that “man is the measure of all things”, the triumph—even in the religious domain itself—of sentimentalism over intellectuality, the shibboleths of “egalitarianism” and “democracy”, and the emergence of a rampant psychologism which usurps functions which properly belong to religion. In recent times we have seen many attempts to assimilate spirituality into the domain of psychology, a move which fails to distinguish between the contingent plane of the psyche and the inviolate Self, or Spirit — this failure generating confusions of all kinds, on full display in “occultist”, “New Age” and purportedly “Eastern” movements which lay claim to some kind of spirituality but which scorn traditional religious forms and practices. The same confusion can easily be discerned in the works of many modernistic writers on religious subjects, even when their general disposition towards religion is sympathetic.3 It might also be observed in passing that it is also quite possible to be “religious” in some externalist sense — punctilious in the observation of ritual obligations and so on — yet remain quite “unspiritual”; this is the phenomenon of an empty religiosity wherein the true goals of the path have been forgotten, and all that remains is an empty husk. (Such folk might usefully remember Martin Buber’s remark that "it is far more comfortable to have to do with religion than to have to do with God".4) However, even such an attenuated form of religious practice is preferable to a so-called “spirituality” which has been stripped of all sense of the Transcendent. There remains some Vincit Omnia Veritas I,2 4 chance that the practices which are performed only to the letter might yet re-ignite embers which seem to have died. Traditional peoples everywhere, whatever their religious commitments, start from very different premises. To state them succinctly, and without privileging any particular theology: man is an “amphibious” or “axial” creature who lives, so to speak, between two worlds—on the one hand, the ever-changing tissue of relativities which comprise the time-space world of multiplicity and contingency (maya or samsara in the Indian lexicon), and on the other, the boundless realm of the Divine, the Absolute, God, from whence come various Revelations which provide us, in our terrestrial condition, with all things needful for our spiritual welfare and pertinent to our ultimate destiny. Such peoples could hardly conceive the idea that ‘spirituality” might be an ad hoc, improvisatory and subjective affair; on the contrary, the God- given forms and practices of tradition (Scriptures, myths, doctrines, rituals, sacred art, moral codes and so on), the example of the saints and sages, and the guidance of those qualified to provide it (masters, lamas, directors, gurus, shamans, priests, shaykhs), provide the adherent with a detailed map of the spiritual path. It is not a matter of dreaming up a new map (which may bear little relation to the terrain to be traversed!) but of following the map which tradition invariably provides to those who seek. In 1984 representatives of all the major religions gathered at St Benedict's Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, to “meditate together in silence and share their personal spiritual journeys” and to deliberate on those elements of belief and practice which their traditions shared. Out of this gathering and subsequent meetings emerged a list of points of agreement. It is worth considering this list as an example of the kinds of convergences which can be discerned by adherents of different traditions working together in a spirit of cooperative fellowship and dialogue. It also throws some light on our present considerations. The Snowmass meeting proved less vaporous than many attempts at dialogue and produced the following list of elements common to all the major religions: • The world religions bear witness to the experience of Ultimate Reality to which they give various names.... • Ultimate Reality cannot be limited by any name or concept. • Ultimate Reality is the ground of infinite potentiality and actuality. • Faith is opening, accepting and responding to Ultimate Reality..Vincit Omnia Veritas I,2 5 • The potential for human wholeness—or in other frames of reference, enlightenment, salvation, transformation, blessedness, nirvana—is present in every human person. • Ultimate Reality may be experienced not only through religious practices but through nature, art, human relationships and service to others. • As long as the human condition is experienced as separate from Ultimate Reality, it is subject to ignorance and illusion, weakness and suffering. • Disciplined practice is essential to the spiritual life... Humility, gratitude and a sense of humour are indispensable in the spiritual life.5 It might be observed that this register, whilst it encompasses a good deal, rather underplays the significance of tradition as the fountainhead of spiritual practice. It also somewhat marginalizes several aspects of spirituality which are fore-grounded in primordial cultures—namely, the paradigmatic function of religious mythology, the sacramental conception of the natural order, and the centrality of ritual life. Nonetheless, in the context of the Snowmass statement one may speak of “spirituality” as a disciplined practice, within the framework of an integral doctrine (derived from a Revelation), whereby we seek to realize the “infinite potentiality and actuality” of Ultimate Reality within ourselves, thus becoming conduits, so to speak, through which Divine Grace may be radiated into the world around us. Needless to say, this kind of formulation will command no assent from materialists, humanists, existentialists, and the like, not to mention those for whom the human being is nothing more than a highly evolved animal, a biological organism whose secrets will be unlocked by a materialistic science and who believe, with Francis Crick, that the soul is a fiction.6 All that need presently be said on this front is that the whole notion of “spirituality” can have no real meaning for such people It might be objected that there have been individuals who have experienced the deepest insights into Reality outside the cadre of any integral tradition and without any disciplined religious practice: the experience of Ramana Maharshi as a seventeen-year old—without doubt a mystical illumination of the most profound kind—might be cited as an instance. As Schuon observes, such experiences are certainly possible as a kind of “isolated miracle”,7 exceptions which prove the rule but certainly could not constitute it. In the vast majority of cases, the deepest spiritual experiences do take place within the embrace of a formal religion, the soil Vincit Omnia Veritas I,2 6 having been prepared, so to speak, by some sort of practice as prescribed by the tradition in question. In those cases where a more or less spontaneous and quite unexpected illumination occurs, if it is to become intelligible to others and to have any efficacy in guiding them along the spiritual path, it must be assimilated into the forms (both doctrinal and practical) of the tradition in question. This, of course, is precisely what happened in the case of the Sage of Arunachala.8 It might also be suggested that all spiritual experience is in some sense an adumbration, no matter how faint, of the mystical experience proper. One mode of spirituality is the awareness of the metaphysical transparency of every cosmic situation, awakened by what are variously called epiphanies, theophanies, hierophanies and mystical illuminations. In the theistic traditions this mode of experience is sometimes called the gift of “seeing God everywhere”—but it is a universal phenomena and one dramatically exemplified by those many saints and sages who perceive the transcendent dimension which is “hidden” in all natural phenomena. One may cite as representative examples such figures as Rumi, St Francis of Assisi, St Seraphim of Sarov, Ramakrishna and Black Elk. To conclude: “spirituality” in vacuo is indeed a vacuous notion! If the term is to have any meaning and vitality it must be understood within the framework of a religious tradition. In its most simple formulation, spirituality is to do with shattering the fetters of the ego (in Sufi terms, the taming of the nafs), the submission of the human will to the Will of Heaven, the “alchemical” transformation of the soul and, in the language of the Vedanta, the re-discovery of that Self (Atman) which Alone is Real. All of this lies infinitely beyond the scope of any profane science; nor can it be accommodated in those pseudo-spiritual and humanistic counterfeits which claim to dispense with the dictates of tradition. 1 F. Schuon: "No Activity Without Truth" in Harry Oldmeadow (ed), The Betrayal of Tradition, Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2005, p. Barry McDonald (ed), Every Branch in Me: Essays on the Meaning of Man, Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2003, p.ix. On the disastrous conflation of the psychic and the spiritual see René Guénon, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, Ghent: Sophia Perennis et Universalis, 1995. M. Buber, A Believing Humanism, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967, p. 110. Thomas Keating, “Meditative Technologies: Theological Ecumenism” in The Other Half of My Soul: Bede Griffiths and the Hindu-Christian Dialogue, ed. Beatrice Bruteau, Wheaton: Quest Books, 1996, p. 115. Kenneth (“Harry”) Oldmeadow, Traditionalism: Religion in the light of the Perennial Philosophy, Colombo: Sri Lanka Institute of Traditional Studies. 2000, p. 122. Vincit Omnia Veritas I,2 7 7 8 Frithjof Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, London: John Murray/Perennial books, 1961, p. 57. See T.M.P. Mahadevan, Ramana Maharshi: The Sage of Arunacala, London: Allen & Unwin, 1977.
- [“The Firmament Sheweth His Handiwork”: Re-awakening a Religious Sense of the Natural Order](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/firmament-sheweth) - "The Firmament Sheweth His Handiwork" Re-awakening a Religious Sense of the Natural Order Harry Oldmeadow Published in Barry McDonald (ed), Seeing God Everywhere: Essays on Nature and the Sacred, Bloomington: World Wisdom. 2003 Thou art the fire, Thou art the sun, Thou art the air, Thou art the moon, Thou art the starry firmament, Thou art Brahman Supreme: Thou art the waters, The creator of all! Thou art woman, thou art man, Thou art the youth, thou art the maiden, thou art the old man tottering with his staff; Thou facest everywhere. Thou art the dark butterfly, thou art the green parrot with red eyes, Thou art the thunder cloud, the seasons, the seas. Without beginning art thou, beyond time, beyond space. Thou art he from whom sprang the three worlds. The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork. The Upanishads 1 Psalms 2 Crazy Horse dreamed and went out into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that world. Black Elk 3 For the sage each flower is metaphysically a proof of the Infinite. Frithjof Schuon 4 The modern mentality characteristically looks for solutions to our most urgent problems in the wrong places; more often than not the proposed remedies aggravate the malady. Various 1 2 3 4 Svetasvatara Upanishad, IV.2-4. Psalms, XIX.1 Black Elk in John Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks, London, 1974, p67. Frithjof Schuon, Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, London, 1969, p10. 1 responses to the so-called environmental crisis are of this type. Hardly anyone is now foolish enough to deny that there is something fundamentally wrong with our way of "being in the world". The evidence is too overwhelming for even the most sanguine apostles of "Progress" to ignore. Much of the debate about the "environment" (itself a rather problematical term) continues to be conducted in terms derived from the secular-scientific- rationalist-humanist world-view bequeathed to us by that series of upheavals which subverted the medieval outlook—the Renaissance and Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment. As Seyyed Hossein Nasr has observed, most Western intellectuals think about environmental issues as if everyone were an agnostic following a secular philosophy cultivated at Oxford, Cambridge or Harvard and so they seek to develop a rationalist, environmental ethics based upon agnosticism, as if this would have any major effect whatsoever upon the environmental crisis...the very strong prejudice against religious ethics...is itself one the greatest impediments to the solution of the environmental crisis..5 My purpose here is to turn our attention to some general principles which informed traditional religious understandings of the natural order and of the human place in it. No "solution" to the environmental crisis is proposed. However, it is perfectly evident to those with "eyes to see and ears to hear" that the desecration (one uses the word advisedly) of nature cannot be remedied without recourse to the principles which governed traditional understandings of the natural order. These might offer some hope where modern scientism (the ideology of modern science) has so spectacularly failed. Traditional Cosmogonies The first question which might present itself in any inquiry into religious perspectives on nature is this: how does this or that religion in particular, or how do religions in general, envisage the origin, the source of the universe? Generally speaking the different traditions, from both East and West, and from both primal and literate cultures, account for the beginnings of the universe through a mythological account, a cosmogony. In the Judeo-Christian tradition we find it in the Genesis story. While the narrative details vary, this is not essentially different from, let us say, the mythical accounts of the Vedas, or of the Aboriginal Dreaming. These days "myth" is often a pejorative term meaning either a naive and childish fabrication or simply a story which is untrue. This kind of view is probably rooted in the 19th century where many scholars and theorists (anthropologists, folklorists, sociologists and the like) took this condescending and disabling view of mythology. Thus, Andrew Lang, for instance, took it that "primitive" mythologies were "a product of the childhood of the human race, arising out of the minds of a creature that has not yet learned to think in terms of strict cause and effect".6 Myths were thus to be understood as a kind of fumbling proto-science. We must return to earlier outlooks if we are to understand religious myths (from wherever they come) aright—as allegorical or symbolic narratives which articulate, in dramatic form, a world-view whose elements will necessarily include a metaphysic (an account of the Real; the metacosmic), a cosmology (an account of the visible world, in the heavens and here on earth; the macrocosmic) and an anthropology (an account of the human 5 6 S.H. Nasr, The Spiritual and Religious Dimensions of the Environmental Crisis, London, 1999, pp7 & 9. Eric Sharpe, Comparative Religion, London, 1975, p61. 2 situation; the microcosmic). In combating the impertinent reductionisms of the anthropologists Ananda Coomaraswamy eloquently reminds us that, Myth is the penultimate truth, of which all experience is the temporal reflection. The mythical narrative is of timeless and placeless validity, true nowhere and everywhere ... Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words ...7 Cosmogonies can be located on a spectrum one end of which might be labelled creationist/theistic and the other emanationist/monistic: the former type envisages the universe as a creation of a divine power or deity while the latter conceives of the universe as a spatio-temporal manifestation of an ultimate, spiritual reality. The Abrahamic monotheisms are of the former type, while Platonism and some forms of Hinduism represent the latter. In the Mundaka Upanishad , for instance, we are told that, As a spider sends forth and draws in its threads, as herbs grow on the earth, as hair grows on the head and the body of a living person, so from the Imperishable arises here the universe.8 Traditional cosmogonies necessarily deal with the relationship of spiritual and material realities, a relationship which lies at the heart of all religious understandings of nature. Philosophically speaking, religions posit the existence of two "worlds", one spiritual, immutable and absolute, the other material, mutable and relative, usually with an intermediary realm (which might variously be referred to as ethereal, subtle, astral and the like). Cosmogonies affirm the primacy of the spiritual: the material world derives from a divine creativity, or, at least, from a divine plenitude. In the religious context it is axiomatic that the material world did not and could not create itself; it is suspended, so to speak, within a reality which is immaterial and which is beyond time and space; the material world has no independent or autonomous existence. Consider a few quotes (one could easily assemble hundreds of such passages from all over the globe): 7 8 The Imperishable is the Real. As sparks fly upward from a blazing fire, so from the depths of the Imperishable arise all things. To the depths of the Imperishable they again descend. Self- luminous is that Being, and formless. He dwells within all and without all...From him are born breath, mind, the organs of sense, ether, air, fire, water and the earth, and he binds all these together. (The Upanishads)10 Ananda Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism, New Delhi, 1996, p6 & p33, n21. Mundaka Upanishad I.i.7. Of the major religious traditions the one which has least to say about the origins of the universe is Buddhism which is generally suspicious of metaphysical speculation and eschews what the Buddha called the Indeterminate Questions, which is to say questions which are either unanswerable, at least in terms accessible to the ordinary human mentality, or which are distractions from the business at hand. Sometimes it is said by Buddhists that the universe "always was"; this, perhaps, is to be understood as being upaya—a kind of sufficient expedient, so to speak. However, as the Prajna-Paramita states, "the belief in the unity or eternity of matter is incomprehensible..."; quoted in Whitall Perry, The Widening Breach: Evolutionism in the Mirror of Cosmology, Cambridge, 1995, p44. Tao Te Ching, XXV. 9 10 Mundaka Upanishad, II.i.1-4. There is something obscure which is complete before heaven and earth arose; tranquil, quiet, standing alone without change, moving around without peril. It could be the Mother of everything. I don't know its name, and call it Tao. 3 (Tao Te Ching)9 This world, with all its stars, elements, and creatures, is come out of the invisible world; it has not the smallest thing or the smallest quality of anything but what is come forth from thence. (William Law)11 Cosmogonies tell of the coming into being of the cosmos, a living, organic unity displaying beauty, harmony, meaning, and intelligibility as against the chaotic and meaningless universe of modern science. ("Kosmos", in its original Greek and in archaic times meant Great Man as well as "world": in the light of various cosmogonies, particularly the Greek and the Indian, this is not without significance. In the Vedas we have but one of many accounts of the universe being created out of Purusa, a cosmic man, Primordial Man, a Divine Archetypal figure.) One of the most beautiful expressions of the idea of an underlying harmony in the universe is to be found in the Taoist tradition and in the symbol of the Tao itself wherein we see the forces of yin and yang intertwined, these being the two fundamental forces or principles or energies out of which the fabric of the material universe is woven. In Hinduism the harmony, order and intelligibility of the universe is signalled by the Vedic term rta which we find in the earliest Scriptures. The beneficent influences on humankind of the natural order, and the attunement of the sage to natural rhythms, are particularly strong leitmotifs in Taoism but are to be found in many Eastern Scriptures. By the same token, humans are enjoined to play their part in the maintenance of the cosmic order, largely through their ritual life. This idea, everywhere to be found in the archaic worlds, makes no sense from a materialistic point of view which now determines the prevailing outlook—one completely impervious to the fact that, in Nasr's memorable phrase, "nature is hungry for our prayers".12 Religious doctrines (which might be expressed in any number of forms, not necessarily verbal) about the relationship of the spiritual and material worlds necessarily deal with the transcendence and immanence of the Absolute (whether this be envisaged in theistic, monistic, panentheistic or apophatic terms—God, Allah, Brahman, Tao, Wakan-Tanka, nirvana, or whatever): the "interplay" of these two "dimensions" varies from religion to religion but both are always present. Whatever accent a particular spiritual economy might place on these aspects of the Real the underlying principle is always the same. It might best be summed up by an old Rabbinic dictum: "The universe is not the dwelling place of God; God is the dwelling place of the universe."13 In the light of such formulations we can also dispense with the sharp dualistic separation of the "two worlds": the world of phenomena is held together by a numinous spiritual presence—indeed, without it the world of "matter" would vanish instantly and completely. Eternity is ever-present within (so to speak) the phenomenal world. The mystic Jan van Ruysbroeck referred to this inner reality as "beyond Time; that is, without before or after, in an Eternal Now...the home and beginning of all life and all becoming. And so all creatures are therein, beyond themselves, one being and one Life...as in their eternal origin."14 A misunderstanding which bedevils many discussions of the beliefs of non-literate peoples is signalled by the term "pantheism", i.e., the worship of the natural order as co-terminous with "God". This, we are sometimes told (usually by anthropologists) was the 11 Selected Mystical Writings, quoted in Whitall Perry, A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom, p26. 12 S.H. Nasr, The Spiritual and Religious Dimensions of the Environmental Crisis, p13. 13 Quoted in Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Selected Writings on Philosophy, Religion and Culture, New York, 1970, p146. 14 Quoted in P. Sherrard, Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition, Brookline (Mass.), 1998, p208. 4 practice of such and such a "primitive" people. In reality, pantheism, if ever it existed as anything other than an anthropological fiction, could never have been more than a degenerate form of what is properly called "panentheism", which is to say a belief in the overwhelming presence of the spiritual within the natural world—a quite different matter from the "pantheistic" fallacy that the natural world is somehow identical to (and thus exhausts) "God". Black Elk, the revered holy man of the Oglala Sioux, clearly articulated the panentheistic principle: We should understand that all things are the work of the Great Spirit. We should know that He is within all things; the trees, the grasses, the rivers, the mountains, all the four-legged animals and the winged peoples; and even more important we should understand that He is also above all these things and peoples.15 There are those who seek to develop an "eco-spirituality" which actually amounts to no more than a kind of secular pantheism, if one may allowed such a term—a view of the natural order which retains some sort of "religiosity", surrendering to the view that it is possible to have an immanent "sacred" while dispensing with the transcendent, as if night and day can indeed be sundered from the sun, or as if there could be a circle with no center.16 Equally absurd is the notion of a "secular scientific spirituality" which has recently been proposed.17 Like all such concoctions this kind of naturism is a sentimental form of idolatry. As Philip Sherrard has so plainly put it, "an agnostic and materialistic science of nature is a contradiction in terms...its findings will necessarily correspond to the living reality of nature as little as a corpse corresponds to the living reality of a human being...18 The Sacred and the Profane A category without which we cannot proceed very far in the study of religion is the sacred. There are many ways of defining it. Here is one from a discussion of Sacred Books by the sovereign metaphysician of our own time, Frithjof Schuon: That is sacred which in the first place is attached to the transcendent order, secondly possesses the character of absolute certainty, and thirdly, eludes the comprehension of the ordinary human mind ... The sacred is the presence of the centre in the periphery ... The sacred introduces a quality of the absolute into relativities and confers on perishable things a texture of eternity.19 Of course, the category can apply to all manner of things: events, texts, buildings, images, rituals. In the context of our present concerns we might isolate two applications of this category or principle: to space and time, and to life itself. The traditional mind, especially in primal, non-literate societies, perceives and experiences space and time as "sacred" and "profane", which is to say that they are not uniform and homogeneous as they are for the modern scientific mind, but are qualitatively differentiated. A good deal of ceremonial life is concerned with entry into or, better, participation in sacred time and space.20 Through 15 Joseph Epes Brown, The Sacred Pipe, Baltimore, 1971, pxx (my italics) . 16 For a specimen see N. Hettinger, "Ecospirituality: First Thoughts", Dialogue & Alliance, 9:2, Fall-Winter 1995, pp81-98. 17 See, for example, Holmes Ralston III, "Secular Scientific Spirituality" in P.H. Van Ness (ed), Spirituality and the Secular Quest, New York, 1996, pp387-413. 18 Philip Sherrard, Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition, p19. 19 Frithjof Schuon, Understanding Islam, London, 1976, p48. 20 One of the most useful expositions of archaic understandings of sacred and profane time and space is to be found in Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, New York,1959. 5 ritual one enters into sacred time, into real time, the "once upon a time", illo tempore, a time radically different from a "horizontal" duration. Likewise with sacred places, remembering that a natural site can be made sacred through various rituals and practices, or it can be recognized as sacred—a place where the membrane, so to speak, between the worlds of matter and of spirit are especially permeable. Rivers, mountains, particular types of trees and places related to the mythological events are sites of this sort. The sacrality of Mt Kailas or Uluru, for instance, is not conferred but apprehended. The sanctity of life itself is expressed in different ways in the various religious vocabularies. In the Judeo-Christian tradition this principle or theme begins in the affirmation in Genesis that man is made in the image of God, that the human being carries an indelible imprint of the Divine. Thence we have what might be called the principle of the spiritual equality of all human beings no matter what their station in life or their natural attributes and shortcomings—"all equal before God", as the Christian formula has it. The Judeo-Christian tradition has primarily affirmed the sanctity of human life, sometimes to the neglect or abuse of other life forms. One of the lessons of the great Eastern and primal religions is the principle of the moral solidarity, if one may so express it, of all living forms: in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism this is embodied in the traditional Indian value of ahimsa (non-injuriousness). Here is what Gandhi had to say about the cow: The central fact of Hinduism ... is 'Cow Protection'. Cow Protection to me is one of the most wonderful phenomena in all human evolution; for it takes the human being beyond his species. The cow to me means the entire sub-human world. Man through the cow is enjoined to realize his identity with all that lives ... Hindus will be judged not by their correct chanting of sacred texts, not by their pilgrimages, not by their most punctilious observance of Caste rules, but by their ability to protect the cow ... "Cow protection' is the gift of Hinduism to the world; and Hinduism will live so long as there are Hindus to protect the cow.21 "Man's identity with all that lives"—this is the key phrase to what appears at first sight to be a rather startling claim from the Mahatma. William Blake affirmed the same notion: "all that lives is holy". The Human Situation The principle of the sanctity of life, and the "moral solidarity" of living forms should not blind us to the fact that all traditional wisdoms affirm, in their different ways, that the human being is especially privileged. The human is an axial or amphibious being who lives in both the material and spiritual worlds in a way which is not quite true of other living beings, and is thus a bridge between them. Seyyed Hossein Nasr reminds us that Man's central position in the world is not due to his cleverness or inventive genius but because of the possibility of attaining sanctity and becoming a channel of grace for the world around him ... the very grandeur of the human condition is precisely that he has the possibility of reaching a state "higher than the angels" and at the same time of denying God.22 This religious understanding is, of course, quite incompatible with the notion that man is simply another biological organism. By the same measure, it is utterly at odds with that most seductive and elegant (and certainly one of the most pernicious) of scientistic hypotheses, Darwinian evolutionism. As Blake so well understood, "Man is either the ark of 21 Gandhi, quoted in Eric Sharpe, "To Hinduism through Gandhi" in Arthur Basham et al., Wisdom of the East, Sydney, 1979, pp61-62. 22 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Ideals and Realities of Islam, London, 1966, pp24-25. 6 God or a phantom of the earth and of the water". As "the ark of God" man is the guardian and custodian of the natural order, the pontifex, the caliph, "the viceregent of God on earth" in Qur'anic terms.23 The peculiar position of the human being can also illuminated by recourse to the traditional cosmological principle of the microcosm/macrocosm, expressed most succinctly perhaps in the Hermetic maxim, "as above, so below". In brief, man is not only in the universe but the universe is in man: "there is nothing in heaven or earth that is not also in man" (Paracelsus).24 The Buddha put it this way: "In truth I say to you that within this fathom-high body ... lies the world and the rising of the world and the ceasing of the world."25 Others have rendered the same truth poetically. Recall the beautiful lines of Thomas Traherne: Similarly, from Blake: You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.26 To see a world in a grain of sand, And Heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour.27 One of the keys to this principle resides in the traditional understanding of consciousness as being infinite, as surpassing the temporal and spatial limits of the material world—which, in fact, is nothing other than a tissue of fugitive relativities, a world of appearances, a fabric of illusions, Maya in the Hindu lexicon.28 At the same time we need to remember that while Maya is indeed "cosmic illusion", ...she is also divine play. She is the great theophany, the unveiling of God "In Himself and by Himself" as the Sufis would say. Maya may be likened to a magic fabric woven from a warp that veils and a weft that unveils; she is the quasi-incomprehensible intermediary between the finite and the Infinite—at least from our point of view as creatures—and as such she has all the multi-coloured ambiguity appropriate to her part-cosmic, part-divine nature.29 Thus, 23 See Jean-Louis Michon, "The Vocation of Man According to the Koran" in Fragments of Infinity: Essays in Religion and Philosophy ed. Arvind Sharma, Bridport, 1991, pp135-152. See also Kenneth Cragg, The Mind of the Qur'an: Chapters in Reflection, London, Allen & Unwin, 1973. 24 Quoted in T.C. McLuhan Cathedrals of the Spirit: The Message of Sacred Places, Toronto, 1996, p270. 25 Quoted in Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth: The Primordial Tradition, New York, 1976, p60. 26 Centuries of Meditations, 1.29. 27 "Auguries of Innocence". 28 Furthermore, as Lama Anagarika Govinda reminds us, "If the structure of our consciousness did not correspond to that of the universe and its laws, we should not be aware either of the universe or the laws that govern it. "Creative Meditation and Multi-Dimensional Consciousness, Wheaton, 1976, p162. 29 Frithjof Schuon, Light on the Ancient World, London, 1966, p89. See also Ali Lakhani, "What Thirst is For", Sacred Web, 4, December 1999, pp13-14. 7 ...the term maya combines the meanings of "productive power" and "universal illusion"; it is the inexhaustible play of manifestations, deployments, combinations and reverberations, a play with which Atma clothes itself even as the ocean clothes itself with a mantle of foam ever renewed and never the same.30 These passages should immunize us to the preposterous but widely held view that the Eastern traditions are "negative", "pessimistic", "life-denying" and the like.31 This world of maya is "illusory", but not in the sense that it is a mirage or a fantasy, but in that its "reality" is only relative: it has no independence, no autonomy, no existence outside the Divine Principle Itself. The sages of both East and West have never been seduced by the idea that the material universe is a self-existing entity, which is to say that they have ever understood that there is no such thing as "pure matter". Their understanding of the cosmos derives from all the sources of knowledge—mystical intuition and the revealed Scriptures as well as the instruments of the mind and the senses. On the other hand, a profane, quantitative science (from whence the modern West derives its understanding of the universe), is ... a totalitarian rationalism that eliminates both Revelation and Intellect, and at the same time a totalitarian materialism that ignores the metaphysical relativity—and therewith the impermanence—of matter and the world. It does not know that the supra-sensible, situated as it is beyond space and time, is the concrete principle of the world, and consequently that it is also at the origin of that contingent and changeable coagulation we call "matter". A science that is called "exact" is in fact an "intelligence without wisdom", just as post-scholastic philosophy is inversely a "wisdom without intelligence".32 The Symbolism of Natural Forms and the Cosmological Sciences In "Frost at Midnight" Coleridge, addresses these lines to his baby son: But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds, Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores And mountain crags: so shalt thou se and hear The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible of that eternal language, which thy God Utters, who from eternity doth teach Himself in all, and all things in himself. The idea of the natural order as not only sacred but as a symbolic language strikes the modern mind as somewhat strange, perhaps as "poetic fancy". In reality it is the modern outlook which is idiosyncratic. Mircea Eliade, has noted how, for homo religiosus, everything in nature is capable of revealing itself as a "cosmic sacrality", as a hierophany. He also observes that for our secular age the cosmos has become "opaque, inert, 30 Frithjof Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, New York, 1975, p89n. 31 Without pursuing the matter here we can note that the charge of "world-denial" directed against Buddhism rests on a very partial understanding of samsara to the neglect of its complement, dharma, by which is meant not simply the teachings of the Awakened One (its most familiar sense, at least to Westerners) but a pre-existent and eternal order to which these teachings testified and of which they are one expression. On this crucial point See Philip Novak, "Universal Theology and the Idea of Universal Order", Dialogue & Alliance, 6:1, Spring 1992, pp82-92, 87-88) 32 Frithjof Schuon, Light on the Ancient World, p117. 8 mute; it transmits no message, it holds no cipher".33 The traditional mind perceives the natural world as a hierophany, a theophany, a revelation—in short, as a teaching about the Divine Order. It is so by way of its analogical participation in the Divine qualities, which is to say that natural phenomena are themselves symbols of higher realities. A symbol, properly defined, is a reality of a lower order which participates analogically in a reality of a higher order of being. Therefore, a properly constituted symbolism rests on the inherent and objective qualities of phenomena and their relation to spiritual realities. The science of symbolism proceeds through a discernment of the qualitative significances of substances, colors, forms, spatial relationships and so on. As Schuon has observed, ...we are not here dealing with subjective appreciations, for the cosmic qualities are ordered both in relation to being and according to a hierarchy which is more real than the individual; they are, then, independent of our tastes...34 This kind of symbolism is an altogether different matter from arbitrary sign systems and artificial representational vocabularies. Only when we understand the revelatory aspect of natural phenomena, their metaphysical transparency, can we fully appreciate the import of a claim such as this: Wild Nature is at one with holy poverty and also with spiritual childlikeness; she is an open book containing an inexhaustible teaching of truth and beauty. It is in the midst of his own artifices that man most easily becomes corrupted, it is they who make him covetous and impious; close to virgin Nature, who knows neither agitation nor falsehood, he had the hope of remaining contemplative like Nature herself.35 Or this, from the great 13th century Zen sage, Dogen: They passed eons living alone in the mountains and forests; only then did they unite with the Way and use mountains and rivers for words, raise the wind and rain for a tongue, and explain the great void.36 Here are a few other formulations which signal the principle of the metaphysical transparency of the natural order: The invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made. (St Paul)37 If we look at the world...with the eyes of the spirit we shall discover that the simplest material object...is a symbol, a glyph of a higher reality and a deeper relationship of universal and individual forces... (Anagarika Govinda)38 Stones, plants, animals, the earth, the sky, the stars, the elements, in fact everything in the universe reveals to us the knowledge, power and the will of its Originator (Al-Ghazzali)39 33 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, pp12-13 & 178. 34 Frithjof Schuon, Gnosis: Divine Wisdom, London, 1979, p110. The most magisterial explication of the science of symbolism in recent times is to be found in René Guénon's Fundamental Symbols, Cambridge: Quinta Essentia, 1995. For a brief but incisive discussion of symbolism-proper and its relation to intellectuality, see Ananda Coomaraswamy: "Primitive Mentality" in Coomaraswamy 1: Selected Papers, Traditional Art and Symbolism ed. Roger Lipsey, Princeton, 1977, pp286-307. See also Adrian Snodgrass, The Symbolism of the Stupa, Delhi, 1992, pp1-10. 35 Frithjof Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, p84. 36 From Dogen's Shobogenzo, quoted in Dharma Gaia: A Harvest of Essays on Buddhism and Ecology, ed. Alan H. Badiner, Berkeley, 1990, pxiii. 37 Romans I.20. 38 Govinda, Creative Meditation and Multi-Dimensional Consciousness, Wheaton, 1976, p102. 9 The creatures are, as it were, traces of God's passing, wherein he reveals his might, power, wisdom and other divine qualities. (John of the Cross)40 The great, gashed, half-naked mountain is another of God's saints. There is no other like him. He is alone in his own character; nothing else in the world ever did or ever will imitate God in quite the same way. That is his sanctity. (Thomas Merton)41 Nature, then, is a teaching, a primordial Scripture. To "read" this Scripture, to take it to heart, is "to see God everywhere", to be aware of the transcendent dimension which is present in every cosmic situation, to see "the translucence of the Eternal through and in the temporal" (Coleridge).42 The great Hindu saint and sage, Ramakrishna, who could fall into ecstasy at the sight of a lion, a bird, a dancing girl, exemplified this gift though in his case, Schuon adds, it was not a matter of deciphering the symbolism but of "tasting the essences".43 It is in the primal cultures (so often dismissed or patronized as "primitive" and "pre- literate"), such as those of the Australian Aborigines, the African Bushmen, or the American Indians, that we find the most highly developed sense of the transparency of natural phenomena and the most profound understanding of the "eternal language". As Joseph Epes Brown has remarked of the Lakota experience, "each form in the world around them bears such a host of precise values and meanings that taken all together they constitute what one would call their 'doctrine'."44 In the traditional world the natural order was never understood or studied as an autonomous and independent reality; on the contrary, the natural order was only be understood within a larger context, drawing on theology and metaphysics as well as the cosmological sciences themselves. The material world was (and is) only intelligible through recourse to first principles which could not, and can not, be derived from empirical inquiry but from revelation, esoteric knowledge, gnosis, metaphysics: The knowledge of the whole universe does not lie within the competence of science but of metaphysics. Moreover, the principles of metaphysics remain independent of the sciences and cannot in any way be disproved by them.45 39 Al-Ghazzali quoted in Cathedrals of the Spirit, p107. For a study of the symbolism of animals within one particular spiritual economy see Joseph Epes Brown, Animals of the Soul: Sacred Animals of the Oglala Sioux, Rockport, 1997. 40 The Spiritual Canticle, V.iii, quoted in Elizabeth Hamilton, The Voice of the Spirit: The Spirituality of St John of the Cross, London,1976, p89. Compare with the well-known hadith qudsi: (in which God Himself speaks): "I was a hidden treasure, I wanted to be known and I created the creatures"; or with St. Thomas Aquinas: "Each creature is a witness to God's power and omnipotence; and its beauty is a witness to the divine wisdom ... Every creature participates in some way in the likeness of the Divine Essence." Aquinas quoted in Matthew Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, Melbourne, 1989, p75. 41 Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, New York, 1961, p31. 42 Coleridge quoted in Kathleen Raine, Defending Ancient Springs, Cambridge, 1985, p109. 43 Frithjof Schuon, "Foundations of an Integral Aesthetics", Studies in Comparative Religion, 10:3, 1976, 135n. See also Christopher Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples, Calcutta, 1974, 61ff. 44 Joseph Epes Brown The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indians, New York, 1982, p37. Two works, comparatively free of the evolutionist and modernistic prejudices which colour much of the "anthropological" literature, might be recommended as introductions to the Aboriginal and Bushmen cultures: James Cowan Mysteries of the Dreaming Bridport,1989, and Laurens van der Post, The Heart of the Hunter, Harmondsworth, 1965. 45 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man, London, 1976, p35. 10 No one has stated the crucial principle here better than the great Vedantin sage Sankara who taught that the world of maya (i.e., the world of appearances, of time-space relativities) is not inexplicable, it is only not self-explanatory.46 To describe the futility of a purely materialistic science (such as we now have in the West), Sankara compares it to an attempt to explain night and day without reference to the Sun. In other words, the study of the natural world is not primarily an empirical business, although it does, of course, have an empirical dimension: matter does not exist independently and its nature cannot be understood in purely material terms. This is the great dividing line between the sacred sciences of the traditional worlds and the Promethean science of our own time. Beauty: Divine Rays A few words on Beauty which we find everywhere in the natural order as well as in the human form itself, and in sacred art. Firstly, there is the intimate nexus between Truth, Goodness and Beauty. The inter-relationships of the three are more or less inexhaustible and there is no end to what might be said on this subject. Here we shall establish only a few general points, taking the nature of Beauty as our point of departure. Marsilio Ficino, the Renaissance Platonist, defined beauty as "that ray which parting from the visage of God, penetrates into all things".47 Beauty, in most traditional canons, has this divine quality. Beauty is a manifestation of the Infinite on a finite plane and so introduces something of the Absolute into the world of relativities. Its sacred character "confers on perishable things a texture of eternity".48 Schuon: The archetype of Beauty, or its Divine model, is the superabundance and equilibrium of the Divine qualities, and at the same time the overflowing of the existential potentialities in pure Being... Thus beauty always manifests a reality of love, of deployment, of illimitation, of equilibrium, of beatitude, of generosity.49 It is distinct but not separate from Truth and Virtue. As Aquinas affirmed, Beauty relates to the cognitive faculty and is thus connected with wisdom.50 The rapport between Beauty and Virtue allows one to say that they are but two faces of the one reality: "goodness is internal beauty, and beauty is external goodness" or, similarly, "virtue is the beauty of the soul as beauty is the virtue of forms".51 To put it another way, Oscar Wilde notwithstanding, there are no beautiful vices just as there are no ugly virtues. The inter-relationships of Beauty, Truth and Goodness explain why, in the Oriental traditions, every avatara embodies a perfection of Beauty. It is said of the Buddhas they save not only by their doctrine but by their superhuman Beauty.52 Schuon gathers together some of these principles in the following passage: 46 See my article, "Sankara's Doctrine of Maya" in Asian Philosophy, 2:2, 1992, pp131-146. 47 Quoted in R.J. Clements, Michelangelo's Theory of Art, New York,1971, p5. 48 Frithjof Schuon, Understanding Islam, p48. 49 Frithjof Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, p241. 50 See A.K. Coomaraswamy, "The Mediaeval Theory of Beauty" in Selected Papers 1: Traditional Art and Symbolism, pp211-20, and two essays, "Beauty and Truth" and "Why Exhibit Works of Art?" in Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art, New York, 1956, pp7-22 (esp. 16-18) & pp102-109. 51 Frithjof Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, pp245-246. See also Frithjof Schuon, Esoterism as Principle and as Way, London, 1981, p95. 52 As Schuon notes, the name "Shunyamurti" - manifestation of the void - applied to a Buddha, is full of significance; Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, London, 1967, p25n. See also Frithjof Schuon, In the Tracks of Buddhism, London, 1968, p121. 11 ...the earthly function of beauty is to actualise in the intelligent creature the Platonic recollection of the archetypes... there is a distinguo to make, in the sensing of the beautiful, between the aesthetic sensation and the corresponding beauty of soul, namely such and such a virtue. Beyond every question of "sensible consolation" the message of beauty is both intellectual and moral:intellectual because it communicates to us, in the world of accidentality, aspects of Substance, without for all that having to address itself to abstract thought; and moral, because it reminds us of what we must love, and consequently be.53 Beauty, whether natural or man-made, can be either an open or a closed door: when it is identified only with its earthly support it leaves man vulnerable to idolatry and to mere aestheticism; it brings us closer to God when "we perceive in it the vibrations of Beatitude and Infinity, which emanate from Divine Beauty".54 The Western Desacralisation of Nature Western attitudes to nature, before the onslaughts of a materialistic scientism, had been influenced by archaic pagan ideas (derived principally from Greece and from Northern Europe), Platonism and Islam, and, pre-eminently, the Judeo-Christian tradition. Many contemporary environmentalists point the finger at the so-called "dominion ethic" apparently sanctioned by the Genesis account. There is no gainsaying the fact that Christian institutions have for centuries been accomplices in an appalling environmental vandalism; one readily understands the reasons why many environmentalists resort to a clutch of clichés about the destructive influence of Christianity. Like most clichés, those bandied about by anti-religious propagandists in the environmental debate have some truth in them. However, if we look a little more closely we will find that the story is rather more complicated than is often supposed.55 Here I can do no more than offer a few fragmentary remarks. Like all cosmogonies, the Genesis myth deals with the relationship of the spiritual and material. The natural world is affirmed as God's handiwork. Throughout both Testaments of the Bible we are reminded that "All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made."56 Furthermore, we are to understand the Creation itself as both a psalm of praise to its Creator and as a revelation of the divine qualities. As one contemporary Christian put it, "Creation is nothing less than a manifestation of God's hidden Being."57 In the Psalms we have many affirmations of this kind: "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork." We find many similar passages in The Qur'an: "The seven heavens, and the earth, and all that is therein, magnify Him, and there is naught but magnifieth his praise; only ye understand not their worship";58 and "All that is in the heavens and the earth glorifieth Allah".59 In fact we can find like passages in many of the great Scriptures from around the globe: thus in the Bhagavad Gita, to choose one example, the universe is celebrated as the raiment of Krishna who contains within himself all the worlds of time and space.60 53 Frithjof Schuon, "Foundations of an Integral Aesthetics", pp131-132. 54 Frithjof Schuon, "Foundations of an Integral Aesthetics", p135. 55 See Wendell Berry's essay "Christianity and the Survival of Creation" in Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, New York,1993, pp92-116. 56 John, I.3. 57 Philip Sherrard, Human Image: World Image, Cambridge, 1992, p152. 58 The Qur'an, XVII.44. 59 The Qur'an, LVII.2. 60 Goethe had something of the sort in mind when he wrote, "Nature is the living, visible garment of God."; quoted in Victor Gollancz From Darkness to Light London, 1964, p246. 12 In the Genesis account, the world of nature is not man's to do with as he pleases but rather a gift from God, one saturated with divine qualities, to be used for those purposes which sustain life and which give human life in particular, dignity, purpose and meaning. That this stewardship ethic could degenerate into a sanction for wholesale exploitation and criminal ruination is actually a betrayal of the lessons of Genesis. How did this come about? The cooperative factors at work in the Western desacralisation of nature are complex but we may here mention a few of the more salient: Christianity's emergence in a world of decadent pagan idolatry which necessitated a somewhat imbalanced emphasis on God's transcendence and on "other-worldliness"; the consequent neglect of those sacred sciences which might later have formed a bulwark against the ravages of a materialistic scientism; the unholy alliance of an anti-traditional Protestantism with the emergent ideologies of a new and profane world-view.61 Various other ideas about and understandings of nature have circulated through the post- medieval world: nature as chaos, disorder, wild-ness, in contrast to "civilisation", a threatening space which lay "outside" the social order (this motif has some pagan antecedents, especially in the Teutonic-Scandinavian religions rather than the Mediterranean and classical); nature as matter and as a mechanistic system governed by various "physical laws" amenable to investigation by a materialistic science (the legacy of the Scientific Revolution, of Newton, Bacon, Locke, Copernicus, Galileo, et al.); as raw material, an inexhaustible quarry to be plundered and, simultaneously, as "enemy" to be subdued, "tamed" or, even more ludicrously, "conquered" (industrialism, which provided a new field of applications for the "discoveries" of science); as an Edenic paradise peopled by "noble savages" (the romantic naturism of Rousseau and his many epigones); as uplifting spectacle (Wordsworth); as the Darwinian jungle, "red in tooth and claw"; as an amenity, a "resource" to be "managed" and protected for human recreation, tourism and the like; as Gaia, a single living organism ("deep ecology"); and as "Wilderness" (a pseudo-religious secularism, if one might so put it, which absolutizes "Nature" under a certain guise and thus becomes a form of idolatry—which is nothing other than the mistaking of the symbol for its higher referent). None of the post-medieval understandings in themselves offer any very real hope of providing a way out of our predicament. Clearly some contemporary developments and movements ("deep ecology", "eco-feminism", the new physics) yield some insights and can be helpful in dismantling the modern mind-set which has brought us to the current situation. But too often these well-intentioned gropings towards a more holistic understanding are bereft of any properly-constituted metaphysical and cosmological framework. This is evident, for instance, in the fact that for all their radical aspirations the proponents of "a new ecological awareness" often fall prey to the materialistic and evolutionist assumptions which are at the root of the problem which they are trying to address. It must also be said that those who are properly sceptical about the pretensions of scientism are also often vulnerable to a kind of sentimental and warmed-over pantheism—sometimes on display in the effusions of the "New Age" enthusiasts. No, what is required is a reanimation of the principles and understandings which governed traditional understandings. The key, perhaps, is to be found in the word "sacramental"—and the catechistic formula is altogether precise and apposite: "an outward and visible sign of an inner and invisible grace". 61 The most authoritative analysis of this process is to be found in Nasr's Man and Nature. 13 14 One might schematize the contrast between traditional and modern world-views, and their respective "attitudes" to nature this way: Like all such schemas, this vastly oversimplifies the case—but it can perhaps serve as a signpost to those modes of understanding and of "being in the world" which we need to reawaken in the modern West. Before any such a healing process can proceed (a healing of ourselves, of the earth, of our "relationship" with the whole cosmos and with what lies beyond it) we must accept that, at root, the "environmental crisis" is actually the symptom of a spiritual malaise. To return to health we must get to the seat of the disease rather that merely palliating the symptoms. As a contemporary Sufi, Abu Bakr Siraj Ed-Din, has so well expressed it: The state of the outer world does not merely correspond to the general state of men's souls; it also in a sense depends on that state, since man himself is the pontiff of the outer world. Thus the corruption of man must necessarily affect the whole...62 Similarly, Seyyed Hossein Nasr: The Earth is bleeding from wounds inflicted upon it by a humanity no longer in harmony with Heaven and therefore in constant strife with the terrestrial environment.63 In this context we might also feel the force of Emerson's claim that, "the views of nature held by any people determine all their institutions."64 We are not able here to detail the ways in which we might escape the tyrannical grip of a profane scientism and its various accomplices (industrialism, consumerism, "development", "economic growth" and other such shibboleths) and so begin to free ourselves and our world from the catastrophic consequences of a collective blindness and a quite monstrous hubris (the two, of course, being intimately related). We must relinquish our Luciferian ideas about "conquering" nature, and allow Mother Nature not only to heal herself but to heal us. As Kenneth Cragg has so properly observed, Traditional Cultures Modern "Civilisation" mythological cosmogonies the geological/historical "record" primacy of the spiritual; spiritual worldview primacy of the material; materialistic worldview qualitative, synthetic and holistic sacred sciences quantitative, analytic and fragmentary science natural forms symbolic and transparent natural forms mute and opaque sacramental outlook profane outlook reciprocal & cooperative relationship with nature exploitative & combative relationship with nature ecological and "natural" economies industrial and artificial economies religious culture secular culture 62 63 64 ...nature is the first ground and constant test of the authentically religious temper–the temper which does not sacralize things in themselves nor desecrate them in soul-less using and consuming. Between the pagan and the secular, with their contrasted bondage and arrogance, lies the reverent ground of a right hallowing where things are well seen as being for men Abu Bakr Siraj Ed-Din, The Book of Certainty, New York, 1974, p33. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Religion and the Order of Nature, New York, 1996, 3. Quoted in Cathedrals of the Spirit, p223. under God, seen for their poetry, mystery, order and serviceability in the cognizance of man, and for their quality in the glory of God.65 The way forward must also be a way back. Suffice it to say that all those concerned about the current "ecological crisis" would do well to ponder the implications of the following passage from Schuon: This dethronement of Nature, or this scission between man and the earth—a reflection of the scission between man and God— has borne such bitter fruits that it should not be difficult to admit that, in these days, the timeless message of Nature constitutes a spiritual viaticum of the first importance. ...It is not a matter of projecting a supersaturated and disillusioned individualism into a desecrated Nature—this would be a worldliness like any other—but, on the contrary, of rediscovering in Nature, on the basis of the traditional outlook, the divine substance which is inherent in it; in other words, to "see God everywhere"...66 Here is the same truth expressed by Black Elk in the inimitable idiom of the Lakota Indians: 65 66 67 Peace...comes within the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the Universe dwells Wakan-Tanka [the Great Spirit] and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.67 *** Kenneth Cragg, The Mind of the Qur'an, p148. Frithjof Schuon, The Feathered Sun, Bloomington, 1990, p13. Joseph Epes Brown, The Sacred Pipe, p115. 15 Suggested Reading (a) Traditionalist Writers Joseph Epes Brown — — Titus Burckhardt Ananda Coomaraswamy Jean Cooper — René Guénon — Martin Lings Barry McDonald (ed) Seyyed Hossein Nasr — — — — & Katherine O'Brien (eds) Whitall Perry Frithjof Schuon — — Philip Sherrard Huston Smith Wolfgang Smith The Sacred Pipe Baltimore: Penguin, 1971. The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indians New York: Crossroad, 1982. Animals of the Soul Rockport: Element, 1997. Mirror of the Intellect ed. Wm. Stoddart, Cambridge: Quinta Essentia, 1987. Time and Eternity New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1993. Taoism, the Way of the Mystic Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1972. Symbolism, the Universal Language Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1982. Fundamental Symbols Cambridge: Quinta Essentia, 1995. The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times Baltimore: Penguin, 1972. Ancient Beliefs and Modern Superstitions London: Allen & Unwin, 1980. Every Branch in Me Bloomington: World Wisdom Books, 2002. Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man London: Allen & Unwin, 1976. Knowledge and the Sacred New York: Crossroad, 1981. Religion and the Order of Nature Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. The Spiritual and Religious Dimensions of the Environmental Crisis London: Temenos Academy, 1999. In Quest of the Sacred: The Modern World in the Light of Tradition Oakton: Foundation for Traditional Studies, 1994. The Widening Breach: Evolutionism in the Light of Cosmology Cambridge: Quinta Essentia, 1995. Light on the Ancient Worlds London: Perennial Books, 1965. Gnosis: Divine Wisdom London: Perennial Books, 1979. The Feathered Sun Bloomington: World Wisdom Books, 1990. The Rape of Nature Colombo: Sri Lanka Institute of Traditional Studies, 1987. Forgotten Truth New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Cosmos and Transcendence La Salle: Sherwood Sugden & Co, 1984. (b) Other Recommended Sources Wendell Berry — Walter H. Capps (ed) James Cowan Kenneth Cragg Mircea Eliade John Neihardt Kathleen Raine Theodore Roszak Roger Sworder Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community New York: Pantheon, 1993. Life is a Miracle: An Essay against Modern Superstition Washington DC: Counterpoint Seeing with a Native Eye New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Mysteries of the Dreaming Bridport: Prism, 1989. The Mind of the Qur'an London: Allen & Unwin, 1973. The Sacred and the Profane New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1959. Black Elk Speaks London: Abacus, 1974. Defending Ancient Springs Cambridge: Golgonooza, 1985. Where the Wasteland Ends New York: Doubleday, 1972. Mining, Metallurgy and the Meaning of Life Sydney: Quaker Hill, 1995. 16 Note: This essay is a revised and expanded version on an article which appeared in Sacred Web 2, December 1998, under the title "The Translucence of Nature". Notes on Contributors: Dr Kenneth Oldmeadow is Coordinator of Philosophy and Religious Studies at La Trobe University Bendigo, Australia. He is the author of Traditionalism: Religion in the light of the Perennial Philosophy and is currently working on a book about Western encounters with the religious traditions of the East. He is a frequent contributor to the traditionalist journal Sacred Web and has published widely on a variety of religious and spiritual themes, including the mythological heritage of the Australian Aborigines, the Vedanta and the Vajrayana branch of Mahayana Buddhism.
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- [The Theology and Times of William of Tripoli OP: A Different View of Islam](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/omeara-william-tripoli) - Thomas F. O’Meara OP In William’s unusual employment of Islamic sources and in its sympathy with the peoples of Islam, comparison becomes theology… The friar was part of a creative and optimistic time of exchange between religions that faded away for centuries after the fall of Acre in 1291. Click here to view the PDF
- [The Vision of God in Philo of Alexandria](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-vision-of-god-in-philo-of-alexandria) - David Bradshaw For Philo any obedience to the Law is a way of puting into action the contents of the divine mind, and so ultimately a kind of imitatio Dei… On the one hand, becoming like God through virtuous action is a means of preparing for the vision; on the other, the vision results in
- [The Book of the Lover and the Beloved](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-book-of-the-lover-and-the-beloved) - Ramon Llull (c. 1232–1315, usually “Lull”, “Lullius” or “Raymond Lully” in languages other than Catalan) The Book of the Lover and the Beloved (Llibre d’Amic e d’Amat) is a collection of mystical aphorisms contained in Blanquerna, considered by some to be the first European novel, and the most famous literary work by Blessed Ramon Llull,
- [Reification of Language in Jewish Mysticism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/idel-reification) - Moshe Idel In creation and in ritual, the Hebrew language was considered by Jewish mystics as playing a role much more important than the common communicative one that language regularly plays. It was the main instrument of the creation of the world, and it is the vessel that is prepared by man to contain the
- [Hindu religion as the ‘complementary/incommensurable other’ to Christian religion](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/wohlschlag-complementary-incommesurable) - Dominique Wohlschlag Making an art of mysticism is to say that God is “tasted” by the devotee. Just as the aesthete (the rasika, the taster) tastes a work of art, the devotee ecstatically tastes the divine reality. Click here to view the PDF Or click here for a special eBook and tablet formatted PDF
- [The Place of <em>T’ien-fang hsing-li</em> in the Islamic Tradition](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/chittick-tianfang-xingli) - Liu Chih’s T’ien-fang hsing-li was one of the most widely read books among Chinese Muslims during the 18th and 19th centuries, but it gradually came to be criticized by some Muslim scholars, who thought that it had deviated from true Islam.1 Today also, those who read the book, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, will be struck by the fact that it is not at all similar to what is usually presented as the teachings of Islam. How is this book, they are likely to ask, about “Islam”? Where are the markers through which Muslim texts are recognized, such as quotations from the Koran, Muhammad, and the great authorities? Where are the ritual instructions, the rules and regulations, and the dogmatic statements of Muslim belief? Why is there so much Neo-Confucian terminology? For my own part, such questions have not arisen. Quite the contrary, the more I study T’ien-fang hsing-li in English translation, the more I see its intimate connection with the Arabic and Persian texts that I have been reading for the past forty years. I suspect that if many people fail to see that Liu Chih is addressing basic Islamic principles, it is because they are unfamiliar with the diversity of forms in which these principles have been expressed over Islamic history. They recognize Islamic ideas only when they are dressed in Arabic clothing. Moreover—and this is especially true today on the political scene—when they see the Arabic clothing, they think that it must be Islam, regardless of what is actually being said. In the case of Liu Chih’s book, people see the Neo-Confucian robes, but they do not see the Islamic meaning. In order to understand how T’ien-fang hsing-li fits into the Islamic tradition, we need to remember that Islam has produced many scholarly disciplines, each of which was divided into several schools. These disciplines address three basic realms of human existence: activity, understanding, and intentionality, but all three realms are not always discussed in any given discipline or scholarly. For example, jurisprudence, which is the science of the Shariah (Islamic law), deals only with activity. Its role is set down the rules and regulations that govern proper ritual forms and social interaction. Kalam (dogmatic theology) addresses only the realm of understanding. Its goal is to establish the proper manner of talking about the articles of belief that are mentioned in the Koran—that is, God, the angels, the prophets, scripture, the Last Day, and so on. Sufism focuses on questions of intentionality, interiority, and spirituality, and it offers practices in order to actualize sincerity, love for God, and the awakening of the heart. Most Muslims have some acquaintance with jurisprudence, Kalam, and the practical side of Sufism. This is because they know various rules about correct ritual and social activity (jurisprudence), they are familiar with basic Islamic dogma (Kalam), and they are acquainted with rituals that characterize Sufism. Relatively few Muslims, however, know anything about the specific Islamic science for which Liu Chih is speaking in T’ien-fang hsing-li. This science is not jurisprudence, nor is it Kalam, nor is it practical Sufism. What is it then? 1 Paper delivered at the Dialogue between Chinese and Islamic Civilizations: Cultural Dialogue and Cultural Consciousness, Yinchuan, China, November 19, 2005. ?????? 2 One could answer by saying that Liu Chih’s book is about philosophy (falsafa) or the theoretical side of Sufism (`irfân). But this does not explain anything to those who are not thoroughly familiar with the different approaches to Islamic learning. What needs to be understood is not the name of the science, but what makes this science different from the more familiar Islamic sciences, such as jurisprudence and theology. What are the characteristics of this specific approach to Islamic learning that allow it to adopt Neo- Confucian concepts and terminology? In order to explain this, I need to provide some background about the search for knowledge in Islam, a search that is required of all Muslims (“even unto China,” as the famous saying of Muhammad tells us). Human beings acquire knowledge in two basic ways, which are called by a variety of names in different religious and philosophical traditions. Muslims commonly distinguished between the two by calling one of them “transmitted” (naqlî) and the other “intellectual” (`aqlî). Transmitted learning depends totally on what has been received from the past. Examples include language, grammar, history, law, Koran, and Hadith. In contrast, intellectual learning—in the strict sense of the word `aqlî—cannot be transmitted, it can only be recovered from within the intellect (`aql), which is also called the “heart” (qalb, dil). A common example of an intellectual science is arithmetic, because all of its principles and details are latent in the human mind, waiting to be understood. We know that two plus two equals four because it is self-evident to our intelligence. At first we may need to be reminded of this, but once we are reminded, we know that our heart has always known it. * The distinction between intellectual and transmitted knowledge is implied in the two Shahadahs (“testimonies”) that are the foundation of Islamic faith. These are the statements “There is no god but God” and “Muhammad is God’s messenger.” The Koran presents the first Shahadah, commonly called “the words declaring [God’s] Unity” (kalimat al-tawhîd), as a universal and ahistorical truth, pertaining to all times and all places. It was known to Adam and was taught by every prophet and sage. Moreover, it is accessible to human intelligence without the necessity for prophetic intervention, because man is made in God’s image, with a primordial nature (fitra) that recognizes things as they are.2 The function of the prophets is not to teach Unity, it is to “remind” (dhikr, tadhkira) people that they already know Unity. In other words, in the traditional Islamic understanding, a normal, healthy intelligence recognizes that the universe and everything within it is governed by the One Supreme Principle, just as it recognizes that two plus two equals four. The truth of the first Shahadah is not a transmitted truth, it is an intellectual truth. It is present in every human heart, waiting to be recalled. In contrast, the second Shahadah declares the importance of historical, transmitted knowledge. To say “Muhammad is God’s messenger” means to acknowledge that Muhammad and his message (the Koran) allow people to learn what the Supreme Principle wants from them. The only possible way to gain this knowledge is by way of transmission from the Prophet. You cannot discover the details of the message in your own heart. Koran, Hadith, Islamic dogma, ritual, rules, and regulations can only be known only through transmission. * ????????????? 3 These two sorts of learning demand two different methodologies. The method of acquiring transmitted knowledge is called “imitation” (taqlîd), that is, learning from others. All knowledge about the historical tradition of Islam, whether it is known by Muslims or non-Muslims, is acquired by way of imitation. Intellectual knowledge, however, cannot be acquired by imitation—by studying books or by memorizing the words of others. It must be discovered by the seeker in his or her own heart. The methodology of discovering knowledge in the heart is called “realization,” tahqîq. The word derives from the same root as haqq (truth) and haqîqa (reality). In the path of realization, imitation is necessary at the beginning, but it cannot provide true understanding, it can only prepare the way. The goal is to know for oneself, directly and without intermediary. In transmitted learning, one needs to follow the opinions of others. This is why Islam asks Muslims to follow the Shariah as taught to them by the ulama (the scholars who have mastered the law). But the ulama in turn have received their knowledge from their teachers, and eventually the chain of transmission goes back to the Koran and the Prophet. Most Islamic sciences are precisely of the transmitted sort, but the road to intellectual knowledge has always been open. Those who made progress on the path were usually known as experts in the sciences of philosophy or Sufism. There has always been a tension between the experts in transmitted knowledge and the seekers of intellectual knowledge. Most Muslims thought that “learning” meant Koran and the Hadith, theological dogma, and the rules of the Shariah. Those who followed the intellectual path held that all of this is elementary learning. It needs to be studied, but its purpose is to prepare the way for the awakening of the heart. In Chinese terms, transmitted knowledge is “small learning” (hsiao-hsüeh), and intellectual knowledge is “great learning” (ta-hsüeh). The arguments and debates that took place between the experts in transmitted knowledge and the seekers of intellectual knowledge can be compared to the relationship between Confucianists and Taoists. Confucianists advocated acquiring the transmitted knowledge of the Classics, but Taoists felt that transmitted knowledge can become a barrier to true understanding. Like Taoists, Sufis and philosophers knew that the real purpose of learning is to achieve transformation—what they called “realization.” True awakening grows up when the heart is purified of knowledge coming from the outside. * In order to appreciate the contrasting natures of intellectual and transmitted knowledge, we need to pay attention to what seekers of intellectual knowledge were trying to understand. Despite many differences in approach and expression, philosophers and Sufis agreed that three sorts of knowledge can and should be sought within the heart. These are metaphysics, meaning knowledge of the Ultimate Reality known theologically as “God”; cosmology, meaning knowledge of the world out there, which is defined as “everything other than God” (mâ siwa’llâh); and psychology (or autology), meaning knowledge of the knowing self (nafs). Of course, these three sorts of knowledge can also be studied as transmitted learning. The Koran and the Hadith have a great deal to say about them, as do books written by theologians, philosophers, and Sufis. Nonetheless, neither philosophy nor Sufism ever forgot that the purpose of learning is to transcend hearsay and to come to know God, the world, and the self for oneself and in oneself. True knowledge can only ??????be found by awakening to things as they actually are, not by quoting the words and opinions of others. * One way to understand the role of the intellectual path is say that it provided forms of learning and praxis that could lead to the achievement of “wisdom” (hikma). The Koran often calls the knowledge that God gave to the prophets by this name, and it refers to God Himself as Wise (hakîm). Philosophy, of course, was defined as “love of wisdom.” In both philosophy and Sufism, wisdom was understood to mean knowing things as they truly are and acting appropriately. This is to say that the goal of searching for wisdom was to become a wise man, a sage (hakîm). The seeker of wisdom was attempting to live in perfect conformity with the Supreme Principle. People are able to achieve conformity with the Supreme Principle because God created them in His own image. Nonetheless, most people do not live up to the requirements of their own divine image. Rather, they live in ignorance and forgetfulness of God and their own true nature. The sage is the person who has awoken to the presence of God in his own heart and who lives appropriately in the world. * Throughout the Islamic tradition, but especially in philosophy and Sufism, God was called by the Koranic name al-haqq, which means Truth, Reality, Right, Real. The principle of Unity, “There is no god but God,” means that “There is no haqq but al- Haqq.” Only God, the Supreme Principle, is truly real, right, and appropriate. As for heaven, earth, and the ten thousand things, they fall short of the absolute reality of the Real. Nonetheless, the Koran and many hadiths tell us that haqq is an attribute of created things as well as of the Creator. This is to say that everything has a truth, a reality, a rightness, an appropriateness. The Prophet mentioned many different things as having haqqs “against us,” by which he meant that we must respond to their rightness and appropriateness in the proper way. Hence the word haqq in Arabic also means both “right” (as in “human rights”) and “responsibility.” The fact that created things have rights means that our human responsibility is to observe and respect these rights. As the Prophet commanded, “Give to everything that has a haqq its haqq.”3 Some authors take this prophetic commandment as a nutshell definition of realization, tahqîq, which means literally to actualize haqq. Thus, realization is understood to mean knowing the reality, truth, and right of God, of the cosmos, and of the human self. At the same time, realization is to act rightly and appropriately in respect to what one knows—it means to give God, the cosmos, and the soul what is due to them, their “rights” (haqq). Only by doing so can people live up to their “responsibility” (haqq). In short, the “intellectual” knowledge that is sought in philosophy and Sufism calls for realization, which means the actualization of wisdom and the transformation of the soul. The goal is to achieve perfection, which is defined in terms of the Supreme Reality, the cosmos (the macrocosmic manifestation of the Supreme Reality), and the awakened heart (the microcosmic manifestation of the Supreme Reality). Only an awakened heart can grasp the truth and reality (haqq) of God, the cosmos, and itself. * ????????????????? 5 Let me now come back to T’ien-fang hsing-li. My basic point here is that this book speaks on behalf of the intellectual tradition, not the transmitted tradition. Although Liu Chih acknowledges the importance of following the learning that has been transmitted from the sages, especially the Utmost Sage (Muhammad), he is not trying to repeat the teachings of the Koran, Hadith, and Islamic law, nor is he providing information about the Supreme Principle and the cosmos. Rather, he is setting down a map of reality in order to guide people on the path of realization. That path leads from ignorance to wisdom and from forgetfulness to awakening. Liu Chih is not telling people what to think. Rather, he is trying to help them learn how to think. He wants to clarify that each of us needs to know reality for ourselves and in ourselves, not by imitating others. We cannot understand God, the cosmos, and the self by quoting the Koran and the Prophet, much less by studying the books of scholars. We have to know for ourselves. Only then can we achieve the perfection that is the goal of human life. For Liu Chih, the transmitted knowledge that Muslims hear from their ulama is the small learning. It is a necessary foundation for the great learning. But the great learning itself, once actualized, does not depend upon the small learning for its expression. The intellect—the heart—once it is awakened through the great learning, does not belong to the realm of forms and images, but rather to the realm of reality and principle. The heart is the master of forms, it is not mastered by forms, so it can express itself in any form appropriate to the audience. Perhaps Liu Chih came to be criticized by some of the Chinese ulama because they knew only the small learning of Islam and they could not recognize his intention. As a result, they thought that he was deviating from the path of true Islam, when in fact he was pointing to the purpose and goal of all Islamic learning. 1 On Liu Chih and the importance of this book, see Sachiko Murata, Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). 2 Some Muslims object to the statement “Man is made in God’s image,” given its obvious Biblical source and its association with the Jewish and Christian traditions. But this would be to forget that the Koran came not as a completely new teaching, but as a confirmation of the previous prophetic revelations. Moreover, Bukhârî, Muslim, and other authorities tell us that the Prophet said, “God created Adam in His form (sûra).” The word sûra is often translated as “image,” though “form” preserves the nuances of the Arabic better in English. The Koran tells us that God is the Form-Giver (musawwir) and that He formed human beings and made their forms beautiful (40:64, 64:3). There is much discussion of the meaning of this hadith of the form in the texts. Many theologians think it simply means that God created Adam in Adam’s own form, that is, as a fully- formed adult. But many others understand it to be a clarification of Koran 2:30, “He taught Adam the names, all of them.” For further explanation, see Sachiko Murata and W. C. Chittick, The Vision of Islam (New York: Paulist, 1994). 3 This hadith is found in most of the standard sources, such as Bukhârî, Muslim,Tirmidhî, Ibn Mâja, and Dârimî (see A. J. Wensinck, J. P. Mensing, and J. Brugman, Concordance et indices de la tradition musulmane [Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1936-1969], vol. I, p. 486). This sentence is introduced by another sentence that shows a good deal of variation in the sources. A typical version reads, “Surely your soul [nafs] has a haqq against you, your Lord has a haqq against you, your guest has a haqq against you, and your spouse has a haqq against you, so give to each that has a haqq its haqq.” Although the hadith mentions a limited number of things as possessing haqqs, it has never been understood as providing a definitive list, especially because of the Koranic statements that God created heaven, earth, and everything in between with haqq (15:85, 30:8, 46:3). The whole enterprise of jurisprudence is concerned with discerning the haqqs of things in terms of the instructions of the Shariah. ???????
- [Comments on a Few Theological Issues in the Islamic-Christian Dialogue](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/issues-in-islamic-christian) - The crucial questions and difficulties that confront serious ecumenism are above all of a metaphysical and theological order and must be confronted in a sincere and serious manner if a profound understanding is to be created between the two sides. It is too late for diplomatic platitudes and the kind of relativization which in the name of ecumenical understanding belittles issues of major theo- logical concern, creating so-called human accord at the expense of truncating, reducing, or distorting the Divine Message. I believe that seven outstanding theological and metaphysical issues can be identified between Islam and Christianity which need to be studied, elaborated, and better understood in order that a more profound harmony and compre- hension between Christians and Muslims can be fostered. Specific cases of in- teraction between Christian and Muslim communities and groups, of course, raise other issues as the attention shifts to human and social considerations. From the theological perspective, however, these seven points remain crucial and need much further reflection by those theologians and religious scholars on both sides who are concerned with a deeper understanding between Christianity and Islam. The first and most complex question is not so much that of the nature of God but rather of the way in which God manifests Himself. The nature of God is of course itself the basic reality of both religions and has been dealt with by numerous generations of Christian and Muslim theologians, philosophers, and gnostics (in the sense of urafa) in Islam rather than the sectarian gnostics of the early Christian centuries). Despite the difference of emphasis in the two religions, namely the insistence of Christians upon trinity and of Muslims upon unity, it is not difficult to reach an accord on the ultimate nature of God, the One Reality. The works of such persons as al-Ghazzali, Rumi, and Ibn Arabi on the Islamic side and Erigena and Nicolas of Cusa on the Christian side provide the necessary metaphysical and theological doctrines on the basis of which one can formulate a doctrine of the nature of God which would be acceptable to either religion. What is needed is a further effort on the part of both Christians and Muslims to provide formulations of traditional and orthodox doc- trines in a contemporary context along the lines found in the works of F. Schuon and also in the writings of such Christian theologian-scholars as Louis Massignon, Louis Gardet, Wilfred Smith, and Willem Bijlefeld. What is much more difficult to understand in its full theological significance across the Christian-Islamic religious frontiers is the way in which the Divine Reality manifests Itself. Here one comes to the question of theophany (tajalli) and incarnation (hulul) and the relation between the Divine (lahut) and the human (nasut). Both religions, of course, accept the primacy of the Divine and the blinding reality of God. But they differ as to whether that Transcendent and Divine Reality can become manifested in the world of becoming and if so, what constitutes the meaning of manifestation. Islam rejects the incarnation, fixing its gaze upon the Absolute as such, which cannot become incarnated without entering into the domain of relativity. Christianity places its emphasis not on the Absolute as such but on the manifestation of the Absolute as the son or the Truth incarnate. Debates within Christianity concerning the Divine and human natures of Christ actually have been and are of great significance for the debates between Christianity and Islam over this issue. Were Islam to carry out a dialogue with some of the Eastern Christian churches, there would be quite a different theo- logical climate of discourse precisely because of other christologies which were cultivated by some of the early Eastern churches. Does lahut enter in niisut, or is it simply reflected in it? Can the two become united in a single reality or do they remain apart? Many of these issues were discussed by early Muslim scholars in works on "schools and sects" (al-milal wa-l-nihal) in the context of early Islamic-Christian debates. But they have not been discussed sufficiently in the contemporary context by theologians and religious thinkers who would take their own tradition seriously. There is no denying the fact that serious Muslim thinkers cannot accept the penetration of lahut into niisut or the incarnation of God in any form unless incarnation be understood in a metaphysical and sym- bolic sense. In any case it is important to realize the central significance of this issue in any Christian-Islamic dialogue that seeks to go beyond simple formali- ties and human niceties. The second question of great theological significance is that of finality. Islam claims finality for itself in the present period of human history and asserts that there will be no major religious message, including the revelation of a new sharzca and Sacred Book, until the second coming of Christ and the ending of human history. The history of the past fourteen centuries has in fact vindicated the Islamic view insofar as no major religion comparable to Buddhism, Christianity, or Islam has appeared since the descent of the Qur'an. The Islamic atti- tude toward religious movements that have appeared more recendy, such as Bahaism and the Ahmadiyya in the nineteenth century, is well-known precisely because they negate the basic Islamic doctrine concerning the Prophet Muhammad as the Seal of Prophets, Khatam al-anbiya). Although the particulars of these two religious movements are not the same, in both cases the question of finality of prophethood has been at the center of this confrontation with Islam. As for Christianity, its founder never claimed to be the "Seal of Prophets." Yet he spoke on the one hand of false prophets who would arise after him and on the other of the rule of the Paraclete, which Muslims identify with the com- ing of Islam, equating the name of the Prophet as Ahmad with the Paraclete.' If the identification of the rule of the Paraclete with the coming of Islam is rejected and Islam is simply identified with the false prophets mentioned by Christ, then there is of course no possibility of a serious religious dialogue and one is back to the position taken by the majority of Christian theologians since the advent of Islam. But as far as Christianity is concerned, the very existence of Islam poses a greater challenge than its finality. In any case it remains for Christian theologians to delve more deeply into the doctrine of the Paraclete in its relation with the Islamic revelation. It might appear strange that such basic questions as the nature of God, the soul, eschatology, the status and meaning of creation and the natural order, and many other issues have not been mentioned here. The reason is that although these are basic issues, and in the case of "the theology of nature" a most timely one, they have either been discussed in various sources already or can be re- solved fairly easily by turning to the rich theological traditions of the two reli- gions wherein they have been discussed extensively. If these discussions were fully understood, such issues would not pose obstacles to mutual Christian-Islamic understanding. The seven points mentioned above explicitly, however, are more divisive and require greater theological attention at the present moment in the history of Christian-Islamic dialogue. In drawing the attention of those seriously involved in religious dialogue to these issues, it is my hope that they can be more satis- factorily addressed and treated. Such a treatment would in turn be of great assistance to mutual understanding if one were to respect both the Christian and Islamic positions in the spirit of authentic ecumenism to which Willem Bijlefeld has devoted so much of his scholarly life.
- [Shugendo and the Yoshino-Kumano Pilgrimage](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/shugendo) - Paul L. Swanson Yamabushi are those who enter the mountains which symbolize the absolute nature of the Law, where they conquer the enemy, blind desire. Shugendo is the Way which shows how to perform ascetic practices and reap the benefits from these austerities. Click here to view the PDF. Click this link for some up-to-date
- [Inside Pathan Country: A Brief Encounter with a Traditional World](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/inside-pathan-country) - Inside Pathan Country: A Brief Encounter with a Traditional World by John Ahmed Herlihy Foreword Amid the strong feelings and surprising events of this Pathan diary, there is perhaps some room for a brief forward. The episodes in the following account might have been the random notes of a stranger in a strange land; instead, they have become the genuine impressions of a rare and unique experience. I had been warned about venturing into the northern frontier regions of Pakistan. The harbingers of doom had shouted dire warnings in the civilized world I inhabit. My family was worried, my friends either skeptical or alarmed. The threat of terrorism and the spirit of anxiety that accompanied the approach of the new millennium seemed to focus in particular on the Muslim world. Stark images and sinister innuendo, I thought unconcerned, are like the bullets of a gun: they can be invasive, determining, and even fatal to the integrity of one’s deep-rooted beliefs unless one was vigilant. Muslim terrorists, Islamic militants, the Kyber Pass, the intransigent Taliban, mysterious Pashtu tribesman—all well publicized elements of an allegedly grand scheme of terror and intrigue that had become a primary focal point of the international media, highlighting the part of the world I was intending to visit as a lawless frontier and focusing on a form of militancy among remote and little known tribal peoples that is portrayed in the media as rigid and unforgiving. Americans were being warned to keep a low profile and avoid large crowds. In particular, people intending to travel abroad during the holiday season were advised to avoid potential hotspots such as Pakistan. Nevertheless, I brushed aside these warnings and resolved to fulfill a promise I had made to my Pathan friend, Farman Allah, to visit him in his village in the NorthWest Frontier Province of Pakistan. I have journeyed to many foreign places, but on this trip, a strange thing happened that the diary itself will have to reveal. When you travel to a remote and distant land, you fully expect to enter an unfamiliar and intriguing world of people, places and events that may interest, entertain and challenge you. In retrospect, I now realize that I didn’t enter Pathan Country; on the contrary the spirit of the Pathan had entered me. The truth is, one takes away from such a rare encounter more than a memory that can be expressed in words and phrases. One comes away feeling changed somehow and different, as if the experience had become a rite of passage into another, a more traditional world, whose ambiance and spirit still remain in my soul in noble contrast and as an anachronism of time to the cultivated fields of Western civilization and the prevailing spirit of the modern world. Behind the fragile façade of a country in transition and behind the noble face of a people in search of a place in the modern world lies the ancient and enduring spirit of a traditional, Islamic way of life. If what we suffer in today’s world is a kind of invasion of the modern ‘spirit’ into the very heart and soul of the individual, then I can similarly affirm that this unexpected journey has resulted in the incursion of another kind into my heart, of a phantom spirit from a distant past, permitting this rare passageway into a frontierland from another era, into a world of people and events in which the vicissitudes of the modern world could be momentarily forgotten and left behind. For a few brief days, I was privileged to enter a world that remembers and emulates the spirit of the traditional world—where one’s word was one’s bond, where a promise was still sacred, where the world itself was transparent; where generosity was the norm. By entering that world, I discovered, it enters you. This diary is a journey into a forgotten realm where a common humanity is inscribed in its inhabitants’ way of life and a mutual respect is reasserted before the terrible darkness of spirit that exists within the modern world. In return, this brief encounter with the traditional world of the Pathan may serve as a vehicle of understanding among men in whom the spirit of the modern world actually reflects something of the traditional world of the spirit. For Pakistan, you is foreign guest; but for me and all the uncles and cousins in my village, Yahya, you is friend and brother. Welcome! (Farman Allah, Pathan Tribesman) Nothing could have adequately prepared me on all the levels of body, mind, and heart for my encounter with the great Pathan tribe and the profoundly moving experience I recently had in the North-West Frontier (NWFP) of Pakistan. A brief hint and perhaps a premonition of what was to come began to take root after my initial introduction to a Pathan named Farman ibn (son of) Saleh Mohamed while working at a university in the Emirates. Fascinated by the sight of a Western Muslim such as myself praying at a local mosque, Farman introduced himself and initiated a friendship that soon grew and deepened. The incredible solidarity and camaraderie of the Pathan people began to unfold as I was slowly taken into the inner sanctum of their unique brotherhood whose integrity they have religiously preserved even amid the hardships and severe working conditions in the Gulf countries. The gathering story culminated in an invitation to visit Farman and his extended family of mother, brothers, sisters, in-laws, uncles, aunts, cousins and other close childhood friends in a small village outside of Peshawar. You come, Yahya. The people in village is waiting for you. If you not come, whole village is very sad and I will kill you. I thought for a minute, then looked at my Pathan friend and beyond to the inner being of the man. At a glance, he could have passed as a tender giant of childhood fairy tales. His frame was larger than life, wellproportioned, solid and suggesting a feeling of strength and nobility that went beyond the normal course of a man. There was a bigness in him that transcended his body. Dark-skinned and toughened by hours of hard work out in the grueling elements of the Emiratee desert where he worked as a foreman for an irrigation company, he wore his thick dark hair closely cropped and had a well-trimmed jet-black beard covering his face, offsetting the brightness of his eyes and the light of his facial expression. I knew he was kidding, not because of the broad smile and the gleaming row of white teeth, but rather because within that incredible body was a simple, innocent, uncorrupted, noble soul incapable of committing any true outrage. Indeed, he was a formidable being by any account and a rare and unique friend that I truly valued and trusted, even with my life. When he invited me to visit his village, I accepted, knowing full well the import and implications of such a rare invitation. He was drawing a line in the sand by inviting me to cross over into a very private and conservative world that few have ever seen, much less experienced. I arose at 4:00 a.m. on the day of departure, to have the pre-dawn breakfast (suhur) and say the prayer. The Muslims were now in the final days of Ramadhan when my trip would coincide with the Eid Festival after the holy month. I was scheduled to fly out of Muscat, in the Sultanate of Oman where I live and work, at 8:00 in the morning for the two and a half hour flight. When I got to the airport, however, I was informed that the flight was unexpectedly delayed. The plane eventually left at 1:00 in the afternoon, jammed packed with Pathan tribesman and the incredible amounts of luggage, blankets, cartons, and oversized bags, some of which had to be left behind. I thought with relief of my friend waiting to receive me with his friends at the still unknown and mysterious destination of Peshawar in the North-West Frontier Province. As we approached Peshawar, I could see the dramatic range of the Safed Koh mountains that runs along the border with Afghanistan and through which the famous Kyber Pass winds. The range of cliffs was shrouded in mist. The pilot attempted a landing, but apparently thought twice about it since the fog at the airport was so dense. He then turned the plane around and we soon landed at Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan and the seat of the government. Needless to say, this was a little alarming. I was supposed to be met upon my arrival and there was the question of “security”. My friend Farman was taking the security issue very seriously, since that part of Pakistan was traditionally considered to be a wild and ungovernable area. Americans had been warned during the millennium festivities about travel, particularly to Pakistan, and there had been bombing incidents against American interests in Pakistan recently. There were the heightened security concerns surrounding the whole Osama bin Ladin affair since he had issued a call to kill Americans world-wide, and the year-end hijacking of the Indian airliner to Afghanistan had recently heightened tensions in the area. The still unidentified hostage-takers had allegedly passed anonymously across the border in the area where I was headed. Against all expectation, there I was in, being bundled into a small transit area of the aging, single-runway airport at Islamabad. We passed through immigration and I was shoved unceremoniously over with the other tribal horde, all bedecked in turbans and shawls and talking agitatedly in a foreign tongue to await further instructions! Oman Air didn’t have any representative there as understandably they don’t fly into Islamabad. I soon gleaned that the luggage was being offloaded, indicating we were here to stay. Dark thoughts began to emerge. I managed to approach the sole person who seemed to have any wits about him and spoke some English. When I suggested that I take a taxi to Peshewar, he quickly advised me not to. “It’s very dangerous,” he whispered, then added ominously as an afterthought, “you’ll never make it to your destination!” Word soon arrived that buses would be provided to take all 200 of us including the mountains of luggage to Peshawar. Before I could ponder the possibilities of an endless night of hassles, and thinking of my friend who has been waiting to meet me since 11:30 that morning, before I could think a further disturbing thought, I was confronted with a well-dressed and charming employee of Shaheen Airlines who informed me that my friend Farman had managed to call and wanted the message passed on to me that he would come down to Islamabad himself to picked me up, a 175 kilometer trip that with the terrible road conditions could take up to three hours! Now the real Pathan experience began to unfold in its truest dimension. I was escorted through the airport to the restaurant and offered a delicious complementary dinner of rice and kebab (I had been fasting through all of this!), and thereafter invited down to the airline office to await the coming of my friend. About 9:00 that night, I finally met Farman and his two other “bodyguards”, all three of whom arrived armed rifles and guns. Indeed, they were taking my security seriously. Farman had a revolver tucked discreetly into his “cloth”, Farouk and Babu both had kaleshnikov rifles hanging discreetly along the folds of their woolen shawls. Indeed the winter weather was freezing beyond belief. Cold, damp, record-setting temperatures had been recorded that winter in the region. I was delighted to see my friend, guns and all, indeed never was the sight of a friendly face so endearing. They all embraced me in great bear hugs, wrapped me into a spare 10-foot woolen shawl and escorted me out into the raw elements of the night only to be confronted with a commotion of people, cars, taxies, rickshaws, horses, donkeys, bicycles whose cacophonic sounds were all draped in a shroud of near total darkness. We hadn’t walked five steps when it became clear that the car, which they had quickly left by the curbside to fetch me from inside, was being taken away. It had been raised up on a forklift that looked like it was attempting to lodge it on top of a tree. This inspired much argument, protestations that I was a foreign guest and much more, then with a wink and a nod (and a few hundred rupees), the car was dumped back down onto the road, whence I was tucked into the back seat for the return trip to Peshewar. People here drive as they like. There is no law on the road. And everyone is government of one. Only God could have prepared me-or saved me-from the wild ride back to Peshewar along a road that was poorly lit, two way, accommodating a multitude of cars all attempting to pass each other at incredible speeds while avoiding the carts, animals, bicycles, and potholes that littered the road. I sat mesmerized by the sight of the on-coming headlights heading straight for us, only to be brought out my trance by near death experiences in which we passed in and out of the on-coming lane at the last minute. It seems to be a question of pride to take chances and show no fear, but as we careened down the road into the dark night of the North-West Frontier Province toward the city of Peshawar, I was petrified. I had finally arrived inside Pathan country. By the time we arrived at my friend’s tiny village about 30 kilometers outside of Peshawar, it was nearly midnight and I was exhausted, but the end of the day was not yet in sight. A great crowd of people, men I should say, awaited my arrival and were there to greet me with a garland of wild flowers that they placed with a great show of spirit around my neck. Everyone was beaming with happiness as we crowded into the “guest room” the family had prepared for me to use while I was visiting. I was ashamed to learn later that these “poor” village people had actually built and refurbished this spacious room at the entrance to their 36 5 living compound, complete with separate private bathroom, running hot water and shower, all American amenities they had never had in the house. I was ensconced in front of the little electric heater, thoroughly wrapped up in the woolen shawl, and so were the others sitting in random semi-circles around me, including Farman’s brother with whom I could communicate in Arabic, his father in law who was an educator and spoke fairly good English, his uncle, his cousins, his nephews, his childhood friends and other close members of his village. As I began to drift off into the total exhaustion of sleep, I noted the clear, strong sound of their native tongue, Pashtu, which belongs to the Iranian linguistic group. It later became clear to me that these tribesman are great storytellers and the story of my arrival was even then being spread far and wide from the crowded room on that dark, sober night. All food is original and fresh from farm. We visit tomorrow the land around village and you see for yourself. As a city boy from the suburbs of Boston, Mass., I had never drunk milk from a cow much less from a goat or water buffalo; I had never eaten fresh yogurt or unprocessed cheese; I had never tasted a farm fresh chicken or a freshly laid egg; nor had I ever eaten meat stewed in buffalo oil! Where had I been all my life to have missed out on this exotic, ‘original’ fare? Indeed, I had never eaten the amounts of food I was called upon to eat in the name of hospitality, for the Pathan people pride themselves on a hospitality without bounds and its success is measured in the amount of food the guest can eat. Gratefully, the first four days of my stay were the last days of the fast of Ramadan, so I had a brief respite before the really serious eating began. We awoke early to have a hearty breakfast, although understandably the word for this meal in both Arabic and Pashtu means anything but “breakfast”. Rather, it is the meal that commences the fast and seals its sacred intention. After eating not only the fresh eggs, yogurt and honey but also the steaming rice, lentils and meat that were to preserve us during the rigors of the fast, we made our ablutions and found our way to the mosque for the early morning, pre-dawn prayer, making our way through the dark, eerie village. The narrow little streets were shrouded in a thick layer of mist and fog which passed like spectral ghosts through the tall, thin poplar trees that lined the near-by fields with their sentinel presence. We went on a tour of the environs surrounding my Pathan friend’s village that morning. The countryside itself was lush, well-tended and green with ripening vegetation in spite of the winter season; but I was even more impressed with the number and variety of trees that highlighted the bucolic setting, particularly the wide variety of fruit trees that crowded around the more stately poplars, cedars, and oaks. Springtime I was told brought a blaze of flowers, so I would have to return then. On one side of the narrow path, a field dense with the tough-looking leaves of the cauliflower, on the other side, purple-skinned potatoes, what we used to call in my Irish-American family “new” potatoes, lay steaming in the newly-overturned soil. In the distance the courtly stalks of the sugar cane were blowing lazily in the light wind. The farmers all waved and then went about their business, cutting, pruning, digging the rich earth and tending the animals who wandered about in this natural setting as though from some primordial past. Great water buffalo stood under well-thatched, open-sided sheds exuding an air of detachment and contentedness, an archetypal example if there ever was one in nature of an animal teaching man the meaning of both contentment and calm. Little lambs frolicked in the grass while one proud villager introduced me to his pet sheep, a magnificent looking animal who sported a well groomed, chocolate colored coat with a lush verge of sheep-down that hung along the back of its legs and sashayed as it moved like the bustle of a woman’s skirt. It nudged its head affectionately against my leg in response to my greetings and looked up at me with clear, intelligent eyes as if it wanted to make friends. This is all natural and original setting, Yahya. Now I take you to see sugar cane factory where they make sugar. Factory, I thought puzzled, entrenched as I was within a fixed mindset that thought only in modern city-scape terms. What I was about to see was a “factory” in the same sense that we say that the discovery of certain tools in pre-historic times was an advance in “technology”. I nearly slipped on a patch of buffalo manure and skipped over a gurgling stream before we came upon the “factory” just over that slight incline covered in sugar cane stalks. A more natural setting could not be imagined and a far cry from the bleak and dismal factories of the Western world. A primitive apparatus set up in the fields squeezed the juices of the sugar cane in a large tub. This raw nectar was then transferred to large copper vats that were heated to boiling point underground in a series of tunnels fueled by the crushed residue of the cane. Two old Pakistanis sporting their traditional beards knelt beside one great vat and stirred the golden creamy broth with flat ladles in what must have been backbreaking work, but their smiles belied their effort and the light on their faces was matched by the rays of the sun that stole through the cracks of the thatched roof to settle and glow on this frothy sweet nectar. On the other side of the enclosure, I saw a similar vat that contained the end result: small, rounded brown sugar balls that I couldn’t taste at that moment as we were all still fasting, but every house sweetened their tea with this natural, home-made sugar. Out back, we saw where the fire was stoked, where the fresh ripe stalks were gathered and where the used cane was prepared for re-cycling, but all was a mere afterthought after the sight of those two old men smiling in the fullness of their years. Factory, indeed! I have new cloth for Pakistani suit and we buy you waistcoat and shoes and sandals All must be new for Eid festival. The next day, we were scheduled to visit the city of Peshawar, including the famous Mughal fort built by King Akbar in the 16th century and of course the grand bazaar. The fort we saw from the distance, a sprawling, magnificently constructed structure in the style of the period that could not be visited in its interior because it is still being used as a military encampment and headquarters. The bazaar we saw by plunging headlong into the labyrinthine puzzle of side-streets and by-ways all jam-packed with every manner of buggy and vehicle from horse, donkey, and bullock-drawn carts to vesper-driven rickshaws that attempted to weave their irritating way through every available space. The amount of pollution thrown off by these vehicles created a thick pea-soup smog that clogged the nostrils and seriously affected my breathing. The Eid was several days away and the city was in the final throes of shopping in preparation for the end of Ramadan celebration, known as Eid al-Fitr. I was very concerned during this shopping spree about the money situation. I had first consulted with Farman at the airport about changing money, but he refused to dignify the discussion with words. I asked him again early that morning, hoping for the opportunity of trying out my famous bargaining skills in the money markets of the Peshawar bazaar, but not wishing to insult him somehow by breaking the protocol of the “guest”, I soon fell silent. I was to have no such experience with the money-changers. In fact, I never touched Pakistani money and never laid eyes on it while I was in Pakistan. It was this Pathan villager Farman who saw to my every need and was ready to buy anything that concerned my well-being or desire. That needless to say included outfitting me for the Eid with new “cloth”, shoes, and a Pashtu vest and hat. A further word on the question of money could not be broached without causing serious insult. We spent considerable time roaming like locals through the maze of streets and stalls, with every kind of clothing and cloth hanging down from overhead awnings, much of the work was tailor-made by people sitting right there in the narrow alleys of the bazaar. I was in the market for a smart Pakistani waistcoat that has since become world famous, in the style of what we often saw Nawaz Shareef wearing before his downfall and incarceration. It is a sleeveless coat that comes in different materials and colors, but we were looking for a heavy one made of wool with a matching Pashtu cap. I was already wearing a Pakistani suit of my own and soon enough, thanks to the bargaining skills of my friend, was sporting the woolen waistcoat and cap. I was fully expecting to stand out in the bazaar “like a sore thumb” as I looked about me in the crowded confusion of the bazaar, especially in light of the hysterical warnings on CNN over the holidays to avoid crowded places and keep a low profile against the event of terrorism. Here I was in the midst of what some people consider to be terror-terror land, plunging into the frantic pre-Eid crowds with aplomb. However the truth was, I realized a little sadly: no one took any notice of me. I was as invisible and anonymous as the next bearded and turbaned person. I mentioned this to Farman as we pushed out way through the bazaar. He smiled happily and beamed a bright light. You look like people who come from secret valley in North Pakistan, near Hunza, descendants of Alexander the Great. They have same colors like you. White color for the beard to make you old; red color for the skin to make you healthy; sky color for the eyes to make you happy, he said. In the life of simple truths that he lived, he considered me to be one of their own people, for I was a Muslim, a brother and a friend. In the evenings of the final days of Ramadan, we always returned to the guestroom where I was staying, to break the fast and sit with Farman’s relatives and village friends. The guestroom itself reveals an inner dimension of the family’s invitation. I had asked Farman where I would stay when I was there and what sort of arrangements could be made that would not intrude on the integrity of the household. I was concerned because I knew with what strictness the Pathan tribesmen preserve their “traditions”, particularly when it comes to home life and the sanctity of the family, what the Arabs call the hareem, (literally: that which is holy) or inner sanctum of the household where the women and children live and that constitutes the hearth (and heart) of the home. Only after my arrival was I to discover the reality of the situation. Farman and his brother had built up a storage area of the household into a fully furnished living quarter complete with an attached bathroom that included a shower with hot water, clearly an incredible concession to my particular western needs since the rest of the house had no running water. The freshly-laid plaster on the walls was still damp. Farman and his brother apologized profusely for the fact that the walls were not yet painted. The room was amply furnished with two beds, a carpet that covered the entire floor, a divan, and a number of Arab style pillows and cushions to service the people, most of whom sat on the floor. I never slept alone—either Farman or his brother slept in the other bed with the kaleshnikov for protection against any unexpected intruders. I was profoundly shocked to learn that for a one-week visit this poor family had gone to this kind of expense and clearly in my naiveté I didn’t realize that these people didn’t have “guest” rooms. The houses in the village were made of red brick, resembling solid, rectangular mini-fortresses. Rooms fanned out around an inner courtyard reflecting a tempo of additions as the need arose for more space: one room for the mother where the grandchildren often gathered, another for the oldest brother, wife and family, another for his other brother Mohammed who lived in the Emirates, housing his wife and four children. Farman and his wife occupied another room with their two young children, the oldest sibling, a sister who had never married and had taken care of her younger siblings when their father died, also had her own room. Finally, there was a communal kitchen used by all the wives and his mother and a latrine used by all. The guestroom was well separated from this hub of activity, being on the other side of the courtyard and adjacent to a small garage that led onto the street. Tomorrow we go into the mountains of the famous Swat area. We visit my friend Akbar and his family in mountains outside Swat. You know Akbar from Emirates. There was a rhythm to this journey and an ambiance of well being and meaning that comes from a number of factors including intelligent planning and purposeful design. To Farman, we were not visiting the area as tourists marvelling at the sights; we were visiting friends who happened to live in a region of the country whose natural beauty could be enjoyed as a byproduct of the journey; but what really mattered was the visit with friends. It was the first day of the Eid, a day for visiting loved ones and friends above all. We said the early morning prayer in the mosque. I was embraced by just about everyone in the mosque, the elders and the youth alike, great bear hugs punctuated with heart-felt greetings and salaams. The way they shook and embraced me attested to the sheer delight it was for them to encounter an American Muslim under these circumstances in their tiny mosque on this special day of rejoicing, celebrating the end of a month-long fast. The elders had given me a place of honor in the front row behind the prayer-leader (imam). In every instance, great care was taken to preserve the “protocol” of the moment. Farman and I, his brother-in-law Babu, Farouk, a close friend who did all the driving in the “borrowed” car-in fact my three bodyguards were 42 5 still armed to the teeth with revolvers and rifles-set off around mid-morning for the foothills of the Himalayas beyond the northern side of Peshawar, whose soot and suffocating smog I was glad to leave behind. We stopped for lunch and sat outside on wooden benches wrapped in our woolen shawls against the bitter cold to sample the local kebab that we scooped up with fresh and piping-hot Pakistani bread. Farman had bought some tomatoes from the vegetable stall and hand washed them himself, knowing of my passion for tomato salad. Nothing was overlooked and everything was remembered. The kebab actually looked like an oversized burger, but didn’t taste like one, being seasoned in the local style with onions, tomatoes, peppers, herbs and spices, putting to shame the stale, overcooked burgers served in fast food places in the US. We washed this down with thick black tea before bundling ourselves back into the small car for the next leg of the journey feeling fully satisfied and well fortified against the winter chill. I had the overwhelming sense of “living” rather than “touring”, of being a part of something real rather than acting out a role as tourist and witness. As I sat in the back seat and looked out over the increasingly more beautiful countryside, I listened to the conversational banter of Farman and his two friends. One thing worth noting is that these people are great conversationalists as well as great linguists and I was able to witness this in person as we drove deeper into the mountains of the northern frontier. Farman himself speaks five or six languages, but he never made much of this ability, as if it were second nature to everyone. I know for a fact that he spoke his own native Pashtu, in addition to Urdu which is the national language of Pakistan officially spoken by everyone in the country but actually used by only one-tenth of the population on a regular basis, Hindi which is similar to Urdu but written with a different script, Farsi which is the Iranian language in which his own language of Pashtu shares an ancient legacy, fluent Arabic and increasingly proficient English, not to mention several other dialects and languages of other tribes of the area that he was familiar with. However, it was in the style of their conversation that their true characters were revealed, for these people love to converse with each other more than anything. They sit together; they talk together; and they are silent together in a manner that doesn’t exist in the Western world. Above all, in spite of the language barriers between myself and the others, a 5 43 sense of balance was preserved. Farman concerned himself with his friends but somehow never forgot me and made every attempt to include me in their banter. I couldn’t understand their conversation as such, but what with my own linguistic ability, my background in Arabic (for Pashtu has Arabic influences) and from a context that was often briefly outlined by Farman, I was often able to glean much of what was being said, at least in its general meaning and import. The truth is, the details didn’t matter to me that much. It was enough to witness the incredible camaraderie, friendship and mirth that flowed from one to the other. It was obvious that much of what they were saying consisted of stories and tales of earlier times and places, humoresque and/or serious events that had happened to them that required dialogue, drama, emotion and talent to recreate as a living memory. But I was never left out. Farman would ask after my well-being, translate particularly interesting points, and comment on the countryside. Babu made courageous attempts to refresh his English in his unselfconscious and bold style. Farouk showed himself to be the imp that he was through a cascade of words and intonations that I couldn’t understand but that somehow had the power to mesmerize me with their intonation and charm. When he laughed, everyone laughed, for his smile was too infectious for words. Whenever I repeated a few phrases of their beloved Pashtu, they made much of it and were as overjoyed as children. It was growing dark and I was getting concerned. After all, someone had to worry as my companions were so carefree and trusting to fate that nothing seemed to bother them and certainly not the approaching night. The mountains were getting more rugged and the landscape more primitive looking. The road narrowed and the cliffs drew down steeper into the valleys. The sparkling waters of the Indus River wound their way down through the hills and cliffs with a clarity and vitality that suggested some kind of living presence and we could hear the roar of the swift-moving current. Soon enough, dusk turned to darkness and in the pitch-black night of the sky, the big dipper rose once again to reaffirm a reality that is greater than our own through the presence of the stars. The final few miles turned into a search for the small village in the mountainous Swat area where Farman’s friend Akbar lived with his large family. Have you been here before, I asked Farman. Yes, he said firmly as he peered out the clouded window, once, about fifteen years ago, 44 5 when I was sixteen. But these people have good memories attested to by the multiple languages they remember. We were soon making our way in total darkness through the street of a tiny village built along the contour of the mountain. Densely packed houses crowded along the side of the village street that was very narrow with very little room for a modern vehicle such as we had. Our expert driver Farouk negotiated the cramped passageway with precision, careful not to let the car slip into the drains separating the street from the houses. We were soon well ensconced in a typical Islamic-style sitting room, what the Arabs call a majlis that is always the first and outermost room of the house, invitingly furnished with carpets and cushions. It was bitter cold, but this was offset by the incredible warmth of feeling and hospitality afforded by the host, Akbar who I knew from the Emirates, together with his father and brothers and a number of other men from the village who had came to welcome us. We sat around on the floor of course, a habit that I have grown accustomed to over the years, and within the hour, the floor was spread with a cloth and Akbar’s brothers brought in a piping hot array of foods, a specially flavored rice famous in that area, meat and vegetable dishes, and the much favored raita, a yogurt dish flavored with chips of cucumber, onion and green pepper, all washed down with the strong black tea that they seemed to favor there. I noted that the bread, as in all Pakistani homes, was lovingly wrapped in a cloth bundle and set in a basket, to keep it warm. When it was time to retire for the night, the four of us were led back out into the elements further up the hill and deeper into the village where we passed through a gate into an inner garden with various rooms for sleeping. When I entered the room, I saw five beds lining the walls. All the beds were hand-made from rope woven across a wooden frame, and each came well equipped with a simple cotton mat covered with hand-embroidered sheets and hand made quilts that were very heavy. Under that mountain of hand-packed cotton, no one was cold. The host slept with us in the room as a courtesy to the guests. During the night, I had to go ‘to the bathroom’, so I got up quietly, not wanting to disturb the others, and especially not my three commandos who like babies slept the sleep of the innocent. Once I had left the safe haven of the blanket, it was bitter cold outside, but I had no choice and donning my sandals at the door, I made my way across to the little out- 5 45 house that stood at the other end of the garden within the walled enclosure. Simple bodily functions were never so difficult, but finally relief was at hand and I stepped back out into the cold dark night of the garden to find my friend Farman standing guard several feet away with the kaleshnikov sitting on his hip and a sleepy grin on his face. In the morning, we made our ablutions and said the early morning dawn prayer, which is recited at the first light of day well before the actual dawn. Hot water was prepared and the host actually pour the water himself over my hands and feet to facilitate the ritual since running water from a tap was not available. Thereafter, and ready as we all were for more food, we sat down to a sumptuous breakfast of fruit, yogurt, a flaking and nourishing oil-based bread well known in the subcontinent as parattha, which we used to scoop up the thick, fresh cream and the raw, unprocessed and pure honey. I asked my host about the honey because not only was the taste exquisite and as my friend Farman liked to say “original”, but it also seemed to have bits and pieces of the hive itself mixed in with the gooey sweet mass. Akbar told me the honey came from within their very house. It seems his eighty year old grandmother can communicate somehow with the bees and had been able to coax them into the house to set up their hive. The bees come and go as they please given the nature of their “duties”, I was told, and no one seems to notice, least of all the bees themselves. You can even play with the bees and they don’t bother you, Akbar told me wide-eyed. Now that’s original honey, I thought. When I stepped through the door of the garden upon our departure, the land spread away in front of me into the distance to form a magnificent panorama of mountains and clouds. As the pale disk of the winter sun rose in the distance, I saw our next destination, the rugged, white mountain peaks of the Karakoram, the land of the snow cloud and the traditional, northern spice-route to China. We said our good-byes and prepared to take our leave. There had been a light rain during the night, the first in many months and the village street had turned into a sea of mud that we had to trek through in order to reach the car. The old man, Akbar’s father, gave me a warm embrace and was the last to pass his hand through the car window to offer me one final hand-shake. Through hand gestures, he gave me the traditional signs to indicate that he wanted me to pray for him. I quickly nodded the customary sentiments, but felt 46 5 humbled by his request. He was the model of benevolence, the host in the tradition of the Prophet and the generous one reflective of one of the names of God in Islam (al-Kareem). His prayers I thought would fall more readily at the foot of the throne of God than mine, but the Muslims have a favorite saying: Allah knows best. In some strange and unexpected way, the highlight of the journey and its true raison d’etre were the people we encountered along the way, while the magnificent setting we passed through only served as an afterthought. Akbar packed his tremendous hulk into the back seat with Farman and myself to accompany us during our tour of the area and a good thing too since we kept each other warm in the bitter cold. As we made our way up the valley deeper into the mountains, the weather became colder than before and eventually we passed the snow and tree line and found ourselves deep into the snow clad territory of the Karakoram. We were now journeying through a wild, mountainous country setting. The snow was coming down hard and as we advanced, it was getting much deeper and the road more treacherous. Yet, in spite of the remoteness of the area, I realized that our whereabouts were being constantly monitored. At one point, we stopped at a kind of check point, and my bodyguards jumped out and consulted with the local authorities as if they were expecting us. When I questioned Farman about it, he just said that my security was “under control”. But I was amazed, to say the least, at the thoroughness and seriousness that my safety was being taken. All throughout the course of my stay in Pakistan, our whereabouts had been monitored by the special security forces of the government in cooperation with my Pathan companions. We finally reached the end of the road at a town called Kalam, a scenic mountain village with a mountain river rushing headlong through it as it made its way down the mountainside. In the summer, I was told, this place was packed with tourists and holiday-makers. Today, the town was nearly empty and fairly desolate; it was snowing hard and threatening to seal us in with an impassible road. When in doubt about a course of action, food was always suggested, so my friends set about finding the best place to eat by fanning out in different directions to make inquiries, each of them comically wrapped up in their woolen shawls, but not before packing snow down each other’s backs. Soon enough, I was being led into what appeared at first sight to be a 5 47 dingy little place, but unexpectedly it opened out in the back to become a spacious dining room that seemed to be hanging on the edge of a precipice on one side of the town. A fine array of windows provided ample views of the houses of the town that were nestled within the contours of those craggy mountains. Great chutes of water made their way down the side of the mountain near the windows of the restaurant and created a tremendous roar within. After marveling at the unbelievable views, we were served up some fresh trout that had been grilled barbecue-style over hot coals out in the snowy street in front of the restaurant. This was served together with a curried chicken cooked in a wok and the inevitable freshly-made and piping hot Pakistani bread served as a satisfying lunch before making our way out of the town and out of the mountains altogether, to escape being sealed indefinitely within the winter landscape. We eventually left Akbar in a town near his village from which he intended to make his way back on his own so as not to delay our return journey. After leaving him by the side of the road, we began the long trek back to Peshawar in the late afternoon. True to the Islamic tradition, the needs and comfort of the traveler are sacrosanct and Akbar had fulfilled his duties well. The next day was to be my last complete day in the North-West Province, in what had become for me the beloved Pathan country. These tribal people are fully conscious of the demands of intimate relationships and respond with deep feeling to the subtleties of the moment. After a full week of what amounted to well orchestrated touring and visiting, we would spend a quiet final day in and around Farman’s village. The following morning, I was scheduled to fly back to Muscat. The day began as always with a tremendous breakfast of fresh, original farm foods including bread, cream, laban, cheese, fruit, farm-fresh eggs, and tea. Thus fortified, we piled into the car and began to tour the countryside for one last nostalgic glance at how people live within this remote, country setting. The memorable images still pass through my mind’s eye. The horse-drawn carriages jingled with bells as they carried their passengers to local destinations along that dusty road, the trotting horse in silhouette against the rising sun like an ancient pictogram. The great cumbrous water buffaloes pulled their heavy loads without any sound of complaint. We passed through a village even smaller than Farman’s where the houses were all made of clay and straw and whose 48 5 inner enclosures traditionally housed the farm animals. Along the outer walls of the houses in this and other villages, I saw sizable mud patties flattened like burgers on the side of the wall to dry in the sun. And what were they, I wondered aloud? None other than the “spoils” of the water buffalo, I was told, carefully preserved and left to dry, to be used later as fuel for cooking and hot water. Nothing is wasted in village life, Farman told me solemnly and I believe him. A hard-working donkey pulling a heavily-loaded cart passes by looking young and boyish and enduring. I think I have learned something about virtue from the sight of this animal. In the village itself, we squeeze the car through the narrow streets. A little dead-end child with a dirty face walks past the car window with a chicken squished in her arms. Their two pinched little faces look up at me. We stop and wait for a cart to pass, packed with sugar cane stalks drawn by a great water buffalo. The little boy on the back of the great beast grins at me and waves hello, or is it good-bye. I do not know. These are the pictures that were not taken by my camera, the pictures not of my imagination but of my discerning mind, pictures I could not have created on my own. Even on this my last day, there was no such thing as idle touring. We were on our way to a destination, another visit, another friend, another group of people who wanted to see the “foreign guest” and talk with the “American Muslim”. On my own in this little village, the clay walls of the houses looking old and run down, I would have been as out of place as an alien being on an outer planet. Under the protection of a local Pathan family and as their honored guest, I was everything that mattered to the village. We descended from the car and tip-toed through the mud of the street to enter the grounds of the house beyond the wall. I was advised to be careful to avoid a great smudge of buffalo waste that was still steaming near the gate of the house. Beyond the grim reality of the outside setting lay all the charm of a truly bucolic existence. An inner courtyard revealed a variety of farm animals. Two elegant, gray colored cranes posed for my stunned vision and fanned their wings in protest at the interruption. A number of chickens provided a frantic counterpart to the detached serenity of the cranes as they scurried about the courtyard in their perennial search for food. Yet nothing could compare to the noblelooking black water buffalo that peacefully munched its hay on the other 5 49 side of the courtyard as it gazed into the distance beyond the limited horizon of its mind. This was a picture I simply had to have, and the host obliged by stepping into this rustic farm setting to lend the image of his own self-possessed nobility and calm appearance to this charming scene. He then gracefully ushered me and my friends into the interior beyond an open door. I was amazed to find myself in a small rectangular room that was fully lined on every wall with glass-enclosed wooden bookcases that housed a complete collection of hard-backed, leatherbound books whose titles and authors were enscripted with the exotic gold lettering of Arabic and Pashtu and Farsi. Perhaps it was the unexpected quality of the experience that left me bereft of words. The man’s son spoke good Arabic, so after we had sat ourselves down on the plush, hand-woven tribal carpets and cushions that were strewn randomly around the room, he busied himself with me, displaying with loving care a number of books in Arabic including a few hand-written and embellished Qur’ans. Of course, every visit must include a meal, so we ate our second breakfast at 11:00 in the morning, a feast that included steaming rice and chicken roasted and stewed in buffalo oil. After a brief prayer of thanks initiated by the host that this happy encounter had been made possible, we took our leave. The remembrance of God is never far away from the rituals of their daily life. 50 5 By the time we left the village, the sun had passed the meridian, we had said the noon prayer, and the day was beginning to die. There was a feeling in the air of closure and departure. No one wanted the moment to pass-not of course the individual moment, but the totality of the moment that summarized our experience as a moment of encounter and exchange. For me as a Westerner and American, it had been a kind of surreal dream of a vanished time and a passageway emerging out of the remote past. For my Pathan friends, the monotony of their lives had been interrupted with this unique encounter, and they had been able to express and show the best of themselves. No one wants such moments to pass, but pass they must, at least in their linear and literal reality, if not in their enduring remembrance. It was past two o’clock and we were going to buy some fish and have lunch at Farouk’s house. Not another meal, I thought. Give me the true satisfaction of hunger any day, I prayed, rather than the false satisfaction of being sated and full. However, this was my last day and Farouk and his family considered themselves honored by my presence. We sat outside on cushions and a carpet in the courtyard of his house. Farman showed me the water pump in the corner and filled a pitcher with water. Every house has a well, he told me. So this is the source of the water supply, I thought, remembering the armies of tourists I had seen in my travels carrying their own water bottles. Farouk’s father came to join us together with his little daughter. Farouk brought in the food, including the steaming fish just cooked by his wife. I tried to make a brave show of interest in eating, but my heart was in it and I couldn’t face another meal. In fact, my friend Farman made matters worse by pilling more food on my plate and encouraging me to eat more. In true Pathan style, Farouk also offered me the choicest morsels of fish and encouraged me to eat more. Perhaps I was distracted by all this attention, but suddenly and unaccountably, I swallowed a sizable fish bone. I felt it scratch the back of my throat, and immediately tried to spit it out, but it was too late, and I realized that it was lodged precariously beyond the back ledge of my tongue. I was beginning to choke. My friend Farman, Babu, Farouk, his father, the child, all were struck dumb and jumped up from the table. To their collective horror, the guest was in distress; this was their responsibility. I excused myself and went to the latrine on the other side of the courtyard to see what I could do 5 51 and try to pull myself together. But there was nothing to be done. I couldn’t swallow and I couldn’t expel the thing. I stepped grimly back out into the courtyard and they immediately took in the reality of the situation. They resolved to take me at once to the local doctor. We left the meal spread out uneaten on the carpet. As we left the inner courtyard, I noticed the worried face of Farouk’s father as he held the little girl in his arms and the kaleshnikovs left abandoned in a corner of the inner courtyard. They were no defense against this. A doctor at a small dispensary in a nearby town shook his head. He couldn’t handle it and we would have to go to the hospital in Peshawar. I groaned audibly. The thought of going all the way to Peshawar, at least 45 minutes away, through that nightmare of pollution, traffic and congestion, was enough to make me sicker than I was. It was as if a curtain had been drawn and a new act was now unfolding, an unexpected denouement to an otherwise perfect play. But Farouk was up to the demands of the moment. He stepped on the gas and leaned on the horn as he made his way at breakneck speed along the road to Peshawar, defying every possible danger and every unexpected circumstance. The world seemed to fall away from our path as our car advanced with the horn blasting a perpetual warning for the cars, carriages, carts and countless pedestrians to get out of the way as we made our way through the smog into the congested city. My three caretakers rush me through the crowds and the injured milling about an emergency room that seemed dark, run-down and uninviting. An x-ray was quickly taken. It was determined that a bone was caught in my throat and we were sent upstairs to the eye, ear and throat department. Throughout the course of this unwanted adventure, my friends were silent and clearly worried, like children struck mute in a situation they couldn’t fully comprehend and over which they had no control. Gone was the happy banter of the previous days and a grim forbearance seemed to settle over them until we got through this harrowing experience. I marveled at the ability of my friends to respond to the needs of the moment. These were no country bumpkins, but people with sharp instincts and sound intuitive reactions ready to respond to any contingency. The calm atmosphere of the eye, ear and throat department upstairs was in sharp contrast to the frantic air of chaos that had prevailed in the emergency room. Farman quickly assessed the doctor of the situation, 52 5 then took my hand and sat down next to me. The doctor briefed me about the probabilities of resolving such an encounter and with a true feeling for the psychology of the moment, tried to calm me down before proceeding to attempt the extraction of this discomforting fishbone. There is nothing to worry about, he assured me with professional calm. These things happen and we should have it out in no time. Even if we can’t manage to extract it, the bone could stay there for several weeks without doing much harm before eventually slipping down into the stomach. So don’t worry, he assured me in good English. He heated a dentist-style mirror and positioned it at the back of my throat. You will have to help me, he said, because I only have two hands, one for the mirror and the other for the tweezers. Secure your tongue and hold it out as far as you can. I did as I was told, breathing deeply to calm myself. “I see it,” he exclaimed as if he had discovered a gold nugget. Several attempts to seize the bone brought me up gagging, and we were all beginning to wonder whether this was going to result in the happy ending we all prayed for. On the fourth attempt, however, with a deft maneuver, he slowly withdrew the offending bone. “Here it is, you can save it if you want.” It didn’t look like much, sharp and oval, like a pared fingernail, but inside my throat, it had felt like an old shoe. I breathed a sigh of relief and uttered the traditional Islamic epithet, in chorus coincidentally, with the others, al-hamdulil-Llah (all praise to Allah), and never was a phrase uttered with more heartfelt sentiment and collective relief. We thanked the doctor and praised him for his skill, he embraced me warmly, and we took our leave from the grim environs. The ride back was a leisurely affair, with much relieved laughter and banter. They kept asking me if I felt better, as if they couldn’t believe that the ordeal was finally over, that I was whole again and myself as before. I never knew what it cost, if it cost anything at all. I never saw any of my three companions pay anyone any money and no one was forced to fill out any paperwork or show any documents. In the end, there are some advantages to a system in chaos. Just before entering the house upon our return, Farman told me not to say anything about the incident to any of the guests at home because everyone would be very upset. We soon discovered that everyone, not only in the house but in the entire village, knew the story of my ordeal which in true village fashion had spread like a brush fire. 5 53 It is a humbling experience to be fully accepted and taken into the inner circle of a family and the warm embrace of village life, indeed into an ancient and traditional tribe who practice very conservative customs and follow strong religious beliefs. The Pathan people seemed to me larger than life, physically, mentally, and spiritually. Physically, the appearance of many of them was that of the lovable giants of legends and folk tales. You come to know them, however, through their actions and not their words, for the extent of their generosity knows no bounds and the needs and comfort of the guest takes precedence in all matters. The face you see is their true face. The words you hear are their true words. If they take you in, you are one with them. They showed an attitude toward me that made it clear they considered me their brother and friend. It was unexpressed in words, but spontaneous and freely offered through their actions and behavior. No matter who I was or where I had come from, to them I was Pathan and one with them. This was no journey of a stranger in a strange land. On the contrary, this was a journey in which my soul felt at home. If I were asked where I was and how I got there and why, I could have given a clear answer because I had found one in the encounter with these simple tribesmen. On a number of occasions, I was asked, perhaps a little self-consciously, what I thought of the Pathan people. It was a question I was instinctively reluctant to answer, partly because I felt that no simple answer existed or came to mind that could do justice to the experience I was having, and partly because it would take serious consideration and the right words to portray the greatness and nobility of these people in their true light and could not be summarized in a few superficial words. In writing this tribute, I have finally answered this question as I promised I would, a promise that needed to be kept in view of the profound outpouring of sentiment this great tribe had extended toward me. The next day, I said my good-byes to all the friends and relatives and villagers who had troubled themselves over me during my brief stay with them. Feelings were muted and subdued and there was a genuine sense of melancholy in the air. They put a brave face on what was a sad parting. As I approached the car that was to take me to the airport, I passed through a line of Pathans who each in his turn embraced me, shook my hand and bid me the traditional Islamic ma salaam or “go in peace”. With a final smile and wave, I was gone. 54 5 At the airport, Farman and his friends carried my luggage up to the check-in counter. I had been loaded down with gifts, but the grandest was the hand-made blanket Farman’s mother had made for me, a dark and rich maroon-colored quilt that seemed to weigh a ton, heavy enough to service those bitter Peshawar winters. In addition to this, Farman had procured for me 10 kilos of the fresh mountain honey that is favored in the area. When I protested the inordinate amount, he grinned broadly. This is Pathan style. I managed to get through all the formalities, the baggage checks, the embarkation forms, the x-ray machines, and finally the immigration line. It was time to say good-bye. Thank you so much, Farman. It has truly been an experience of a lifetime. You have been too kind. But Farman has no use for these awkward English pleasantries and finds refuge in one final act of generosity. I leave when plane leave, Yahya, and not before. At parting, words finally fail. What remains is an embrace that wouldn’t let go, a final raising of the hands, and then the traditional gesture of leave-taking, namely the right hand over the heart. This final symbolic gesture must now seal the narrative closed, just as it allowed us to leave behind with each other the best of ourselves, without the need for another word.
- [The Endless Voyage](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/chodkiewicz-voyage) - Michel Chodkiewicz If man is indeed tied to what in the writings of the French School of Spirituality in the seventeenth century was called ‘la vie voyagère’, the travelling life, it is first of all because he belongs to a universe that is itself a perpetuum mobile. Click here to read the article, with thanks
- [The Desert as Reality and Symbol](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/desert-reality-and-symbol) - Christian spirituality, or life, in the contemporary world, as it attempts to find its roots as well as read the signs of our times, has surfaced certain ways of articulating spiritual self-understanding that are at one and the same time both contemporary and traditional, showing that there need not be a dichotomy between these two facets of any profound Christian life. One example of such a way of speaking is “the spiritual journey,” in which the Christian is envisioned as a pilgrim on his or her way; at times this journey is correlated with life’s passages as articulated from a psychological perspective.1 Such an image could hardly be more traditional or more contemporary. Another such image is that of the desert. Few words are heard more frequently in the language of contemporary spirituality, and few are more expressive of the traditional roots of the Judeo-Christian experience. The desert experience was one of the formative experiences in Israel’s history as it was later theologically reflected upon.2 Both Moses and Elijah conjure up images of the desert, and greater prophets than this there could not be. Christian origins, too, cannot avoid the role of the Judean wilderness for John, the baptizer, and also for Jesus. Even Paul speaks of traveling into Arabia after his conversion (Gal. 1:17). The religious quality of the desert has come home to me in a personal way when I have had the opportunity to be there, once at Christ in the Desert Monastery in New Mexico for forty days in 1979, and again on an excursion from the École Biblique de Jérusalem into the Negev and Sinai in 1981. This Judeo-Christian reality or symbol manifests itself over and over. It is not only rooted in our traditions; it is a direction or trend in spirituality today. We hear much talk about a “desert experience” or a “desert day.” Susan Muto’s A Practical Guide to Spiritual Reading (Dimension Books, 1976) devotes a major section of her book to “Living the Desert Experience.” The second volume of Studies in Formative Spirituality discusses “spirituality and the desert experience.” People are reading the desert fathers. Athanasius’s life of Antony has been one of the volumes to appear in the Paulist series Classics of Western Spirituality. In a more academic way, the desert has come to the foreground with the discoveries in the Judean wilderness (for example, Qumran) and in the Egyptian desert (for example, Nag Hammadi). An important contribution has been Edward Schillebeeckx’s discussion of the wilderness background to John and Jesus.3 Outside a specifically religious context, Saint-Exupery’s Wind, Sand and Stars has moved many readers. These are only a few of many possible references. Evenari, Shanan, and Tadmor in their work on The Negev: The Challenge of a Desert write: 1 E.g., Walter Hilton, “The Parable of the Pilgrim,” Spirituality Today, 33 (1981): 250–56. Also Evelyn and James Whitehead, Christian Life Patterns: The Psychological Challenge and Religious Invitation of Adult Life (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1979). 2 See Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). 3 Jesus: An Experiment in Christology (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), especially pp. 126–39. ?1 goergen · desert as symbol It is no whim of history that the birth of the first monotheistic faith took place in a desert, or that it was followed there by the other two great religions, Christianity and Islam. The prophets of Israel repeatedly sought and found inspiration in the desert. Christian hermits fled to it to escape the pollution of the world and to commune with God, and in modern times the secular literature of the desert in the works of Doughty, Lawrence, Philby, Thomas, and many other famous travelers reveals the powerful influence it exerts on the minds and spirits of all who seek its mysteries.4 Thus, given its traditional and current appeal, I have chosen to begin my own contributions to Spirituality Today where religious experience itself often begins, whether personal or collective—with the desert. ? When one thinks of desert, one thinks of desertedness and barrenness. Yet it is a barrenness balanced with beauty. The desert is not simply one thing. In its utter simplicity the desert is multifaceted. Nor can one simply say that a desert is a desert. There are different kinds of deserts. Nor is a desert simply a place without rainfall. A desert can experience flash floods, as bedouin well know and fear. It is a diminished rainfall, an unpredictable and irregular rainfall, yet a rainfall that supports widely varied and surprising vegetation. These two words, unpredictable and surprising, are the two words with which I would describe my own experience of the desert. The unpredictability can be frightening, the surprise enlightening. The desert is simply nature at its best, or at its worst, perhaps at its purest, and this quality it shares with mountains and oceans or seas. Oh! that the Desert were my dwelling place, With one fair Spirit for my minister, That I might all forget the human race, And, hating no one, love but only her! Ye Elements!—in whose ennobling stir I feel myself exalted—Can ye not Accord me such a being? Do I err In deeming such inhabit many a spot? Though with them to converse can rarely be our lot. There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society where none intrudes By the deep Sea, and music in its roar: I love not Man the less, but Nature more, From these our interviews in which I steal 4 Michael Evenari, Leslie Shanan, and Naphtali Tadmor, The Negev: The Challenge of a Desert (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 9. ?2 goergen · desert as symbol From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe, and feel What I can ne’er express, yet can not all conceal. Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean-roll! Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain; Man marks the earth with ruin—his control Stops with the shore;— upon the watery plain The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain A shadow of man’s ravage, save his own, When, for a moment, like a drop of rain, He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan, Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknowns.5 Untouched nature has a purity to it that can raise one’s heart and mind immediately to God. One who is in touch with the land, with nature, does not create a sophisticated view of secondary causes. There is an immediacy about nature that takes one straight to its Lord. Its barren and vast plenitude signals transcendence. The desert continually made me aware of my utter dependency on the Lord. One lives there by faith. One cannot harbor illusions of self-sufficiency. The dependency is too real, too obvious, too frightening, or even consoling. Whether it be salvation from heat, from cold, from thirst, from falling, one’s human assurances are often out of reach and one must rely on nature, on God alone. The experience of the desert is first of all an experience of dependency. Once one makes this shift from self-reliance to reliance upon God, from independence to dependence, the desert is no longer frightening but reveals an unparalleled beauty. The desert is a call to surrender; it is also the offer of delight. The awful becomes the awe-full. And neither of these two sides of nature can be dismissed. Both are part of the reality and the experience. Its barren landscape and dry breeze can inspire insecurity and facilitate fatigue. One can bake by day and freeze by night: survival is an issue. At the same time its varied colors, its fantastic shapes, its breathtaking vastness and staggering heights, its solemn silence, especially this stillness—these delight the senses, overwhelm them, can lead only to a beauty that one cannot grasp. Its uncontaminated and sometimes unthinkable purity can easily lead to the description from Deuteronomy 1:19—“that great and terrible wilderness.” The desert invites dependency. The desert reveals its beauty. The desert is also an alternating rhythm of complaint and praise. One need not be in the desert for long, whether it be mild Judean wilderness, the stark southern Negev, or the mountains of Sinai, before the interior oscillation between fatigue/fear and beauty/delight manifest themselves in two complaints. Spiritual maturity and self-surrender do not necessarily remove the rhythm. It is like going uphill and downhill. Both are inevitable. The Israelite experience makes all the sense in the world. Even Jesus’ being tested called him out of peaceful self-composure. Both these, complaint and praise, simply show 5 George Gordon, Lord Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, A Romance,” canto 4, stanzas 177–79. 3 ? goergen · desert as symbol how readily one’s heart and mind move directly to the Lord. To whom else could one complain? Whom else should one praise? When it is hot in the midday sun, one longs for the cool and promises never to complain again about being too cold. But when the midnight cold comes, one longs for the sun that will thaw one’s limbs. It is as simple as that—dissatisfaction at every turn, yet turns that open up and unravel unforetold beauty as well. But the desert, and the mountains and the oceans, wherever God’s presence is more immediate to man and woman, manifest not only two sides, but many.6 The vastness is varied. Sand, pebbles, stones, and rocks, and no two rocks alike, neither in shape nor in color, whether grey or red, rugged or smooth, arid or flowering, windy or tranquil, the offer of life or the threat of death, and the silence speaks. Reality becomes symbol. Reality becomes something more than simply real, or more fully real by what it reveals. Just one example—water. How the desert brings home its nature and meaning! In the desert the reality of water becomes the very symbol of life and the thin line between reality and symbol breaks down, for there is nothing more real than these symbols whose meanings are not difficult to elucidate. Water in the desert is a reality that is a gift. Every bedouin knows that. It is not to be taken for granted. One may not know with scientific sophistication its chemical composition, but one knows it contains the power of life, is a source for purification, and is always a gift, yet one upon which we depend and without which we cannot do. As symbol, its inner meaning is revealed. The Desert as Revelatory The desert is not an easy place in which to survive. For this very reason one becomes aware of a dependency beyond oneself. As I have mentioned before, the mountains and sea can do the same. It would take only a minor storm at sea to raise one’s consciousness to a similar dependency. Not only the desert dweller but the farmer and the fisherman are well aware that their livelihood is not in their hands. But there is something else in uncontaminated nature besides survival and dependency. It has a revelatory power which is manifest in the beauty it expresses. In a strange contrast to the harshness of the desert, mountains, or sea, one is overwhelmed by their beauty as much as by one’s dependency. The beauty may lie in the vastness, the strength, the silence, the color, the shapes, the vegetation, or any combination. But it is this beauty, as well as one’s dependency, which turns one’s heart and mind to God. The beauty reveals a beautiful face of God: God is beauty. My first clear impression of this was at Christ in the Desert Monastery in New Mexico, and it again became apparent to me when I had several days to spend on Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain, in northern Greece. One of the effects of prayer can be described as inner peace. Yet the desert and mountains do not immediately produce this interior reality, precisely because they cause one to focus one’s attention 6 For a valuable exegetical discussion of the wilderness theme in the Scriptures, see Ulrich Mauser Christ in the Wilderness (London: SCM Press, 1963). He also points to a parallel of the desert with the mountain and the sea, especially within the Gospel of Mark. ?4 goergen · desert as symbol outside oneself. One can close one’s eyes and pray. But one cannot close one’s eyes and capture what the desert, the ocean, and the mountains have to offer—or when one does, it is for a different reason, as we shall see. These settings of beauty draw one’s attention outward. Thus, in contrast to other situations of prayer in which I felt a peace within me, I can describe the experience of the desert only as my becoming part of it, rather than its becoming part of me. It was more difficult to delineate the personal boundaries. The mountains or ocean were too big for me to master like a physical or ascetical exercise. I could only admire, appreciate, be absorbed. Rather than seeing prayer as part of me, it was more akin to seeing me as part of prayer—which is why nature and beauty and symbol and liturgy are so closely related. We are called upon to participate rather than control. But perhaps I am jumping ahead too far. There is a beauty in nature as well as the threat it provides to our very existence. The beauty turns our gaze outward and beyond ourselves. This beauty is a share in the divine life. It is precisely the moment during which nature reveals these many facets that it becomes most real—it becomes symbol. The desert becomes symbolic as it calls us forth to participate in what it shares and reveals. There is no wonder that the reality of the desert includes the desert as a symbol, and that there is no separating these two into “the reality” and “mere symbol.” Reality is at its most profound here because one shares in its fullness and not only reacts to its surface. The reality is that it is also symbolic and it would have no power as symbol if it were not for the deeper excentration into reality. Natural beauty mediates or reveals this connectedness between reality and symbol. A symbol is a way of knowing which is not immediately either discursive or intuitive but participative. For us, in both the discursive/objective or intuitive/personal modes of knowing, the knowledge is mine, my understanding, my insight; but symbolic knowledge never becomes “mine” in this same way. I become its; I participate. I am in the grips of what I thought I could grasp in some other way. A symbol is not only a way of knowing which draws me ever deeper into sharing its reality; a symbol is a reality that always refers me beyond itself. The reality of the symbol is unconfined. To participate is to go deeper into reality. As symbol it is not just “this water,” “this height,” “this desert,” but this desert partaking of and manifesting a beauty in which it too participates and which is essential to it. Beauty is not confined by “place” but revealed “within” it. Nature and symbol mediate reality to us and allow us to share in it. But why mediation at all? Because the human being can only take so much. Again, beauty is the best way to exemplify this. I mentioned earlier, when one is first struck by nature, one does not close one’s eyes. Yet often one does, but not in order to pray or facilitate inner peace, but simply because one can take only so much. Too much beauty can become awful. I remember distinctly an experience in New Mexico which was so breathtaking that I had to turn away for a moment. A common example of this, of course, is that one seldom looks for long directly at the sun. Beauty is precisely something that I cannot control, master, manipulate; to it I can only surrender. It can be appreciated; it never becomes mine in the same way as knowledge. But symbols 5 goergen · desert as symbol allow me, nevertheless, to participate and share in them. But I can never own them, for they transcend me; and a symbol is that reality within which immanence and transcendence break down and manifest false dichotomies, for the experience of the height of Mount Athos overlooking the sea is simply a reality in which that which is so immanent is transcendence. Here reality need not be broken up; it remains whole. Perhaps one can see more readily now my earlier reference to liturgy. For liturgy and nature are so much alike in this particular way. The liturgy is a symbol which I am not called upon to grasp fully but in which I participate, so that reality can open itself up to me more and more and I can enter into that contact with the Divine who will never be mine, I only his; and not I his as much as we his, for like beauty, liturgy is public, common. Truly no one owns the desert; it is everyone’s. Thus, liturgy is called upon to create that same reality/symbol. This relation between liturgy and beauty is a factor well emphasized in Orthodox theology. But here I go too far, except for the need to make this connection. It is the desert which we are attempting to probe, but in probing it the reality that it reveals is the same reality that liturgy reveals (albeit in different ways). One can easily see why Christian monks and solitaries who thirsted for God were drawn into its arms (the arms of nature and of liturgy). But this word solitary must cause us to pause. It is possible to have a solitary experience of the desert, even if not a possessive one. Liturgy, however, can never be a solitary experience. Thus we must pause and see another facet of this “great and terrible wilderness.” The Desert as Temptation The beauty and calm of the desert, once perceived, once felt, become an alluring and charming temptation as well as a source of divine presence—the temptation to remain. This does not imply that some are not called to a life there for the sake of the larger Christian community, but rather implies that one ordinarily does not go out into the desert as a home of permanence. That is only for a certain few. The Hebrew people wandered in the desert and never mistook it for the promised land. They did not settle it as later hermits and monks would do. Elijah did not stay on Mount Horeb; that was not its purpose. Nor did John the Baptizer remain in the wilderness. No matter how long he prepared himself in the wilderness, his mission brought him forth from it. And so with Jesus, one of whose temptations we could interpret as the temptation to stay in the desert. But before long he comes forth preaching the good news of the coming reign of God. For many, of course, the desert presents no temptation at all. For others it is a genuine vocation. But for others it can be an allurement to a more peaceful and divine life than the call to ministry to which we are all called. For these the temptation is diabolical. The other aspect of this temptation is to see those whose lives are lived there as the holy ones, rather than seeing the holiness of God magnificently manifest in the poor and the alienated, the stranger and widow and orphan of the Hebrew Scriptures, the hungry and the thirsty with whom Jesus identifies. This was again clear to me 6 goergen · desert as symbol during my very brief sojourn on Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain. For the many pilgrims there, one must ask: What did we come out to see? Just as we can speak of the presence of God in the holy monks, and certainly in their celebration of the divine liturgy, and also in the holy mountain itself, so we must speak of the presence of God in the fishermen and laborers, mentioned but in passing in books on Athos, at the port in Daphne where pilgrims first land. Few of us come to see them, make the trip to Athos in order to visit Daphne. Yet this represents the mistake and the temptation—to conjure up an illusory view of holiness as withdrawnness from other human affairs. As if our God, the living God of Abraham and Sarah, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Word Incarnate, ever saw noninvolvement in the affairs of his people, of humanity, as anything other than temptation. God is Emmanuel. We cannot be tempted to celebrate or recognize his presence only in a class of holy ones—whether these be priests, prophets, sages, kings, monks, nuns, ascetics, martyrs; his presence is everywhere and must be recognized in all his brothers and sisters. For, in the end, even Paul summarizes the Law as love of neighbor, and the Lucan parable of the Samaritan indicates who is our neighbor—anyone who is in need. So this is where the journey into the desert leads us—back out again. But, first, we must go there, not in a futile effort, but for what the Lord has to reveal to us there, so that our love of neighbor is indeed a response to our encounter with the living God and not the projection of our own ego needs. The desert forms us; it ought not detain us; yet we ought not too quickly reject what history has taught us it has to offer. Let us not be too quick to interpret the desert and one’s experience of it in non-geographical ways. Not every experience is a desert experience, even though the desert may provide a valid analogue. Although the desert is an experience as much as a place, it is an experience enriched by a place, and an event tied to an environment. My reflections here are simply one response, my own, to a visit to the desert. Other responses provide other perspectives or different experiences. For everyone’s experience of the desert is his or her own, as is everyone’s experience of God. Yet there is something common and shared in these experiences. Do we not all need to return in some fashion to this experience of God in nature that civilized life so easily conceals?
- [Ascent to Heaven in Islamic and Jewish Mysticism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/ascent-to-heaven-in-islamic-and-jewish-mysticism) - Introduction The mythical garden of tradition is a closed and blessed system from which the contemplative does not willingly depart in order to become involved in the cold and neutral space of an “exact science”, such as “comparative religion”. Frithjof schuon The motif of ascent to heaven may be viewed as an archetypal topic of exceptional metaphysical importance in the history of religious and philosophical discourse. Those contemporary scholars who faithfully and rather blindly follow Mircea eliade try to relate the ascent to the “mystical experience” of archaic spirituality with a clumsily labelled “shamanism” (this term sounds much less attractive in russian than in english). putting aside this universalized scholarly construction (namely, “shamanism”), we entirely agree with jeremy naydler’s apt observation that “the mystical ascent to the sky is as central to the hermetic tradition as it is to both egyptian and platonic mysticism.”1 starting with the ancient egyptian pyramid Texts,2 the ascent to heaven of various royal and priestly heroes is promi- nent in near eastern and Mediterranean cosmological, litur- gical and soteriological systems, which simultaneously cover political, juridical and socio-mystical dimensions.3 This meta- physical and literary topos of ascent is fundamental for the 1 jeremy naydler, “plato, shamanism and ancient egypt,” Temenos Academy Review, vol. 9, 2006, p. 92. 2 see Whitney M. davis, “The ascension Myth in the pyramid Texts,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, vol. 36, no. 2, 1977, pp. 161-79. 3 see algis UŽdavinys, Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth: From Ancient Egypt to Neoplatonism (westbury: prometheus Trust, 2008). ix Ascent to Heaven proper understanding of second Temple judaism and of early apocalyptic christianity, whose mythologems can be traced back ultimately to Mesopotamian antiquity.4 at the same time, the motif of the spiritual flight is common in neoplatonic literature (which faithfully follows plato’s Pha- edrus in this respect) and the related hieratic arts (hierourgia, theourgia, hieratike techne) of late antiquity. sarah iles johnston describes the theurgist’s goal (similar to that of plotinus and other platonists, including philo of alexandria, the jewish hermeneus) as follows: “he sought to experience anagoge—to cause his soul to ascend out of the material world and into the noetic realm where it could enjoy henosis with the Nous patrikos (theurgy’s transcendent, supreme god).”5 in the context of hellenic platonism and the sacramental rites of theurgy, the term anagoge indicates elevation to the level of archetypes and principles, an ascent in the sense of an inner journey back to the “paternal harbour”; henosis means unification, union (sometimes understood in the sense of unio mystica); and Nous patrikos is the paternal intellect whose lumi- nous epiphany is tantamount to the irradiation (ellampsis) and creation of the psycho-somatic cosmos. The pattern of ascent to the divine Throne in both the jewish and islamic traditions is less philosophical and more cer- emonial, scriptural and liturgical, in accordance with the main paradigms and dogmas of monotheistic mythologies, systemati- cally and uncompromisingly presented as “objective histories”. For this reason (and also because so-called Middle east studies are extremely politicized, ideologized and theologized) it is difficult for any independent scholar to avoid various accusa- tions and scrutiny conducted by the tacit or openly established mihnas (the mihna refers, historically, to the “inquisitia” insti- tuted by the early abbasid caliphs). 4 see helge s. Kvanvig, Roots of Apocalyptic: The Mesopotamian Background of the Enoch Figure and the Son of Man (neukirchen-vluyn: neukirchen verlag, 1988). 5 sarah iles johnston, Riders in the Sky: Cavalier Gods and Theurgic Salvation in the Second Century A.D., classical philology, vol. 87, r.a. saller (ed.) (chicago: University of chicago press, 1992), p. 303. x Introduction The key word in this particularly sensitive field of canonized mythologies (be they jewish, islamic or secular modernist) is “controversial”, as if any hermeneutical hypothesis, opinion or historical fact which cannot fit the comfortable standard picture of the socio-religious consensus is to be regarded as potentially scandalous and tantamount to a plot by evil forces. in this realm, therefore, not everything can be explicitly said, especially when relationships between the multiple branches of judaism and islam (and their respective doctrines) are involved. in order to avoid crossfire from all kinds of puritans (those who pretend to be the very incarnation of kindness, godliness and truth) and mystical fundamentalists, we ritually confirm the orthodox boundaries, the borders of “property” in the flooded fields of comparative religion, at the same time as being unable to follow those rules of courtesy which require one to believe in certain supposedly “noble” but incredible things simply because they are “firmly established”. we do not intend to compare and analyse the ascension material in jewish hekhalot literature and some early sufi texts (using a great amount of contemporary scholarship) out of a particular ecstatic dionysian enthusiasm or childish hope to reveal what “really happened”. Therefore our assertions are not to be displaced from their hermeneutical and metaphorical (or, in a sense, rhetorical) context. hence, to say that islam, in a cer- tain respect, may be viewed as Third Temple judaism is not to say that islam “is” judaism. Far from it—and generally we avoid making far-reaching conclusions. yet in addition, since mul- tidimensional explanations are better suited for approaching the civilizations and religious movements of late antiquity, we regard positivistic theories of cultural “borrowings” and external “influences” as too simplistic. in this respect we agree with Michael Morony, inasmuch as conclusions based on unverified assumptions resemble “an intellectual house of cards” and tend to dissolve in “meaningless generalizations”.6 The problem is more serious than it seems, since hermeneutical piecing together of this kind appears to be 6 Michael g. Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest (princeton: princeton University press, 1984), p. 16. xi Ascent to Heaven the normal practice for any cultural construction or reconstruc- tion, in spite of the fact that “the imposition of an aristotelian topical structure on material tends to give it an architectonic appearance, and makes circumstances appear to be more stable, ordered, and coherent than they actually are.”7 hence, if our discourse is not coherent and ordered according to semi-mythic standards, it turns out to be a great advantage, or at least an occasion for engaging in perennial irony. recurring patterns or themes follow the logic of a dynamic arabesque which, nonethe- less, is “static” in its continuity and change. however, we are unable to share the naïve joy of the spanish christian professor when he, “on closer study of ibn arabi’s quasi-dantesque allegory,” suddenly found that “it was itself no more than a mystical adaptation of another ascension, already famous in the theological literature of islam: the Miraj, or ascension, of Mahomet from jerusalem to the Throne of god.”8 The nocturnal journey and ascension of the prophet Muhammad may or may not be a prototype of dante’s concep- tion. Metaphysically, the problem of copyright is not so impor- tant. likewise, when we compare the ascent of the prophet and the descent of revelation with well-known neoplatonic concep- tions, we are simply exploring possibilities and analogies (in the process of hermeneutical construction and deconstruction), not asserting “borrowings” and “influences”. as Morony aptly remarks, “one can usually find whatever one looks for, and a predisposition to emphasize similarities or differences will have a prejudicial effect on the outcome.”9 The art of scholarly presentation consists in turning this apparent disadvantage into a real advantage. *** 7 ibid., p. 17. 8 Miguel asín, Islam and the Divine Comedy, translated and abridged by harold sunderland (london: john Murray, 1926), p. Xiii. 9 Michael g. Morony, op. cit., p. 16. xii Introduction The main draft of this monograph was written during the spring of 2008 at la Trobe University, Bendigo, australia. i am most grateful to reza shah-Kazemi, a research associate at the institute of ismaili studies, london, and the Matheson Trust (UK) for their support in producing this book. xiii ?1? The path of descent and the path of ascent in late neoplatonic thought, both procession (proodos) and reversion (epistrophe) are required before actuality (energeia) is achieved, because the cyclic process of rest in the higher prin- ciple, procession (“descent”) from it, and reversion (“ascent”) to it, is the structural model which governs all activity within mani- fested reality, be it noetic, psychic or physical. any irradiated (or “created”) entity fixes its essence only through reflecting back to its higher—one could say metaphysical—cause, which may be regarded both as producer of the effect and as goal of its perfection. Ultimately, all being springs from the ineffable one, and “oneness in general is that which holds together every level of existence—and every individual—and gives it form.”1 This neoplatonic motif, partly related to the metaphysical interpretation of plato’s Phaedrus and Parmenides, is reflected in the islamic sufi mythology of two “great nights” that represent descent and ascent, manifestation and reintegration respectively. The laylat al-qadr, the night on which the archetypal divine Book miraculously descended in the form of oracular verses (or signs, ayat) in arabic, or rather the night on which the archangel gabriel, speaking with the voice of allah, placed the “recita- tion” (qur’an) in the heart of the prophet Muhammad during one of his retreats in a cave on Mount hira, is analogous to the neoplatonic proodos. The laylat al-mi‘raj, the night of ascension, on which the prophet was miraculously taken by the same archangel from Mecca to jerusalem and thence up through the seven heavens 1 john dillon, general introduction, Proclus’ Commentary on Plato’s Par- menides, trs. glenn r. Morrow and john M. dillon (princeton: princeton University press, 1987), p. XXi. 1 Ascent to Heaven of Mesopotamian-hellenistic cosmology to the divine Throne, is analogous to the neoplatonic epistrophe. in this particular context we are not concerned with the poignant theological question of who precisely (gabriel or god himself) appeared to Muhammad “on the night horizon” and by the lote tree near the “garden of the dwelling”. since we are dealing with metaphysical topoi and canonized patterns of sacred mythology (or even with the pious inventions of the sub- sequent hermeneutical tradition), the different versions of how and when the Qur’an was sent down or how and when it was really collected cannot disturb our speculative philosophical approach. according to this particular interpretation of islamic sacred history, the heavenly Qur’an is tantamount to the essential living Being (autozoon) of plato’s Timaeus, since this auto- zoon contains within itself not only the archetypes of the four empedoclean elements, but also the ideas of all the living crea- tures that are manifested in the sensible realm. For plotinus, this intelligible world, viewed as an ideal paradigm of physical reality, as the noetic “well-rounded whole”, becomes “a globe of faces radiant with faces all living” (Enn. vi.7.15). The archetypal Qur’an is like the plotinian kosmos noetos: “a completely coherent and comprehensive matrix, timeless, ungenerated, immaterial and perfect, of the physical cosmos.”2 The descent of the Book (in its role of the demiurgic Logos and soteriological revelation) and the ascent of Muhammad (in his role of the paradigmatic mystagogue and divine vicegerent, tantamount to the assyrian sacred king) are celebrated every year as calendrical events on the twenty-seventh of the month of ramadan and on the twenty-seventh of the month of rajab respectively. however, ibn ‘arabi (1165-1240), the inspired sufi writer, boldly claims that the night of destiny (laylat al-qadr) is none 2 john dillon, Pleroma and Noetic Cosmos: A Comparative Study, Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, r.T. wallis and j. Bregman (eds.) (albany: sUny press, 1992), p. 100. see also algis UŽdavinys, “From homer to the glorious Qur’an: hermeneutical strategies in the hellenic and islamic Traditions,” Sacred Web: A Journal of Tradition and Modernity, vol. 11, 2003, pp. 79-114. 2 The Path of Descent and the Path of Ascent other than the prophet Muhammad himself, regarded as the metaphysical hypostasis of anthropos teleios, the perfect Man. This figure of the angelic anthropos, cast in the image (selem) and likeness (demut) of god, is well known from the jewish mystical tradition. The perfect Man as the noetic Form of Muhammad (al-surat al-muhammadiyyah), whose “nature” is the archetypal Qur’an, kosmos noetos, is called a copy (nuskha) of allah by the sufis and described as the pole (qutb) on which the spheres of existence revolve. Therefore nathaniel deutsch aptly remarks, while discussing reynold nicholson’s analysis of ‘abd al-Karim ibn ibrahim al-jili’s (1365-1417) doctrine of the perfect Man: if nicholson had been more aware of jewish Merkabah tra- ditions, however, he could have noted a number of striking parallels between jili’s perfect Man and the jewish figure of Metatron. indeed, the perfect Man of jili’s al-Insan al-kamil appears, in many ways, to be a transformation of earlier jewish conceptions of the angelic vicegerent.3 For ibn ‘arabi, Muhammad as a perfect (or complete, kamil) anthropos is the word (kalimah) which comprises the integral totality of paradigms. Therefore he may be designated as the brother of the Qur’an, if not equated with the all-encompassing Book itself, one which embodies both the path of descent and the path of ascent. These paths may be viewed as the “existen- tial texts”, as the display of demiurgic (creative) and theurgic (elevating) signs to be read or recited (since to read and recite is to live the life-text) in both directions. if the night of destiny is equated with the prophet Muhammad as anthropos teleios, it means that he fulfils and accomplishes the entire cycle of onto- semiotic manifestation which encompasses both construction and deconstruction. Michel chodkiewicz says: Thus, laylat al-qadr is both the symbolic date of the last mes- sage, and also, for man himself, the date of the second birth through which he becomes that which he was from all eter- 3 nathaniel deutsch, Guardians of the Gate: Angelic Vice Regency in Late Antiq- uity, leiden: Brill, 1999, p. 159. 3 Ascent to Heaven nity. This correspondence between the Qur’an and the insan kamil is strengthened by the fact that the descent of one and the ascension of the other come under the sign of the same number.4 This number is twenty-seven, since, as previously mentioned, the descent of the Qur’an is celebrated on the 27th ramadan, and the ascent of the prophet on the 27th rajab, thus symboli- cally forming two semicircles whose conjunction constitutes the whole circle, tantamount to the completed divine year which may be likened to the restored macrocosmic eye of horus in egyptian mythology. The ascension through the seven heavenly spheres of tra- ditional antique cosmology took the prophet of islam to the threshold of the divine presence symbolized by the Throne, at a “distance of two bow’s length or even nearer” (Qur’an 53:9). ibn ‘arabi interprets these two as the two semicircles of exis- tence (which may be likened to procession and reversion in neoplatonism) whose conjunction brings together and unites the divine realities (or true realities, haqa’iq haqqiyyah, the prag- mata of proclus) and the created realities, thereby restoring the unity of the whole. The reunited ontological circle resembles ouroboros, the egyptian symbol of eternity, ritually recon- firmed when, in illo tempore, the ba (manifestation) of osiris is united with the ba of ra, of the solar intellect. The prophet’s ascent (mi‘raj) through the seven heavens (“the naïve adoption by Muhammad of the ptolemaic celes- tial construction,” according to the ironic remark of w.h.T. gairdner)5 both constitutes the politico-mythical legitimization of islam and establishes the paradigm for sufi mystical ascen- sion. however, it is only briefly mentioned (at least such is the shared opinion of all traditional Muslim commentators) in the 4 Michel chodkiewicz, Seal of the Saints: Prophethood and Sainthood in the Doctrine of Ibn ‘Arabi, tr. liadain sherrard (cambridge: islamic Texts society, 1993), p. 88. 5 w.h.T. gairdner, introduction, Mishkat al-anwar (“The Niche for Lights”) by Al-Ghazzali, tr. w.h.T. gairdner (new delhi: Kitab Bhavan, 1994. First edition: 1923), p. 26. 4 The Path of Descent and the Path of Ascent opening verse of surah 17, whose aberrant rhyme, according to F.e. peters6, is regarded as a later addition to the rest of the surah: glory to the one who took his servant on a night journey from the sacred place of prayer to the furthest place of prayer upon which we have sent down our blessing, that we might show him some of our signs. he is the all-hearing, the all- seeing (Qur’an 17:1).7 Therefore, surah 17:1 is the main point of departure in discussing all hieratic stories related to Muhammad’s night journey (isra) and ascension (mi‘raj). according to the hadith accounts, one night the prophet undertook the miraculous journey (either spiritually, ruhan, or bodily, jisman) from the sacred place of prayer (al-masjid al-haram, the holy mosque in Mecca) to the furthest place of prayer (or the most distant mosque, al-masjid al-aqsa), where god’s ayat (signs, verses) were revealed to him. ibn ishaq (d. 761), as recounted by ibn hisham (d. 835), relates it as follows: i have been told that al-hasan said: The envoy of god, god’s peace and blessings on him, said: while i was sleeping in the sanctuary (hijr), jibril came to me and roused me with his foot....i sat up, he took my arm, and i rose with him. he took me out to the door of the place of prayer (masjid) and there was a white beast, part mule and part donkey. The beast had two wings for thighs with which he would propel his lower legs, placing his hooves as far as his eye could see. he mounted me on himself and took me out. . . . The envoy of god, god’s peace and blessings on him, went on, and with him jibril, until he came at last to the house of the sanctified (bayt al-muqaddas) and found there ibrahim, Musa, and ‘isa in 6 F.e. peters, Muhammad and the Origins of Islam (albany: sUny press, 1994), p. 144. 7 see Early Islamic Mysticism: Sufi, Qur’an, Mi‘raj, Poetic and Theological Writ- ings, translated and edited by Michael a. sells (new york: paulist press, 1996), p. 47. 5 Ascent to Heaven a group of prophets. The envoy of god, peace and blessings on him, led them in prayer and prayed with them.8 Uri rubin maintains that the isra-mi‘raj is in itself not only a dramatic event of revelation, but also one of confirmation in which the initiation of the prophet is completed.9 The “most distant mosque” of Qur’an 17:1 probably first meant heaven. The early Qur’anic commentators reached an agreement (but not without some initial hesitation) that this masjid al-aqsa refers to jerusalem or the Temple Mount (al- haram al-sharif) where the First and the second jewish Temples once stood. Thus, the prophet of islam is taken to jerusalem by Buraq, a mythical beast which is equivalent to solomon’s flying carpet. he enters the house of sanctity (bayt al-maqdis, bayt al-muqaddas) and, after certain hieratic rites, initiations and trials (various drinks are offered to him and he chooses the milk, which signifies al-fitrah), the prophet ascends through the seven heavens. Thereby he reaches the “house of life” (al-bayt al- ma‘mur), usually regarded as an archetype or celestial analogue of the Ka‘bah, the Meccan sacred house (al-bayt al-haram). hence, we have three different temples: in Mecca, in jerusalem, and in the seventh (or fourth) heaven. it seems that initially the isra and the mi‘raj were two different stories: Muhammad’s climbing a ladder (mi‘raj) or ascent to the lote Tree of the Boundary (sidrat al-muntaha), and his night journey from Mecca to a place called bayt al-maqdis. When these stories were combined and al-bayt al-maqdis identified with jerusalem, then the ascent to heaven followed the isra, the miraculous journey to al-bayt al-maqdis. as peters observes, none of this is immediately apparent in the above-mentioned Qur’anic verse (17:1). instead, there are what appear to be (according to Qur’an 8 ibid., pp. 54-55. see a. guillaume, The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah (Karachi: oxford University press, 2007), p. 181 ff. 9 Uri rubin, The Eye of the Beholder: The Life of Muhammad as viewed by the Early Muslims: A Textual Analysis (princeton: darwin press, 1995), p. 65. 6 The Path of Descent and the Path of Ascent 17:90-93) “earlier denials of the possibility of a heavenly journey with the revelation to islam”.10 alfred guillaume even raised a bold hypothesis (unsup- ported by other scholars) that the night journey, briefly described in surah 17:1, actually represents an umra that Muhammad alleg- edly performed from a place situated on the iraqi pilgrim road (in wadi ji‘rana, at the boundary of the Meccan haram) and called al-masjid al-aqsa, to Mecca and back in one night.11 so al-masjid al-aqsa in surah 17:1 can theoretically designate three (or two, if the mosque at wadi ji‘rana near Mecca is dis- counted) sanctuaries. The Muslim scholars, however, reached a firm conclusion that it was nothing other than the haram al- sharif, the Temple in jerusalem. since all different reports and narrative accounts of the prophet’s miraculous journeys had not only theological, but also important social and political dimensions, Brooke vuckovic emphasizes that the ascension narratives reflect the Muslim’s struggle with self-definition. she says: “The myth of the proph- et’s ascent should be viewed less as a miraculous historic event than as a means to understanding how early scholars wrestled with defining Muhammad, themselves, and the values of the Muslim community.”12 10 F.e. peters, op. cit., p. 144. 11 alfred guillaume, “Where was al-masjid al-aqsa?” Al-Andalus 18, 1953, pp. 323-36. 12 Brooke olson vuckovic, Heavenly Journeys, Earthly Concerns: The Legacy of the Mi‘raj in the Formation of Islam (new york and london: routledge, 2005), p. 41. 7 ?2? The Meccan sanctuary The arabic term haram means “prohibited, forbidden by the shari‘ah”, and thereby stands in contrast to the term halal, “per- mitted”. it also covers the concept of the sacred, especially when related to the Ka‘bah, the chief islamic sanctuary in Mecca. For every pious Muslim who turns towards the Ka‘bah, it represents the axis mundi as a primordial temple containing the presence of Allah or al-Haqq, the Truth, viewed as the supreme principle. This principle, tantamount to the Ultimate reality, is the sacred as such, which manifests all subsequent sacred phenomena, including symbolic and qualitative spaces arranged and modi- fied by the presence of the divine. in this respect, seyyed hos- sein nasr speaks of a sacred geography, or even geosophy, for which the directions and properties of our physical world are not uniform, but rather qualitatively distinct.1 in both the islamic and pre-islamic arabian milieux, the political, economic and social order cannot be separated from the sacred. The sanctity of the Meccan haram played a decisive role in regulating and maintaining peace among the arabs, thereby providing a spiritual context for their trade and ensuring both protection and safety. Therefore, it is no wonder that the term mu’min in early islamic times means not simply “believer”, but a person to whom security is guaranteed by his adherence to the juridically based system of tribal custom and the religious community (ummah) of the prophet. according to al-razi, “believing goes back to the sense of security.”2 1 seyyed hossein nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred (lahore: suhail academy, 1988), p. 202. 2 r.B. serjeant, “Haram and Hawtah, the sacred enclave in arabia,” Studies in Arabian History and Civilization (aldershot: ashgate/ variorum, 1981), p. 57. 8 The Meccan Sanctuary The two complementary ideas of circularity and centrality are involved in the establishment of a haram. The arabic word for pilgrimage, hajj, in its original sense is not related to any intrinsic metaphysical idea, but rather denotes a regular, well- traversed route. of several different objectives, the route may lead to a sanctuary, which at the same time presupposes the suq, or market-place, maintained under the special protection of the local gods. The suq cycle is regulated by the sacred calendar and ultimately by the deity who inhabits the haram. however, as Mohammed Bamyeh has pointed out, neither Mecca nor its haram were in themselves the objects of veneration or worship.3 They simply housed the tribal idols—sacred stones, statues and symbols. a haram may be created in order to protect the posses- sions acquired by raiding, which is symptomatic of the so-called ghazw economy. during the time of islam, the Meccan haram, or sacred terri- tory, expanded to include not just the area around the Ka‘bah, but the entire city of Mecca and the surrounding valleys. within the territory of the haram it is usually prohibited to kill any human being or animal (except for the purpose of sacrifice), or cause any damage to its vegetation. in addition, the Meccan haram becomes forbidden to those who are not Muslims. The esoteric interpretation of the pilgrimage to the Ka‘bah, regarded both as the symbolic centre of the terrestrial world and as the innermost heart of the individual as microcosm, is pro- vided by the sufis and the shi‘ite mystics. however, for every Muslim who enters Mecca in order to perform the circumam- bulation around the Ka‘bah, this means to enter the holy place where the first house of god (bayt Allah) was built, according to the Qur’an: lo! the first sanctuary appointed for mankind was that at Bakkah, a blessed place, a guidance to the peoples (3:96). Allah has appointed the Ka‘bah, the sacred house, a standard for mankind. . . . (5:97). 3 Mohammed a. Bamyeh, The Social Origins of Islam: Mind, Economy, Dis- course (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press, 1999), p. 32. 9 Ascent to Heaven The arabic verb tafa, from which the term for the circum- ambulation (tawaf) is derived, has the meaning “to attain to the summit of a thing by spiralling around it”.4 hence, it is thought that through the tawaf the pilgrim participates with the angels in their circumbulation of the divine Throne. This is so because cosmologically the Ka‘bah is regarded as the reflection of the archetypal divine house in the seventh (or fourth) heaven, above and beyond which stands the Throne of Allah, around which the angels are constantly rotating. Those and other similar interpretations are based on the metaphysical premise that everything in the lower world is a projection and image of something in the higher noetic world. everything in the sensible realm is a form (surah), a reflection or image of its spiritual archetype (haqiqah). When understood in this sense, the Ka‘bah on earth corresponds to the Ka‘bah in the fourth heaven, as indicated in the Qur’an (al-bayt al-ma‘mur: 52:4). it is square in form, because it is viewed as a cosmological mandala supported by four pillars, elements or limits (arkan, sing. rukn). since the Meccan sanctuary is an image of the Throne sur- rounded by four limits, namely, a beginning (awwal), an end (akhir), an inner aspect (batin) and an external aspect (zahir), the square inscribed within the circle represents a descent (tanazzul) of the suprasensible world (‘alam al-ghayb) to the level of the sensible world (‘alam al-shahadah).5 For the sufis, the general form of the Ka‘bah is a symbolic configuration of the perfect Man, regarded as the first divine emanation, that is, as the Muhammadan light (nur muhammadi) which contains all lights and is tantamount to the divine intellect (‘Aql, the neoplatonic Nous) or the Throne (‘Arsh). The three dimensions of the cube represent the three aspects of divine unity: that of 4 Fritz Meier, “The Mystery of the Ka‘ba: symbol and reality in islamic Mysticism,” The Mysteries: Papers from Eranos Yearbooks, joseph campbell (ed.) (princeton: princeton University press, 1978), p. 184. 5 henry corbin, Temple and Contemplation, tr. philip sherrard and liadain sherrard (london: Kegan paul international and islamic publications, 1986), p. 204. 10 The Meccan Sanctuary the essence (tawhid dhati), of the attributes (tawhid sifati) and of activity (tawhid fi‘li). needless to say, those and other theological interpreta- tions are later developments. They were not current among the members of the early islamic community which, however, inherited the oral semitic traditions of adamic and abrahamic mythology. Therefore, for the mythologically inspired Muslims, the original and “real” Ka‘bah was not simply an ‘arish (a sacred tabernacle covered by the kiswa) or a man-made sanctuary built in the jahiliyya with loose stones without clay, but rather a pavilion from among the “tents” of paradise which god caused to descend. according to an account related by the fifth shi‘ite imam Muhammad al-Baqir, the surface of this tent, set up upon the site of the future Ka‘bah, exactly covered the area to be occupied by the future abrahamic sanctuary. The central pillar of this marvelous tent was made of red hyacinth, the four tent pegs were of pure gold, and the ropes were woven of violet threads. according to imam ja‘far as-sadiq, a white cloud (ghammah) descended onto the future site of the Ka‘bah, and the angel gabriel ordered adam, the first among the Muslim prophets, to trace with his foot an area covered by the shadow of this archetypal cloud. Thereby adam traced the limits of the haram with the sanctuary as its centre.6 in this case, a spiritual realm of archetypes determines a terrestrial figure and becomes imma- nent therein. Though remaining beyond the scope of sensory perception, the realm of archetypes and their psychic images can, however, be perceived by the eye of the heart. For ibn ‘arabi, the Ka‘bah itself takes on life through those who circle around it, that is, the building is animated like a hier- atic statue of the ancient theurgists. he says: “i see the building animated by those who circle round it. and there is no self-ani- mation, except through a physician with effective power.”7 since the Ka‘bah symbolizes the essence (dhat) of god, the Black stone (al-hajar al-aswad), believed to have descended 6 ibid., p. 215. 7 Fritz Meier, op. cit., p. 161. 11 Ascent to Heaven from heaven, not only represents the human spiritual essence, but also symbolizes the primordial covenant between man and god. This covenant justifies islam as the din al-fitrah, the original religion of those who are the children of adam. There- fore, the circumambulation of the Ka‘bah (the seven prescribed circuits corresponding to the seven attributes of Allah) repre- sents the road to god which leads through the heart (qalb). Moving around the Ka‘bah (or the invisible divine Throne) the pilgrim is regarded as being purified of everything that is other than god. This purification and meeting with the lord is accomplished through continual dhikr, that is, through constant remembrance and invocation of the name Allah. Fritz Meier describes the Ka‘bah as a symbol of where the annihilated human self touches upon the divine self, in the same way as the atman becomes identical with Brahman in the Upanishadic teachings.8 paradoxically, this comparison finds its rather peculiar confirmation in the islamized arabic trans- lation of Amrtakunda (under the title Hawd ma’al-hayat, or The Pool of the Water of Life), a work on hatha-yoga where Brahma and vishnu are rendered respectively as ibrahim and Musa, that is to say, abraham and Moses.9 8 Fritz Meier, op. cit., p. 164. 9 carl w. ernst, “The islamization of yoga in the amrtakunda Transla- tions,” JRAS, series j, 13, 2, 2003, p. 208. 12 ?3? each prophet has a Haram in islam, abraham (ibrahim) is regarded as a prophet and called the intimate Friend of god (Khalil). he typifies the sufi mystic who is possessed by the divine love that conceals itself from this world, thereby imitating the so-called exile of ibrahim, and accordingly follows the din Ibrahim, that is, the original and primordial islam. The arabs maintained the conviction of their direct genea- logical descent from ibrahim and isma‘il, two mythical heroes of the near eastern tribes. according to the later hagiographic and theological tradition, ‘abd al-Muttalib (the well known grandfather of the prophet) claimed: “we are the people of Allah in his town. This has always been according to ibrahim’s covenant.”1 The Quraysh, the tribe from which the future prophet Muhammad was to come, were regarded as the noblest descen- dants of isma‘il. hence, the authority they held among the rest of the arabs was based both on this mythologized descent and on their adherence to the religion of ibrahim. Din Ibrahim means the abrahamic way of life which is symbolically centred at the sacred house of abraham, namely, the Ka‘bah. a certain house of abraham is already indicated in the jewish Book of jubilees, although its location in Mecca (instead of jerusalem) was not shared by the jews themselves, except those who, like ‘abdallah ibn salam of Medina, venerated the Meccan sanc- tuary. ‘abdallah ibn salam (d. ca. 663-664), a member of the jewish arab tribe of Qaynuqa, though a real historical jewish 1 Uri rubin, “hanifiyya and Ka‘ba: an inquiry into the arabian pre- islamic Background of din ibrahim,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 13, 1990, p. 107. 13 Ascent to Heaven convert to islam, “functioned as a symbol of the islamization of the jews,” according to steven wasserstrom: “This figure was used by Muslims to give voice to purportedly jewish age-old traditions that had prophesied the coming of Muhammad.”2 The ancient arabs viewed the Meccan haram as the site where the offering of abraham’s son had taken place. For this reason, the prophet ibrahim had allegedly hung the horns of the ram (kabsh) on the water spout of the sanctuary, because a founder of any haram, or hawtah, demarcated its boundaries, usually with white-washed cairns. it seems that the abrahamic associations with the Ka‘bah are mainly established by identi- fying the spring of Zamzam with the “well of water” of Genesis 21, which saved ishmael and his mother hagar from dying of thirst. Therefore gerald hawting, while speaking about the process of islamization, or rather of the “abrahamification” of the Meccan haram, maintains that the Zamzam mythologies were introduced as a secondary development, being “a part of the transformation by islam of the Meccan sanctuary into an abrahamic institution.”3 however, this transformation is clearly pre-islamic and related to the hanifiyya of the Meccan Quraysh. The Qur’an describes the prophet Muhammad as a hanif, a primordial monotheist, and his religion as the “right religion” (al-din al- qayyim: 30:43), related to that of the prophet ibrahim: “so set your purpose (o Muhammed) for the religion as a hanif—this is the nature (framed) of allah, in which he hath created man. . . . This is the right religion” (30:30-31). There are two versions of the construction of the Ka‘bah, both current in early islamic times. The first links it with ibrahim and has been supported by some passages of the Qur’an. The second establishes the foundation of the settle- ment of Mecca by Qusayy ibn Kilab, known as the “unifier” (mujammi) of the Quraysh. The ancient Ka‘bah, described as an 2 steven n. wasserstrom, Between Muslim and Jew: The Problem of Symbiosis under Early Islam (princeton: princeton University press, 1995), pp. 175 & 176. 3 gerald r. hawting, “The ‘sacred offices’ of Mecca from jahiliyya to islam,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 13, jerusalem, 1990, p. 83. 14 Each Prophet has a haram ‘arish without any roof—it was turned into a permanent roofed structure by the Byzantine carpenter Baqum a few years before Muhammad’s first revelation—belonged to the legendary tribe of jurhum. afterwards it passed on to the Khuza‘a, and was eventually inherited by Qusayy, who married a daughter of the Khuza‘a cult official of the sanctuary. The carpenter Baqum (a name taken to reproduce the greek pachomius) is himself almost a legendary figure, and is described as a passenger from a Byzantine ship wrecked at shu‘ayba. The timber of this ship was used for the Ka‘bah’s roof. in a more elaborate version, the Byzantine ship was car- rying building materials for the reconstruction of an ethiopian church destroyed by the persians.4 Qusayy ibn Kilab consolidated the pre-eminence of the Quraysh, combining the cultic (hijaba) and political (siyada) functions of the re-established haram which symbolized the unification of his tribe on behalf of Allah, presumably based on the idea of din Ibrahim. walter dostal supposes that a place name Macoraba, put on the map of ptolemaeus (in the second century ad), though not exactly in the present area of Mecca, corresponds to the sabaic word makoraba, which designates a holy place or temple (mukariba).5 patricia crone rejects this identification, arguing that the name of Macoraba has nothing to do with that of Mecca. she says: after all, we only make things worse by postulating familiarity on the part of greco-roman authors with both Mecca and Quraysh before they mattered, whereas neither was known until after they had risen to commercial and political impor- tance. it is the sixth-century silence that is significant, and this silence cannot be attributed to the fact that sources have been lost, though some clearly have. The fact is that the sources written after the conquest display not the faintest sign of rec- 4 walter dostal, “Mecca before the time of the prophet: attempt of an anthropological interpretation,” Der Islam, vol. 68, issue 2, Berlin, 1991, pp. 193-231; reprinted in The Arabs and Arabia on the Eve of Islam, F.e. peters (ed.) (aldershot, ashgate/variorum, 1999). 5 ibid. 15 Ascent to Heaven ognition in their accounts of the new rulers of the Middle east or the city from which they came.6 Being chief custodian of the Ka‘bah, Qusayy emerges as a cultic reformer. according to early islamic chronicles, he reno- vated the periphery of the haram district in order to enable the settlement of Mecca, whilst at the same time assuming control of the pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca by establishing the siqaya and rifada institutions, dealing respectively with the supply of water and food. and control over the Ka‘bah means control over the town. The “sacred house of god” was considered the property of a divinity, therefore Qusayy acted both as upholder of the hijaba (the priest’s office) and as its administrator. hence, the control of the sanctuary (wilayat al-bayt) provided a guarantee for political leadership and was essential for establishing the superiority of Quraysh, who represented the hanifiyya based on the obligation to worship Allah, the lord of the Ka‘bah. accord- ingly, the hanifiyya consisted mainly of adherents of the religion of ibrahim and devotion to the house of ibrahim, that is, the Ka‘bah. The young Muhammad was introduced into the idea and realm of the din Ibrahim by Zayd ibn ‘amr, a local hanif. Zayd used to pray facing the Ka‘bah, saying: “This is the qibla of ibrahim and isma‘il. i do not worship stones and do not pray towards them, and do not eat that which was sacrified to them and do not draw lots with arrows.”7 Muhammad himself used the Ka‘bah as his qibla before adopting, for a short time, the qibla of jerusalem when he estab- lished the haram of Medina on the model of the abrahamic haram of Mecca. Two assertions of the prophet, quoted by ibn hanbal, run as follows: “each prophet has a haram, and al-Madinah is my haram”; “Mecca was ibrahim’s haram, and al- Madinah is my haram.”8 6 patricia crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (princeton: princeton University press), p. 137. 7 Uri rubin, op. cit., p. 101. 8 r.B. serjeant, op. cit., p. 50. 16 Each Prophet has a haram according to r.B. serjeant, the process by which Muhammad became established in Medina is analogous to the growth of a hawtah, a sacred enclave.9 The crucial importance attached to the institution of hawtah, or haram, is proved by the fact that Muhammad had been rejected by the Banu hanifah tribe, con- ceivably because they had their own haram already, established by the prophet Musailimah, the chief rival of Muhammad. The term hawtah (still used in contemporary southern arabia) is a synonym of haram and means a sacred enclave that could be created by a member of a holy family by declaring a certain piece of land a hawtah, where security under god’s law is established. When the founder of a hawtah was recognized by the tribes as an administrator and representative of the divinity, the merchants could settle in it and found a market (suq). The founder of a hawtah, himself turned into a semi-divine hero, would remain forever lord of this haram. his descendants kept the office with the title of mansab, or mansub, and could tax the inhabitants of the enclave. Bearing in mind the oft-repeated pattern related to this kind of sacred institution, one can understand the importance of the Medinan haram within which Allah, but for practical purposes his “oracular voice”, the prophet Muhammad, is the announcer and hermeneus of the law for the surrounding tribes linked to this haram. in fact, the haram constitutes a nucleus around which might gather many different tribes that adhere to the centralized authority of the mansab, who is able to judge all inter-tribal disputes. in this case, Muhammad as a mansab rep- resented the din Ibrahim, restored by the Qur’anic revelations. since these tribes were asked to give up very little of their tra- ditional habits, serjeant argues that Muhammad fitted well into the system of law and custom into which he was born.10 Both the ancient arabs and the early Muslims tended to consider themselves attached to a haram rather than to a dynasty. Therefore the Umayyad caliph ‘abd al-Malik feared that the pilgrims might form an allegiance to ‘abdullah ibn al- 9 ibid., p. 47. 10 ibid., p. 51. 17 Ascent to Heaven Zubayr, who held the Meccan haram for a few years, and for this reason the caliph re-created a new haram in jerusalem, namely, al-haram al-sharif. This fact provides additional evidence that to hold sacred offices in Mecca was to hold power. since the prophet Muhammad became the holder of both the Medinan and the Meccan sacred enclaves, the expansion of his power was quite easy and without requiring military effort, except when directed against Musailimah, the owner of his own haram, and in other similar cases. The two harams possessed by the prophet contributed to his politico-religious success in creating the confederation based on his allegiance to Allah and to the sacred house of ibrahim. Therefore, it is little wonder that in various ascension accounts the archetypal hanif Ibrahim serves as a father figure to Muhammad. abraham is depicted as a celestial anthropos. like the jewish angel Metatron, he sits on the throne at the gate of bayt al-ma’mur, the venerated house of immortality, where every day 70,000 angels go to stay until the day of resurrection. abraham himself is pictured as a venerable and solemn shaykh, whom the prophet Muhammad meets either in the Temple of jerusalem or in the seventh heaven on the night of ascension. he is astonished by their physical similarities. as vuckovic observes, in the mi‘raj narratives abraham has “looks and man- nerisms similar to the prophet’s”.11 By having Muhammad appear as a son of the hanif Ibrahim, the jewish and christian claims on abraham are surpassed and neutralized. 11 Brooke olson vuckovic, Heavenly Journeys, Eartlhy Concerns: The Legacy of the Mi‘raj in the Formation of Islam (routledge, 2005), p. 56. 18
- [The Inner Dimension of Pilgrimage to Mount Athos](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/inner-dimension-of-pilgrimage-athos) - The Inner Dimension of Pilgrimage to Mount Athos MARCO TOTI ‘The great road is something that seems never ending: it is like a human dream, the nostalgia of the infinite’ F.M. Dostoevsky, The Devils All you have been, and seen, and done, and thought, Not You but I, have seen and been and wrought: I was the Sin that from Myself rebell'd: I the Remorse that tow'rd Myself compell'd: I was the Tajidar who led the Track: I was the little Briar that pull'd you back: Sin and Contrition—Retribution owed, And cancell'd—Pilgrim, Pilgrimage, and Road, Was but Myself toward Myself: and Your Arrival but Myself at my own Door: Who in your Fraction of Myself behold Myself within the Mirror Myself hold To see Myself in, and each part of Me That sees himself, though drown'd, shall ever see. Come you lost Atoms to your Centre draw, And be the Eternal Mirror that you saw: Rays that have wander'd into Darkness wide Return and back into your Sun subside (Far?d al-D?n ‘Att?r, The speech of the birds). The inner dimension of pilgrimage is inextricably bound up with some notions belonging to the most ancient technical vocabulary of monasticism, particularly the Latin peregrinatio (Greek xeniteía), the condition of living while roaming as a stranger which, inherited by Stoicism,1 takes amerimnía (Greek for ‘lack of worries’) and possibly hesychía (Greek for ‘spiritual peace’, Latin quies) as its goal.2 Moreover, it is closely connected with the symbolism of the centre, a fact allowing us to understand the relationship between pilgrimage and the modern world, and some contemporary versions of the former. The deepest aim of every pilgrimage is to find one’s long-abandoned home once again. Christian life is pre-eminently a constant pilgrimage to the ‘lost homeland’, experienced primarily in one’s own heart. The homesickness that every man carries in his eyes for the dramatic loss brought about by original sin 1 A. Guillaumont, Aux origines du monachisme chrétien. Pour une phénomenologie du monachisme (Abbaye de Bellefontaine, 1979), p. 91. See also the similarities with the cynic philosophers (ibid., 105). 2 Ibid., pp. 91 and 100. To father Efrem – a feeling more or less concealed by external reality – can be effectively soothed by the light radiating from Mount Athos. I saw this light on the arrestingly sweet, delicate, and innocent faces of some Athonite monks, most especially on the face of a Romanian from St Paul’s monastery, who now lives in Lakkou skete. I shall return to the subject of the faces and looks of Athonite monks, in my opinion the most striking feature of the Holy Mountain.3 Pilgrimage, as a formalized – but never completely institutionalized4 – expression of the ancient idea of peregrinatio,5 is a form of individual and collective asceticism that aims at metánoia (Greek for ‘repentance’, ‘change of the noûs’). As an authentic fuga mundi, it is an effort and an offering of one’s self, a sacrifice leading to detachment from the ordinary categories of time and space. A victory over time, it manages to make the pilgrim feel, by way of the meeting with unknown brothers, the universality of the Church in space.6 The notion of peregrinatio was at one time widely known in Judaism, being directly founded on the Scriptures: in Genesis 12: 1, God asks Abraham to leave his country, his relatives, and his father’s home, and go to the land which he would show him. With the Diaspora, this tradition was to know the spiritualization of the condition of stranger, thereafter attributed to every member of the ‘people of God’. Philo of Alexandria7 interpreted Genesis 12: 1 as the migration of Abraham’s spirit (Greek ekdemía) from the sensitive to the intellectual plane – an interpretation that, by way of Anthony, influenced Cassian and led to the interiorized hermeneutics of xeniteía.8 Irenaeus of Lyons first used the verb xeniteúo,9 later passing the term down to Ambrose, Anthony, and Gregory of Nyssa. Moreover, it is fundamental to keep in mind that in one of the most significant texts of ancient Christianity, the Letter to Diognetus, the author said that ‘every foreign land is for Christians a country and every country is a foreign land [...] Christians live in the world, but they are not of the world’.10 In early Christianity, where peregrinatio had an essentially spiritual dimension, the ecclesial community was considered to be roaming in every place (Latin Ecclesia peregrina). On this subject, the Exodus into the desert, the chosen place of the peregrinatio – being at once empty and full of temptations – was one of the 3 Below, pp. 9–10. 4 See E. Turner, Preface to V. Turner and E. Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (New York, 1978), pp. xiii–xiv (perhaps the opposition between ‘antistructural’ pilgrimage and religious institution has to be nuanced). 5 On the relationship between peregrinatio and pilgrimage, which tends to become confused from the ninth century on, see J.L. Voillot, ‘Peregrinatio. 3. Spiritualità della peregrinatio’, Dizionario degli Istituti di Perfezione (Rome, 1983), vol. 6, p. 1433. 6 T. Špidlík, La preghiera secondo la tradizione dell’Oriente cristiano (It. tr. Rome, 2002), p. 385. 7 Bear in mind that Philo is influenced by dualism (he perceived the body and the earth as ‘strangers’). 8 A. Guillaumont, Aux origines du monachisme chrétien, p. 94. 9 Adversus haereses 4. 5. 3–4. 10 Ch. 4. 5 (the English translation is mine, as is that of the following passages not originally written in English, unless otherwise stated). most frequently recurring images to describe the itinerary of the Church in this world. However, the personal and eschatological character of the idea of peregrinatio is contained in Jesus’ saying ‘And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold, and inherit eternal life’ (Matt. 19: 29).11 The ancient idea of peregrinatio – a sort of ‘non-institutionalized monasticism’, whereas monasticism can be thought of as an ‘inner and never completely achieved peregrinatio’12 – is connected with the themes of the Exodus, exile, ‘quest’ (for God, of the bridegroom for the Canticle, afterwards for the Holy Grail and the ‘pure prayer’, as in the case of the well-known Russian pilgrim),13 pilgrimage to holy places, renunciation, detachment, and sequela Christi (Matt. 16: 24).14 In particular, the Old Testament theme of the Red Sea crossing can be interpreted, in the light of St Paul, as an exit from the flesh. Moreover, the Apostles, after renouncing all possessions (Greek apotagé), practised xeniteía by scattering across different foreign countries, aiming to acquire the right ascetic disposition to proclaim the Gospel. Becoming a stranger because of God (Greek xeniteúein dià tòn Theón) means becoming estranged from all worldly passions in order to free oneself from the psychic ‘encrustations’ of the ego, thereby clearing a space for divine grace. From one standpoint, this highlights the negative dimension of spiritual existence – represented, in the words of St John Climacus, by the monk’s ‘unheralded wisdom’, ‘unpublicized understanding’, ‘hidden life’ produced by xeniteía.15 From another, it stresses the substance of Christianity, a spirituality which turns the laws of the world upside-down in order to react against the reversal produced by the fall. From this point of view, the Eastern Christian and especially Russian ‘mad for God’16 – mad because entirely devoid of worldly worries – are an illuminating example. The itinerant life of the monkperegrinus generally gives rise to people’s disdain and strengthens the relationship between walking on the humus (Latin for ‘soil’) and achieving humilitas (Latin for ‘humility’). To cut furrows into the ‘soil of humility’ is the 11 See also, on the scriptural foundation of xeniteía, John 4: 4, Ps. 39: 13, Ps. 44: 11–12, Ps. 119: 11, Heb. 11: 13. 12 See A. Guillaumont, Aux origines du monachisme chrétien, p. 104. See also V. Turner and E. Turner, Image and Pilgrimage, pp. 33–4: ‘pilgrimage may be thought of as extroverted mysticism, just as mysticism is introverted pilgrimage’; nevertheless, ‘Pilgrimage has its inwardness, as anyone who has observed pilgrims before a shrine can attest; while mysticism has its outwardness, as evidenced by the energetic, practical lives of famous mystics such as St Theresa of Avila, St Bernard of Clairvaux, St Catherine of Siena, William Law, al-Ghazali, and Mahatma Ghandi’. 13 For an excellent Italian edition see Racconti di un pellegrino russo (4th edn., Rome, 2000). 14 E. Lanne, ‘Peregrinatio’, Dizionario degli Istituti di Perfezione (Rome, 1983), vol. 6, pp. 1424–6. For the similarity between peregrinatio and monasticism (and for the assimilation of the former to the latter) see J.L. Voillot, ‘Peregrinatio’, p. 1432. 15 Patrologia Graeca 88, 664 AB. Compare this to the idea of ‘envelopment’ in A. Scrima (below, p. 7). 16 On this see E. Montanari, La fatica del cuore. Saggio sull’ascesi esicasta (Milan, 2003), pp. 99 and 121 n. 157. main objective of the monk, and it is noteworthy that soil and humility – the latter being best represented, in the Christian tradition, by the Virgin – are two eminently feminine realities, as well as being connected in Latin by an obvious etymological relationship. Monasticism, which emerged when the institutionalization of the Church risked denying its real character by making it worldly, makes use of the condition of living as a stranger (Greek xenos, Latin peregrinus; Symeon the New Theologian said that a monk had to be a ‘stranger to the world’, Greek xenos toû kosmoû)17 in order to cut all human and profane relationships, which risk separating the monk from God, and to obtain spiritual liberation from subjection to worldly things and passions. St John Climacus’ definition of xeniteía as ‘an irrevocable renunciation of everything in one’s familiar surroundings that hinders one from attaining the ideal of holiness’18 is in this respect illuminating. From the monastic perspective, reaching God can only be achieved by eliminating all that is ‘familiar’ and, therefore, ‘passionate’, plunging into an environment where one does not have relationships. As A. Guillaumont said about the uprooting of the individual from his birthplace as a means of conversion, ‘le changement de vie est lié à un changement de lieu’.19 This is the ‘strait way’ of the Gospel (Matt. 7:14), a form of ‘spiritual warfare’ comparable to the Islamic jih?d al-akbar (Arabic for ‘great holy war’). The warlike character of this form of asceticism20 is clearly shown by the military origin of the term xeniteía:21 what is a positive attitude for ordinary people – affection for their homeland – turns out to be a ‘passion’ for monks, not an evil in itself but an obstacle in the way to God. In this sense, xeniteía is in opposition to parrhesía,22 ‘familiarity with the world’ or ‘falling into habit’,23 which inexorably and secretly erodes the kénosis (Greek for spiritual ‘emptying’) of the person; for example, John of the Ladder defined xeniteía as a ‘disposition without familiarity’ (Greek aparresíaston ethos).24 One of the most eloquent forms of xeniteía was that of Maximos of Lampsakos, an Athonite monk who continually burnt the huts he lived in (hence his sobriquet Kafsokalivítis, ‘burner of huts’) to escape the sin of pride caused by the fame he enjoyed among the faithful.25 From the comparative point of view, it is significant that the first degree of ordination for Buddhist monks is called pabbajja, ‘the departure’, the 17 Chapitres théologiques, gnostiques et pratiques, 3, 15, Sources Chrétiennes 51, 84. 18 John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, tr. C. Luibheid and N. Russell (Mahwah, NJ, 1982), p. 85, step 3, Patrologia Graeca 88, 664 A. 19 A. Guillaumont, Aux origines du monachisme chrétien, p. 89. 20 See the words of Nilus in A. Guillaumont, Aux origines du monachisme chrétien, p. 98. 21 A. Guillaumont, Aux origines du monachisme chrétien, p. 90. 22 Ibid., p. 112. Parrhesía is a Greek term which can also mean the ‘freedom of speech’ to God achieved by the experienced monk (see Eph. 6: 19). 23 A. Scrima, Il padre spirituale (partial It. tr. Comunità di Bose [Bi], 2000), p. 64. 24 Patrologia Graeca 88, 664 BC. 25 On the potential dangers of the practice of xeniteía without firm spiritual discipline, noted by Egyptian and, later, Benedictine monasticism, see A. Guillaumont, Aux origines du monachisme chrétien, pp. 108–11. ‘exit’ from the previous ‘secular’ condition. Moreover, in the same context the transformation of a person into an ascetic comes about through ‘the departure from home in the direction of a way without home’.26 Pilgrimage is a ritual and a radically centripetal act, a quest for the spiritual centre without which life has no meaning or is reduced to a fruitless tramping about. As westerners, we have almost completely lost the meaning of the symbolism of the centre.27 The fact that, when some primitive people moved away from their land of extraction, they brought a pole with them, in order to be always at the ‘centre’ of the world, is almost incomprehensible to us; they had understood that eccentricity produces eradication. Many contemporary Western literary and artistic works bear witness to this dramatic loss. In particular, the ‘obsession for travelling’ – eminently expressed by J. Kerouac’s words ‘we have to go’ – and the tendency towards uprooting shown by American beatniks in the 1950s – linked with the theme of ‘voluntary exile’ as a form of asceticism – are noteworthy examples of a trend consisting in a sort of heterodox drift partially deriving from the Christian roots of the society in which the ‘beat’ generation emerged. Moreover, the American myth of the frontier – which strongly influenced the beats – represents the unconscious profanation of human inwardness through movement that is potentially boundless and devoid of a superior orientation. In this instance it is correct to talk, not so much of ‘roaming’, but of ‘vagabonding’, a degeneration of the spiritual technique of xeniteía, since modern Western nomads, not prepared for an ascetic use of roaming, follow their own will and only want to leave in order to fill an existential void. For them, travel is simply a substitute for the drugs and image-producing creations of our civilization. On the contrary, the peregrinus knows the object of his peregrinatio or pilgrimage, and he is only superficially a vagabond. The modern obsession with travelling is partly a degeneration of the peregrinatio, being often just a sterile reaction to the alienating and anaesthetizing atmosphere of contemporary life or, in the worst cases, an escape from one’s own responsibilities. On the other hand, a marvellous example of spiritual pilgrims in continuous movement are the Russian stranniki (‘strangers’, ‘pilgrims’),28 who spend their lives visiting sanctuaries, monasteries, and churches, a prime example being the above-mentioned Russian pilgrim and his ‘initiatory journey’.29 The Russian pilgrim seems to belong to the category of the Problemwanderer (German for ‘[spiritual] problem solvers’): the 26 Ibid., pp. 115–16 (notice also the similarities with Hinduism). 27 On the symbolism of the centre see R. Guénon, Simboli della scienza sacra (It. tr., 4th edn., Milan, 1997), pp. 63–71 and 81–8. 28 On the figure of the strannik see M. Evdokimov, Pèlerins russes et vagabonds mystiques (Paris, 1987), and N. Kauchtschischwili, ‘Il pellegrinaggio in Russia e in Occidente’, in E. of Vladimir et alii, Optina Pustin’ e la paternità spirituale (It. tr. Comunità di Bose [Bi], 2003), pp. 215–16. 29 On the ‘initiatory journey’ see E. Montanari, La fatica del cuore, pp. 120 and 196. More generally, Turner maintains that ‘there is undoubtedly an initiatory quality in pilgrimage. A pilgrim is an initiand, entering into a new, deeper level of existence than he has known in his accustomed milieu. Homologous with the ordeals of tribal initiation are the trials, tribulations, and even temptations of the pilgrim’s way’ (Image and Pilgrimage, p. 8). From this point of view, we can consider the pilgrimage a sort of via crucis. stranniki ‘take the great road not only to accomplish a podvig [Russian for ‘great spiritual effort’], but to ease the anxiety harassing their existence’.30 This bears witness to the fact that the pilgrim-stranger needs to incessantly break the worldly relationships through a continuous iter which is an endless inner progression, to use Gregory of Nyssa’s words an epéktasis (a Greek word meaning a sort of ‘infinite tension’ directed towards achieving Christian perfection), with the unattainable end being ‘He who is present at the beginning, along the path and at the end of the world’.31 Mount Athos is undoubtedly one of the main vessels of traditional Christianity, broadly speaking a discrete but very strong ‘spiritual centre’. In this respect, the Romanian monk A. Scrima (1925–2000) spoke brilliantly of a topology of concealment: there are places, centres, in which tradition has its sources, with custodians, vigilant sentries, men invested with a special responsibility: places jealously ‘preserved’ [...] The consciousness [...] and the testimony of such a region [of the sources of tradition] integrate orthodoxy [...] in what I call Eastern tradition, which spreads as far as the borders [...] of Asia. They are specific assonances coming from their common orientation, in an awareness of the centre which exists, mutatis mutandis, in other traditions situated under the sign of the East.32 I have no doubt that while writing this passage Scrima was thinking, in relation to the Christian tradition, also of Mount Athos. The inner dimension of pilgrimage was subtly highlighted by the Romanian monk, who in his book Timpul Rugului Aprins (Romanian for The time of the Burning Bush) stated that ‘the monk is an envoy on the way, setting off on this path without having in mind a precise terrestrial destination to reach in order to settle down permanently. The monk is essentially an envoy, a foreign envoy’.33 Besides having come into this world as a stranger who ‘has nowhere to lay his head’ (Matt. 8: 20), the name of ‘stranger’ is explicitly attributed to Christ after his resurrection: ‘Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem...?’ (Luke 24: 18), a characteristic which is closely connected with the continuous revelation of further spiritual significances. The ‘ontological, irreducible excess’ Christ carries in himself describes his quality of ‘stranger’ and is ‘compensation’ for constitutive human weakness, the imposing of His knowledge onto those who did not recognize him.34 The ‘found seekers’ find God because he finds them first: the disciples were searching for Jesus and, before they found him, he found them. According to a part of a Muslim had?th, God said: ‘He who loves me searches for me. He who 30 N. Kauchtschischwili, Il pellegrinaggio in Russia e in Occidente, p. 233. From this point of view, a problematic but interesting comparison with the beats is possible (see above, p.00). 31 A. Scrima, Il padre spirituale, p. 58. Compare this expression with the above-quoted passage from Far?d al-D?n ‘Att?r’s Mantiqu’t Tair (above, p. 1). 32 A. Scrima, Il padre spirituale, p. 92. 33 Ibid., p. 83. 34 Ibid., pp. 24–5. searches for me, I have found him’.35 Moreover, ‘the pilgrim, the monk, and the foreign envoy are both travelling and sedentary, the ones who “stand firm”. This is precisely the hesychastic posture, opening towards others and, above all, opening itself towards the zenith. Such an interpretation actualizes the very posture of the hesychast: sedebit solitarius et tacebit. He stands still and is, simultaneously, in perpetual passage. This is by no means an oxymoron, but an absolutely necessary juxtaposition in our condition of finitude in space and time. Given the structure of our physical condition, in order to be stable we must be in movement: “He who stands must be careful not to fall”. “Stability” in this sense means an inner fulfilment, not only inside the personal being, but inside the spiritual being. As such it means a spreading in the spirit beyond the limits of the individual person; it is, at one and the same time, an envelopment and a development’.36 Here the author is concerned with a point central to the spiritual hermeneutics of the pilgrimage which is, as already stated,37 a symbol of the Christian life and most especially of monasticism: the relationship between peregrinatio and stabilitas,38 movement and stability, well represented in the figure and function of the spiritual father (Greek geron, Russian starec, Arabic shaykh, Sanskrit guru), who stands as an envoy, in accordance with a paradoxical combination of itinerancy and immobility: ‘the monk is stable only when he keeps in motion [...] refusing every [...] solidification ([...] herein lies the difference between the spiritual father and the classical confessor, the latter being of necessity more stable, “established”)’.39 The compatibility of peregrinatio with stabilitas is possible if the former is considered from a spiritual perspective: the idea of a peregrinatio in stabilitate, well known in medieval Latin monasticism,40 is the result of the process to interiorize xeniteía, realized in Egyptian monasticism.41 In like manner, the need to spiritualize the peregrinatio corresponds, in the words of P. Evdokimov,42 to the need for an ‘interiorized monasticism’ in the ‘desert of the contemporary cities’.43 The becoming is a form, a manifestation of the Being: from another point of view, ‘existence is but a movable image of stability’.44 Paradoxically, stability in God can be reached 35 Quoted ibid., p. 27. 36 Ibid., p. 76 (my italics). 37 Above, p. 2. 38 On the ‘stability of the monk’ see I. Hausherr, Hésychasme et prière, Orientalia Christiana Analecta series no. 176 (Rome, 1966), p. 197, and, concerning Eastern Christianity, E. Herman, ‘La ‘stabilitas loci’ nel monachesimo bizantino’, Orientalia Christiana Periodica, 21 (1955), 115–42. 39 A. Scrima, Il padre spirituale, p. 40. 40 In the Benedictine rule stabilitas and peregrinatio are opposed in favour of the former, while Irish monasticism reconciled the two. 41 A. Guillaumont, Aux origines du monachisme chrétien, p. 113. 42 P. Evdokimov, Sacramento dell’amore: il mistero coniugale secondo la tradizione ortodossa (It. tr. Sotto il Monte [Bg], 1966), pp. 108–11; id., Le età della vita spirituale (It. tr. Bologna, 1981), pp. 143, 246ff. 43 E. Montanari, La mistica: fattore di comunione nel cammino ecumenico (Rome, 2002), typed, p. 10. 44 Scrima, Il padre spirituale, p. 65. through continuous roaming which refuses every relationship and compromise with the world, especially since detachment from ordinary life makes dangers more obvious – and, consequently, dependence on God more perceptible. Movement and stability are respectively represented by the complementary but radically distinct symbols of the circle and of the square, ‘the two essential figures of the appearance of the world’, which refer to the dynamism and to the firmness of reality.45 Traditional pilgrimage to Mount Athos is constantly threatened by the penetration of modern conveniences, which discreetly but profoundly make life on the Holy Mountain more and more comfortable – and therefore less and less directed to man’s awareness of his radical dependence on God.46 To this end, technology may be thought of as a modern form of Titanism based on the misinterpretation of Genesis 1: 28. Back in 1977, Philip Sherrard, known mainly for his excellent translation of the Philokalía from Greek into English (in collaboration with Gerald Palmer and Metropolitan Kallistos Ware), appealed against this improper modernization, saying that ‘the paths of Athos – those venerable paths over which the feet of countless monks and pilgrims have walked for a thousand years and more – are disappearing.’47 By a process dating back to the 1950s, new means of transportation, which to a large extent replaced the traditional mule tracks or footpaths, led to ‘the whole rhythm and pattern of movement on Athos’ being ‘completely changed’.48 Sherrard’s words ring clear: because of the introduction of modern technologies on Athos, the sense, the possibility itself, of the pilgrimage is undermined, if not destroyed. There is a whole psychology, even a whole doctrine, of pilgrimage [...] a pilgrimage is not simply a matter of getting to a particular shrine or holy place. It is a deliberate sundering and surrender of one’s habitual conditions of comfort, routine, safety, convenience [...] the pilgrim sets out on a quest which is inward as much as outward, and is, in varying degrees, into the unknown. In this sense, he becomes the image of the spiritual seeker [...] Of this spiritual exploration, inward and outward, walking is an essential part. His feet tread the earth from which he is made and from which he is usually so cut off, especially in the more or less totally urbanized conditions of modern life [...] The crucial point in all this is that a pilgrimage is a process which must not be hurried.49 Here the opposition between pilgrimage and modern travelling50 – and the incompatible psychological dispositions at the root of the two – is very evident: while pilgrimage is a spiritual and physical effort, a sacrifice, even an áskesis 45 Ibid., p. 82 n. 36. 46 P. Sherrard, ‘The Paths of Athos’, Eastern Churches Review, 9: 1 (1977), 106. 47 Ibid. p. 101. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., pp. 101–2 (my italics). On the involuntary contribution of monks to the ‘modernization’ of Mount Athos and its causes see ibid., pp. 103ff., where the author talks about the infiltration of ‘a form of Manichaeism’ on the Holy Mountain. 50 Ibid., p. 102. (Greek for ‘exercise’), modern travelling is generally comfortable and undertaken simply out of aesthetic curiosity for the exotic and what we have just called ‘loss of the centre’. In conclusion, I would like to devote a few words to my personal experience as a pilgrim to the Holy Mountain. In 2005, between late August and early September, I had the privilege to make my first journey to Mount Athos. Beyond the marvellous liturgy and art of Athos, there were two unforgettable ‘highlights’ of the journey. The first was a ‘pilgrimage’ to Kafsokalivia. Accompanied by two friends, I took the path from St Anne’s to the very isolated skete located in the area known as the ‘Athonite desert’, at the southern tip of the Athonite peninsula. Seven hours were needed, and to say that getting there was exhausting is a gross understatement. Initially I felt great disappointment at its run-down atmosphere and the indifference shown by the monks. However, having adapted to the alien environment and met an icon painter and an aged Hesychast – Kafsokalivia is considered one of the main centres of iconography and Hesychasm on the Holy Mountain – something dawned on me. I realized it was not a question of indifference, but of detachment. I would like to return to Kafsokalivia, a place where I found a delicate, discreet presence, something I cannot even say of Athos itself. The other highlight was the movements, gestures, faces, and looks of some of the monks met en route. In Hesychasm, the devotee, invoking a formula endowed with sense for ascetic ends, in a context characterized by an ‘affective’ (but not sentimental) connotation, aims to establish a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. The notion of ‘person’, established by Roman jurisprudence, received substantial theological and anthropological contributions from Christianity. On the basis of Boethius’ classical definition as ‘rationalis naturae individua substantia’,51 it has rendered more and more explicit its own constitutive features of relationship, incommunicability, self-consciousness, freedom, duties, rights, and inalienable dignities.52 The face of God, which is the person of the Son,53 could be thought of as a ‘protection’, ‘covering’ of the unattainable apophatic level of the transcendent. Therefore, personality defines itself, in the Latin origin of the term (which means ‘mask’), as the face of God turned to man – which results in the possibility of a concrete relationship between the two54 – and, at the same time, as the mask of the inaccessible divine essence (Greek ousía). In traditional exegesis, ‘face’ and ‘look’ refer to the biblical notions of ‘image’ and ‘resemblance’: the look being, according to P. Florensky, 51 Boethius, De duabus naturis et una persona Christi, Patrologia Latina 64, 1343 D. 52 G. O’Collins and E. Farrugia, Dizionario sintetico di teologia (It. tr. Vatican City, 1995), pp. 278-9. 53 G. Bunge, Vasi d’argilla: la prassi della preghiera personale secondo la tradizione dei santi padri (It. tr. Comunità monastica SS. Trinità, Magnano [Bi], 1998), p. 10. On the relationship between ‘person’ (Greek hypóstasis) and ’face’ (Greek prósopon) see C. Schönborn, L’icona di Cristo. Fondamenti teologici (3rd edn., Cinisello Balsamo [Mi], 2003), pp. 34–6. 54 See Bunge’s penetrating comments on the connection between the notion of relation, personality, and face (Vasi d’argilla, pp. 10–12). ‘the resemblance to God caught on one’s face’.55 On Athos I found the proof of what that great Orthodox theologian once wrote: ‘saints bear witness to God through mysterious action, they bear witness through their looks’.56 This article reproduced here by The Matheson Trust with kind permission from the author. www.themathesontrust.org 55 P. Florenskij, Le porte regali. Saggio sull’icona (9th edn., It. tr. Milan, 2004), pp. 43–4. 56 Ibid., p. 56.
- [Pilgrimage to the Holy Mountain](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/pilgrimage-holy-mountain) - Pilgrimage to the Holy Mountain ©2007 James S. Cutsinger This article also appears on Professor Cutsinger’s weblog, Anamn?sis, together with a number of photographs: http://www.cutsinger.net/wordpress2/?page_id=68. For several years my son, Trevor, and I had discussed the possibility of making a pilgrimage to the Holy Mountain of Athos, the world’s only monastic republic, located on the easternmost peninsula of Halkidiki in northern Greece. Renowned for its natural beauty and the numberless treasures of its ancient Byzantine monasteries, this “Garden of the Theotokos” has been the spiritual center of Eastern Orthodox Christianity for over a thousand years, and for Orthodox men—women are not permitted—it is in many ways the equivalent of what Lhasa is (or rather was) for the Tibetan Buddhist and of what Mecca is for the Muslim. In early June of 2007, the moment seemed right for this long-anticipated journey, and we set out for Greece, flying first to Thessaloniki, where we visited the Church of Saint Gregory Palamas (1296-1359), venerating the relics of this great defender of the Athonite monks and their practice of hesychasm, before taking a taxi to the small seaside village of Ouranoupolis, whence one departs for the Mountain on the daily ferryboat, traveling along the Singitic Gulf side of the peninsula. Disembarking at the port of Zographou and hiking the first day to the opposite side of the peninsula, we made our way in a clockwise direction, traveling to the communities of Vatopedi, Stravronikita, Iveron, the Great Lavra, Prodromos, Agia Anna, and Simonopetra. A number of students, friends, family members, academic colleagues, and fellow Orthodox Christians have asked about our pilgrimage, and it seemed the best response I could offer was to type up a few of the entries from my journal while the experience was still relatively fresh in my mind. The results—largely travelogue, but in part meditation— are here made available to the wider audience afforded by my website and weblog. I am the first to recognize how inadequate these words are to the realities concerned. It is my hope nonetheless that this brief and necessarily idiosyncratic account might be a source, if not of inspiration or instruction, then at least of enjoyment for a few of my readers. Day One: Wednesday, 13 June — Ouranoupolis to Vatopedi Up at 6:30 a.m. we arrived in the lobby of our hotel—the Zeus—for breakfast at 7:45, but were told by the manager we would be well advised to secure our diamonitiria (the special permits one must have for entrance to the Mountain) and tickets for the ferry as soon as possible, so we headed to the Pilgrims’ Office, just a five minute walk from the hotel. Having stopped there yesterday, we were prepared to show our passports and reservations, and to pay the 55-Euro charge. We then walked back to the hotel and had just seated ourselves for breakfast when I heard a hearty voice across the lobby call, “So look who’s here!” It was Vincent Rossi, my former colleague at Rose Hill College, who had just arrived in town with a friend. They had come to interview someone associated with the village’s famous Byzantine tower. Vincent and I had exchanged a few emails in the spring, so he knew in general terms of our plan to come to Athos but did not know our dates. We visited with them for a half hour or so and then, having shouldered our backpacks, headed to the quay to board the ferry—along with the daily quota of roughly one hundred other men, together with an assortment of trucks and vans carrying supplies to the monasteries. The ferry is named the Axion Estin after one of the Mountain’s most famous icons. Axion estin is Greek for “It is truly meet”, the opening words of an Orthodox hymn to the Virgin: “It is truly meet to bless thee, O Theotokos, ever blessed, and most pure, and the Mother of our God. More honorable than the cherubim, and beyond compare more glorious than the seraphim, without corruption Thou gavest birth to God the Word. Thou art truly Theotokos, and we magnify Thee.” The second, and older, part of the hymn, beginning with the words, “More honorable than the cherubim”, is attributed to Saint Cosmas the Hymnographer (eighth century). According to Athonite tradition, however, the words of the first sentence—commencing with the phrase Axion estin— were revealed by the Archangel Gabriel to a monk of the Mountain in the year 980. One Saturday, it seems, a geron (spiritual elder) left his cell to attend the all-night vigil in Karyes, capital of the Holy Mountain, telling his disciple to chant the services alone. That evening an unknown monk came to the cell, and he and the disciple began the vigil together, but during the Ninth Ode of the Canon of the Matins service, when they began to sing the Magnificat, the visiting monk inserted the words “It is truly meet...” and then continued with “More honorable than the Cherubim....”; as he sang, the icon of the Theotokos began to radiate with Uncreated Light. When the disciple asked his mysterious visitor to write down the new words, he took a roof tile and wrote upon it with his finger as though the tile were made of wax. The disciple knew then this was no ordinary monk, but the Archangel Gabriel. The angel disappeared, but the icon—which now hangs in the Church of the Protaton in Karyes and is referred to as the Axion Estin— continued to radiate light for some time and has been the source of numerous miracles over the course of the centuries. In any case this other, seaworthy Axion Estin left the dock promptly at the appointed time of 9:45 a.m. About a half hour later we rounded a bend in the undulating coastline and were treated to our first glimpse of Athos itself, at this point just a gray silhouette barely visible in the distance through the morning mist. It took about another half hour to reach the arsanas (port) of the Bulgarian Monastery of Zographou, where we had elected to disembark. (Most pilgrims continue further along the coast to the port village of Daphne.) We had carefully studied what we thought was a good topographical map—namely, Wege am Athos by the Austrian Reinhold Zwerger, recommended by the Friends of Mount Athos—and had come to the conclusion it would be a relatively easy hike from there to Zographou itself and then on across the peninsula to Vatopedi, where we had arranged to stay our first night. I also inquired about this plan at the Pilgrims’ Office, only to receive confirmation that this was indeed a reasonable itinerary. Well, hike we did, but not for the “three hours or so” we were told it would probably take us. In fact, owing in part to a short detour with a pilgrim from Germany who had lost his way, but also to our own frequent stops along the path to take in a sudden glimpse of the Mountain, to offer a prayer at a wayside shrine, to enjoy the many varieties of beautiful wildflowers, and to make certain of our bearings by cross-checking our map with the occasional sign, it took us nearly three to reach Zographou, and I believe it would have taken at least another two to get to Vatopedi—if, that is, we’d not ourselves gotten rather seriously lost! It was approaching mid-afternoon when we found ourselves at the end of a tortuous, unusually rocky, and increasingly thorny path. The cobblestones simply disappeared in the middle of a hillside meadow, and our compass did us no good since we were no longer sure in which direction our destination lay. The only signs of civilization were two abandoned wooden platforms, each constructed atop four roughly hewn logs and positioned at a height of perhaps eight to ten feet from the ground. Could these be, we wondered, the surviving workmanship of some bygone Athonite stylites? We inquired about this more than once afterward, but none of the monks we asked had ever seen or heard of such thing. In any case it was beginning to look as though we might have to spend our first night in the wilderness—and without the benefit of our own styloi (pillars)! All we knew to do was entreat the Mother of God for Her help and start retracing our steps to the main road. As Heaven would have it, our coming to that road coincided exactly with our meeting a man coming down a small side path from the opposite direction, and next to this path, as we could see very clearly now, was a sign marked (in Greek) “To Vatopedi”—a sign either both of us had missed or that had not been there before.... Be that as it may, there is little doubt we would once again have failed to take the proper turn were it not for the striding figure who had suddenly caught our attention at just the right instant, but who had now, just as suddenly, disappeared into the forest. The strange thing was that this fellow had no backpack (unlike most of the pilgrims we met), and he was clearly not a monk; and rather than sturdy hiking shoes he was wearing sandals. Indeed his overall appearance was that of someone going out for a rather casual stroll, which led us to conclude that the monastery must be just a few minutes away. So imagine our surprise as we trudged on and on and on, only to discover that Vatopedi was still another two hours away—over difficult ground, including a rocky descent of about one thousand feet to the northern coast, to match of course the thousand feet we had ascended at the start of the day. So: man or angel? Either way he had evidently performed an angelic function! It is indeed “truly meet to bless Thee, O Theotokos”. We finally arrived at Vatopedi about 5:45 p.m., almost exactly seven hours after setting out in the morning. We were drenched with perspiration, exhausted, and extremely thirsty, having consumed the last of our water (thinking we were nearly finished with our hike) about an hour and half earlier. A monk in the gatehouse took our diamonitiria and told us that Vespers was in progress and that we would need to wait until it was over to see the guest master. Fortunately, as we were stumbling about the courtyard trying to find the catholikon (central church of a monastery), the guest master appeared, introducing us in turn to an American monk, Father Matteus, who knew me from his visit to Rose Hill in 1996. The monks and guests were soon called into the trapeza (refectory) for supper—and some welcome water!—after which we were invited to go to the catholikon to hear a short talk about Vatopedi’s history and architecture and venerate several miracle-working icons and the holy relics. These included a piece of the true Cross and the skulls of Saints Gregory the Theologian (329-89) and John Chrysostom (c. 347-407), the latter with its left ear completely incorrupt and visible behind a small piece of glass inside a little lid on the silver reliquary. Father Matteus explained that this was the ear, according to tradition, into which Saint Paul had been seen to whisper while Saint John was writing his homilies on Romans. Vatopedi also possesses the zone (sash) of the Theotokos, which is known for effecting many cures, especially for women who are experiencing difficult or dangerous pregnancies, but also for people with cancer. Small pieces of cloth that have been touched to the sash and that are reputed to have the same thaumaturgical benefits are available to pilgrims who request them, and we did this before our departure the following morning. I think of Philip Sherrard’s description of pilgrimage when I reflect on this, our first day on the Mountain: “A pilgrimage is not simply a matter of getting to a particular shrine or holy place. It is a deliberate sundering and surrender of one’s habitual conditions of comfort, routine, safety, convenience. Unlike the tourist, whose aim is to see things and to travel around in conditions which are as comfortable, secure, familiar, convenient, and unchallenging as possible, the pilgrim breaks with his material servitude, puts his trust in God, and sets out on a quest which is inward as much as outward. In this sense he becomes the image of the spiritual seeker. He removes himself as far as possible from the artificiality within which he is enclosed by his life in society. Of this spiritual exploration, inward and outward, walking is an essential part. His feet tread the earth—the earth from which he is made and from which he is usually so cut off. Through his eyes, ears, nose, he renews his sense of natural beauty. He watches the flight of bird or insect, the ripple of light on leaves, the timeless vistas of the sea; he listens to the song of water, the call of God’s creatures; he breathes in the scent of tree and flower and soil. His feet tire, his body aches, sweat drips from his head and trickles into his eyes and down his neck. He tastes rigor and hardship. But through all this—and only through all this, and through his prayer and dedication and confidence—slowly an inner change is wrought, a new rhythm grows, a deeper harmony. The pilgrimage is at work” (“The Paths of Athos”, Eastern Churches Review, Vol. 9:1-2 [1977], p. 102). Day Two: Thursday, 14 June — Vatopedi to Stavronikita A less eventful—and blessedly less rigorous!—day began with our attending Orthros in the catholikon followed by the Divine Liturgy in the oldest of the monastery’s chapels. I neglected to mention in my entry for Wednesday that Vatopedi is the largest community on the Mountain; there are currently about one hundred monks, and the brotherhood’s numerous buildings include thirty-four separate chapels. Owing to the large number of pilgrims and the relatively small size of the catholikon, the Liturgy is normally served simultaneously in a number of different locations. The chanters during Orthros were excellent, and I was particularly struck by something I had never seen before: in addition to the two lead chanters, who sang antiphonally from each side of the nave, there was a third monk who strode quite rapidly back and forth between them, the wide sleeves of his cassock billowing in the breeze he created. He would arrive just in time at each kliros (chanter’s stand) to intone a given verse of the Psalms while the chanter on that side was singing the appropriate sticheron (special hymn)—or at least I think this is what might have been happening! There was much to attend to on many levels. After breakfast we decided to begin making our way toward the monastery of Stavronikita even though we had been granted the abbot’s blessing to stay a second night at Vatopedi. Several friends who have been to the Mountain had recommended to me that we try to spend at least two days in at least one of the monasteries in order to get a sense of the daily rhythm of monastic life. This would doubtless have been a most rewarding experience, but we were eager to see as many different communities as possible, and Trevor was especially keen on exploring as much of the natural environment as we could. Perhaps on a future visit I shall attempt to stay put for a longer time in one place. Before leaving we stopped by the monastery’s bookstore and there secured what has proven to be a much better map (the Road Editions of “Mount Athos”) along with a little booklet on “The Paths of Agion Oros” (published by Lectus). I would strongly recommend both of these to prospective hikers over the Zwerger map. Most pilgrims spend only four days (and three nights) on Mount Athos, but we had decided early in our planning that we would try to stay a full week. Since the diamonitiria the Pilgrims’ Office had issued us were only for the usual, shorter period, we had been advised that we would need to request an extension of these permits after our arrival on the Mountain. Extensions are granted at the headquarters of the Holy Epistasia in the capital, Karyes, so to Karyes we decided to go. This proved a fruitless detour, however, since the monk in charge of the approval process was away from his office and was not expected back until afternoon. Therefore, having first purchased some fruit in one of the little shops in the village, we headed down the road toward Stavronikita. This was quite an easy walk of only an hour and half, though it was along one of the Mountain’s rather dusty and not very agreeable forest roads, many of which have been only recently cut—partly in the interest (we were told by one monk) of bringing in water more rapidly in the event of forest fires, though also in order to deal with the increasing numbers of visitors. Stavronikita we have found to be a perfectly exquisite little gem. I am writing these words very comfortably seated on a little couch on a balcony overlooking the deep blues and greens of the Aegean with the (quite uncharacteristically) unclouded peak of Athos rising directly in front of me, framed against the bright afternoon sky. Reaching the monastery about 1:15 p.m., we have spent a quiet and relaxing afternoon and early evening exploring the grounds—including the eighteenth-century Chapel of Saint Demetrius of Thessaloniki (fourth century) at the edge of the cemetery; relaxing in our room and taking short naps; listening to the sounds of the waves on the rocks about a hundred feet beneath our guestroom windows; sitting along the water’s edge and reading; attending Vespers; enjoying a delicious supper of pasta, tomatoes, onions, bread, and apricots; and visiting with the guest master, Father Palamas, who gave us little icon cards of Saint Nicholas (also fourth century), the patron of the catholikon, as well as some holy oil. After Compline we had the opportunity to venerate the monastery’s relics, which include those of The Three Holy Siblings (my epithet, not the tradition’s!): Saint Basil the Great (c. 330-79), Saint Gregory of Nyssa (c. 330-c. 395), and Saint Macrina the Younger (324-79). I have very much enjoyed our stay in this little community and shall make a point of coming here again if and when I am able to return to Athos. It is the smallest of the monasteries, both in terms of physical size and number of monks (just twenty or so at this time), and for this reason attracts fewer pilgrims, which means in turn of course that it affords the physical traveler who aspires to be a spiritual traveler a very quiet setting—a superb place for making a retreat of several days. A younger monk, and relative newcomer to the Mountain, told us of being invited to go on a walk with an eighty-five-year-old elder and his disciple, and of the old man scampering along the path as if he were a mountain goat! It is customary in Eastern Christian spiritual practice for a disciple to externalize, and thus objectify, his thoughts—both good and bad—by telling them all to his spiritual master. At one point the disciple said, “Father, I have just had a thought, and would like your blessing to express it.” And of course the blessing was given. “My thought was ... to push you off the cliff!” The elder just laughed and said it was of the devil, who knew that in killing his spiritual master the disciple would only hurt 9 himself. The story was told to illustrate the great freedom and love involved in radical openness. Day Three: Friday, 15 June — Stavronikita to Iveron We rose this morning at 5:00 a.m. to catch the end of Orthros and then the Liturgy. Since “breakfast” would not be served until mid-day, Father Palamas, knowing we needed to leave fairly early, kindly offered us some bread, homemade apricot jelly, and water, as we sat under the grape arbor just outside the guesthouse. Another, older monk also gave Trevor a small cross he had fashioned from the seeds of olives. We had arranged the night before to share a “taxi” with four Greek pilgrims, rather than walking back up the same dusty road we came down yesterday. The taxis are eight-to-ten-person vans, some driven by monks, though in this case the driver was a layman. Arriving in Karyes around 9:00 a.m., we elected first to walk up the hill on the northeast side of the village to the Skete of Saint Andreas, a dependency of Vatopedi that boasts the largest catholikon on the Mountain—owing in large part to the patronage of two Russian czars. The skete was virtually abandoned at the time of the Russian Revolution, however, and the monks’ quarters and other outbuildings are now very dilapidated. As elsewhere on the Mountain, extensive restoration work is in progress— we saw a large bell that had been brought down from the tower for cleaning—and lay workers were all about, together I fear with considerable litter, which we have noticed at a number of construction sites. We were able to take a very brief (and unauthorized!) peek inside at the huge, gilded iconostasis (icon screen) before being scolded by one of the workers. Back down to the village we went again to the Office of the Holy Epistasia and were this time able to secure the needed extension on our permits. That task accomplished, Trevor agreed to guard our backpacks for a few minutes while I browsed in a couple of shops, looking at icons and such. When I returned I found him engrossed in conversation with a monk, who turned out to be someone mentioned to us just the day before yesterday by Vincent Rossi and his traveling companion. I had expressed my bemusement at the fact that many of these ancient monasteries now have fax machines, 10 and Vincent’s friend had replied, “Fax machines? That’s nothing. I correspond with a monk in one of the sketes who uploads things to the Internet on his solar-powered laptop!” Well, as Providence would have it, out of the two or three thousand other Athonite possibilities, this turned out to be the very same computer-savvy father. Trevor had apparently not yet mentioned our surname, so when I introduced myself, the monk’s eyes grew wide and then immediately narrowed: “So you’re James Cutsinger! You’re that crazy, mixed-up Sufi!” Somewhat taken aback, I nonetheless had the presence of mind to reply, “On what authority do you say that?” To which he replied, “By my own authority!” “On what grounds?” I then asked. At this point, he faked a flurry of punches to my jaw, and simply said, “GRRR!” I confess it is still not clear to me, even after a few more minutes of rather tense conversation, what he might have read of mine or heard about me, but I suspect he must have seen my contribution to the Paths to the Heart: Sufism and Christian East conference and book: “Hesychia: An Orthodox Opening to Esoteric Ecumenism”. I had fully intended to keep my perennialism to myself on the Mountain, not realizing I would be dealing with such widely read, or highly “wired”, monks! At this point we bought some apples, peaches, and nuts in one of the shops and, having fortified ourselves for more hiking, headed out of town, passing through the grounds of Koutloumousiou Monastery on the outskirts of Karyes, and then along a very beautiful—and thankfully well-marked—cobble-stone path, which wound through a wooded glen or two, past a tiny wayside chapel, and then across an old stone bridge, extending over a small waterfall and rapids. We arrived at our next destination, the Monastery of Iveron, about 2:00 p.m. and were welcomed by the guest master, Father Jeremiah. He had no record of the reservation I had made by telephone some months ago, but having looked over a copy of the letter and fax I had also sent to the monastery, and having learned of my friendship with Father John Chryssavgis—like him a Greek Australian, who had recommended we visit Iveron—he was ready enough to offer us some very satisfying accommodations. The afternoon was spent reading, taking a few photographs of the environs—including the curious figure of what appeared to be a black woman on the catholikon cupola—and doing some laundry. We then attended Vespers at 11 6:00 p.m. in the catholikon. One of the cantors was by far the best we have heard yet: he seemed to have a kind of river of Byzantine sound running through him, and when he opened his mouth it flowed forth as if with no effort. Vespers was immediately followed by a short akathist service in a chapel near the gate, where we were able to venerate the monastery’s best-known icon, the wonder-working Panagia Portaitissa, or “All-Holy Keeper of the Gate”. Tradition has it that this sacred image of the Theotokos and Christ, painted by Saint Luke and miraculously preserved through the centuries, found its way into the possession of a poor widow in Nicaea during the time of the iconoclastic controversy. At the Virgin’s instruction, the widow placed the icon into the sea to preserve it from destruction, and to her amazement it did not sink but floated away upright on the waves. Many years later it came to the Holy Mountain, arriving near the Monastery of Iveron, once again floating on the waves—“in a pillar of fire”, as the Athonite narrative recounts. The Mother of God appeared in a vision to a holy monk of the monastery named Gabriel, telling him She wished for his brotherhood to have Her icon for their help and salvation; by his faith in Her power he was able “to walk on the waters as though on dry land”, bringing it to shore and placing it in the altar of the catholikon. The next morning, however, the monks found the icon was missing, having been moved—or having moved itself—to a position near the gate of the monastery. It was returned to the altar, but the next day was found again at the gate. This scenario was repeated a third time, at which point the Theotokos spoke from the icon, informing the monks, “It is not for you to guard Me, but for Me to guard you!” Hence the name Portaitissa, and hence its present position in its own special chapel by the gate. A monk reflected on his family: parents who are now in their eighties, an older sister, a younger brother. His mother had given him her blessing to come to Mount Athos, but was very sad at his decision to do so, until she saw pictures of his tonsuring. Then she said it all began to make perfect sense to her. He spoke of the paradox of feeling closer to certain people in the world, including the members of his family, now that he was separated from them physically, while others—whom he had formerly thought were important—had nearly dissolved in his memory. 12 Day Four: Saturday, 16 June — Iveron to the Great Lavra Having been warned against trying to hike the exceptionally tortuous and poorly marked footpath from Iveron to our next destination, the Holy Monastery of the Great Lavra, and not wishing to follow the only alternative land route—one of the newly bulldozed, and very dusty, forest roads, which would have taken us five hours or so—we elected to travel by water. One of the monks in the bookstore was kind enough to telephone the captain of a little boat (named “Saint Athanasios the Athonite”) that trolls up and down the coast of the peninsula shuttling pilgrims between the monasteries, and arrangements were made for us to be picked up at Iveron’s arsanas at 10:00 a.m. We had managed to find a couple of rather scrawny apples and a handful of raisins in the guest house and made a breakfast of these as we waited for the boat, which appeared about 10:20. It was a very quick trip of about thirty minutes down the coast to the port of the Lavra and then a climb of maybe three or four hundred feet up to the monastery itself. Drenched with perspiration—as is becoming our custom!—we signed ourselves in at the guesthouse and were assigned what proved to be our poorest accommodations on the Mountain, which we shared with two Venetian pilgrims: a tiny room with even tinier windows would make the night a very hot one—though the windows, we later discovered, were plenty large enough to accommodate the entry of several dozen mosquitoes! The afternoon was spent with the usual explorations and a short rest, lying on the hillside just outside the east wall overlooking the sea. The Great Lavra, which stands near the southeastern tip of the peninsula, is the oldest of the monasteries, having been founded in 963 by Saint Athanasios the Athonite (c. 920-c. 1000), and it therefore ranks first in hierarchical order among the twenty “ruling monasteries” of the Mountain. Like most of the others, it is laid out in the form of a small medieval town, surrounded on all sides by high walls, punctuated in this case by fifteen towers. It is also like several others in that it is undergoing extensive repair. I confess there is something rather disconcerting about the site of a brightly painted red tower crane rising high above a tenth century Byzantine fortress! Of special interest were a number of icons in the porch of the catholikon featuring scenes from the Last Judgment: brightly colored and gilded saints enjoying the glories of Heaven were set in contrast to gigantic whales with huge teeth 13 consuming torrential downhill flows of naked sinners; or again—to make it clear to the fathers that they themselves are by no means exempt from this final assize!—a ladder crowded with monks, some successfully (if painstakingly) climbing to the top with the help of attending angels, while others were being clawed at and pulled from the ladder by demons. Vespers was at 6:00 p.m. with two excellent chanters (one at each kliros), and as at Vatopedi there was a third monk shuttling back and forth to intone the verses. I was particularly struck by the periodic lowering, lighting, and raising of small candelabra; one on each side of the church, they were attached to ropes and raised and lowered by means of pulleys. After a light supper of boiled potatoes, salad, and bread we returned to the catholikon to venerate the relics, including those of Saint Basil the Great, Stephen the Protomartyr, Saint Anne, Saint Andreas (the Apostle Andrew), and of course Saint Athanasios, the founder of the monastery, who is entombed in the narthex. We were relaxing in the courtyard afterward when one of the monks, Father Efstathios, came by and volunteered to take us on a short tour of the Great Lavra environs beyond the west wall. He showed us the monastery’s water-driven olive press (no longer in use), and then took us to the charnel house where we were able to look through a small slatted gate and see a few of the twenty-five thousand skeletons—or rather parts thereof—that are housed there, among them those of thirty-five ecumenical patriarchs. Next he took us further up the hill, passing the small cave of a hermit just a few feet from the trail. “The heart should be a cave,” Father Efstathios quietly commented, “even if you live in the world.” We came at last to an area strewn with a number of ancient boulders, the remnants of a pre-Christian shrine. The monk explained that there had been a pagan settlement on this site, though all the inhabitants were long since gone by the time the first Christians arrived on the Mountain in the third or fourth century. One of the boulders had been carved on one side so as to serve as a sundial; another had the faint etching of a face, presumably that of a deity. Nearby was a tiny rock chapel, built by Saint Athanasios, who had been told by the Theotokos he must erect a church and then celebrate a liturgy in it, 14 all within the space of a single day, in order to drive away the pagan gods who lived there, thus making the place safe for a monastery. Hence the tiny size of the chapel! A few of the many monkish incongruities we have noticed as we travel the Mountain: a monk driving a backhoe, a monk operating a forklift, and— most curious of all!—a monk at the helm of a speedboat. Or are these incongruities? It has been difficult to understand how, or why, the fathers have begun to allow so much of the “world” to intrude into their life here. While readily acknowledging the problems this poses, one monk with whom we discussed the question observed that historically the technological “level” of Athos has been more or less “up to” that of the outside world, the only real exception being during the period of decline from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, when the Mountain became, unintentionally, more of a Byzantine museum than a living community. With the incursion of electricity, telephones, fax machines, roads, taxis, tower cranes, and so forth, the more typical pattern of the past is reasserting itself. Of course the principial question remains of where one draws the line. Day Five: Sunday, 17 June — Great Lavra to Prodromos The simantron (a wooden board, or sometimes metal bar, that is rhythmically struck with a mallet) began to sound in the courtyard around 3:15 or 3:30 a.m., followed soon afterward—this being a Sunday—by the monastery’s bells, which were rung by our new friend Father Efstathios. We attended all the services this morning—about six and a half hours altogether—including a blessing of the waters in the phiale (the largest on Athos), which is situated just outside the catholikon beneath a thousand-year-old cypress tree said to have been planted by Saint Athanasios himself. With only some fruit and nuts, a few small potatoes and salad, and a little bread the day before, I was more than ready when we were called to the trapeza around 9:45. Following a “brunch” of beans cooked in tomato sauce, bread, water, wine, and a little chocolate cracker something, we packed our things and headed down the path to our next destination, the Romanian Skete of Prodromos (that is, “the Forerunner”, which is the epithet in the Orthodox East for Saint John the Baptist). Arriving about 1:00 p.m., we checked in with the guest master by pantomime, he knowing no English and we no Romanian, and then, having dropped our backpacks off in our room, we continued our hike a half hour or so further along the road, following the signs to Saint Athanasios’s Cave, which is reached by descending a steep 15 cliff leading down toward the sea. We found a quiet, shaded spot near the cave and spent some time reading, praying, drinking in the spectacular view, and writing in our journals. Back at the skete, Vespers was from 4:00 to 5:30. A word or two should be interpolated at some point—and this is as good a place as any—concerning the carved wooden choir stalls that are positioned along the walls and around the pillars in the several churches we have visited, and sitting or standing in which we have spent a great deal of our time. With a seat that folds down for “full sitting” or up for “half sitting” or leaning, I find them to be very cleverly constructed affairs. For it is thus left up to the occupant whether to stand all the time, if his aim is to be as ascetical as possible, or only at key points in the services. During the two (or more) hours of services that take place every morning in a darkness illumined by only a few oil lamps and candles—well before the sun has even begun to think about peeking through the windows!—the stalls become handy places to doze. When “half sitting” you can rest yourself on the arms of the stall, nodding your head down to your chest, or when “full sitting” you can lean yourself back or to one side for a more thorough and satisfying slumber! Trevor was somewhat chagrined one morning to discover he had more or less slept through all of Orthros, but he felt better when I told him I had seen more than one monk do the same. Perhaps I should add, since this is now a public document, that I mean no disrespect whatsoever by this observation; on the contrary, it is one more positive sign of Orthodoxy’s utter realism—of its recognition that a man is entitled to his finitude even on his way toward theosis, its characteristic sense that all of life, even sleep, is somehow caught up in the dance of prayer. I think of the Zen master Bankei, who objected to the use of the keisaku stick in the meditation hall on the grounds that “even a sleeping man is still a Buddha”! This was my first in-person experience with Romanian chant, a very beautiful combination of Byzantine melodies with some simple polyphony. The thirty or so monks made many more proskyneses (full prostrations) during the course of the service than their Greek counterparts do, not only when venerating the icons but also, more rapidly and rhythmically, when repeating Doamne, miluie?te, Romanian for “Lord, have mercy”. After Vespers it was supper in the trapeza as usual, followed—again as is usually the 16 case on the Mountain—by a short service back in the catholikon during which the relics were venerated, including those of Saint Irenaeus (c. 130-c. 200). Afterward we talked with Father Gabriel, a young monk in his mid-twenties, who visited the United States a few years ago on an exchange program in Maryland and who seems the only English speaker in the community. He informed us that services would begin in the morning at 3:00 a.m., but since we are planning a rather lengthy hike tomorrow we will probably just go to the liturgy, which starts around 5:30. We spent the rest of the evening strolling around the courtyard and sitting on a bench, enjoying the beautifully tended gardens and watching the aerial acrobatics of some birds (we had also seen them at the Lavra) who build little nests of mud under the eaves. Trevor said they were his new favorites. I am very glad to have stopped here and would strongly recommend that other pilgrims include this community in their itineraries. Much could be written about the light, or rather lights, of the Holy Mountain: the soft oranges and pinks of the cliffs during the liminal minutes at each end of the day; the twinkling, dancing play of candle flames and oil lampada reflected in the icons; the shimmering reflections of stars on the sea; the otherworldly blending of gold and silver—the two Trees of Valinor!—when the sun has not yet quite retired for the night and the moon has just begun her journey across the sky; the radiant faces of the monks in church as morning first begins to creep through the windows after hours of service in darkness and one begins to realize that the black- robed swirls of movement have been people all along! Day Six: Monday, 18 June — Prodromos to Agia Anna (Saint Anne) — The “Desert” Up at 5:00 a.m., we entered the porch of the catholikon at about 5:15 in almost total darkness. Stepping unexpectedly backward to make way for the priest, who was just coming out to cense the icons, I nearly crushed a poor monk who was prostrate to the left of the door—and I doubtless would have done so had Trevor not pushed me back just in the knick of time! After a breakfast of fresh fruit and delicious bread—several slices of which, together with a few apricots and some halva, Father Gabriel had kindly packed for our lunch—we said goodbye to the Forerunner about 7:30. The first half hour or so was spent retracing our steps back up the road to the main path we had taken yesterday coming over from the Great Lavra. Here we filled our water bottles at a small spring— 17 where we were briefly joined by a canine traveling companion—and then began our trek in the direction of the Skete of Agia Anna. This was the hike we had perhaps looked forward to more than any other, as it would be our one and only opportunity to experience just a bit of the “Desert”, the name the monks give the most remote part of their peninsula, an area of wildly varied topography located to the south and east of the peak of Mount Athos itself. Here is where many of the greatest ascetics have lived during the course of the centuries, whether with a few other monks in the numerous kellia (cells), kalyvae (huts), and kathismata (settlements) that dot the area or as true solitaries in isolated hesychasteria (hermitages), these last taking the form of rather ramshackle cabins or small caves in the cliffs. This would also be our chance to dive deeper into the Mountain’s exquisite natural environment. For the first two hours the trail was almost entirely uphill and rather difficult going. Like many of the Athonite paths, it had at some point been painstakingly cobbled by monks who must have been thinking (or so it seemed to us) more about the hooves of their mules, and perhaps the erosion these obliging pack animals might cause on the slopes, than their own two human feet! Fortunately the path soon leveled off and turned to mostly dirt and small gravel, a much easier walking surface—at least for us bipeds!— than the broken and often jagged stones had been. Rising like a wall on our right were the lower reaches of the Mountain, and to our left was a lovely meadow, brightened by hundreds of exquisite wildflowers, cascading down the hill toward the sea. Though we were unable to see them, we heard the cries of wild jackals in the distance several times, coming it seemed from somewhere just below the treeline. Another half hour or so further on, and we passed rather suddenly into a very dense forest. It was as if someone had abruptly turned the lights out—and turned down the thermostat by a dozen degrees! The canopy afforded by the (mainly) chestnut, oak, and fir trees was thick enough to block the sun almost entirely. The profusion of colors we had been enjoying in the meadow gave way at once to the deep earthen greens of moss and lichen, and the browns of a mostly sandy soil were replaced by the blacks of a loam 18 that had been enriched by centuries of falling leaves. I do not recall ever feeling so much as if I were in a cave while still outdoors! We found the perfect spot to pause for our lunch just below an old stone bridge on a bank of tangled roots overlooking a small mountain stream. To one side of the bridge we noticed two weathered icons of the Mother of God tacked to a tree, a superb spot for a mid-day session of invocation, while on the opposite side was a tangled, rocky path, like so many we had come across today, leading off from the main trail we had been following. Its entrance was marked by one of the most memorable things we have seen: a small rock bearing the roughly etched image of the Theotokos and an unidentified saint. Could this be the portal, I wondered—through this labyrinth of trees and bushes—to the hidden fastness of some holy Hesychast? It would no doubt have been a great blessing to encounter such an elder, someone whose very being had become his teaching, and it was tempting to forsake the mid-day hour of prayer to see what we might find. But this would have been a temptation precisely, I realized. For all the traditions teach us not to neglect the way we are given, wandering (Greek: plan?) away in search of experiences, graces, sensible consolations. Rested and nourished, we continued on our way, coming in another two hours to the “Cross”, a place where one can turn either right to ascend to the Panagia Chapel (at an elevation of around 5,000 feet) and then on up to the peak of Athos (6,700 feet) or to the left to descend toward Karoulia—a name meaning “pulleys” in Greek after the only method by which the hermits of old were able to get down the cliffs to their hesychasteria or have food and supplies lowered to them. We were told that the monks who continue to live in these settlements have reduced their bodily needs to an absolute minimum, drinking only rainwater, which they collect in the hollows of the rocks outside their huts, eating just enough to stay alive, and supporting themselves by weaving baskets and making komvoskinia (prayer ropes), which they exchange for food in the port village of Daphne. Just a few minutes more, and we came to a small clearing where we could catch our first glimpse of the Skete of Agia Anna, over 2,000 feet below the level of the trail we had been following, as well as the Monastery of Simonopetra, which will be our next and last stop, perched atop its distinctive rock tower further along the coast. Here we began our descent along a very precipitous, very rocky trail, where every step had to be 19 taken with the utmost care to avoid slipping or stumbling—which, thankfully, I managed to do only once! It was quite a demanding hour or so, punctuated by three or four stops to rest and drink in some of the breathtaking scenery. I must say I had never before become so weary walking downhill. We arrived at the skete about 3:00 p.m. and were soon joined outside the archontariki (guesthouse) by seven other pilgrims arriving from various directions, mostly coming up the hill from the arsanas. While waiting for the guest master to make his appearance, we struck up a conversation with one of these travelers, who turned out to be the national director of the professional football (soccer) association for Greece— basically the equivalent, I suppose, of the Commissioner of the NFL, though I rather doubt the latter makes a pilgrimage every year to the Mountain, as this man does! There was no Vespers this evening in the kyriakon (central church of a skete). In the sketes, unlike the monasteries, it is the custom for the monks to read the daily services in their separate cells, coming together for the Divine Liturgy only on Sundays and feasts. But one of the fathers was kind enough to show us inside the church and let us venerate the relics and icons, including a thaumaturgical icon of the community’s patroness, Saint Anne—the mother of the Mother of God—who is especially known for favoring the supplications of women who have had trouble conceiving or bearing children; numerous photographs of babies had been left beneath the icon in thanksgiving for answered prayers. Among the relics were the skull of Saint Makarios the Great (c. 300-391) and the right foot (with skin and veins still attached) of Saint Anne. There soon followed a delicious supper of lentil soup, cucumbers, bread, and apples. We have been sitting in the courtyard just outside the church, enjoying the braying of the mules—though not the accompanying flies!—and writing in our journals, as the sun sets over the Aegean and another memorable day concludes. It is the middle of the Apostles’ Fast on the Mountain (Old Calendar), which accounts in part for the simplicity of the meals we have been given. Of course, this is nothing compared to Great Lent, which entails the strictest discipline of the year. We were told that the first three days of Lent—Clean Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday—are the most rigorous of all. Many of the fathers will eat and drink nothing, even water, during 20 this period, and one of them described how drawn their faces can get as their bodies begin to dehydrate. Beginning with the Presanctified Liturgy on Wednesday night, it is common for the monks to say, “The fast is over!” For then a meal, however simple, is eaten each day. Day Seven: Tuesday, 19 June — Agia Anna to Simonopetra Breakfast this morning was exceptionally spare, just a little bread and water, which we supplemented with some dried fruit and a few nuts from our backpacks. Actually there were also a few pieces of Turkish delight, apparently left over from yesterday’s hospitality for arriving pilgrims; this ubiquitous Athonite sweet, which is traditionally served to newcomers along with little cups of water, coffee, and ouzo, is in my opinion rather like lemon- or cherry-flavored Elmer’s glue even when it is fresh, so I decided to pass! We stopped briefly to visit a tiny grotto—just below the guesthouse—that had belonged to Saint Gerasimos (1506-79) before making our way down the several hundred steps to the arsanas. As we were waiting for the ferry that would take us further along the coast to Simonopetra, a large supply boat docked. A truck piled high with bales of hay was the first to come off, followed by a number of palettes heavily laden with pieces of slate for some of the construction work going on back up the hill at the skete. These two quite disparate sorts of cargo turned out to be closely linked, as lay workers and a few monks began placing the slate in baskets tied to the backs of some rather sad looking mules, who had already set to work munching the hay, gathering strength and steeling their courage for the difficult climb ahead. A few pilgrims—perhaps better called “tourists”—who had also emerged from the boat had decided to take advantage of these transportation arrangements as well and were climbing aboard little wooden platforms strapped to the backs of the mules, their rather considerable luggage slung to each side. Although Athos has been referred to as a “Christian Tibet”, compassion toward “all sentient beings” did not seem the rule this morning! A quick (twenty-minute) passage on the ferry, which afforded some spectacular scenery, including close-up views of a hesychasterion perched just above the water as well as the monasteries of Dionysiou and Gregoriou, brought us to the port of 21 Simonopetra, where we began a somewhat longer (thirty-minute) heart-racing climb up the zig-zagging, cobbled path to the monastery itself, which sits—rather precariously—at the top of a huge pinnacle of barren rock rising about a thousand feet above sea level. Speaking of Tibet, I must say that both the construction and the position of this latest of our Byzantine fortresses seem uncannily like that of the Potala in Lhasa, traditional home of the Dalai Lama. Perhaps a case could be made for an “immanent unity” of sacred architecture! The guest master, clearly experienced in these matters, quickly deduced from our soaking wet shirts that we had not been driven from the port at Daphne, which seems the most common mode of journeying for the other travelers who come here, and he very kindly asked whether we would like something to eat—besides the Turkish delight, of course!—to which Trevor replied, “Yes, please!” So after being shown to a spacious room with a beautiful view of Athos, we were treated to an unexpected lunch of roasted potatoes, eggplant, bread, and fruit, and then we both luxuriated in our first showers in five days. I had just lain down for a short nap when one of the monks, Father Maximos, knocked on our door, and I am now writing these words having just arrived back from a delightful hour or so exploring the monastery with him in the lead. His name was mentioned to me before we came to the Mountain, and I had been hoping to have a chance to meet him. A former professor (Dr Nicholas Constas) at Harvard, he has been here at Simonopetra for two years and was tonsured a monk just two months ago. He is now the librarian and took us on a tour of the forty-some-thousand-volume, multileveled facility—complete with computerized catalogue and moveable shelving in the stacks to save on space—all deftly wrapped around the mountain in the lowest reaches of the monastery’s foundation. Much of the monastery was destroyed by a terrible fire in 1891, including the library, but a few volumes were rescued and others have since been acquired from other monasteries, including a 1782 edition of the Philokalia, which he allowed us to hold. As we descended several flights of stairs, Father Maximos explained that the monastery is smaller than it appears in photographs (there are only about half the monks of Vatopedi) since the core is actually the mountain itself, and we could see this 22 clearly as we looked into several side rooms, in each of which the inner wall was indeed solid rock. We also visited the kitchen and trapeza, both of which are in the process of being renovated. Many beautiful, newly painted icons adorn the walls of the trapeza, one entire mural telling the story of the founding of the monastery by Saint Simon. We then headed outside, walking along one of the eyrie-like balconies—where we could look down (!) on birds in flight—and then visiting the cemetery. As with other Athonite cemeteries, there are just a few graves (perhaps five or six) since the bodies of the monks are periodically exhumed to make way for the newly departed. Father Maximos explained that the graves are dug only about three feet deep. The monk’s body is laid right on the earth without a casket, fully dressed in monastic habit, and is then covered with pieces of slate before being buried (this apparently helps to keep the bones in place for ease of exhumation). The length of time the bodies remain in the ground varies somewhat, but it is usually three or four years, and of course by then the flesh has mostly melted away. The garments are still intact, however—“Polyester socks last forever!” Father Maximos quipped—and he admitted it could be rather eerie to confront the skeleton of an old friend still garbed in full monastic habit. An excellent memento mori! The skull and other major bones are then arranged in the charnel house with their counterparts from other skeletons, and the smaller bones are all placed in a common, metal-lidded ossuary in the adjacent garden. Some of the fathers say the color of the bones is significant, an amber color being often deemed a mark of sanctity, while white “isn’t good”; in the final analysis, though— Father Maximos was quick to add—“bones are bones”. In each of the monasteries there are elderly monks who came to Athos in their teens, straight from small country villages, never having been on a date, never having seen a movie, without ever going to college—and perhaps without finishing high school. A younger, highly educated father described them to us, with evident affection and admiration, as incredibly childlike, though by no means impractical, people. 23 Day Eight: Wednesday, 20 June — Simonopetra to Ouranoupolis I left off writing yesterday in the mid-afternoon before the simantron sounded for Vespers, when we had our first chance to hear the beautiful chanting of the much- recorded monks of this monastery. I am told that Simonopetra is the only community on the Mountain to employ full double choirs at every service, though perhaps Vatopedi is not far behind. In any case it was quite a change from the soloist cantors we had experienced thus far on our pilgrimage, and it was the first really powerful use of the ison (the drone note of Byzantine chant); the resonating richness of the sound was breathtaking. As usual Vespers was followed by a light supper, and then it was back to the catholikon for a short Compline service and the opportunity to venerate the relics, including in this case the right hand of Saint Dionysios the Areopagite and the left hand of Saint Mary Magdalene—which is incorrupt and from time to time heats up to body temperature! “This,” said one of the fathers, in a memorable understatement, “is rather unusual.” I can only assume he was speaking in comparison with the hundreds of more “usual” Athonite relics! At this point—it was probably 7:00 p.m. or so—Trevor went to get his camera, and we spent the rest of the evening with Father Maximos, walking first to the cave of Saint Simon, the monastery’s founder, just a short distance outside the gate and around a bend in the road leading past the monastery’s aqueduct. Here we passed through a small anteroom, from which we were able to climb a narrow rock-cut stairway onto a tiny ledge where the saint slept. Tradition has it that Saint Simon, emerging from this grotto on a mid-thirteenth-century Christmas Eve, caught sight of the Star of Bethlehem in the sky. A single shaft of light was shining down upon the huge rock tower upon which Simonopetra (Greek for “Simon’s rock”) now stands, and a voice told him that here he should build a monastery: hence its dedication to the Nativity. In recent times Saint Mary Magdalene has come to be regarded as a second founder of the community, for after the great fire of 1891 the abbot, who was already traveling in Russia with the saint’s hand, was able to raise money for rebuilding the monastery by displaying this wonder-working miracle in many cities. 24 We continued walking along the road further up the hill above the monastery. Simonopetra has the best view of the peak of Athos of any place we have yet stayed, and we paused at several exquisite vantage points for photographs—including one of Trevor and me taken by our obliging new friend. We came at last to a small grassy plateau, a spot to which the monks process every Bright Monday with all the monastery’s relics and many of its icons. Back down the hill we spent a few minutes opposite Saint Simon’s cave in a small gazebo, catching sight of a small pod of dolphins cavorting just off shore in water that was growing increasingly gilded by the soon-to-set sun. We then continued further down, down through a number of terraces to a point below the monastery where the gardener, Father Mardarios, was busily taking advantage of the cool of the evening. Father Maximos told us that this one wiry monk—a veritable elf out of Middle-earth— was almost solely responsible for planting, tending, and harvesting an extensive, many- terraced array of trees and plants, including grapes, figs, beans, peppers, tomatoes, apricots. The terraces are connected by a network of ladders and steps that have been cut into the walls, and as we clambered down one of the ladders from one heavily-vined plot to the next, Father Maximos observed, very rightly, that it was all rather like Swiss Family Robinson! Father Mardarios soon finished his work and joined us on the balcony of his workshed, where he insisted on our having some ice water, almonds, and little cookies as we enjoyed the sunset and talked about his gardening methods (organic except during droughts and other “extreme situations”), the sources of electrical power at the monastery (solar first, then hydro, then a back-up diesel generator), and the importance of obedience in the monastic life (he told us a story about a monk he had heard about in a nearby cell who disobeyed his elder by going fishing without the elder’s blessing and was eaten by a shark!). I expressed my amazement at the incredible labor and skill involved in his care of the extensive gardens, to which he responded that it was “all God and Saint Triphon”, the patron saint of gardeners, whose icon was appropriately positioned in a little shrine near the greenhouse. As the evening unfolded we had an opportunity to talk at some length with Father Maximos about Athonite spirituality. I asked at one point whether there is such a thing as 25 a “typical prayer rule” for the monks. His answer was no, but he also stressed that one’s cell rule was never discussed with anyone except one’s spiritual father, so that “except for the geron nobody really knows, or should know, what others are doing”. Generally speaking, however, one could certainly say that each of the fathers probably uses some form of the Jesus Prayer during the hours before Orthros, but how many times it is repeated, according to what rhythm and at what speed, with or without how many metanias (bows) or proskyneses (prostrations), over what length of time—all this can vary considerably. This discussion gave Father Maximos an opportunity to talk about the differences between monastic communities. I mentioned the Elder Ephraim and the several communities he has established in America, notably Saint Anthony’s in Florence, Arizona. Father Maximos observed that this elder was known for the rigor of his teaching. Philotheou, from which Ephraim launched his American mission, had been described to us elsewhere on the Mountain as rather like a Marine boot camp. By contrast the now retired (and very ill) Abbot Aimilianos, the elder of many of the monks at Simonopetra, always insisted on joy as an essential element in the spiritual life, and indeed we had noticed more smiling monks here than elsewhere. Father Maximos described a far more relaxed spiritual ethos at Simonopetra in general, and specifically between each of the monks and the abbot. He spoke of someone he knew eating too many cookies when he was serving as guest master and of this person going to the abbot and asking to be given the obedience of no longer eating them, or at least a limit on how many he could eat. “I’m not going to tell you what to do,” the abbot responded. “You’ve got to do this for yourself!” In the same vein he remarked that the spiritual life should be guided, not by inflexible rules that all and sundry must follow, but by “what works”. I thought of the Buddhist idea of up?ya, or “skillful means”. And of course different strategies work best for different people, he added. The fathers of Simonopetra speak a great deal, and very reverently, about the former abbot, Aimilianos, widely regarded as a living saint and true Hesychast, and of the extent and depth of his spiritual influence, both on the Mountain and elsewhere throughout the world. One of the fathers had come to the monastery years earlier as a pilgrim. Someone brushed past Coda 26 him while he was standing in the courtyard one evening, lightly touching him on the shoulder, and it was as if he felt suddenly “empty”—of his ego and everything associated with the world—and thus correspondingly open to the plenitude of God. It turned out the person who had touched him was Aimilianos. We were also told that Father Aimilianos had said, upon first meeting the monastery’s present abbot when the latter was only fourteen, that this would be his successor, and so it was almost forty years later. Many, many hours of Father Aimilianos’s talks were recorded and are available for the fathers to listen to in the monastery library. Back to Ouranoupolis, we spent the rest of this day decompressing and reacquainting ourselves with the ways of “this world”: enjoying a much larger meal than we had had for a week, browsing in the little shops—where I secured a lovely hand-painted copy of the Virgin as ephor (overseer) of Mount Athos, one of the favorites of the monks—and noticing repeatedly what exotic-looking creatures women are! I decided to take an evening stroll down a dirt and gravel road leading out of the village and winding back along the coast in the direction of the Mountain. About a half hour outside of town the road simply comes to an end. There is a small quarry to one side, where they appeared to be breaking rock into slate tiles, and on the other side a little metochion (dependency) of one of the monasteries, sitting like a guardhouse on the border of another world. Two large signs stood nearby, one in Greek and one in English, with the same forbidding message: “Access to the Holy Mountain of Athos strictly prohibited. Border patrolled. Entry restricted to ferry to Daphne/Karyes”—as if, I thought, the density of the surrounding underbrush and the ruggedness of the landscape were not enough to deter all but the most seasoned hikers and rock climbers from attempting an overland entry! It was a curious sensation, having been to Mount Athos, now to confront so daunting a barrier. Something in me wanted to feel a bit smug, privileged, in-the-know. I, after all, had been to this forbidden place, circumventing these doubtless feeble patrols and their ineffective warnings! I had walked within the Secret Garden and was now safely returned to tell the tale. Thankfully, these foolish musings were quickly repelled by 27 a rapid series of questions: Had I really been there? Was I ever truly on the other side of this barrier? And what in any case is the “other side”? How many depths within depths does it have? What outermost skin had I only just lightly brushed, and how much more must there be to the breathing, beating life within? I think of the concluding paragraph of one of Father Maximos’s articles, a copy of which he was kind enough to give me: “We expect, and perhaps demand, that every revelation be an unveiling, a drawing aside of the curtain, a lifting of the veil. But when the object of revelation is not an object at all, but that which is invisible and beyond predication, then it can give itself to us only through an event or appearance that is also a concealing. Divine transcendence, divine hiddenness, remains absolute, and yet providentially reveals itself by concealing itself in a sacred veil, which is at once the revelation of, and means of participation in, the very life of God” (“Symeon of Thessalonike and the Theology of the Icon Screen”, Thresholds of the Sacred, ed. Sharon E. J. Gerstel [Harvard University Press, 2006], p. 183).
- [Infinite and Finite](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/infinite-and-finite) - Abdal Hakim Murad (T. J. Winter) It’s really an infalible yardstick of the nature of the iman and the taqwa, the faith and God consciousness of a believer that he or she can see, as it were, beyond the page, and can see something of the timeless majesty and the miraculous uncreated quality of Allah’s
- [Letter Symbolism and <em>Merkavah</em> Imagery in the <em>Zohar</em>](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/wolfson-letter-merkavah-in-zohar) - Elliot R. Wolfson “To delve into the mysteries of the mystical orchard means to penetrate the essence of the name through these various linguistic techniques, ultimately arriving at a knowledge of divine oneness… The one who enters into the depth of the combination of the letters can understand from them the depth of wisdom and
- [Iconic Visualization and the Imaginal Body of God: The Role of Intention in the Rabbinic Conception of Prayer](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/iconic-visualization) - Elliot R. Wolfson “Even though the rabbis clearly would not have articulated an incarnational theology of the kind affirmed by Christianity, they attempted… to keep alive the theophanic traditions attested in Scripture… Prayer is one of the key ways affirmed by the rabbis to access that body.” Click here to view the PDF (2.6MB) Originally
- [New Jerusalem Glowing: Songs and Poems of Leonard Cohen in a Kabbalistic Key](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/wolfson-new-jerusalem-glowing) - Elliot R. Wolfson The poet perceives the difficulty stemming not from forgetting Jerusalem, but in failing to remember Babylon. If the cleft of forgetfulness is forgotten, there can be no memory, and no truth can be uttered, no blessing bestowed. Only when one reaches the limit of oblivion can one begin to remember, and rivers
- [“Truly God is Beautiful and He loves Beauty”](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/shah-kazemi-god-is-beautiful) - The Metaphysics of Aesthetics in the Islamic Tradition Reza Shah-Kazemi A lecture arranged by the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts as part of their Open Programme Lecture Series. We cannot love God without acquiring knowledge of Him, and conversely, we cannot know God without, as it were, falling in love with Him. In the Islamic
- [Istruzioni sullo <em>dhikr</em> nei centri sottili in alcuni trattati in urdu sulla via mistica](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/istruzioni-sullo-dhikr-urdu) - La dottrina al riguardo di organi o centri sottili della costituzione umana, distinti dal corpo materiale, ma che nell’involucro fisico si raffinano in virtù di un metodo di realizzazione, costituisce un insegnamento ben noto di diverse tradizioni spirituali orientali. Il misticismo islamico, o sufismo, e quello di matrice indiana in questo caso, offre trattazioni di notevole interesse al riguardo e certo meno note di altre.1 Le istruzioni esposte oltre rendono chiaro che sebbene la dottrina degli organi sottili dei sufi indiani presenta delle analogie con quella dei chakra dello yoga, è solo all’interno della scienza mistica, esoterica e cosmologica islamica che tali insegnamenti sono trattati dagli autori e nei testi qui descritti. Il termine usato nel misticismo islamico per definire un centro sottile è lat?fa, al plurale lat?’if. Lat?fa è un aggettivo arabo al femminile che, come la maggior parte dei termini del lessico sufi, deriva da una radice già impiegata nel Corano; l’aggettivo lat?f (al maschile) significa ‘sottile’, ‘fine’, ‘delicato’, ‘brillante’, ‘benevolo’, il nome di Dio al-Lat?f è appunto il Benevolo. Le lat?’if dimorano nell’uomo in forma sopita, e possono essere dischiuse grazie a l’esercizio di un metodo spirituale, lo dhikr, capace di risvegliare questi organi sottili dal loro stato di oblio. Lo dhikr, termine anch’esso d’origine coranica, è il più importante metodo di realizzazione spirituale del sufismo. Lo dhikr è il ‘ricordo’ o ‘menzione’ del nome di Dio, l’orazione mistica che secondo le fonti sufi fu all’origine impartita dal profeta Muhammad al suocero Ab? Bakr, nella sua forma silente, ed al genero ‘Al?, in quella sonora (jal?). È soprattutto la forma silente (khaf?) ? Questo contributo costituisce la rielaborazione di una conferenza tenuta presso l’Officina di Studi Medievali il 15 dicembre 2005. 1 Il sufismo fu introdotto in India dall’Asia Centrale e, in misura minore, dal mondo arabo; intorno al 1072 muore a Lahore (Pakistan) al-Hujw?r?, il primo santo patrono del mondo indiano ed autore del Kashf al-mahj?b, il primo trattato sul sufismo composto in persiano nel subcontinente indiano. Con la fondazione del sultanato di Delhi all’inizio del XIII secolo, diversi ordini sufi sono introdotti e fondati in India. In epoca sultaniale s’impiantano ordini maggiori, ed in particolare la Chishtiyya e la Suhrawardiyya, e ordini minori come la Kubrawiyya, la Shatt?riyya, la Qalandariyya, la Mad?riyya e la Musa Suh?giyya. All’epoca dei Moghul (1526-1858) acquistano grande influenza altri due ordini introdotti dall’Asia centrale e dal mondo arabo, la Q?diriyya e la Naqshbandiyya. Alla Q?diriyya aderì il principe moghul D?r? Shukoh (m. 1659), celebre per i suoi studi delle dottrine religiose indiane. ?dello dhikr ad essere connessa al dischiudersi delle lat?’if, quando lo dhikr è eseguito in corrispondenza dei punti del corpo dove sono localizzati tali centri sottili. Le trattazioni più rilevanti della dottrina del dhikr nelle lat?’if nella letteratura mistica musulmana d’India sono piuttosto tarde e risalgono per la gran parte all’epoca moghul, fase di considerevole rinnovamento del tessuto mistico indo- islamico. Fra le opere indiane più antiche, si ritrovano delle indicazioni al riguardo nei Asm?r al-asr?r dell’eminente chisht? Muhammad G?s?dir?z (m. 1422), tuttavia tale dottrina fu poco codificata nella pur vasta letteratura sufi indiana d’epoca pre- moghul. Si può ipotizzare che tali argomenti facevano in passato più parte dell’insegnamento orale trasmesso da maestro a discepolo, sebbene un sufi naqshband? del XIX secolo, Mawl?n? Fazl Rahm?n, affermi al proposito che celebri santi chisht? quali Niz?m al-D?n Awliy? (m. 1325) e Nas?r al-D?n Chir?gh-i Dihl? (m. 1356) eseguivano solo lo dhikr del cuore.2 Insegnamenti al riguardo si trovano inclusi in alcuni importanti trattati sulla via mistica tradotti e composti in urdu. Fra questi vi è la traduzione di Khurram ‘Al? del Qawl al-Jam?l di Sh?h Wal? All?h e la Ta‘l?m-i Ghawthiyya di Gul Hasan, due testi che fanno parte della tarda produzione letteraria del misticismo indo-islamico e si segnalano in particolare per essere fra i principali esempi di manuali di sufismo scritti e tradotti in urdu nel XIX secolo. Il fine principale di queste opere era di istruire i discepoli e trasmettere le istruzioni dei maestri sul sul?k, il sentiero spirituale. Questi testi espongono gli insegnamenti canonici del sufismo, i concetti e le tradizioni dell’Islam, la dottrina metafisica e cosmologica, la funzione del patto iniziatico con il maestro, i metodi di meditazione e realizzazione, ecc. La descrizione particolareggiata dei diversi metodi dello dhikr che si ritrova nell’opera di un autore quale Gul Hasan si rifà nello stile, sebbene un po’ meno nella scelta degli argomenti, a quello già affermato di celebri manuali indiani d’epoca moghul, quali i Jaw?hir-i khamsa di Muhammad Ghawth (m. 1562), un famoso maestro shatt?r?, ed il Kashk?l- i Kal?m? del chisht? Sh?h Kal?m All?h Jah?n?b?d? (m. 1729). I testi di Gul Hasan, la traduzione-commentario di Khurram ‘Al? insieme a quella amplificata in urdu dei Jaw?hir-i khamsa eseguita nel 1897 da Mirz? Muhammad Beg Naqshband?, si collocano fra i primi rilevanti manuali sulla mistica islamica apparsi in urdu e che circolarono attraverso la stampa. Gli storici della letteratura urdu hanno riservato finora una scarsa attenzione a tale letteratura mistica in prosa a carattere manualistico e biografico redatta e tradotta dalla metà del diciannovesimo secolo. Se i temi ed il simbolismo mistico avevano ispirato la letteratura poetica urdu fin dal suo sorgere, diversamente nella produzione letteraria sufi in prosa a carattere manualistico il passaggio dal persiano, lingua dell’aristocrazia indo-musulmana, all’urdu si realizzò solo molto più tardi. Non mancano alcuni esempi d’opere precedenti a carattere mistico composte in prosa urdu e in particolare nella sua variante dakhni, ma fino al XIX secolo i sufi indiani 2 SAYYID MUHAMMAD ‘AL?, Irsh?d-i rahm?n? wa fazl-i yazd?n?, Matba‘-i Intiz?m?, Kanpur 1895, p. 11. 1 (gennaio-giugno 2007) ? ?continuarono a impiegare ampiamente il persiano per la redazione di testi in prosa quali i manuali sulla via spirituale e le biografie dei santi. Questi testi in urdu furono preceduti dalle prime traduzioni del Corano in questa lingua apparse per opera di Hak?m Shar?f Kh?n (m. 1804)3 e di due figli di Sh?h Wal? All?h, Sh?h Rafi‘ al-D?n (m. 1817) e Sh?h ‘Abd al-Q?dir (m. 1814). L’uso dell’urdu nei trattati mistici in prosa, nelle biografie dei santi così come le traduzioni e i commentari in questa lingua di precedenti manuali arabi e persiani, si affermarono in una fase storica caratterizzata da crescenti critiche e attacchi contro il misticismo sufi portati da altre sezioni della società indo-musulmana. I manuali di mistica in urdu qui citati furono tradotti e composti fra il decennio precedente e il mezzo secolo successivo alla caduta dell’ultimo ed inerme imperatore moghul nel 1858, seguita dall’instaurazione del r?j britannico. In epoca coloniale, e soprattutto dalla seconda metà del XIX secolo, l’islam indiano fu attraversato dall’attivismo di diversi movimenti e pensatori religiosi riformisti che, sebbene in diversa misura e restandone talora influenzati, criticavano il misticismo sufi condannandone in particolare alcuni aspetti come il culto dei maestri e dei santi ed i rituali popolari connessi quali il pellegrinaggio alle tombe di questi e la richiesta di intercessione. Per diffondere le proprie idee ed i propri testi fra segmenti più ampi della società indiana e soprattutto fra le classi popolari, all’aristocratico persiano i riformisti preferirono l’uso dell’urdu, parlata dalla maggioranza dei musulmani del subcontinente. La comparsa di questi trattati di misticismo in urdu fu accompagnata dal passaggio della letteratura indiana del genere dalla copiatura manuale dei testi alla stampa; tutti i testi in urdu qui indicati furono pubblicati, e in alcuni casi più di una volta, in epoca coloniale. L’innalzamento dell’urdu a lingua letteraria della manualistica sufi si conformava anche al fatto che questa, come testimonia l’opera di Gul Hasan, era diventata la lingua principale, sebbene non la sola, usata dai maestri indiani durante il loro insegnamento. Il linguaggio di un manuale come Ta‘l?m-i ghawthiyya, che evidentemente riflette il poliglottismo dell’insegnamento orale, resta impregnato del lessico arabo e persiano, con frequenti citazioni e strofe poetiche nelle due lingue; lo stile rimane quello dotto ed esoterico della letteratura persiana del genere, accessibile in prevalenza alle elite dei discepoli sufi. Resta forte in questi scritti il richiamo all’importanza del rapporto con un precettore spirituale, al fatto che la vera istruzione in tali ambiti passi non tramite il testo, ma attraverso la relazione fra maestro e discepolo. La Shif?’ al-‘al?l di Khurram ‘Al? è una traduzione commentata del al-Qawl al- jam?l f? bayn saw?’ al-sab?l di Sh?h Wal? All?h Dihlaw? (1703-1762).4 Il Qawl al- 3 Cfr. il recente articolo di HAK?M ‘AB?D AL-RAHM?N ISL?H?, Hak?m Muhammad Shar?f Kh?n, urd? k? pahl? mutarjim-i Qur’?n, in ALT?F A‘ZM? (Eds.), Tibb-i y?n?n? awr urd? zab?n wa adab, Hamdard, Delhi 2004, pp.129-134. 4 KHURRAM ‘AL?, al-Qawl al-jam?l ma‘ sharh Shif?’ al-‘al?l, Kanpur 1922; questa edizione include il testo in arabo e le note in urdu di Mawl?n? Naw?b Qutb al-D?n Kh?n Dihlaw?. L’opera fu tradotta nuovamente in urdu da Muhammad Sarwar a Lahore nel 1957, cfr. A. BAUSANI, Note su Sh?h 1 (gennaio-giugno 2007) ? ?jam?l, composto originariamente in arabo, è un’opera giovanile di Sh?h Wal? All?h e probabilmente minore rispetto ad altre del celebre autore di Delhi. Khurram ‘Al? era un esperto di studi arabi (mawl?w?) e da quanto lui stesso riferisce possiamo dedurre che era presente agli insegnamenti di Sh?h ‘Abd al-‘Az?z. Il testo tratta nella prima parte del patto iniziatico (bay‘at) fra maestro e discepolo e dei metodi spirituali (dhikr, mur?qaba, habs-i nafs, ecc.) di tre ordini, la Q?diriyya, la Chishtiyya e la Naqshbandiyya. Nella seconda parte sono esposte invocazioni e pratiche particolari ‘sperimentate’ (a‘m?l-i mujarrab) per diversi usi, quali la guarigione delle malattie e l’esorcismo gli spiriti, che Sh?h Wal? All?h apprese dal padre e suo precettore ‘Abd al-Rahim (m. 1719).5 Khurram ‘Al? terminò la sua traduzione il 24 del mese di rabi‘ al-akhar del 1260/13 maggio1844. La versione di Khurram ‘Al?, come lo stesso segnala nell’introduzione, include in vari passi spiegazioni ed istruzioni in merito al testo date da Sh?h ‘Abd al-‘Az?z (m. 1824), il figlio e successore maggiore di Wal? All?h, e anche da Sh?h Ahl All?h, il fratello di Wal? All?h.6 L’opera di Sayyid Sh?h Gul Hasan Qalandar Q?dir?, intitolata Mir’?t al- wahdat (Specchio dell’unità) e meglio nota come Ta‘l?m-i ghawthiyya, raccoglie l’insegnamento (ta‘l?m) del suo maestro, Sayyid Ghawth ‘Al? Sh?h Qalandar Q?dir? (1804-1880) di Panipat.7 Sayyid Ghawth ‘Al? Sh?h si ricollegava per via familiare alla Q?diriyya attraverso il padre, Ahmad Al? Hasan, e il nonno, Zuh?r al-Hasan. Come numerosi altri mistici della sua epoca, Ghawth ‘Al? Sh?h fu iniziato anche ad altre confraternite sufi. Fid? Husayn Ras?l Shah? di Delhi lo affiliò all’ordine Ras?l Sh?h?, un ramo qalandar? derivato dalla Suhrawardiyya, e Hab?b All?h Sh?h Sanbhal?, un successore dell’insigne Sh?h Ab? Sa‘?d (m. 1835), lo iniziò alla preminente linea naqshband? indiana derivata da Ahmad Sirhind? (m. 1624) e Mirz? Mazhar J?n-i J?n?n (m. 1781). Fu poi iniziato una seconda volta alla Q?diriyya da Shaykh ‘Abd al-Lat?f Th?n? di Kiratpur (Uttar Pradesh), mentre un altro biografo, W?qif al-Rahm?n, riferisce che Ghawth ‘Al? Sh?h conferiva anche la khil?fa, o successione spirituale, dell’ordine Chishtiyya. L’istruzione di Ghawth ‘Al? Sh?h spaziò dallo studio dell’arabo, del persiano, della logica e delle tradizioni religiose islamiche a quello del sanscrito. Egli narra in un altro passo a carattere autobiografico che ancora in età molto giovane si recò a Delhi con il padre dove studiò le tradizioni profetiche (had?th) con altri due illustri maestri di ambiente naqshband?, Sh?h Muhammad Ish?q (m. 1846) e anche il nonno di questi, il menzionato Sh?h ‘Abd al-‘Az?z. Ghawth ‘Al? Sh?h menziona fra i maestri avuti in Wal?ull?h di Delhi (1703-1762), in «Annali dell’Istituto Orientale di Napoli» 10 n.s. (1960), pp. 93- 147, alla p. 106. 5 Sh?h Wal? All?h riferisce nella sua autobiografia di aver studiato un compendio del padre sulle proprietà dei nomi divini e dei versetti coranici (Khaw?ss-i asm?’ wa ?y?t); cfr. HIDAYAT HUSAIN, The Persian Autobiography of Sh?h Wal?ullah bin ‘Abd al-Rah?m al-Dihlav?, in «Journal & Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal» 8/4 (1912), pp. 161-175, alla p. 172 del testo persiano. 6 Sh?h Ahl All?h (m. 1776) fu autore di opere mediche, fra le quali la traduzione persiana del M?jaz al-q?n?n, noto compendio in arabo del Canone di Avicenna redatto da Ibn al-Naf?s (m. 1288). 7 Centro ad alcune ore a nord di Delhi noto in particolare per il celebre santuario del mistico qalandar? Ab? ‘Al? Qalandar (m. 1324). 1 (gennaio-giugno 2007) ? ?giovane età anche Fazl Im?m Khayr?b?d? (m. 1825), un noto insegnante di logica e filosofia discepolo di Mull? ‘Abd al-W?hid di Khayrabad. Sulle orme d’altri sufi indiani del passato, Ghawth ‘Al? Sh?h fu indubbiamente un conoscitore della tradizione e delle dottrine indiane, sapere del quale il suo discepolo e biografo Gul Hasan ci offre alcune interessanti testimonianze. Lo stesso Ghawth ‘Al? Sh?h ricorda nei suoi discorsi di aver studiato in gioventù il sanscrito e le tradizioni indiane con Pandit R?m San?h? e poi con Pandit Siddha Chandra-K?tuki. Gul Hasan scrive che in tutto Ghawth ‘Al? Sh?h prese il ba‘yat da undici maestri musulmani ed ebbe otto maestri indù.8 Gul Hasan iniziò la sua opera il primo del mese di rajab del 1304/26 marzo 1887 e la completò il 14 di rabi‘ al-awwal del 1305/30 novembre 1887. Il testo, in una lunga introduzione e tre capitoli (b?b), tratta vari argomenti canonici della letteratura del genere, a partire da una dettagliata definizione del sufismo, include argomenti di metafisica e cosmologia, affronta il dibattuto rapporto fra la dottrina del wahdat al-wuj?d (Unicità dell’esistenza) di Ibn ‘Arab? (m. 1240) e quella del wahdat al-shuh?d (Unicità della testimonianza) di Ahmad Sirhind?, e su tale argomento riporta il testo persiano di varie lettere (makt?b?t) di noti naqshband? indiani, fra le quali alcune di un altro illustre maestro di Panipat, Q?d? Than? All?h (m. 1810). Il secondo capitolo è dedicato ai metodi di realizzazione spirituale e contiene una dettagliata descrizione dello dhikr e delle sue forme in diverse battute (zarb). Gul Hasan fu il compilatore di un precedente e famoso testo in urdu di sufismo, la Tadhkira-yi ghawthiyya, terminata il 14 di sha‘b?n del 1301/9 giugno 1884. Questa tadhkira (biografia) raccoglie la vita, gli insegnamenti e i racconti sapienziali del suo maestro Ghawth ‘Al? Sh?h. L’opera non è una biografia in senso stretto, ma secondo modelli già collaudati nella precedente letteratura mistica indo-persiana coniuga lo stile biografico della tadhkira con quello altrettanto canonico e qui forse più influente delle malf?z?t, ovvero i ‘discorsi’ dei santi raccolti dai discepoli, e allo stesso tempo include alcuni temi più tipici dei trattati e manuali sulla dottrina sufi.9 Gul Hasan fu uno scrittore raffinato e dotto, capace di spaziare fra le forme e gli stili del repertorio letterario precedente e di adattarli pienamente all’urdu. L’intensa descrizione che offre della vita e dell’insegnamento del suo maestro costituisce una delle più vive testimonianze letterarie dell’ambiente sufi indiano ottocentesco. La sua opera si colloca a ragione fra i massimi esempi della letteratura mistica a carattere biografico e manualistico in urdu. Gul Hasan, sebbene ne fu il 8 Cfr. GUL HASAN QALANDAR Q?DIR?, Tadhkira-yi ghawthiyya, Delhi 1918, pp. 16-23; W?QIF AL-RAHM?N, S?rat-i ghawthiyya, Delhi s.d., pp. 6-7, 18. 9 GUL HASAN QALANDAR Q?DIR?, Tadhkira-yi ghawthiyya, cit.; l’opera fu stampata nel 1881 (Delhi), 1900 e 1918 (Delhi), ed è stata recentemente ripubblicata varie volte. La Tadhkira-yi ghawthiyya è stata anche tradotta parzialmente in inglese da Hasan Askari, il quale ha riunito soprattutto le molte storie e i racconti allegorici narrati da Ghawth ‘Al? Sh?h ad istruzione dei suoi discepoli; non sono però inclusi nella traduzione di Askari la maggior parte dei passi biografici su Ghawth ‘Al? Sh?h che ho segnalato prima né il discorso riferito oltre sui chakra dello yoga, cfr. H. ASKARI, Solomon’s Ring. The Life and Teachings of a Sufi Master, Altamira Press-Sage, Walnut Creek-London-Delhi 1998. 1 (gennaio-giugno 2007) ? ?maggiore, non fu l’unico biografo di Ghawth ‘Al? Sh?h, un'altra e più succinta biografia del santo di Panipat fu scritta, anche questa in urdu, da W?qif al-Rahm?n, un ispettore del sale e discepolo, e a sua volta successore, di un khal?fa (vicario spirituale) di Ghawth ‘Al? Sh?h.10 La Tadhkira-yi ghawthiyya contiene anche riferimenti ad insegnamenti di origine indiana, notabili sono alcune descrizioni comparative della dottrina islamica ed indù. In conclusione al quarto capitolo, sulla dottrina dell’Unicità divina (tawh?d), Gul Hasan traspone il discorso di un saggio (mah?-purusha) indiano nel quale si equipara la funzione degli avat?r e dei profeti quali portatori di un insegnamento esteriore per le masse e di uno esoterico per gli eletti, come quello trasmesso da Krishna ad Arjuna e da Muhammad ad ‘Al?.11 Il discorso successivo si sofferma sulla descrizione delle lat?’if, e il particolare che si segnala di questo passo è di essere accompagnato da istruzioni sulla dottrina dei chakra o kanwal (loto) dello yoga. Sono qui descritte due gerarchie di lat?’if, secondo l’insegnamento dei naqshband?, e secondo il modello (vedi oltre) che Ghawth ‘Al? Sh?h espone anche nella Ta‘l?m-i ghawthiyya, il quale contempla anche i centri sottili (come nello yoga) dell’ombelico e all’apice del cranio. La forma è quella dell’esposizione comparativa, come già per altri sufi indiani che avevano trattato di tali argomenti l’intento non è di giungere ad una sintesi della dottrina islamica con l’indiana, né si affronta nel dettaglio la questione delle analogie e delle differenze fra i due insegnamenti. La descrizione qui data dei chakra è piuttosto canonica, e la meditazione sulle lettere riferita da Gul Hasan appare una forma del ny?sa, rituale che consiste nel trasferire lettere, sillabe o mantra nel corpo, o parti del corpo, attraverso la visualizzazione. Queste descrizioni offrono in ogni caso una testimonianza indicativa di come anche in tarda epoca rimasero vive fra i dotti musulmani una certa conoscenza ed attenzione per il sapere indiano. Gul Hasan scrive che anche secondo la visione dei sanny?sin (shany?s) vi sono sei centri sottili (lat?’if), che secondo la via dello yoga s?stra12 sono i sei kanwal o chakra. Com’è noto le diverse scuole indiane, così come quelle sufi, non concordavano sullo stesso numero di centri sottili, e Gul Hasan riporta al riguardo due diverse classificazioni dei chakra. Questa descrizione comparativa dei centri sottili è accompagnata nell’edizione a stampa del testo del 1918 da tre diagrammi, il primo simboleggia le sei lat?’if secondo l’insegnamento naqshband?, il secondo il modello delle lat?’if descritto anche nella Ta‘l?m-i ghawthiyya e sul quale ritorneremo, mentre l’ultimo raffigura la gerarchia dei chakra attraverso la composita immagine di una pianta allegorica dal cui fusto-asse centrale dipartono fasci laterali 10 W?QIF AL-RAHM?N, S?rat-i ghawthiyya, cit., pp. 17-18. 11 GUL HASAN, Tadhkira-yi ghawthiyya, cit., p. 144; cfr. H. ASKARI, Solomon’s Ring, cit., p. 159. 12 Qui da intendersi verosimilmente come ‘scienza’ (sastra) dello yoga, e non in diretto riferi- mento ai testi di autori indiani, quali il jaina Hemacandra (1160) e il maestro nath Adinatha Parvatiputra, intitolati appunto Yoga s?stra; poco oltre Gul Hasan riferisce che la fonte da lui riportata in questo passo è il ‘detto’ (maq?la) di un non meglio identificato saggio indiano (kas? gy?n?). 1 (gennaio-giugno 2007) ? ?di petali o foglie (barg). Questi fasci sbocciano su entrambi i lati del fusto all’altezza dei punti simboleggianti i diversi loti nel corpo. Il numero dei petali di ogni centro sottile varia, dal primo loto del supporto (?dh?r per m?l?dh?ra), posto alla base della spina dorsale, dipartono quattro petali o boccioli (kal?), sei da quello dell’organo genitale, dieci da quello dell’ombelico, dodici da quello del cuore, sedici da quello della gola, due da quello della fronte ed infine ventidue da bram-manda,13 chiamato anche il ‘tesoro delle emanazioni nascoste’ (makhzan-i fayz?n-i ghayb), vale a dire il chakra posto sull’apice del cranio. Queste efflorescenze connettono i kanwal a gruppi di lettere dell’alfabeto sanscrito. Ad esempio, al primo chakra sono collegate quattro lettere, dalla va alla sa, al secondo sei, dalla ba alla la, al terzo dieci, dalla da alla pha, sebbene il numero delle lettere connesse ad ogni loto non sempre è identico a quello dei petali. Nei gruppi di lettere collegati ai primi quattro chakra, il primo e l’ultimo fonema della sequenza compongono delle formule. Questi gruppi di lettere, servendosi dell’immaginazione (ba-tasawwur), devono essere addotte dai petali all’interno del fusto, il quale deve essere a sua volta immaginato come un immenso fiume (dary?-yi ‘az?m) che scorrendo verso l’alto trasporta le lettere fino a bram- manda; dary? termine persiano che significa ‘mare’, ‘fiume’, traduce qui il ‘canale’ o n?d? della sushumn?. Quando tutte le lettere sono state riunite in cima si fanno fuoriuscire ognuna in ordine (ba-tart?b). In alto nella figura, al lato destro di bram- manda, è raffigurato un seggio (takht). Una chiosa a lato riferisce che l’aspirante (t?lib) deve immaginare il guru o il p?r che siede sul seggio, mentre un fiume di luce dal ‘tesoro delle emanazioni nascoste’ riempie il cuore. In tal modo, conclude l’autore, dopo diversi giorni si attivano i centri sottili (lat?’if) e tutto il corpo diventa lucente (munawwar).14 Sh?h Wal? All?h appare invece meno incline alla comparazione fra i metodi spirituali islamici ed indù, e nel Qawl al-Jam?l, discutendo della pratica naqshband? del controllo del respiro, non esita a rilevare che esiste una considerevole differenza fra questa e il metodo usato dagli yogi per regolare il respiro.15 Gli scritti degli autori naqshband? attivi fra il XVII e il XIX secolo sono le fonti sufi dell’India che offrono le esposizioni più dettagliate della dottrina delle lat?’if. Il principale modello naqshband? è descritto anche nella Tadhkira-yi ghawthiyya di Gul Hasan. La raffigurazione del modello naqshband? dei centri sottili in forma di diagrammi si ritrova in un altro e coevo testo redatto in urdu, le malf?z?t del menzionato Mawl?n? Fazl Rahm?n (1793-1895, Muradabad) raccolte dal suo discepolo e khal?fa Sayyid Muhammad ‘Al?.16 Nei diagrammi dei testi di Gul Hasan e Muhammad ‘Al? i centri sottili sono raffigurati da piccoli cerchi disposti ad 13 Brahmanda, qui usato al posto di brahma-randhra, il loto capovolto dai mille petali. 14 GUL HASAN, Tadhkira-yi ghawthiyya, cit., pp. 147-152. 15 Cfr. KHURRAM ‘AL?, al-Qawl al-jam?l ma‘ sharh Shif?’ al-‘al?l, cit., p. 62. 16 La filiazione naqshband? di Mawl?n? Fazl Rahm?n si ricollega alla linea di un khal?fa di Muhammad Ma‘sum (m. 1668), cfr. Sayyid Muhammad ‘Al?, Irsh?d-i rahm?n? wa fazl-i yazd?n?, cit., pp. 9-10, 80. 1 (gennaio-giugno 2007) ? ?imitazione del loro ordine gerarchico e geometrico.17 Sh?h Wal? All?h osserva sull’uso simbolico di questi cerchi che il padre gli raffigurava le lat?’if disegnando una circonferenza (d?’ira, che Khurram ‘Al? traduce anche con kundal, ‘anello’, ‘cerchio’) dicendo che questo è il cuore, poi tracciava un secondo cerchio dentro al primo simboleggiante r?h e così via fino al sesto cerchio più interno chiamato an?, l’io interiore, che Khurram ‘Al? spiega anche quale realtà dell’uomo (haq?qat-i ins?n?), aggiungendo che in persiano è detto man e in hindi main.18 La cosmologia naqshband? simboleggia l’universo come un cerchio denominato sfera dell’esistenza possibile (d?’ira-yi imkan), raffigurata dal secondo diagramma del testo di Muham- mad ‘Al?, la quale è divisa in due metà da una linea orizzontale che a sua volta simboleggia l’ubicazione di al-‘Arsh il Trono di Dio. La sezione superiore del cerchio, al di sopra del Trono divino, rappresenta il Mondo del comando divino (‘?lam-i amr), quella inferiore simboleggia il Mondo del creato (‘?lam-i khalq). In rapporto alla dottrina delle Cinque Presenze Divine alla quale si accennerà oltre, si può dire che al di sotto del Trono si trovano il mondo sottile degli spiriti (‘?lam-i malak?t), le sfere astrali e planetarie e infine il mondo sensibile e terreno (‘?lam-i mulk o ‘?lam-i n?s?t). L’antropologia spirituale dei naqshabandi indiani descrive la costituzione umana come un composto (nuskha, kham?ra) di dieci elementi o lat?’if, suddivisi in due gruppi di cinque, a secondo della loro provenienza dal Mondo del comando divino o dal Mondo del creato.19 Le lat?’if del Mondo del comando, chiamate anche le cinque gemme (jaw?hir-i khamsa), costituiscono la natura interiore (b?tin) dell’uomo e sono: qalb (cuore), r?h (spirito), sirr (segreto) khaf? (nascosto), akhf? (il più nascosto). Le cinque lat?’if del Mondo del creato, connesse alla costituzione esteriore (z?hir) dell’uomo, sono la nafs, l’io individuale dell’uomo, ed i quattro elementi: aria, acqua, terra e fuoco. Le cinque gemme costituiscono i principi superiori delle cinque lat?’if del Mondo del creato. Oltre agli elementi, ciascuna lat?fa è connessa ad un colore, che si manifesta quando il centro sottile è dischiuso, essenziali sono i rapporti con i profeti e gli attributi divini. A livello dell’involucro fisico, le lat?’if sono localizzate nel torace, locus della conoscenza gnostica, e sono disposte secondo un ordine gerarchico che disegna un triangolo raffigurato nel primo 17 Diagrammi più sintetici delle lat?’if compaiono già nei manuali in persiano di due importanti autori naqshband? di poco più antichi, Hid?yat al-t?lib?n di Ab? Sa‘?d Dihlaw? (m. 1835) e Mar?tib al-wus?l di Ra’?f Ahmad (m. 1838), cfr. AB? SA‘?D MUJADDID? DIHLAW?, Hid?yat al-t?lib?n, Lahore 1912, p.10, SH?H RA’?F AHMAD, Mar?tib al-wus?l, ms. pers. 638, Andhra Pradesh Oriental Manuscript Library, Hyderabad, p. 6. 18 KURRAM ‘AL?, al-Qawl al-jam?l ma‘ sharh Shif?’ al-‘al?l, cit., p. 84. 19 Spiega un più recente autore naqshband? che «Dio, il saggio medico (hak?m-i d?n?), preparò la sublime ricetta (nuskha) dell’uomo con le parti di entrambi i mondi, dei cieli e della terra, di modo che la composizione (dell’uomo), nella sua essenza, divenne uno specchio dell’universo e un piccolo mondo (‘?lam-i k?chak) ... Per tale motivo, l’uomo è chiamato essenza delle possibilità e microcosmo (‘?lam-i sagh?r)» (AB? AL-ASAN ZAYD F?R?Q?, Man?hij al-sayr wa mad?rij al-khayr, Qandahar 1957, pp. 11-12). 1 (gennaio-giugno 2007) ? ?diagramma del testo di Muhammad ‘Al?.20 Attraverso lo dhikr, il ricordo, questi organi sottili si epurano e si destano dallo stato d’oblio, ed è come se acquisissero memoria e consapevolezza della loro natura originale. A questo punto le lat?’if fuoriescono dalla gabbia corporea degli elementi e si ricongiungono alla loro origine nel Mondo del comando divino. Esistono alcune differenze fra gli insegnamenti di diversi ordini indiani riguardanti i gradi dello dhikr e le lat?’if, e alle volte anche all’interno dello stesso ordine. Fra i massimi autori della Chishtiyya d’epoca pre-moghul, Muhammad G?s?dir?z espone nei Asm?r al-asr?r un modello a cinque lat?’if che nell’ordine sono nafs (anima), qalb (cuore), r?h (spirito), sirr (segreto) e khaf? (nascosto).21 In una delle sue lettere, il chisht?-s?bir? ‘Abd al-Qudd?s Gangoh? (m. 1537) enumera quattro gradi dello dhikr, quello della lingua, del cuore, del segreto e dello spirito.22 Sh?h R?j? (m. 1682), un discendente di Muhammad G?s?dir?z attivo come il suo avo nel Deccan, contempla invece cinque livelli dello dhikr, quello della lingua, del cuore, dello spirito, del segreto e del nascosto.23 Gul Hasan offre un’interessante sebbene coincisa descrizione di uno dhikr qalandar? nelle lat?’if. Si tratta di uno dhikr silente (khaf?), eseguito ritenendo il respiro (habs-i dam) ed invocando il nome Huwa All?h ascendendo dal centro sottile posto vicino all’ombelico a quello all’apice del cranio (umm al-dim?gh) e poi da questo all’ombelico; quando non si riesce più a trattenere, il respiro deve essere esalato invocando All? H?.24 Al di là delle variazioni riscontrabili fra i diversi ordini, nell’insegnamento naqshband? come nel modello 20 La prima lat?fa, il cuore, l’origine della nafs, è connessa al profeta Adamo, al colore giallo ed è collocata sotto al seno sinistro. Il centro sottile dello spirito, origine dell’aria, è connesso ai profeti Noe e Abramo, al colore rosso, ed è localizzato sotto il seno destro. La terza lat?fa, il segreto, è connessa all’acqua, al profeta Mosè e al colore bianco ed è posta due dita sopra il seno sinistro. La lat?fa successiva, il nascosto, è connessa al fuoco, al profeta Gesù, al colore nero e si trova in posizione simmetrica rispetto alla precedente, sul lato destro. La lat?fa akhf?, origine della terra, è connessa a Muhammad, il sigillo dei profeti, al colore verde, ed occupa il vertice del triangolo formato degli altri centri sottili. A questi cinque gli autori naqshbandi fanno spesso seguire altri due centri sottili, il primo dei quali è la stessa nafs, la quintessenza (lubb) dei quattro elementi, posta fra i due occhi. Infine vi è la lat?fa q?libiyya, ovvero la lat?fa del corpo (q?lab), il cui luogo è appunto nella totalità del corpo, dai capelli alle unghie dei piedi; nella gerarchia dei centri sottili questa lat?fa è anche posta all’apice del cranio. Fra i testi già menzionati cfr. KURRAM ‘AL?, al-Qawl al-jam?l ma‘ sharh Shif?’ al-‘al?l, cit., p. 84-86, AB? SA‘?D DIHLAW?, Hid?yat al-t?lib?n, cit., pp. 10-12, SAYYID MUHAMMAD ‘AL?, Irsh?d-i rahm?n? wa fazl-i yazd?n?, cit., pp. 8-12, AB? AL-HASAN ZAYD F?R?Q?, Man?hij al-sayr wa mad?rij al-khayr, cit., pp. 15-29; in italiano si veda in particolare lo scritto di A. VENTURA, L’invocazione del cuore, in B. SCARCIA AMORETTI – L. ROSTAGNO (cura di), Y?d-n?ma. In memoria di Alessandro Bausani, Bardi, Roma 1991, pp. 475-485. 21 Cfr. KHUSRO HUSSAINI, Sayyid Muhammad al-Husayn?-i G?s?dir?z (721/1321-825/1422) on Sufism, Idarah-i adabiyat, Delhi 1983, pp. 87, 109, 150. 22 ‘ABD AL-QUDD?S GANGOH?, Makt?b?t-i Qudd?siyya, al-Faisal, Lahore 2004, trad. urdu di W?hid Bakhsh Siy?l Chisht?, p. 538, lettera n. 122. 23 Y?SUF AL-HUSAYN? SH?H R?J?, Tar?q al-muwahhid?n, Sh?h R?j? Academy, Hyderabad 1975, pp. 28-32. 24 Gul Hasan aggiunge che fra gli effetti (athar) di questo metodo vi è il volo spirituale (tayr), GUL HASAN, Ta‘l?m-i ghawthiyya, Hyderabad s.d., p. 292. 1 (gennaio-giugno 2007) ? ?associato alle Cinque Presenze Divine circolante fra i chisht? e i qadir? indiani appare centrale il nesso stabilito fra la dottrina dei centri sottili e i principi della scienza metafisico-cosmologica. I testi redatti da Gul Hasan e la traduzione di Khurram ‘Al? offrono alcune interessanti illustrazioni delle dottrine trasmesse in seno ai q?dir? indiani e alle quali vogliamo accennare nel resto di questo scritto. Definire come esclusivamente q?dir? alcuni di questi insegnamenti appare tuttavia impreciso, in quanto, come segnaleremo oltre, se ne ritrovano descrizioni alquanto simili in testi dell’ordine chisht?. Questo è da ricondurre anche al fatto che già da molto prima di Ghawth ‘Al? Sh?h numerosi maestri indiani fra i più insigni, pur mantenendo un rapporto privilegiato con un ordine, erano allo stesso iniziati ad altri e ne trasmettevano gli insegnamenti e la successione spirituale. Gul Hasan riporta in entrambi i suoi testi istruzioni di Ghawth ‘Al? Sh?h concernenti un modello a sei lat?’if che pone akhf? all’apice del cranio, khaf? fra le due sopracciglia, r?h sotto il seno destro, sirr al centro del petto fra r?h e qalb, qalb sotto il seno sinistro, ed infine la lat?fa nafs poco sotto l’ombelico. Il colore connesso ad akhf? è il verde, quello di khaf? è il nero, r?h è collegato al rosso, sirr al bianco, il colore di qalb è invece il giallo, mentre la nafs è della tonalità del bianco lunare. L’ordine nel quale i centri sottili devono essere attivati inizia da qalb dal quale si passa alla lat?fa speculare di r?h, poi a quella centrale di sirr, dopo a quella inferiore della nafs, dalla quale si ascende a khaf? ed infine ad akhf?. Quando tutte le lat?’if sono attivate si passa allo stadio del sult?n al- adhk?r, ovvero il ‘sultano degli dhikr’, che corrisponde alla menzione del nome dell’Essenza (All?h) emesso da ogni radice dei capelli, lembo di carne e pelle.25 Gul Hasan non chiarisce se tale modello dei centri sottili sia di origine q?dir? o meno, mentre altre fonti indicano che questo circolava anche fra altri ordini indiani.26 Nel capitolo sullo dhikr della Ta‘l?m-i ghawthiyya, Gul Hasan raccoglie l’insegnamento del suo maestro concernente i rapporti fra i piani della realtà e i livelli dello dhikr. La trattazione data si riallaccia alla dottrina metafisica delle Cinque Presenze Divine che fu sviluppata in particolare, sebbene non solo, dalla scuola di Ibn ‘Arab? (m. 1240). La Q?diriyya indiana fu un ordine sicuramente ricettivo ai temi della dottrina metafisica e gnostica di Ibn ‘Arab? e dei suoi eredi. La dottrina delle Cinque Presenze Divine ordina la realtà in cinque piani o mondi, secondo un assetto gerarchico che va dalla sfera della Ipseità divina al mondo della natura umana. Nel testo di Gul Hasan questi cinque piani coincidono con i diversi stadi dello dhikr, indicando in tal modo la corrispondenza esistente fra la dottrina 25 Cfr. GUL HASAN, Ta‘l?m-i ghawthiyya, cit., p. 158; ID., Tadhkira-yi ghawthiyya, cit., pp. 147, 152. 26 Cfr. la chiosa del traduttore e scrittore sufi contemporaneo W?hid Bakhsh Siy?l Chisht? (m. 1995) alla lettera menzionata (n. 122) di ‘Abd al-Qudd?s Gangoh?, cfr. ‘ABD AL-QUDD?S GANGOH?, Makt?b?t-i Qudd?siyya, cit., p. 538; a proposito di alcune fonti naqshband? cfr. A. BUEHLER, Sufi Heirs of the Prophet. The Indian Naqshbandiyya and the Rise of the Mediating Sufi Shaykh, University of South Carolina Press, 1998, p. 109, nota 39. ? ?inziatica e quella metafisico-cosmologica, e che la struttura del macrocosmo si rispecchia nel microcosmo del corpo sottile dischiuso dallo dhikr. Scrive a questo riguardo Gul Hasan che lo dhikr della lingua (zaban), vale a dire quello eseguito solo verbalmente e non da un organo sottile, corrisponde allo ‘Alam-i n?s?t, il Mondo umano, materiale e sensibile. Il dhikr del cuore si collega allo ‘Alam-i malak?t, letteralmente il Mondo del Reame, vale a dire il mondo sottile delle forme incorporee e degli spiriti; è questo il mondo abitato dai jinn, i geni. Il dhikr di r?h, lo spirito, corrisponde allo ‘Alam-i jabar?t, il Mondo della Potenza, ovvero il dominio della manifestazione sopraformale o mondo serafico, il mondo che abbraccia e contiene la creazione formale. Il dhikr eseguito da sirr, il segreto, è connesso allo ‘Alam-i l?h?t, il Mondo della natura divina creatrice, dei Nomi e delle Qualità divine. Il dhikr invocato da khaf?, l’ascosto, corrisponde infine allo‘Alam-i h?h?t, (dal nome divino Huwa, Lui, nome dell’Essenza divina), cioè il Mondo della Ipseità divina, la sfera della natura essenziale di Dio. Il rapporto fra i livelli dello dhikr e i pani dell’essere è connesso all’invocazione di formule specifiche, alla via e gli stadi della conoscenza religiosa e spirituale, questi ultimi sono: la shar?‘at, ovvero la legge religiosa essoterica; tar?qat, la ‘via’ iniziatica e spirituale; haq?qat la ‘realtà’ o ‘verità’ spirituale; ma‘rifat, la ‘conoscenza’ nel senso di ‘gnosi’ suprema. Il primo livello, sul piano della shar?‘at-i n?s?t?, è quello dello dhikr della lingua che invoca la formula l? il?ha ill? All?h Muhammad ras?lu-ll?h, vale a dire la professione (shah?da) di fede islamica. Il secondo livello corrisponde al piano della tar?qat-i malak?t? ed è quello del dhikr del cuore invocante la prima parte della shah?da, ovvero l? il?ha ill? All?h (non vi è divinità all’infuori di Dio), attestante l’unicità divina. Il terzo livello dello dhikr, corrispondente alla haq?qat-i jabar?t, è quello del nome All?h, il nome dell’essenza divina, invocato da r?h. Il quarto livello, connesso alla haq?qat-i l?h?t?, è quello dello dhikr del nome Hu (Lui), menzionato da sirr. Il quinto livello è quello dello dhikr di khaf? invocante an? (io), che è correlato alla ma‘rifat-i h?h?t?. Si menziona infine un sesto ed ultimo livello che è quello della haq?qat al-Haqq, la ‘realtà di Dio’, che corrisponde a khaf? al-akhf? (il nascosto del più nascosto), del quale niente è detto. Sul rapporto con le formule invocate, è aggiunto poco oltre che dhikr-i jabar?t? è anche da considerarsi quello del nome dell’essenza, ovvero All?h, unito ad una qualità divina (sifat), come All?h al-Samad (Dio l’Eterno), mentre dhikr-i l?h?t? è quello del nome dell’essenza senza qualità.27 27 GUL HASAN, Ta‘l?m-i ghawthiyya, cit., pp. 281-283. ?Tav. 1. Schema riassuntivo delle relazioni fra livelli della realtà, stadi dello dhikr e della via spirituale secondo Ghawth ‘Al? Sh?h Qalandar Q?dir?. ????Cinque Presenze Divine Stadi dello dhikr ???Via spirituale ??H?h?t Nascosto ??Ma‘rifat-i h?h?t? ??L?h?t Segreto ??Haq?qat-i l?h?t? ??Jabar?t Spirito ??Haq?qat-i jabar?t? ??Malak?t Cuore ??Tar?qat-i malak?t? ??N?s?t Lingua ???Shar?‘at-i n?s?t? ?????Esposizioni analoghe di tale insegnamento si ritrovano in precedenti opere persiane di sufi indiani. Nell’ambito della Q?diriyya si segnala la Ris?la-yi j?m-i haqq-num? di Muh? al-D?n Ahmad Q?dir?, autore attivo a Hyderabad (Deccan) dove morì nel 1773. Muh? al-D?n Ahmad aveva dato, con qualche variazione rispetto a Gul Hasan, un’enunciazione ampliata della gerarchia pentadica menzionata prima, che oltre ai livelli della realtà e dello dhikr includeva la dottrina concernente l’anima (nafs), il wuj?d (essere), il cuore (qalb), il tawh?d (Unità Divina), la conoscenza, i luoghi (mahall?t), la testimonianza (shah?dat). Tali sintesi offrono al discepolo e al lettore un’illustrazione comprensiva del sapere metafisico e mistico della tradizione, un albero della conoscenza che espone le concordanze fra le sfere della scienza tradizionale e le corrispondenze fra i livelli della gnosi, dell’universo, dell’Essere e della costituzione umana. Ad esempio, la corrispondenza fra le nature dell’anima e i piani della realtà (qui detti man?zil?t) codifica il principio cardine della struttura gerarchica della costituzione animica dell’uomo, che riflette appunto la gerarchia dei mondi nell’universo. Le cinque vie (sab?l?t) secondo Muh? al-D?n Ahmad sono: la via della legge religiosa (r?h-i shar?‘at), la via sufica (r?h-i tar?qat), la via della realtà (r?h-i haq?qat), la via della gnosi (r?h-i ma‘rifat) e la via dell’ Unità Divina (r?h-i tawh?d). Le condizioni e i livelli del wuj?d sono dell’Esistenza Necessaria (l?zim al- wuj?d), dell’Esistenza Possibile (mumkin al-wuj?d), dell’Esistenza Impossibile ?(mumtani‘ al-wuj?d), dopo di che troviamo ‘?rif al-wuj?d, lo gnostico o conoscitore dell’Esistenza, e w?hid al-wuj?d, l’unico dell’Esistenza. La dottrina dell’anima contempla: l’anima concupiscente (nafs-i amm?ra), vale a dire l’io vile ed inferiore legato alla natura materiale e alla sfera infera del sussurro satanico; l’anima che biasima (nafs-i law?mma), l’anima ispirata (nafs-i mulhama), l’anima pacificata (nafs-i mutma’inna), ovvero purificata dei suoi difetti inferiori e capace di reintegrarsi nella sfera spirituale, ed infine nafas-i Rahm?n?, il respiro o soffio del Misericordioso. I cinque cuori (qul?b) sono il cuore carnale (qalb-i muzgha), il cuore penitente (qalb-i mun?b), il cuore bello o grazioso (qalb-i was?m), il cuore che testimonia (qalb-i shah?d) e il cuore reale (qalb-i haq?q?). I cinque gradi del tawh?d sono quello delle parole (aqw?l?), delle azioni (af‘?l?), degli stati (ahw?l?), dell’Essenza (dh?t?) e dell’estinzione nell’Essenza (fan? f?-l-dh?t?). Le forme di conoscenza (‘uq?l?t) sono l’analogia o sillogismo (qiy?s), l’immaginazione (wahm), la congettura (gum?n), la comprensione (fahm), l’ultimo grado è quello di ‘aql-i kull, l’Intelletto Universale. I cinque luoghi o stazioni (mahall?t) sono la stazione dell’aria (haw?), della purezza o limpidezza (saf?’), della dimora (mak?n), del non luogo (l? mak?n), l’ultimo mahall è definito come il ‘dopo l’oltre’ (war?’ al-w?ra). L’ultima divisione data riguarda la gerarchia dei livelli o gradi (mar?tib?t) che verosimilmente concerne i centri sottili, i quali sono la nafs, il cuore (dil), lo spirito (r?h), la luce (n?r) ed il segreto (sirr); gli ultimi due gradi appaiono incongrui, ed è verosimile ipotizzare che nella copiatura del testo la posizione di sirr sia stata invertita accidentalmente con quella di n?r.28 Il passo citato da Ghul?m ‘Al? (cf. nota precedente) non include commenti o spiegazioni delle gerarchie descritte e dei termini corrispondenti ai diversi gradi. I richiami fondamentali agli insegnamenti canonici della tradizione sono in ogni modo ben visibili. Fra questi si possono notare in particolare i riferimenti alla dottrina menzionata dei livelli dell’anima e a quella delle stazioni del cuore.29 I primi tre gradi del wuj?d richiamano a prima vista le 28 Il passo in questione della Ris?la-yi j?m-i haqq-num? fu incluso da un discendente dell’autore, Sh?h Ghul?m ‘Al? (m. 1842), nell’ampia voce su Muh? al-D?n Ahmad del suo celebre dizionario biografico dei sufi del Deccan, cfr. SH?H GHUL?M ‘AL? Q?DIR?, Mishk?t al-nubuwat, Hyderabad 1985, trad. urdu di Wah?d Q?dir?, vol. VII, pp. 128-129; il passo è qui riportato nell’originale persiano con traduzione urdu a fronte. 29 La suddivisione ternaria della nafs in amm?ra, law?mma e mutma’inna è d’origine coranica, e questa costituì il modello fondamentale della dottrina sufi dell’anima; tuttavia diversi mistici musulmani descrissero anche altre nuf?s (pl. di nafs), come la nafs-i mulhama e la nafs-i n?tiqa (anima razionale o logica), assimilando alle volte elementi tipici delle scienze filosofiche e naturali, come la nafs-i nab?tiyya (anima vegetativa). La dottrina delle stazioni (maq?mat) del cuore si ritrova in eminenti sufi del passato come Hak?m al-Tirmidh? (m. 936 c.), sebbene la terminologia usata da Muh? al-D?n per i diversi gradi è diversa da quella di al-Tirmidh?, cfr. N. HEER, A Sufi Psychological Treatise. A Translation of the Bay?n al-Farq bayn al-Hadr wa al-Qalb wa al-Fu’?d wa al-Lubb of Ab? ?modalità fondamentali (necessità, contingenza, impossibilità) della logica aristotelica, mentre negli ultimi due gradi di questa gerarchia, gnostico dell’Esistenza ed unico dell’Esistenza, è chiaro il riferimento terminologico e concettuale alla dottrina della Unicità dell’Esistenza (wahdat al-wuj?d) di Ibn ‘Arab?. Anche i primi tre gradi più che in riferimento all’abituale definizione filosofica e teologica dei termini adottati devono qui essere intesi in rapporto alla dottrina esoterica e alla gerarchia dei piani dello sviluppo spirituale; ciò risulta chiaramente da alcuni paragrafi della Ta‘l?m-i ghawthiyya dove i termini in questione sono definiti con più precisione e connessi ai livelli del corpo, dello spirito e alle sfere angeliche. Ad esempio, lo stadio di dell’Esistenza Necessaria (w?jib al-wuj?d) corrisponde al livello del corpo terrestre (tan-i kh?k?) e alla sfera dell’angelo Michele, quello dell’Esistenza Possibile al corpo sottile (tan-i r?h?n?), al cuore penitente e allo spirito viaggiatore (r?h-i j?r? o r?h-i mus?fir) che si libra nel mondo del sogno (coincidente con il mondo del malak?t nello schema di Muh? al-D?n Ahmad), mentre il grado di gnostico dell’Esistenza, vale a dire dell’essere conoscitore (d?n?) di sé stesso, è quello del corpo luminoso (tan-i n?r?n?), del cuore che testimonia, dello spirito santo (r?h-i quds?) che corrisponde tradizionalmente a Gabriele.30 Tav. 2. Schema riassuntivo parziale delle corrispondenze in pentadi secondo Muh? al- D?n Ahmad. ???Vie (sab?l?t) ?R?h-i shar?‘at R?h-i tar?qat ??R?h-i haq?qat ??R?h-i ma‘rifat ??R?h-i tawh?d ??Esistenza ?Necessaria Possibile ??Impossibile ??Gnostico dell’Esistenza ??Unico dell’Esistenza ??Anima ?Concupiscente Che biasima ??Inspirata ??Pacificata ???Soffio del Misericordioso ???Cuore ?Carnale Penitente ??Bello ?Che testimonia ?Reale ?Tawh?d ?Delle parole ?Delle azioni ???Degli stati ??Dell’Essenza ???Dell’estinzione nell’Essenza ??????‘Abd All?h Muhammad ibn ‘Al? al-Hak?m al-Tirmidh?, in «The Muslim World» 60/1 (1961), pp. 25- 36, alle pp. 25, 27. 30 GUL HASAN, Ta‘l?m-i ghawthiyya, cit., pp. 322, 327, 338. ?????Conoscenza ?Analogia Immaginazione ??Congettura ??Comprensione ???Intelletto Universale ???Dhikr ?Sonoro (jal?) Del cuore ??Dello spirito ?Del segreto ?Del nascosto ??Mahall?t (Stazioni) ?Dell’aria Della limpidezza ??Della dimora ??Del non luogo ??Del dopo l’oltre ??Man?zil?t ?Manzil-i n?sut Manzil-i malak?t ??Manzil-i jabar?t ??Manzil-i l?h?t ???Manzil-i h?h?t ??Mar?tib?t (Gradi o livelli) ?Martaba-yi nafs (Grado dell’anima) ?Martaba-yi dil (Grado del cuore) ???Martaba-yi r?h (Grado dello spirito) ?Martaba-yi sirr (Grado del segreto) ??Martaba-yi n?r (Grado della luce) ?????Sintesi dottrinali analoghe si incontrano in precedenti fonti redatte da autori chisht?. Muhammad G?s?dir?z aveva indicato le corrispondenze delle cinque lat?’if menzionate sopra con i livelli della auto-manifestazione di Dio (Effetti, Atti, Nomi, Attributi divini, Essenza divina), con i cinque livelli della via spirituale (shar?‘at, tar?qat, haq?qat, haqq al-haq?qat, haq?qat al-haqq), con gli stadi in rapporto alla profezia e con i cinque stadi mistici dell’audizione musicale (sam?‘).31 Meno rilevante appare qui il riferimento alla dottrina delle Cinque Presenze Divine, e al proposito si può ricordare che Muhammad G?s?dir?z era un sostenitore della prospettiva del mistico iraniano ‘Al? al-Dawla Simn?n? (m. 1336), uno dei maggiori critici del wahdat al-wuj?d di Ibn ‘Arab?. Una sintesi pressoché uguale a quella data da Muh? al-D?n Ahmad è presente nel Ma‘rifat al-sul?k, un importante trattato sulla dottrina mistica composto da Shaykh Mahm?d Khwush-Dah?n (m. 1617), un chisht? vissuto anch’egli nel Deccan, a Bijapur.32 Sh?h Kal?m All?h aveva trattato brevemente delle correlazioni fra formula e nome invocato e le Presenze divine; secondo tali corrispondenze l? il?ha ill? All?h è uno dhikr-i n?sut?, l’affermazione ill? All?h è malak?t?, lo dhikr del nome All?h è jabar?t?, ed infine Huwa è l?h?t?.33 31 Cfr. KHUSRO HUSSAINI, Sayyid Muhammad al-Husayn?-i G?s?dir?z on Sufism, cit., pp. 87, 150, 178. 32 Cfr. W. C. CHITTICK, Travelling the Sufi Path. A Chist? Handbook from Bijapur, in L. LEWISOHN - D. MORGAN (Eds.) The Heritage of Sufism, vol. III, Oneworld, Oxford 1999, pp. 247- 265. 33 SH?H KAL?M ALL?H SH?HJAH?N?B?D?, Kashk?l-i Kal?m?, Delhi s.d., p. 81. ?Tav. 3. Corrispondenze fra Presenze Divine, formule e nomi invocati nel dhikr secondo Sh?h Kal?m All?h e Ghawth ‘Al? Sh?h. ????Presenze Divine ??Formule e nomi corrispondenti secondo Shah Kalim Allah ??L?h?t ?Huwa ??Jabar?t ?All?h ??Malak?t ?Ill? All?h ??N?sut ?L? il?ha ill? All?h ?????????Presenze Divine ??Formule e nomi corrispondenti secondo Ghawth ‘Ali Shah ??H?h?t ?An? (dal nascosto) ??L?h?t ?H? (dal segreto) ??Jabar?t ?All?h (dallo spirito) ??Malak?t ?La il?ha ill? All?h (dal cuore) ??N?sut ?La il?ha ill? All?h Muhammad ras?lu-ll?h (invocato dalla lingua) ???????1 (gennaio-giugno 2007) Istruzioni sullo dhikr nei centri sottili in alcuni trattati in urdu sulla via mistica 153 ?La traduzione di Khurram ‘Al? e la Ta‘l?m-i ghawthiyya di Gul Hasan descrivono diverse forme e stili di dhikr. Il quarto capitolo della Shif?’ al-‘al?l è dedicato alla Q?diriyya e n’espone i metodi spirituali, ed in particolare le forme di dhikr, l’osservazione del respiro (tar?qa-yi p?s-i anf?s), alcuni tipi di mur?qaba (contemplazione spirituale), e considera anche un metodo per la guarigione della malattia che consiste nell’invocazione del nome divino y? Shaf? (oh il Guaritore). Dopo una breve introduzione sull’ordine q?dir? e il suo fondatore ‘Abd al-Qadir al- J?l?n? (m. 1166), è descritto lo dhikr sonoro (jahr?) del nome All?h eseguito in diverse battute (zarb). Nella forma a due battute, l’invocante, seduto nella posizione della preghiera, deve menzionare il nome All?h prima sul ginocchio destro e nella seconda battuta con enfasi nel cuore; nello dhikr a tre battute, seduto a gambe incrociate, questi deve invocare prima All?h sul ginocchio destro, poi sul sinistro ed infine alla terza battuta con forza nel cuore; la forma a quattro battute è uguale alla precedente nei primi tre movimenti, mentre l’ultima zarb va emessa con intensità di ‘fronte a sé’. Lo dhikr q?dir? sonoro della negazione e dell’affermazione (naf? awr ithb?t), vale a dire recitante la formula l? il?ha ill? All?h, è eseguito sedendo ad occhi chiusi nella posizione della preghiera, in direzione della qibla, dopo di che s’invoca la negazione l? salendo dall’ombelico alla spalla destra, nella seconda battuta s’invoca il?ha ascendendo dalla spalla destra al cervello, ed infine ill? All?h battendo con forza sul cuore.34 Lo dhikr della negazione e dell’affermazione eseguito con l’osservazione del respiro consiste nell’invocare la negazione l? il?ha con l’espirazione e l’affermazione ill? All?h durante l’inspirazione; l’effetto maggiore della via dell’osservazione dei respiri (p?s-i anf?s) è di estinguere i pensieri ed il sussurro della nafs.35 Fra i metodi di dhikr q?dir? implicanti la concentrazione sulle lat?’if vi è uno peculiare di questo ordine chiamato daura-yi Qadiriyya, il ‘circolo della Qadiriyya’; daura, o daur, è un termine che indica un moto circolare, una rotazione, una rivoluzione, di un corpo o del tempo, e quindi un orbita, un epiciclo. Tale metodo è descritto con qualche variante sia nel commentario di Khurram ‘Al? sia nel trattato di Gul Hasan. Il circolo della Qadiriyya, nella sua forma a tre stazioni, consiste nell’invocazione del nome dell’Essenza divina (ism-i dhat) insieme ai tre nomi che si riferiscono agli attributi (sif?t) divini dell’Udito (Sam‘), della Vista (Basar) e dell’Onniscienza (‘Ilm). L’istruzione preliminare specifica di sedere chiudendo gli occhi e le labbra, Ghawth ‘Al? Sh?h aggiunge di porsi in direzione della qibla, di unire la lingua al palato e, particolare più rilevante, di ritenere il respiro, particolare al quale invece non si fa riferimento nel Qawl al-Jam?l. A tal punto si deve recitare con la lingua del cuore (dil ki zab?n) i tre nomi All?h Sam?‘ (Allah l’Udente), All?h Bas?r (Allah il Vedente), All?h ‘Al?m (Allah l’Onnisciente). All?h Sam?‘ deve essere invocato ascendendo dall’ombelico al centro del petto, dove, chiarisce Gul Hasan, si trova la lat?fa sirr, dopo si deve invocare All?h Bas?r salendo dal petto all’apice del 34 KHURRAM ‘AL?, al-Qawl al-jam?l ma‘ sharh Shif?’ al-‘al?l, cit., pp. 39-40. 35 Ibid., p. 43. ?cranio, poi si deve invocare Allah ‘Al?m ascendendo dal cervello fino a raggiungere il Trono di Dio (‘Arsh). A questo punto si deve discendere grado per grado, recitando gli stessi nomi in ordine inverso, vale a dire All?h ‘Al?m dal Trono divino all’apice del cranio, All?h Bas?r dal cranio al centro del petto, All?h Sam?‘ discendendo dal petto all’ombelico. In tal modo si forma appunto un daura. Si fa qui forse allusione alla circonferenza immaginaria il cui diametro verticale coincide con il segmento di retta che unisce i punti corrispondenti ai centri sottili umani per lo zenit fino al Trono divino; si può notare in tal senso che proiettando il movimento ascensionale e discensionale del dhikr dal diametro sui due archi della circonferenza si ottiene in effetti un moto ed un’orbita circolare che dal piano umano ascende a quello divino e poi da questo ridiscende al primo. Khurram ‘Al?, commentando il conciso testo di Sh?h Wal? All?h, spiega che alcuni eseguono tale dhikr invocando anche un altro nome, quello dell’attributo divino dell’Onnipotenza (Qudra), dividendo l’ultimo movimento ascendente in due parti; secondo tale variazione si deve invocare Allah Qad?r (Allah l’Onnipotente) al terzo movimento che giunge così fino al cielo (?sm?n); mentre il quarto, con Allah Al?m, ascende dal cielo al Trono divino. Gul Hasan chiarisce che il dhikr dei tre gradi (p?ya) del circolo della Q?diriyya deriva il suo nome dal fatto di avere tre fondamenti (rukn), il primo è di stabilire il nome dell’essenza nello stadio (maq?m) della conversazione della nafs (had?th-i nafs), il secondo è di stabilire la contemplazione degli attributi principali (mul?haza- yi sif?t-i ummah?t) nella stazione della paura (mahall-i khatra), il terzo è di stabilire la visione del cuore (nazar-i dil) nel suo centro. Quando i nomi degli attributi divini sono uniti al nome dell’essenza, questo nella terminologia dei sufi è detto contemplazione (mul?haza) ed inclinazione (ir?da), e ciò che è visto è detto immaginazione (tasawwur), mediatore (w?sita), connessione (r?bita) e mondo intermedio (barzakh). In questo dhikr vi sono poi otto condizioni (shart), delle quali le prime quattro sono interne (d?khil?) e sono indispensabili allo dhikr, queste sono l’intensità (shadd) e il prolungamento (madd) dell’invocazione della lettera alif del nome dell’Essenza; la parte inferiore (taht) e l’apice (fauq) o nadir e zenit, che si riferiscono alle regioni dell’ombelico e dell’apice del cranio dove è invocato lo dhikr; la quinta condizione è il combattimento (muh?raba) che si compenetra con l’intensità (shadd) ed è di due tipi, il piccolo (sagh?r) ed il grande (kab?r), il piccolo combattimento consistente nella ripetizione del nome quaranta volte in un respiro, mentre il grande combattimento corrisponde ad un numero di ripetizioni superiore a quaranta fino a cento; la sesta condizione è la mur?qaba, la vigilanza o concentrazione, che si compenetra con la contemplazione; la settima condizione è l’esame dell’anima (muh?saba) mentre l’ottava sono i consigli o insegnamenti (maw?‘iz), e queste ultime due condizioni sono invece esterne.36 Le descrizioni qui presentate offrono solo una sintesi di alcuni insegnamenti concernenti lo dhikr nelle lat?’if che si ritrovano nelle fonti mistiche indo-islamiche; queste istruzioni sono in ogni caso indicative dell’attenzione che fu riservata a tale 36 Ibid., p. 42-43; GUL HASAN, Ta‘l?m-i ghawthiyya, cit., pp. 293-294. ?dottrina nei trattati in urdu sulla via mistica che furono redatti in epoca coloniale. La trattazione del soggetto dei nuovi trattati in urdu segue sostanzialmente quella canonica dei testi persiani del genere e consolida ed arricchisce l’uso di diagrammi illustranti le lat?’if. Questa letteratura svolse il ruolo di rendere accessibili in urdu i principi e i metodi della dottrina mistica, in forme talora più estese e dettagliate, come nel caso della Ta‘l?m-i ghawthiyya, in altri casi più sintetiche e compendiate, come per la traduzione di Khurram ‘Al?. Spetta a sforzi futuri il compito di offrire studi più ampi della letteratura sufi a carattere manualistico e biografico redatta in urdu e ricognizioni più dettagliate degli insegnamenti sullo dhikr nei centri sottili che furono assimilati ed esposti in queste opere. ?
- [The Mystic Word “OM”](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-mystic-word-om) - Swami Prabhavananda From Vedic times until the present day the word “OM” has been taken as a symbol and as an aid to meditation by spiritual aspirants. It is accepted both as one with Brahman and as the medium, the Logos, connecting man and God. It is God, and by its aid man may realize
- [Weighing the Word: Reasoning the Qur’an as Revelation](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/weighing-the-word) - by Peter Samsel, 2016. ISBN 978-1-908092-14-4 Click here to read an excerpt Click here to buy through The Book Depository. Alternatively, buy through Amazon US, or Amazon UK. This is a Matheson Trust Publication, click here to view other Matheson Trust Publications.
- [Petite mystagogie de la Divine Liturgie](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/petite-mystagogie) - Petite mystagogie de la Divine Liturgie I Lorsque nous prions dans une église, nous sommes entourés d’une grande richesse de symboles. Connaître la signification de ces signes rendra notre prière plus riche, plus consciente, plus pleine. La symbolique de l’espace Tout d’abord, une église est orientée : tournée vers l’est, et donc le soleil levant. C’est d’ailleurs le sens littéral du mot « anatolî » en Grec, qui nous parle donc de « Levant » plutôt que « d’Orient ». Ce soleil levant est le symbole à la fois de la résurrection et de la seconde venue du Christ. C’est donc la résurrection qui oriente notre prière, et le peuple chrétien est tout entier tourné vers le « second et glorieux nouvel avènement ». Toute célébration liturgique chrétienne est eschatologique en ce sens qu’elle transporte les fidèles, par anticipation, dans le Royaume à venir. Au niveau de l’architecture d’ensemble, la symbolique des volumes exprime l’idée théologique principale de la liturgie. Une église byzantine consiste essentiellement en une imbrication de cube et de sphère. La magnifique basilique St Paul de Harissa en est un exemple caractéristique. Au cube principal, celui du chœur, qui a parfois la forme d’une croix grecque, s’ajoute souvent celui du vestibule, ou « exonarthex », qui finit par ne faire plus qu’un avec lui et allonge l’église. Or, dans la symbolique biblique, le cube - ou le carré - est le symbole de tout ce qui est créé, limité dans le temps et l’espace. On parle ainsi des quatre points cardinaux de l’univers etc. Par contre, la sphère, qui n’a géométriquement ni commencement ni fin, figure le monde céleste et éternel. Deux sphères viennent donc s’insérer dans l’édifice cubique principal : la coupole qui le coiffe par au-dessus, tandis que l’abside lui est accolée du côté oriental. Dans le sens de la hauteur comme dans celui de la longueur, nous avons la même pénétration du volume cubique par la sphère. L’architecture signifie ainsi une rencontre du ciel et de la terre, du temps et de l’éternité, des hommes et du monde spirituel (figure 1 : schéma de l’église St André à Constantinople). Le Temple de Jérusalem et l’église. Une église byzantine reprend beaucoup d’éléments de l’ancien Temple de Jérusalem. Ce dernier, divisé en trois parties, était lui-même au centre d’un système de pureté rituelle qui allait du plus impur vers le plus pur : cour des païens, des femmes, des (hommes) israélites et enfin des prêtres. Puis venait le bâtiment proprement dit, avec le vestibule, sorte de transition entre la cour et le temple, où les prêtres pouvaient circuler librement pour le service du temple. Ensuite le « Saint », où, par tirage au sort, on offrait quotidiennement l’encens et les pains de proposition (cf. Lc 1, 8 ss. et la charge sacerdotale de Zacharie, Père du Précurseur Jean le baptiste). Et enfin le « Saint des saints », caché par un rideau, lieu redoutable de la présence de Dieu qui y siège sur l’arche d’alliance, dans lequel seul le grand Prêtre entrait, une fois par an, le jour des expiations, après s’être très soigneusement purifié (cf. Hb 9, 1-7). ? Notre sanctuaire reproduit cet archétype : l’iconostase remplace le rideau ; l’autel figure l’arche d’alliance ; la réserve eucharistique se substitue à la manne du désert, qui était renfermée dans une urne placée dans l’arche, et l’évangéliaire est la nouvelle loi qui succède à la première, dont les tables de pierre gravées par Dieu se trouvaient avec la manne. Enfin et surtout, la Vierge orante orne l’abside (dès le VIe siècle, au moins). Elle est en effet le nouveau Temple car elle remplit le rôle de l’ancien sanctuaire des hébreux : ayant porté le Verbe en son sein, elle est le lieu de la présence de Dieu sur terre. Elle est d'ailleurs représentée dans l'abside comme « Vierge trônante » sur laquelle est assis l'Emmanuel. En ce sens, elle est la nouvelle arche d'Alliance, qui était dans l'ancien temple le trône de la divinité. Parce qu’elle a été l’instrument de l’incarnation, elle apparaît comme le temple vivant de la divinité. Dans nos églises, nous retrouvons la division en trois parties de l’ancien temple : le vestibule pour les catéchumènes et les pénitents, c’est-à-dire ceux qui n’ont pas encore accès où sont momentanément exclus des « mystères » ; puis chœur où se tient le peuple des baptisés ; enfin le sanctuaire, au-delà de l’iconostase, où officie le clergé. Il ne s’agit pas, comme dans le judaïsme, d’un système d’exclusion qui consiste à distinguer et à séparer des classes de personnes selon leur degré de sainteté légale. Dans le christianisme, le système d’exclusion basée sur la pureté rituelle s’inverse en une dynamique de sanctification qui invite chacun à parcourir un chemin spirituel allant du profane - l’extérieur de l’église - au « parfaitement saint » - la communion eucharistique. La disposition de l’église nous rappelle que la vie de tout homme est un pèlerinage vers la Jérusalem céleste. Chacun de nous est un homo viator Le programme iconographique d’une église byzantine. Le plan horizontal d’une église byzantine fait donc apparaître une division tripartite. Le plan vertical met en évidence une double dynamique. La disposition des fresques nous donne une véritable catéchèse théologique. Elle nous montre d’abord un mouvement descendant, qui voit le Dieu créateur de toutes choses (Christ Pantocrator 1 au sommet de la coupole), autour duquel se déploie la glorieuse liturgie céleste et l’éternelle louange angélique (1er niveau du tambour de la coupole) daigner se faire connaître aux hommes d’abord dans l’ancienne alliance (les patriarches et les prophètes au niveau inférieur du tambour), puis à travers la nouvelle (les apôtres, sur les supports de la coupole). C’est le mouvement de la révélation, dans lequel Dieu est à la recherche de l’homme et se fait connaître de lui. Cette dynamique trouve son terme dans l’incarnation (figure 2 : coupole de l’église de Capharnaüm). Un mouvement ascendant vient à sa rencontre. Son premier niveau est constitué par ... les fidèles participant à la louange divine. C’est pour cela qu’il n’y a jamais de représentations figuratives au premier niveau d’une église byzantine, à hauteur l’homme. Au-dessus sont représentés les saints (niveau intermédiaire des fresques du chœur), qui sont les plus avancés sur le chemin de la divinisation, laquelle n’est possible que 1 Pourquoi le Christ ? N’est-ce pas le Père qui est créateur ? Il y a deux éléments de réponse à cela. Tout d’abord le Fils et l’Esprit sont les collaborateurs de Dieu dans l’œuvre de la création - ils sont les deux mains de Dieu qui façonnent l’univers, dit St Irénée de Lyon. Ensuite et surtout, le Père, invisible et mystérieux par essence, n’est pas représentable, et n’est jamais représenté dans l’iconographie orthodoxe. ?? par l’incarnation du Verbe, représentée par les scènes de la vie du Christ (niveau supérieur des fresques du chœur), qui attire à soi les niveaux inférieurs : les saints, bien sûr, mais aussi tout le peuple des fidèles. L’Incarnation est ainsi montrée comme le point central de l’histoire du salut, où se rencontrent la kénose ou abaissement volontaire de Dieu, et la théosis ou divinisation de l’homme, qu’elle seule rend possible. Il faut enfin mentionner un élément esthétique d’une grande importance : la perspective inversée. En perspective classique, les lignes d’un tableau convergent vers un point imaginaire, situé au-delà de la représentation : le ‘point de fuite’, bien nommé en ce qu’il traduit une réalité qui nous échappe toujours de quelque manière. Dans les fresques byzantines, ce ‘point de fuite’ s’inverse en ‘point de convergence’, qui se trouve non plus au-delà mais en-deçà de la scène représentée, en direction de l’observateur vers qui elle semble se déplacer. De là une intense impression de présence où les anges, les saints, la Mère de Dieu et le Christ viennent à la rencontre des fidèles et constituent avec eux le corps total du Christ, unissant l’Église visible et invisible. Une simple disposition de technique picturale suffit à manifester l’universelle concélébration : dans tout acte de culte chrétien, le Christ et les hommes, les créatures matérielles et spirituelles, les vivants et les morts nous accompagnent et « glorifient avec nous ta bonté » (figure 3 : fresques du chœur de l’église de Chevetogne). Temps linéaire et temps cyclique L’idée spontanée que nous nous faisons du temps, c’est-à-dire un temps linéaire, ayant un commencement et une fin, nous paraît évidente. Mais dans l’histoire de la pensée humaine, il s’agit d’une véritable révolution intellectuelle qui a été introduite par la révélation biblique. Cette conception est défendue par les religions « abrahamiques » : judaïsme, christianisme et islam, ainsi que, dans une moindre mesure, par les sciences physiques. Mais elle est étrangère aux sociétés primitives, à la Grèce antique et aux grandes civilisations de l’Extrême-Orient et de l’Amérique pré-colombienne, dont la vision du temps est cyclique. Quelle que soit l’origine de la conception du temps cyclique, elle se manifeste de différentes manières (‘éternel retour’ chez les grecs ; écoulement cyclique dans les religions d’Extrême-Orient) mais avec une idée à la fois de répétition et d’infinité. Dans l’hindouisme, ce qu’on appelle la ‘réincarnation’ est le résultat de deux lois : le samsara (écoulement cyclique du temps) et le karma (loi de causalité des actes) qui fait de chaque existence une conséquence des actes commis dans la précédente. L’unité de mesure de la durée est une immense période cosmique (le grand kalpa), qui est elle-même constituée de nombreux petits cycles. Or chaque cycle représente une durée extrêmement longue, comparable « au temps qu'il faudrait à un homme pour user une énorme montagne si, une fois par siècle, il l'effleurait avec un mouchoir de soie ». Bref, c’est une longueur de temps qui échappe à notre imagination, d’autant plus que le nombre de cycles échappe lui aussi à nos possibilités de calcul. C'est pourquoi le cycle des naissances et des morts est ressenti, dans l’hindouisme et le bouddhisme, comme ‘sans commencement ni fin’. Pour eux, le temps et le cycle des existences est une malédiction, une sorte de purgatoire interminable dont il faut s’échapper, ce qui est le but de la délivrance ou de l’éveil. Dans les religions révélées, au contraire, le temps est l’un des éléments de la création ex nihilo ; il sort des mains de Dieu, en dehors de qui rien n’existe ou ne préexiste, et sera aboli dans l’eschaton, à la fin des temps. De même, pour la physique moderne le temps a un commencement absolu, connu sous le terme populaire de « big-bang », une direction rectiligne (la « flèche du temps ») et aura une fin, même si les interprétations diffèrent sur sa forme. ? Kronos : le temps quantitatif dévorateur Les religions d’Extrême-Orient ne sont pas les seules à avoir une vision négative du temps. Même le temps linéaire peut être vu de manière néfaste si on le considère sous l’angle de la quantité, il est alors le kronos qui mesure la durée. Dans la mythologie grecque, Kronos appartient à la première génération des dieux. Ses parents lui ayant prédit qu’il serait détrôné par l’un de ses enfants, il les dévoraient au fur et à mesure de leur naissance (seul Zeus y échappa par une ruse de sa mère, et la prophétie fut réalisée). L’idée qui est restée est celle d’un temps dévorateur : le présent est un moment infime qui sombre immédiatement dans le passé pour s’y dissoudre. D’un certain côté, temps ronge la vie et tout ce qu’elle comporte de beau et d’attachant : la grâce physique, la santé, la fortune, les affections humaines etc. C’est un thème fondamental de la poésie : « avec le temps, avec le temps, va, tout s’en va » (Léo Ferré). Cette idée de temps dévorateur qui dégrade la réalité se retrouve dans les sciences physiques, c’est ce qu’on appelle «l’entropie», ou loi de conservation de l’énergie. Au fur et à mesure que le temps s’écoule, l’énorme quantité d’énergie nécessaire aux grandes synthèses de l’univers (la fusion nucléaire dans les étoiles, le maintien de la biosphère, l’activité psychique humaine etc.) fait que le stock énergétique du cosmos s’use et se dégrade et que l’univers tombe très lentement vers des états d’énergie plus ‘froide’, plus stable et plus stérile. L’aspect théologique du kronos, enfin, pourrait être appelé le temps « déchu ». C’est l’ensemble des conditions mauvaises qui conduisent au péché, et que les Pères grecs appellent la « corruption », qui amène la dégradation de l’être physique, moral et spirituel. D’une certaine manière, nous n’y échappons jamais, puisque nous vivons dans le temps chronologique jusqu’à notre mort. On peut en dire autant de l’ensemble du cosmos. Kairos : le temps qualitatif salvateur Mais à côté de ce temps « déchu », la tradition biblique et patristique introduit une autre conscience du de temps, positive cette fois, qui porte sur sa qualité et nous permet d’échapper à la désespérante fuite de la durée. C’est d’ailleurs la bible qui introduit, dans la pensée humaine, l’idée nouvelle de l’histoire comme un progrès. Á un premier niveau, cette qualité de temps se manifeste comme un reflet de l’activité organisatrice de Dieu. Même dans la création déchue, il reste des traces d’un ordre divin et harmonieux qui règle l’univers et se manifeste en particulier dans la régularité des cycles astronomiques, les conditions favorable à l’apparition et au développement de la vie, l’alternance des saisons, la beauté du cosmos etc. Mais cette qualité de temps est beaucoup plus que cela. Elle est le cadre où se déploie l’activité salutaire dont Dieu a l’initiative. Le plan initial de Dieu, entravé par le péché, va se manifester dans le temps sous forme de salut. Dieu s’insère dans l’histoire pour réaliser son but initial : associer ses créatures à sa vie même, à ce qu’il est. Il saisit pour cela les moments favorables qui se présentent dans l’histoire humaine, lorsque les temps sont « mûrs » pour qu’il puisse atteindre son but. Il y a donc une idée de croissance, ou plus précisément de venue à maturité qui est attachée à ce type de temps. C’est cette maturation qui est exprimée par le concept du kairos biblique. La traduction précise serait : «instant propice» ou «moment favorable». Chaque kairos divin est un élément du plan de Dieu, qui choisit ces circonstances tout à la fois d’opportunité et de maturité pour intervenir dans l’histoire et y réaliser son économie. Cette intervention culmine avec l’incarnation du Verbe (cf. Eph. 1, 10 : « pour réaliser [son dessein bienveillant] quand viendrait la plénitude des temps »), où l’acceptation de la Mère de Dieu est le kairos par excellence. Ainsi le temps du salut vient doubler et secrètement renverser le temps déchu. La durée n’est plus alors une machine à détruire le monde vivant, mais au contraire l’occasion de la construction du corps mystique, l’Église. Le temps chronologique n’est pas aboli pour autant. Au contraire, il poursuit son cours destructeur. Mais parallèlement, la durée est secrètement fécondée par le temps « messianique » ou « liturgique », qui, lui, fait œuvre positive : l’édification de la Jérusalem céleste, la construction du Royaume de Dieu qui se fait dans l’histoire (Ap 19, 5-8). L’anamnèse ou mémoire liturgique Le concept central de ce temps « messianique » et de la théologie liturgique est celui d’anamnèse. Le verbe « mimniskô », signifie : ‘se souvenir ; faire mémoire’. Mais, dans l’anamnèse chrétienne, il ne s’agit pas de se rappeler un événement passé, même si il a eu des conséquences considérables sur le présent, comme lorsque l’on commémore l’indépendance le 22 novembre. L’anamnèse liturgique - déjà dans le judaïsme - est une récapitulation et une actualisation du salut. Les concepts de passé, et même de futur, s’effacent devant l’éternel présent du salut de Dieu. D’ailleurs, la formule même de l’anamnèse, dans l’anaphore de St Jean Chrysostome - celle de St Basile lui est quasiment identique -, le prouve : « faisant donc mémoire de ce commandement salutaire et de tout ce qui a été fait pour nous : la croix, le tombeau, la résurrection au troisième jour, l’ascension aux cieux, le trône à la droite, le second, glorieux et nouvel avènement... » On y mentionne des actes de l’économie divine situés dans le passé historique (la croix, le tombeau), d’autres qui sont à la frange de l’éternité (la résurrection, l’ascension) et le dernier, enfin, qui est situé dans le futur, au terme de l’histoire (la seconde parousie). C’est paradoxal de ‘faire mémoire’ d’une événement futur ! Cela prouve que les événements salvifiques dont nous faisons mémoire dans l’anaphore ne sont pas révolus, mais qu’ils sont éternellement présents, agissants et efficaces. Plus précisément, nous nous rendons nous-mêmes présents, par l’anamnèse, à l’éternelle bienveillance divine manifestée dans son économie. Le temps récapitulé : l’ogdoade Le dimanche, jour de la résurrection, n’est pas un simple shabbat christianisé. Il est le premier jour de la semaine, comme le notent les récits de la résurrection (par exemple Mc 16, 2), c’est-à-dire le jour de la nouvelle création. Mais il est aussi est surtout le huitième jour, le jour au-delà du cycle hebdomadaire, qui symbolise donc la réalité au-delà du temps, l’eschaton, le royaume de Dieu, la Jérusalem céleste. Il n’est donc pas le shabbat, jour de repose et de jouissance de la création, mais il signifie ce qui est au-delà de la création et de la durée. Il récapitule donc l’histoire, l’assume entièrement dans toutes ses dimensions, mais c’est pour l’entraîner dans son ascension vers la vie divine et éternelle. Chaque dimanche est donc une échappée, un épisode d’éternité au sein du cycle du temps. Il se trouve d’ailleurs que le cycle des dimanches, « l’octoèque », renvoie également à ce chiffre. Il y a pour cela des raisons de technique et de théorie musicale, mais c’est néanmoins une coïncidence significative. Tout donc, dans le cadre qui entoure nos célébrations, nous indique que la vie ecclésiale, et en particulier l’eucharistie dominicale, n’est autre qu’une rencontre du ciel et de la terre, une expérience anticipée de la communion eschatologique, un avant-goût de l’éternité. Ce n’est pas pour autant qu’il faut, comme le souhaitait saint Pierre lors de la transfiguration, « rester sur la montagne ». Car cette présence de la Jérusalem céleste au creux de la durée a pour vocation de féconder l’histoire, ce qui est le rôle des chrétiens dans le monde. II – LE MYSTÈRE : LE ROYAUME AU MILIEU DE NOUS Les catéchèses mystagogiques, dans l’antiquité, étaient prononcées, généralement pendant la semaine pascale, pour expliquer aux nouveaux baptisés la célébration à laquelle ils venaient de prendre part pour la première fois. L’eucharistie, que nous continuons à nommer « les saints mystères », était alors réellement de l’ordre du secret réservé aux seuls initiés. Comme nous le verrons, il en reste des traces dans notre liturgie dominicale. L’introduction, puis la généralisation du baptême des enfants a malheureusement entraîné, en pratique, la quasi-disparition de cette nécessaire catéchèse liturgique. Le but des lignes qui suivent est donc de donner une brêve explication des mystères qui tienne compte des différents volets de l’interprétation ecclésiale de la Divine Liturgie. Une véritable tradition de commentaires de la célébration eucharistique s’est, en effet, développée au cours des âges. Á la sensibilité eschatologique de l’antiquité, centrée sur le mystère de l’initiation chrétienne, a succédé une interprétation spirituelle, représentée par la fameuse « Mystagogie » de saint Maxime le Confesseur. La période suivant l’iconoclasme, à partir du VIIIe siècle, a vu le développement d'une symbolique historique interprétant les rites eucharistiques à la lumière de l’économie divine, et en particulier de la vie humaine du Verbe. Le chef-d’œuvre de cette dernière phase est l’ouvrage de Nicolas Cabasilas sobrement intitulé : « Explication de la Divine Liturgie »2. L’interprétation mystagogique : la liturgie des catéchumènes La première partie de la divine liturgie, que nous appelons la « liturgie des catéchumènes » ou encore « synaxe de la parole », en vint rapidement à se dérouler, du moins dans sa première partie, non seulement à l’extérieur du sanctuaire, comme c’est encore le cas pour la liturgie pontificale, mais tout simplement en dehors de l’église, dans la mesure où elle commençait par une longue procession ou « station ». Il faut y voir l’influence conjointe de la liturgie de Jérusalem, où les pèlerinages aux lieux saints donnaient lieu à de tels cortèges, et celle de l’étiquette impériale, la liturgie de Constantinople ayant pour prélude le déplacement solennel de l’empereur depuis son palais jusqu’à la « grande église » de Sainte-Sophie. Spectacle qui ne manquait pas d’être impressionnant : le prince arabe Haroun Ibn-Yahya, otage à la cour byzantine vers la fin du IXe siècle, affirme que la marche impériale du palais à l’église se faisait avec le concours de plus de 55 000 officiers impériaux ! L’actuelle procession avec l’évangile, ou « petite entrée » est ce qui reste de cette station qui menait jadis non au seuil des portes saintes de l’iconostase, mais devant les portes royales, qui s’ouvrent, du vestibule, sur le chœur de l’église. Les antiennes qui, aujourd’hui, font suite à la grande litanie de paix sont les vestiges des psaumes alternés ou responsoriaux (complétés par un refrain) qui accompagnaient l’antique procession inaugurale. L’ancienne prière de l’entrée atteste clairement l’existence de cette dernière : « Ô Bienfaiteur et Artisan de toute la création, reçois l’Église [c’est-à-dire l’assemblée des fidèles] qui s’avance vers toi, exauce chacun selon ce qui lui est profitable, conduis-nous tous à la perfection, et juge-nous dignes de ton royaume. Par la grâce, la compassion et l’amour pour les hommes de ton Fils seul engendré avec qui tu es béni, et avec ton très saint, bon et vivifiant Esprit, maintenant et toujours et dans les siècles des siècles ». La signification spirituelle de cette première partie de la liturgie est exprimée par le terme même de « station », ou étape de pèlerinage. Chaque fidèle est invité à inscrire dans l’espace le cheminement spirituel qui le conduit du profane - le monde extérieur - vers l’anticipation du royaume signifié, on l’a vu, par ?Maxime le Confesseur : Mystagogie. Éditions Migne. Collection « les Pères dans la Foi » n°92, 2005. 2 Nicolas Cabasilas, Explication de la Divine Liturgie. Cerf. Collection « Sources Chrétiennes » n°4bis. Réédition 2006. l’architecture même de l’église. Chaque célébration de la divine liturgie commence donc par un exode, une migration semblable à celle d’Abraham, où il s’agit de quitter la routine de la vie quotidienne, ses soucis, ses pesanteurs et ses tentations, pour aller vers la terre promise des mystères, là où Dieu se fait connaître. La « petite entrée » ne fait qu’exprimer la disposition spirituelle qui doit être dans le cœur de chaque fidèle. Dans l’antiquité, les catéchumènes, qui n’étaient pas encore admis à entendre les prières de l'anaphore ni a recevoir la communion eucharistique, et les pénitents, qui en étaient momentanément exclus, pouvaient néanmoins participer à cette première partie de la divine liturgie, d'où son nom. En particulier, les lectures bibliques et l’homélie qui s’ensuivait leur étaient aussi destinées. Devant recevoir le lait spirituel et non une nourriture solide (cf. 1Co 3, 2), ils ne pouvaient bénéficier que de cette première phase de la liturgie où la Parole se donne à entendre pour édifier, mais ne se livre pas encore pour être consommée. En d’autres termes, n’étant pas encore initiés, ils se tenaient au porche du mystère. C’est pour cela que les livres liturgiques ont conservé le texte de leur renvoi. Il y est manifesté quelque insistance : « Que tous les catéchumènes se retirent ! Catéchumènes, retirez-vous ! Que tous les catéchumènes se retirent ! Plus de catéchumènes ! ». Certains manuscrits en rajoutent même de façon à ce qu’il ne reste plus la moindre ambiguïté : « Que ceux qui n’ont pas reçu le baptême se retirent ! ». Le chœur répond alors : « En vérité, que ceux qui ne l’ont pas reçu se retirent ! ». Et le célébrant ajoute : « Allez, auditeurs, et tenez-vous attentifs à la porte ! Ceux qui n’ont pas reçu le baptême, qu’ils se retirent ! Ceux qui n’ont pas reçu le saint Esprit, qu’ils se retirent ! Ceux qui ne l’ont pas reçu, qu’ils se retirent ! Allez, auditeurs, et tenez-vous attentifs à la porte ! ». Voilà qui est clair ! Mais on peut se demander pourquoi manifester une telle insistance. En fait, à travers cet épisode apparemment pittoresque de la divine liturgie, nous abordons un élément ecclésiologique capital. Le sacerdoce royal des baptisés Poursuivons notre parcours liturgique. Juste après le renvoi des catéchumènes, la première litanie commence par ces mots : « nous tous, fidèles, encore et sans cesse, en paix, prions le Seigneur ». Une distinction nette est donc faite entre les catéchumènes et les baptisés. Un peu plus loin, après la grande entrée ou procession des dons qui n’a pris que tardivement l’ampleur et l’importance qu’elle a de nos jours, la récitation du credo est précédée d’une mystérieuse injonction : « Les portes, les portes ! Avec sagesse, soyons attentifs ! ». Encore une fois, les portes dont il est question ici ne sont pas celles de l’iconostase, qui n’existaient guère, d’ailleurs, avant le IXe siècle, mais les portes principales de l’église, situées entre le vestibule et le chœur. Ce sont elles qui doivent être hermétiquement fermées à ce moment : personne ne peut plus entrer et nul ne peut sortir ! Il existait d’ailleurs dans les premiers siècles de l’Église un ministère ordonné particulier, celui de « portier », dont l'objet principal était de veiller à ce que la célébration des mystères ne rassemble que les initiés. Cette précaution nous intrigue aujourd’hui. On peut avancer des raisons d'ordre historique, comme le fait que, la liberté d’association étant extrêmement réduite dans l’empire romain et les chrétiens n’en ayant pas bénéficié avant l’empereur Constantin, au début du IVe siècle, les célébrations liturgiques étaient vouées à la clandestinité. C’est indéniable, mais ce n’est sans doute pas la raison principale. Remarquons que cette fermeture des portes se fait juste avant la récitation du symbole de foi. Or ce dernier, qui n’était dévoilé aux catéchumènes qu’à la veille de leur baptême, ne devait être connu que des fidèles. C’est l’un des aspect de ce que les érudits appellent « la discipline de l’arcane », c’est-à-dire du secret qui devait être conservé sur les croyances des chrétiens, et sans laquelle nombre d’éléments du christianisme primitif nous restent obscurs. Nous avons largement perdu le sens de ces précautions, en un temps où, par exemple, les saintes Écritures sont disponibles sur les rayonnages de toutes les librairies, ce qui serait inconcevable pour un chrétien de l’antiquité. Elles trouvent pourtant leur justification dans la vocation au sens biblique et étymologique du terme, c'est-à-dire l'appel de Dieu. L’ensemble des baptisés constitue un peuple choisi (« klérikos » en grec), une nouvelle réalité humaine et spirituelle, et donc, au moins dans un premier temps, séparée des autres. Ce choix initial de Dieu poussera un grand théologien orthodoxe à proposer un paradoxe provocateur : « en tant que laïcs (« laïkoi » = membres du peuple de Dieu) ils [les chrétiens] sont le partage de Dieu (« klérikoi » = choisis). Ils sont donc clercs et, en tant que clercs, des laïcs »3 D’autre part, la pleine connaissance des mystères chrétiens n’est possible que moyennant un certain degré de maturité morale et spirituelle, ce qui explique les exigences rigoureuses posées aux catéchumènes dans l’antiquité, et qui se traduisait entre autre par la discipline du secret. Nombre de chrétiens contemporains risquent de se scandaliser de cet « élitisme » supposé. Ce serait méconnaître le sens du sacerdoce et de l’élection dans la bible. Il est vrai que certains courants de pensée défendant un augustinisme extrême ont contribué à embrouiller les choses, en liant étroitement l’élection et le salut. Nous ne voyons rien de tel dans l'Écriture et la tradition ecclésiale ancienne. Celui qui est choisi ne l’est pas pour se voir gratifier d’un salut attribué plus ou moins arbitrairement. Il est mis à part en vue d’un ministère, c’est-à-dire d’un service qui a lui-même vocation à devenir universel. L’élection d’Abraham implique « qu’en [lui] seront bénies toutes les nations de la terre » (Gn 12, 3). Quant au sacerdoce, il est lui aussi une mise à part pour le service exclusif de Dieu. C’est pourquoi ce dernier déclare au peuple d’Israël : « Je vous tiendrai pour un royaume de prêtres et une nation consacrée » (Ex 19, 6). Les hébreux ont donc été choisis d’entre les nations pour exercer, au nom et pour le bénéfice de ces dernières, un ministère particulier. Cette élection substitutive se retrouve d’ailleurs au sein même du peuple élu. La tribu de Lévi est seule à exercer, pour des raisons pratiques, un sacerdoce qui est en droit celui de tout le ?3 Nicolas Afanassieff. L'Église du Saint-Esprit. Cerf, collection « Cogitatio Fidei » n° 83 (1975), p. 42. peuple : « ils assumeront la charge qui incombe aux enfants d’Israël en faisant le service de la demeure » (Nb 3, 8). On peut donc dire des lévites à la fois qu’ils remplacent et qu’ils représentent le peuple tout entier. Cette vocation est accomplie dans l’Église, où tous les éléments déjà présents dans l’ancienne alliance se trouvent portés à leur plénitude. « Vous êtes, dit saint Pierre à l’assemblée chrétienne, une race choisie, un sacerdoce royal, une nation sainte » (1P 2, 9), phrase qui est reprise dans l’anaphore de saint Basile. Les baptisés sont donc la dîme du genre humain, c’est-à-dire, au sens biblique, la partie qui sanctifie tout, ce dernier se trouvant consacré à travers elle. Tel est le ministère particulier des chrétiens au sein de l’humanité présente, passée et future. Tous, par le baptême, acquièrent cette dignité de prêtre, roi et prophète. Il faut garder à l’esprit que, dans l’antiquité, le seul statut ecclésial important est celui de baptisé. Les rôles que tel ou tel peut tenir dans la hiérarchie, en particulier le gouvernement de l’Église par l’évêque ou, un peu plus tard, la présidence de l’assemblée par le presbytre (prêtre), sont de l’ordre du ministère, du service, de la fonction. Ils ne font pas de ceux qui exercent ces charges des chrétiens d’une essence particulière, d’un caractère spirituel différent : tous sont essentiellement et avant tout des baptisés, qui ont différents rôles dans les activités du corps (cf. 1 Co 12, 12-30). Ces longs développements ne sont pas sans importance pour notre intelligence de la divine liturgie. Ils impliquent en effet que tous les participants concélèbrent avec le prêtre ou l’évêque qui préside. Le célébrant, en effet, incarne le caractère sacerdotal qui est celui de l’assemblée des baptisés. S’il a été « ordonné », c’est pour assurer, précisément, un ordre dans la célébration. Il est bien évident qu’il n’est pas choisi au hasard et que son charisme personnel est décisif. Néanmoins, il préside la célébration au nom de l’assemblée tout entière qui s’y associe. Cette concélébration se marque de plusieurs manières : - Le fait que le prêtre célèbre dos au peuple ne signifie nullement qu’il « lui tourne le dos », au contraire. Cette disposition symbolique indique que tous sont tournés dans la même direction, vers le Seigneur, et tendus vers le royaume qui vient, ce que le prêtre ne fait que récapituler. Il rassemble et « collecte » les prières de l’assemblée pour les présenter à Dieu. Il ne dirige pas l’assemblée à proprement parler, mais lui indique la direction. - Toutes les oraisons - à l’exception d’une ou deux, pour lesquelles le célébrant utilise, au moins dans la liturgie de saint Basile, la première personne du singulier - sont dites par le célébrant au nom du peuple. Là encore, il ne fait qu’exprimer les pétitions, louanges et intercessions de toute l’assemblée. D’où l’importance, en pratique, de prononcer ces belles prières à voix haute. - Même là où la liturgie byzantine s’est le plus « cléricalisée », le peuple continue de réciter les deux textes centraux du culte chrétien : le credo et le « Notre Père », c’est-à-dire la foi de l’Église et la prière enseignée à ses apôtres par le Verbe lui-même. - « L’Amen » prononcé par le peuple au moment des paroles de l’institution - et a fortiori de l’épiclèse, qui ne devrait donc pas être escamotée - est comme le sceau de sa concélébration. Ceux qui le prononcent marquent ainsi l’adhésion de tout leur être à ce qui est dit en leur nom par le célébrant en ce sommet de la divine liturgie. - Il est d'ailleurs à remarquer que l'invocation à l'Esprit saint, lors de la prière de l'épiclèse comme, auparavant, dans l'oraison conclusive de la litanie récitée après la « grande entrée », n'est pas seulement destinée à le faire descendre sur les « dons ici présentés », mais aussi « sur nous » ce qui, à l'évidence signifie l'ensemble des fidèles présents et non les seuls célébrants. Chaque épiclèse est donc une petite Pentecôte qui sanctifie chaque baptisé, indépendamment de sa place ou de son ministère dans l'Église, le renouvelant et le confirmant ainsi dans sa dignité de prêtre, roi et prophète. - Enfin, la communion sous les deux espèces marque qu’il n’y a pas de différence entre le clergé et le peuple sous ce rapport. Nous avons même différents témoignages laissant à entendre qu’avant la période iconoclaste - et parfois même après en certains endroits, semble-t-il - les communiants allaient à l’autel pour y recevoir le corps et le sang du Seigneur. Bref, depuis le renvoi des catéchumènes jusqu’à la communion eucharistique, la divine liturgie nous offre une merveilleuse progression qui voit se déployer et s’approfondir toutes les dimensions du sacerdoce royal des baptisés. En cela, elle exprime toute une conception de l’Église qui est justement appelée par les théologiens « ecclésiologie eucharistique ». Le développement de la symbolique historique dans la grande entrée La défaite de l’iconoclasme, puis le développement du courant spirituel appelé « hésychasme » dans la tradition byzantine ont entraîné les derniers remaniements de la liturgie constantinopolitaine. En fait, par rapport à la grande période impériale, il s’agit d’une sorte de « révolution cultuelle » imprégnée d’esprit monastique, qui donne naissance à une mentalité religieuse très différente de celle de l’âge d’or byzantin des VIe-VIIe siècles. Ce changement est déjà sensible au niveau architectural : dorénavant, le cadre de la célébration est constitué par des édifices plus petits - marque de l’appauvrissement de l’empire - basés sur un plan en croix grecque qui s’impose partout, dépourvus d’atrium, et où s’introduit une certaine verticalité, la coupole étant surélevée par un tambour. On ne bâti plus de spectaculaires basiliques baignées de lumière, accessibles de tous côtés, et dont l’espace intérieur est à la fois vaste et dégagé, permettant de suivre le déroulement de la célébration de n’importe quel point de l’édifice. Le bêma (estrade disposée au milieu du chœur) disparaît. La sacristie et l’autel de la préparation des dons sont aménagés à l’intérieur de l’édifice, occupant les deux absidioles qui flanquent le sanctuaire, d’où le « trône élevé » a disparu. Par contre, la paroi de l’iconostase, qui à la fois expose les images saintes et masque le sanctuaire, prend des proportions monumentales. Les rites eux-mêmes, qui ont définitivement pris l’aspect qu’ils ont de nos jours, rompent avec les fastes impériaux pour manifester une piété beaucoup plus personnelle et intériorisée. Les processions ne sont plus des stations solennelles qui mènent jusqu’au seuil de l’église, mais se déroulent à l’intérieur, dans une certaine intimité. Les fresques, moins coûteuses, remplacent les mosaïques dans les églises. La différence concernant les effets de lumière est saisissante : on passe de la gloire impériale, manifestation anticipée du royaume de Dieu et expression de l’ordre du cosmos grec, à une pénombre sur base chromatique sombre qui rappelle la cellule où la grotte monastique, lieu de la conversion et de la recherche du «lieu du cœur». Cette piété plus intérieure et christocentrique va influencer l’interprétation des rites, qui évolue du schéma mystique, exposé en son temps par Maxime le Confesseur, au schéma historique centré sur la vie terrestre du Verbe incarné et l’économie de la rédemption. Cet aspect, d’origine antiochienne, est particulièrement évident dans le développement de la «grande entrée». Appendice rituel très peu solennisé dans la liturgie cathédrale de Sainte Sophie à Constantinople, le transfert des dons devient alors le symbole de la procession funéraire du Christ, la crucifixion et la mort ayant été préalablement mises en valeur dans les nouveaux développements de l‘office de la préparation des oblats (« proskomidia »), avant la célébration. La fermeture du rideau après l’entrée symbolise la pierre roulée devant le tombeau. Le grand voile (« aër ») posé sur les dons représente le suaire du Christ défunt, et son agitation pendant la première partie du credo les honneurs funèbres rendus par les anges. Ce voile/suaire est retiré lorsque le symbole de foi fait mention de la résurrection. Le cœur de l’anaphore, constitué par les paroles l’institution lors de la dernière cène, le « mémorial » et l’épiclèse, signifie à la fois la résurrection du Christ opérée par la force de l’Esprit saint et la descente de ce dernier sur le peuple à la Pentecôte. C’est donc un peuple sanctifié qui est appelé à communier au corps ressuscité du Christ. L’appropriation personnelle du rituel sacré Le sacerdoce royal des baptisés n’est exercé qu’en commun, et l’œuvre divine collective de la célébration liturgique est une image anticipée de la communion céleste. Pour autant, cela n’empêche pas mais suppose au contraire que cette concélébration soit assimilée par chacun au plus intime de son être pour devenir une expérience intensément personnelle. C’est en grande partie dans ce sens que Maxime le Confesseur a développé sa fameuse « mystagogie », où la divine liturgie représente un cheminement spirituel intérieur. Bien que cela n’apparaisse pas explicitement dans l’interprétation de Maxime, il serait commode de diviser ce pèlerinage selon des étapes que, dans la tradition occidentale, on assigne à la vie mystique : respectivement les voies « purgative », « illuminative » et « unitive ». La première voie, celle de la purification, est exprimée, c’est bien naturel, par la procession initiale qui symbolise le passage que doit effectuer chaque fidèle du mal et de l’ignorance à la vertu et à la connaissance. Ce passage se fait par la conversion. Au plan historique, il correspond au premier avènement du Christ, et en particulier à sa prédication qui commence précisément par un appel à la conversion. L’accès de l’évêque au « trône élevé », symbole de l’ascension du Christ, marque une nouvelle étape et introduit donc la voie « illuminative ». Cette dernière correspond essentiellement à ce que l’on appelle la « liturgie de la parole », centrée qu’elle est sur la manifestation de la volonté et du dessein de Dieu à travers les lectures bibliques, et la joie qui accompagne cette révélation, exprimée par le prokiménon (un cantique psalmique beaucoup plus développé qu’aujourd’hui à l’époque de Maxime le Confesseur). La bénédiction de paix indique le terme du parcours spirituel, le but à atteindre : « l’apatheia » ou parfaite paix du cœur qui s’acquiert en dominant, en nous, les passions mauvaises. Une deuxième transition est ménagée par le renvoi des catéchumènes, qui annonce le jugement final et la séparation des « brebis d’avec les boucs » (cf. Mt 25, 32). Cette séparation doit être rapprochée de l’invitation faite par l’hymne des chérubins de « déposer tout souci de cette vie » : ce qu’il peut encore y avoir en nous de profane doit être écarté de notre esprit, tout comme les catéchumènes sont alors congédiés. Ainsi notre cœur purifié et illuminé est-il prêt à entrer dans la chambre nuptiale. La fermeture des portes de l’église, juste avant la récitation du credo, marque précisément la sortie du monde matériel et l’entrée dans la « chambre nuptiale » du monde intelligible. Les différentes étapes de la liturgie des fidèles sont autant de degrés sur la voie de la communion parfaite avec Dieu. Le baiser de paix symbolise l’union intime et céleste avec le Verbe de Dieu. Le chant du sanctus manifeste notre réunion et notre égalité d’honneur et de dignité avec les puissances célestes. La récitation du « Notre Père » scelle notre adoption filiale, et donc l’acquisition de notre qualité de fils à l’égal du Fils éternel, au-dessus même de la condition angélique. Finalement le chant de : « un seul saint... » et surtout la communion eucharistique consacrent l’union eschatologique qui nous fait participer à la nature divine, ce que les Pères grecs appellent la « divinisation ». La communion eucharistique, en effet, doit être comprise comme un prolongement de l’incarnation et de ses effets. De même que la pleine et entière humanité du Verbe était, dans sa vie terrestre, secrètement illuminée et sanctifiée par l’intime union avec sa nature divine, de même notre communion aux espèces matérielles de son corps et de son sang nous met en contact avec la puissance divinisante que recèle ce corps ressuscité. C’est en ce sens très réaliste que la communion eucharistique est une anticipation du royaume de Dieu. C’est ainsi qu’elle fait de chacun de nous, comme le disait Maurice Blondel, « un fils unique, dans l’immense embrassement de toutes les volontés, de tous les mondes enfin compris ». Les saints mystères dans la vie Parvenus à ces hauteurs spirituelles, les fidèles pourraient être tentés, comme l'apôtre Pierre lors de la transfiguration, de rester sur la montagne, dans la gloire divine. Pour autant, le renvoi final ne signifie pas que la parenthèse céleste et eschatologique de la célébration des mystères se referme sans plus et les renvoie à une vie quotidienne inchangée. La célébration eucharistique n'est pas un monde à part mais le foyer brûlant de la vie même. Par conséquent, son rayonnement doit s'étendre à tous les domaines de l'existence. La « braise qui ne consume pas », reçue lors de la communion eucharistique, transmet le feu divin aux activités improprement appelées « profanes ». Pour l'initié aux mystères, rien n'est profane puisque toute réalité concrète : relation humaine ou conjugale, engagement social ou écologique, repas et convivialité, écoute et empathie, tout est pénétré par les vagues lumineuses de l'eucharistie. De même que les propriétés matérielles des oblats restent inchangées bien que la consécration les aient gorgées d'énergies divines, ainsi la structure du monde est secrètement transfigurée par les œuvres accomplies selon l'évangile. Nous retrouvons le paradoxe de l'élection : le chrétien doit se séparer de l'esprit du monde pour participer aux mystères, mais, en retour, ceux-ci refluent vers le monde pour le bénir, par la médiation des serviteurs du Verbe. Ainsi s'édifie mystérieusement le royaume de Dieu, espérance et but de l'univers.
- [The Vedic Religion: Introductory](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/vedic-religion-introductory) - The Vedic Religion: Introductory The Religion without a Name We speak of the “Hindu religion”, but the religion denoted by the term did not in fact have such a name originally. According to some, the word “Hindu” means “love”; according to some others a Hindu is one who disapproves of hims? or violence. This may be an ingenious way of explaining the word. In none of our ancient ??stras (scriptures) does the term “Hindu religion” occur. The name “Hindu” was given us by foreigners. People from the West came to our land across the Sindhu river which they called “Indus” or “Hind” and the land adjacent to it by the name “India”. The religion of this land came to be called “Hindu”. The name of a neighboring country is sometimes applied to the land ad­jacent to it. Only when there are a number of religions do they have to be identified by different names. But when there is only one, where is the problem of identifying it? All religions barring our own were established by single individuals. “Buddhism” means the religion founded by Gautama Bud­dha. Jainism was founded by the Jina called Mah?v?ra. So has Christianity its origin in Jesus Christ. Our religion predating all these had spread all over the world. Since there was no other religion to speak about then it was not necessary to give it a name. When I recog­nized this fact I felt at once that there was no need to be ashamed of the fact that our religion had no name in the past. On the contrary, I felt proud about it. If ours is a primeval religion, the question arises as to who established it. All inquiries into this question have failed to yield an answer. Was it Vy?sa, who composed the Brahmas?tra (one of the great inspired scrip­tures), the founder of our religion? Or was it Krishna Param?tman (Krishna as the incarnation of the Transcendent Unity) who gave us the Bhagavad G?t?? But both Vy?sa and Krishna state that the Vedas existed before them. If that be the case, are we to point to the risis, the seers, who gave us the Vedic mantras, as the founders of our religion? But they them­ selves declare: “We did not create the Vedas.” When we chant a mantra we touch our head with our hand mentioning the name of one seer or another. But the sages themselves say: “It is true that the mantras became manifest to the world through us. That is why we are mentioned as the ‘mantra risis’. But the mantras were not composed by us but revealed to us. When we sat meditating with our minds under control, the mantras were perceived by us in space. Indeed we saw them; we did not compose them.” The sacred syllable Om in Devanagari All sounds originate in space. From them arose creation. According to science, the cosmos was produced from the vibrations in space. By virtue of their austerities the sages had the gift of seeing the mantras in space, the mantras that liberate men from this creation. The Vedas are apauru??ya (not the work of any human author) and are the very breath of the Param?tman in his form as space. The sages saw them and made a gift of them to the world. If we know this truth, we have reason to be proud of the fact that we do not know who founded our religion. In fact we must feel happy that we have the great good fortune to be heirs to a religion that is eternal, a religion containing the Vedas which are the very breath of the Param?tman. Distinctive Features of San?tana Dharma (Eternal Code of Conduct) Our religion has a number of unique or distinctive features. One of them is what is called the theory of karma, though this theory is common to religions like Buddhism which are offshoots of Hinduism. What is the karma doctrine? For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. There is an ineluctable law of physics govern­ ing cause and effect, action and reaction. This law pertaining to physical phenomena our forefathers applied to human life. The cosmos includes not only sentient beings endowed with consciousness but also countless insen­tient objects. Together they constitute worldly life. The laws, the dharma, proper to the first order must apply to the second also. Accord­ ing to the karma theory, every action of a man has an effect corresponding to it. Based on this belief our religion declares that, if a man commits a sin, he shall pay the penalty for it. Also if his act is a virtuous one, he shall reap the benefits thereof. Our religion further asserts that one is born again and again so as to experience the consequences of one’s good and bad actions. “Do good.” “Do not do evil,” such are the exhortations of all religions. But Hinduism (and its offshoots) alone lay stress on the cause­ and-effect connection. No religion originating in countries outside India subscribes to the cause-and-effect connection, nor to the reincarnation theory as one of its articles of faith. Indeed religions originating abroad hold beliefs contrary to this theory and strongly oppose the view that man is born again and again in order to exhaust his karma. They believe that a man has only one birth, that when his soul departs on his death it dwells some­ where awaiting the day of judgment. On this day God makes an assessment of his good and bad actions and, on the basis of it, rewards him with eternal paradise or sentences him to eternal damnation. That the one and only Param?tman who has neither a form nor attributes is manifested as different forms with attributes is another special feature of our religion. We worship idols representing these forms of deities. For this reason others label us polytheists. Their view is utterly wrong. Because we worship the one God, the one Reality, in many different forms it does not mean that we believe in many gods. It is equally absurd to call us idolaters who hold that the idol we worship is God. Hindus with a proper understanding of their religion do not think that the idol alone is God. The idol is meant for the worshipper to offer one-pointed devotion and he adores it with the conviction that the Lord who is present everywhere is present in it also. We see that practitioners of other religions also have symbols for worship and meditation. So it is wholly unjust to believe that Hindus alone worship idols—to regard them with scorn as idolaters is not right. That ours is the only religion that does not proclaim that its followers have an exclusive right to salvation is a matter of pride for us Hindus. Our catholic outlook is revealed in our scriptures which declare that whatever the religious path followed by people they will finally attain the same Param?tman. That is why there is no place for conversion in Hinduism. The countries are many and they have different climates and grow different crops. Also each part of the world has evolved a different culture. But the Vedas encompassed lands all over this planet from the very beginning. Later other religions emerged in keeping with the changing attitudes of the nations concerned. That is why aspects of the Vedic tradition are in evidence not only in the religions now in force but in what we know of those preceding them. But in India alone has Hinduism survived as a full-fledged living faith. It must also be added that this primeval religion has regarded—and still regards—with respect the religions that arose subsequent to it. The Hindu view is this: “Other religions must have evolved according to the degree of maturity of the people among whom they originated. They will bring well-being to their adherents.” “Live and let live” has been and continues to be the ideal of our religion. It has given birth to religions like Buddhism and Jainism and they [particularly Buddhism] have been propagated abroad for the ?tmic advancement (progress toward Self-realization) of the people there. I have spoken about the special characteristics of Hinduism from the philosophical and theological points of view. But it has also an­ other important feature which is also distinctive—the sociological. All religions have their own philosophical and theological systems. Also all of them deal with individual life and conduct and, to a limited extent, with social life. “Look upon your neighbor as your brother.”“Regard your adversary as your friend.”“Treat others in the same way as you would like to be treated yourself.” “Be kind to all creatures.” “Speak the truth.” “Practice non-violence.” These injunctions and rules of conduct relate to social life up to a point—and only up to a point. To religions other than Hinduism social life or the structure of society is not a major concern. Hindu­ ism alone has a sturdy sociological foundation, and its special feature, varn??rama dharma, is an expression of it. Varna dharma (caste system) is one con­ cept and ??rama dharma (four stages of life) is another—together they make up varna?rama dharma. ??rama dharma deals with the con­ duct of an individual during different stages of his life. In the first stage, as a brahmac?rin (student), he devotes himself to studies in a gurukula (??ram, or home of a guru). In the second stage, as a youth, he takes a wife, settles down in life, and begets children. In the third, as he ages further, he becomes a forest recluse and, without much attachment to worldly life, engages himself in Vedic karma. In the fourth stage, he forsakes even Vedic works, renounces the world utterly to become a sanny?sin (ascetic who has renounced the world) and turns his mind towards the Param?tman. These four stages of life or ??ramas are called brahmacarya (student), garhasthya (householder), v?naprastha (forest dweller) and sanny?sa (ascetic). Varna dharma (caste) is an “arrangement” governing all society. It is very much a target of attack today and is usually spoken of as the division of society into j?tis (sub-divisions of the castes). But varna and j?ti are in fact different. There are only four varnas but the j?tis are numerous. Critics of varna dharma brand it as “a blot on our religion” and as “a vicious system which divides people into high and low”. But, if you look at it impartially, you will realize that it is a unique instrument to bring about orderly and harmonious social life. The Vedas, the Root of All We find that there is but one scripture as the source common to the different sects and schools of thought in the Hindu religion. This source includes the Upanishads. The great teachers of the ?iva, Vishnu, and ?ankara traditions have written commentaries on ten of the Upanishads. The Upanishadic texts proclaim that the Brahman is the one and only Godhead. In one Upanishad It is called Vishnu;1 in another It is called ?iva.2 All the deities mentioned in the Vedas—Mitra, Varuna, Agni, Indra and so on—are different names of the same Truth. So it is said in the Vedas: “Ekam sath vipr? bahudh? vadanti.” (It is the one truth, which jn?nins call by different names.) It emerges that for all the divisions in our religion there is but one scripture—a scrip­ ture common to all—and one Godhead which is known by many names. The Vedas are the common scripture and the Godhead common to all is the Brahman. Thus we can say with finality, and without any room for doubt, that all of us belong to the same religion. The Vedas that constitute the scripture common to all and which reveal the Godhead that is common to us also teach us how to lead our life, and—this is important—they do us the ultimate good by showing us in the end the way to become that very Godhead our­ selves. They are our refuge both here and in the hereafter and are the source and root of all our different traditions, all our systems of thought. All sects, all schools of our religion, have their origin in them. The root is one but the branches are many. The Vedas are the source not only of the various divisions of Hinduism, all the religions of the world may be traced back to them. It is our bounden duty to preserve them for all time to come with their glory undiminished. The Vedas in their Original Form Some do not seem to attach any special significance to the fact that the Vedas are in Sanskrit. They think that these sacred texts could be known through translations. Nowadays a number of books are trans­ lated from one language into another and in this process the original form or character is changed or distorted. The words spoken by a great man on a particular subject may not be fully understood today. But if they are pre­ served in the original in the same language, there is the possibility of their meaning being fully grasped at some future date. You use a beautiful word to convey an idea in your language, but its equivalent may not be found in any other tongue. Also, it may become necessary to express the same in a roundabout way. There is also the possibility that the opinion expressed first, in its original context, may not come through effectively in a translation. We must consider the further disadvantage of the translation being circumscribed by the mental make-up of the translator, the limitations of his knowledge and understanding of the subject dealt with. The translation done by one may not seem right to another. When there are a number of translations of the same work, it would be hard to choose the right one. We shall then be compelled to go back to the original. This is the reason why I insist that the Vedas must be preserved in their original form. They are the source of the philosophical systems associated with the great ?c?ryas (teachers). These masters evolved their doc­ trines without making any modifications in the Vedas to suit themselves; nor did they establish any religions of their own outside the Vedic tradition. The source, the root, of their systems of thought is one and the same—the Vedas. It is because this source has remained unchanged in its original character that thinkers Veda parayanam (reading religious texts) and teachers have, from time to time, been able to draw inspiration and strength from it to present new viewpoints. But these viewpoints have not meant the creation of new religions. The reason is that all of them—all these systems—belong to the larger system called the Vedic religion. Homam (ritual Vedic sacrifice) in progress at Kumbakonam Sankara Mutt Page from the Rigveda The Vedic Religion and Varna (Caste) Dharma What is Varna (Caste) Dharma? In other countries other physicians have pre­ scribed medicines in the form of their own religious systems. Would your doctor like to be told that he should treat you in the same way as another doctor treats his patient? There are several systems of medicine. In one there is a strict diet regimen, in another there is not much strictness about the patient’s food. In one system the medicines administered taste sweet; in another they taste bitter. To be re­ stored to health we have to follow strictly any one method of treatment, not insist on a combination of the various therapies. Other religions lay down only such duties as are common to all their followers. In the Vedic religion there are two types of dharma, the one being common to all and the other to individual varnas (castes). The duties common to all Hindus, the universal code of conduct, have the name of s?m?nya dharma. Non-violence, truthfulness, cleanliness, control of the senses, non-acquisitiveness (one must not possess material goods in excess of what is needed for one’s bare requirements, not even a straw must one own in excess), devotion to ??vara, trust in one’s parents, love for all creatures— these form part of the s?m?nya dharma. Then each varna has its own special code of conduct or vi??sha dharma determined by its hereditary vocation. It is difficult to say how long people will continue to owe allegiance to the religions that arose in various countries during historical times. I say this not because I happen to be a representative of Hindus nor is it my wish to speak in demeaning terms about other religions. My wish is indeed that people following different religions ought to continue to remain in their respective folds and find spiritual fulfillment in them. I do not invite others to embrace my faith. In fact I believe that to do so is contrary to the basic tenets of my religion. Nothing occurs in this world as an accident. People with different levels of maturity are born in different religions: so it is ordained by the Lord. I believe that a man grows inwardly by practicing the tenets of the religion of his birth. If I speak about what I feel to be the worthy features of Hinduism—features that are not found in other religions—it is neither to speak ill of the latter nor to invite their followers to our side. Non-Hindus attack these unique aspects of our religion without taking the trouble of understanding them and some Hindus themselves are influenced by their views. That is why I am constrained to speak about the distinctive doctrines of our religion. Acceptance of concepts like karma, the Lord’s incarnations, etc, will in no way weaken their [non-Hindus’] attachment to the basic beliefs of their own religions. What is the fundamental concept of any religion, its living principle? It is faith in the Lord and devotion to him. For others to view these special concepts of Hinduism sympathetically does not mean that their faith in God or devotion to him will be affected in any way. I say all this not because I think that other religions are in any trouble, nor because I have reason to be happy if indeed they are. I merely repeat the view that lack of faith in religion— indeed atheism—is growing day by day every­ where and that all religions are struggling for their survival. Divided by Work but Still of One Heart Any society has to depend on the proper execution of a variety of jobs. It is from this social necessity that the concept of division of labor arose. But who is to decide the number of people for each type of work? Who is to determine the proportions for society to function in a balanced manner? In the West they had no answer to these questions. Everybody there competes with everybody else for comfortable jobs and everywhere you find greed and bitterness resulting from such rivalries. And, as a consequence of all this, there are lapses from discipline and morality. In our country we based the division of labor on a hereditary system and, while it worked, people had a happy, peaceful, and contented life. Today even a multimillionaire is neither contented nor happy. Then even a cobbler led a life without cares. What sort of progress have we achieved today by inflaming evil desires in all hearts and pushing everyone into the slough of discontent? Not satisfied with such “progress” there is talk everywhere that we must go forward rapidly in this manner. Greed and covetousness were unknown during the centuries when varna dharma flourished. People were bound together in small well-knit groups and they discovered that there was happiness in their being together. Besides they had faith in religion, fear of God and devotion, and a feeling of pride in their own family deities and in the modes of worshipping them. In this way they found fullness in their lives without any need to suffer the hunger and disquiet of seeking external objects. All society experienced a sense of well-being. One more point must be considered. Even if you concede that the social divisions have caused bitterness among the different sections here, what about the same in other countries? Can the existence of such ill-will in other lands be denied? The differences there, based on wealth and status, cause bitterness and resentment among the underprivileged and poorer sections. In America, it is claimed that all people have enough food, clothing, and housing. They say that even a domestic servant there owns a car. It is reasonable to infer from this that the Americans are a con­ tented people. But what is the reality there? The man who has only one car is envious of another who has two. Similarly, the fact that one person has a bank balance of a hundred million dollars is cause for heart-burning for another with a bank balance of only a mil­ lion. Those who have sufficient means to live comfortably quarrel with people better off over rights and privileges. Does this not mean that even in a country like the United States there are conflicts between the higher and lower classes of society? It seems to me that better than the distinctions prevailing in the West—distinctions that give rise to jealousies and social discord— are the differences mistakenly attributed to the hereditary system of vocations. In the old days this arrangement ensured peace in the land with everyone living a contented life. There was neither envy nor hatred and everyone readily accepted his lot. The different types of work are meant for the good of the people in general. It is wrong to believe that one job belongs to an “inferior” category and another to a “superior” type. There is no more efficacious medicine for inner purity than doing one’s work, whatever it be, without any desire for reward and doing it to perfection. I must add that even wrong notions about work (one job being better than another or worse) is better than the disparities and differences to be met with in other countries. We are [or were] free from the spirit of rivalry and bitterness that vitiate social life there. Divided we have remained united, and nurtured our civilization. Other civilizations have gone under because the people of the countries concerned, though seemingly united, were in fact divided. In our case, though there were differences in the matter of work, there was unity of hearts and that is how our culture and civilization flourished. In other countries the fact that there were no distinctions based on vocations (anyone could do any work) itself gave rise to rivalries and eventually to disunity. They were not able to withstand the onslaught of other civilizations. It is not practicable to make all people one, nor can everyone occupy the same high position. At the same time it is also unwise to keep people divided into classes that are like water-tight compartments. The Dharma??stras (scriptures on dharma) have shown us a middle way that avoids the pitfalls of the two extremes. I have come as a representative of this way and that is why I speak for it: that there ought to be distinctions among various sections of people in the performance of rites but that there must be unity of hearts. There should be no confusion between the two. Though we are divided outwardly in the matter of work, with unity of hearts there will be peace. That was the tradition for ages together in this land—there was oneness of hearts. If every member of society does his duty, does his work, unselfishly and with the conviction that he is doing it for the good of all, considerations of high and low will not enter his mind. If people carry out the duties common to them, however adverse the circumstances be, and if every individual performs the duties that are special to him, no one will have cause for suffering at any time. Why Only in This Country? How did we lose our inner vitality? By giving up our traditions we have become weak. What was it that nurtured our civilization and kept it growing for thousands of years? By part­ ing with our traditions we descended so low as to be ashamed of calling ourselves heirs to this civilization. The fact is that, so long as we practiced varna dharma (caste system), which is unique to our country, our civilization stood like a rock arousing the admiration of all the world. But after this dharma began to decline we have been on the descent day by day. Why should this country alone practice varna dharma? Because this dharma is necessary if we want to sustain a civilization that can promote the growth of philosophy, nourish our arts and culture, inspire us more and more in our inward search and help us in the realization of the Godhead. If the varna system is followed at least in this country, it will be an example to the rest of the world. If there is no varna dharma, it means at once the growth of social disharmony, the rise of jealousies, and discontent among the people. Men will compete with one another for the jobs they like or are convenient to them. There will be competition for education on the same lines. Since all will not succeed in their efforts or in their desire or ambition being satisfied, the result will be hatred and resentment everywhere. No civilization can flourish in the absence of a system that brings fulfillment to all. Varna dharma brought fulfillment and satisfaction to all. The Conflict between Tradition and Modernity Politicians and intellectuals alike say that varna (caste) is part of an uncivilized system. Why? Who is responsible for the disintegration of so worthy an arrangement as varna dharma? These are questions that I raised earlier and I shall try to answer them. The wrong ideas that have developed about varna dharma must be ascribed to the Brahmins themselves. They are indeed responsible for the decay of an ages-old system that contributed not only to our ?tmic advancement (progress toward Self-realization) but also to the well-being of the nation as well as of all mankind. The Brahmin relinquished the duties of his birth—the study of the Vedas and performance of the rites laid down in the Vedic tradition. He left his birthplace, the village, for the town. He cropped his hair and started dressing in European style. Giving up the Vedas, he took to the mundane learning of the West. He fell to the lure of jobs offered by his white master and aped him in dress, manners, and attitudes. He threw to the winds the noble dharma he had inherited from the Vedic seers through his forefathers and abandoned all for a mess of pottage. He was drawn to everything Western, science, life-style, entertainment. The canonical texts have it that the Brahmin must have no love for money, that he must not accumulate wealth. So long as he followed his dharma, as prescribed by the ??stras, and so long as he chanted the Vedas and performed sacrifices, he brought good to the world, and all other castes respected him and treated him with affection. Others now observed how the Brahmin had changed, how his life-style had become different with all its glitter and show and how he went about with all the pretence of having risen on the scale of civilization. The Brahmin had been an ideal for them in all that is noble, but now he strayed from the path of dharma; and following his example they too gave up their traditional vocations that had brought them happiness and contentment and left their native village to settle in towns. Like the Brahmin they became keen to learn English and secure jobs in the government. A question that arises in this context is how Vedic studies which had not suffered much even during Muslim rule received a severe setback with the advent of the European. One reason is the impact of the new sciences and the machines that came with the white man. Granted that many a truth was revealed through these sciences—and this was all to the good up to a point. But we must remember that the knowledge of a subject per se is one thing and how we use it in practice is another. The Varadaraja Perumal Temple Tank at Kanchipuram The introduction of steam power and electricity made many types of work easier but it also meant comforts hitherto unthought-of to gratify the senses. If you keep pandering to the senses more and more new desires are engendered. This will mean the production of an in­ creasing number of objects of pleasure. The more we try to obtain sensual pleasure the more we will cause injury to our innermost being. The new pleasures that could be had with scientific development and the introduction of machines were an irresistible lure for the Brahmin as they were to other communities. An­ other undesirable product of the sciences brought by the white man was rationalism which undermined people’s faith in religion and persuaded some to believe that the religious truths that are based on faith and are inwardly experienced are nothing but deception. The man who did not give up his duties even during Muslim rule now abandoned them for the new-found pleasures and comforts. He dressed more smartly than the Englishman, smoked cigarettes, and even learned to dance like his white master. Those who thus became proficient in the arts of the white man were rewarded with jobs. Now occurred the biggest tragedy. Up till now all members of society had their hereditary jobs to do and they did not have to worry about their livelihood. Now, with the example of the Brahmin before them, members of other castes also gave up their traditional occupations for the jobs made avail­ able by the British in the banks, railways, collectorates, etc. With the introduction of machinery our handicrafts fell into decay and many of our artisans had to look for other means of livelihood. In the absence of any demarcation in the matter of work and workers, there arose competition for jobs for the first time in the country. It was a disastrous development and it generated jealousy, ill-will, disputes, and a host of other evils among people who had hitherto lived in harmony. Ill feelings developed between Brahmins and non-Brahmins also. How? Brahmins formed only a small percentage of the population. But they were able to occupy top positions in the new order owing to their intelligence which was the result of the spiritual efforts of their forefathers. They excelled in all walks of life—in administration, in academics, in law, in medicine, engineering, and so on. The white man made his own calculations about developing animosity between Brahmins and non-Brahmins and realized that by fuelling it he could strengthen his hold on the country. He fabricated the Aryan-Dravidian theory of races and the seeds of differences were sown among children born of the same mother. It was a design that proved effective in a climate already made unhealthy by rivalry for jobs. The Brahmin spoiled himself and spoiled others. By abandoning his dharma he be­came a bad example to others. Now, after he had divested himself of his dharma, there was nothing to give him distinction, to mark him out from others. As a matter of fact, even by strictly adhering to his dharma the Brahmin is not entitled to feel superior to others. He must always remain humble in the belief that “everyone performs a function in society; I perform mine”. If at all, others respected him in the past and accorded him a high place in society, it was in consideration of his selfless work, his life of austerity, discipline, and purity. Now he had descended to such depths as to merit their most abrasive criticism. Is it not better then to starve and yet be attached firmly to our dharma so long as there is breath in us? Is not such loyalty to our dharma a matter of pride? Why should we care about how others see us, whether they honor us or speak ill of us? So long as we do not compete with them for jobs they will have no cause for jealousy or resentment. Let them call us back­ ward or stupid or think that we are not capable of keeping abreast of the times. Are we not now already their butt of ridicule? Let us be true to our dharma in the face of the mockery of others, even in the face of death. Is not such a lot preferable to suffering the slings of scorn and criticism earned by forsaking our dharma for the sake of filling our belly? People nowadays die for their motherland; they lay down their lives for their mother tongue. Was there any demonstration of faith like this, such willingness to die for a cause or a belief, when the British came here with their life-style? At that time did we protect our dharma with courage, in the belief that even death was a small price to pay for it? The Lord himself has declared in the G?t? that it is better to die abiding by one’s dharma than prosper through another man’s dharma. Brahmins who had seen no reason to change their life-style during the long Muslim period of our history changed it during British rule. Why? New sciences and machinery came with the white man. The motor car and electricity had their own impact on life here. Brahmins were drawn to comforts and conveniences not thought of before. This could be a reason for their change of life, but not a justification. The Brahmin is not to regard his body as a means for the enjoyment of sensual pleasures but as an instrument for the observance of such rites as are necessary to protect the Vedas—and the Vedas have to be protected for the welfare of mankind. The basic dharma is that to the body of the Brahmin nothing must be added that incites his sensual appetite. It was a fundamental mistake on the part of the Brahmin to have forgotten the spirit of sacrifice that imbues his dharma and become a victim of the pleasures and comforts easily obtained from the new gadgets and instruments. There is pride in adhering to one’s dharma even when one is faced with adverse circumstances. Brahmins (during British rule) committed a grave mistake by not doing so and we are suffering the consequences. See the ill-will in the country today among children of the same mother. We have created suffering for others also. At first Brahmins were denied admission to colleges and refused jobs. Now things have come to such a pass that other communities also suffer the same fate. All was well so long as man, using his own innate resources, lived a simple life without the help of machines. With more and more factories and increasing machine power, life itself has become complicated. The situation today is such that everyone is facing difficulties in getting admission to college or in getting a job. People ask me: “What is the remedy to­ day? Do you expect all Brahmins to leave their new life-style and return to Vedic learning?” Whether or not I expect them to do so and whether or not such a step seems possible, I must ask them to do so (to return to their Vedic dharma). Where is the need for a guru­ p?tha (??ram) or a seat on which an ?c?rya great teacher) is installed if I am to keep my mouth shut and watch idly as the dharma that is the source of everything is being endangered? Even if it seems not possible (Brahmins returning to the dharma of their birth) it must be shown to be possible in practice: that is the purpose of the ??rams. They must harness all their energies towards the attainment of this goal. The Least Expected of Brahmins This is the least Brahmins can do to preserve the Vedic traditions. Arrangements to impart Vedic learning to children must be made in every Brahmin household. I know that there are not enough teachers, a sad reflection on the state of our dharma. Considering this and the likely economic condition of parents I would suggest that Veda classes may be conducted for all children together of a locality or neighborhood. Children of poor families may be taught on a cooperative basis. Veda patashala students at Vishnu Kanchi Step by step in this way the boys will be able to memorize the mantra part of the Vedas and also learn how to conduct rites like up?karma (first step for a young boy to become a Vedic student). I speak here about prayoga, the conduct or procedure of rites, because in the absence of priests in the future everyone should be able to perform Vedic rites himself. Young Brahmins in the temple at Madurai The sound of the Vedas must pervade the world for all time to come. Everyone must sincerely work towards achieving this end. It is your duty to ensure the good not only of the Brahmin community, not only of all the castes of India, but of all the countless creatures of earth. It is a duty imposed on you by ??vara—it is a divine duty. It is important that we perform this duty we owe to the people of the present. But it is equally important that we perform it so as to be saved from committing a crime against future generations. “As it is nobody cares for the Vedas,” you are likely to tell me. “Who is going to care for them in the coming years? What purpose is served by all the efforts we take now to keep up their study?” I do not share this view. When the wheel keeps turning, that part of it which is now down has necessarily to come up. Modern civilization with its frenzied pace is bound to have its fall after attaining its peak. We have been carried away by the sup­ posed comforts made possible by advanced technology. But one day we will realize that they do not give us any feeling of fullness and that we have indeed created only discomforts for ourselves through them. Preserving the Vedas: Why it Is a Lifetime Mission “The sages transcended the frontiers of human knowledge and became one with the Universal Reality. It is through them that the world received the Vedic mantras,” this is one of the basic concepts of our religion. If you do not accept that human beings can obtain such ?tmic Power as exemplified by these seers, any further talk on the subject would be futile. One could point out to you great men whom you can see for yourself, great men who have perfected themselves and acquired pow­ ers not shared by the common people. But if you think of them to be cheats or fraudulent men, any further talk would again be useless. In our present state of limited understand­ ing, the argument that denies the existence of anything beyond the range of human reason and comprehension itself betrays the height of irrationalism. Are sounds and vibrations spontaneously produced? No. If vibrations arise on their own they will be erratic and confusing and not re­ lated to one another. But what do we see in the cosmos? There is a certain orderliness about it and one thing in it is linked to another. What do we infer from this? That a Great Intelligence has formulated this scheme that we see, that it has created it from its own vibrations. The Vedas are sounds emanating from the vibrations of this Great Intelligence, the Great A Vedic teacher with sishyas (pupils) in Rameswaram 31 Gnosis.That is why we believe that the mantras of the Vedas originate from the Param?tman himself. We must take special care of such sounds to ensure the good of the world. Yes, the Vedic mantras are sequences of sounds that are meant for the good of the world. Whatever is present in space is also present in the individual being. These elements exist in the human body in a form that is accessible to the senses. The sounds a person makes in his throat have their source in space in a form not audible to us. The radio transforms electrical waves into sound waves. If a man can grasp the sounds in space and make them audible, he will be able to create with them what is needed for the good of the world. Yoga is the science that accomplishes such a task. Through yogic practice (perfection) one can become aware of what is in the macrocosm and draw it into the microcosm. I shall not be able to give you proof of this in a form acceptable to human reason. Yoga transcends our limited reason and understanding. The purpose of the Vedas is to speak about matters that are beyond the com­ prehension of the human mind. You must have faith in the words of great men or else, to know the truth of such mat­ ters, you must practice yoga strictly observing its rules. It may not be practicable for all those who ask questions or harbor doubts about the Vedas to practice yoga in this manner. Even if you are prepared to accept the words of a true His Holiness ?ri Jayendra Saraswati with young Brahmins yogin, how are you, in the first place, to be convinced that he is indeed a true yogin and not a fraud? Altogether it means that you must have faith in someone, in something. Later such faith will be strengthened from your own observations, inference, and experience. There is no point in speaking to people who have either no faith or refuse to develop it through their own experience. There is a state in which the macrocosm and the microcosm are perceived as one. Great men there are who have reached such a state and are capable of transforming what is subtle in the one into what is gross in the other. I am speaking here to those who believe in such a possibility. When we look at this universe and the complex manner in which it functions, we re­ alize that there must be a Great Wisdom that has created it and sustains it. It is from this Great Wisdom, that is the Param?tman, that all that we see are born and it is from It that all the sounds that we hear have emanated. First came the universe of sound and then the uni­ verse that we observe. Most of the former still exists in space. All that exists in the outer uni­ verse is present in the human body also. The space that exists outside us exists also in our heart. The mantras of the Vedas are remarkable in that they bring blessings to the world in the form of sound—even if their meaning is not understood. Of course, they are pregnant with meaning and represent the lofty principle that it is the One Truth that is manifested as all that we perceive. They also confer blessings on us by taking the form of deities appropriate to the different sounds (of the mantras). Sound does not bring any benefits, any fruits, by itself. ??vara alone is the bestower of benefits. However, instead of making the fruits available to us directly, he appoints dei­ ties to distribute them in the same manner as the king or president of a country appoints officials to carry out his dictates. The mantras represent various deities in the form of sound. If we attain perfection (siddhi) by constant chanting and meditation of a mantra, it should be possible for us to see the deity invoked in his physical form. The deities also arise if we make offerings into the sacrificial fire reciting specific mantras. If a sacrifice is conducted in this manner, the deities give us their special blessings. We do not pay taxes directly to the king or president. In the same way, we pay tax­ es in the form of sacrifices and Vedic chanting to the aides of the Param?tman for the sake of the welfare of the world. The sounds of the mantras constitute their form. The Vedas have won the admiration of Western scholars for their poetic beauty. They bring us face to face with many deities—they bring us also their grace. Above all, through Deity at the wall shrine of Kailasanatha temple at Kanchipuram the Upanishads they teach us the great truths relating to the Self. The Vedas are thus known for the profundity of the truths contained in them, but their sound is no less important. Indeed their sound has its own significance and power. All mantras, it must be noted, have power, not only Vedic mantras. The Vedic mantras do good to all creatures in this world and the hereafter: we must have implicit faith in this belief. It is not proper to ask whether what we ourselves cannot hear with our ears will be heard by the seers. There is such a thing as the divine power of seeing and hearing. Our sight is dependent on the lens in our eyes. Were this lens different what we observe would also be different. Through the intense practice of yoga we can obtain the divine power of seeing and hearing. We must not inquire into the Vedas with our limited powers of perception and with our limited capacity to reason and comprehend. The Vedas speak to us about what is beyond the reach of our eyes and ears and reasoning— that is their very purpose.There are things that we comprehend through direct perception. We do not need the help of the Vedas to know about them. What cannot be proved by reasoning and what is beyond the reach of our intellect—these seers have gifted us in the form of the Vedas with their divine perception. The question that now occurs is why there should be a separate caste committed to Vedic learning and Vedic practices even if it is con­ ceded that Vedic mantras have the power to do good. In answering this question we must first remember that the Vedas are not to be read from the written text. They have to be memorized by constant listening and repeated chanting. The learner then becomes a teacher himself and in this manner the process goes on from generation to generation. Maintain­ ing such a tradition of learning and teaching is a whole-time occupation. Neither the teacher nor the taught may take up any other work. We must also remember that the Brahmin is expected to master subjects other than the Vedas also, like the arts and crafts and the various sciences. He has in fact to learn the vocations of other j?tis (sub-divisions of castes)—but he must not take up any for his own livelihood. It is the responsibility of the Brahmin to promote knowledge and culture. He is expected to learn the hereditary skills of all j?tis, including the art of warfare, and pass on these skills to the respective j?tis to help them earn their livelihood. The Brahmin’s calling is learning and teaching the Vedas. Ac­ cording to the ??stras he must live in a modest dwelling, observe strict rules and vows so as to gain mastery of the mantras. He must eat only as much as is needed to keep body and soul together. All temptations to make money and enjoy sensual pleasures he must sternly resist. All his actions must be inspired by the spirit of sacrifice and he must pass his days sustaining the Vedic tradition and practices for the good of mankind. It is the duty of other varnas (castes) to see that the Brahmin does not die of starvation. They must provide him with the bare necessities of life and such materials as are needed for the performance of sacrifices. Wages are paid to those who do other jobs or a price is paid for what they produce. The Brahmin works for the whole community and serves it by chant­ ing mantras, by performing sacrifices, and by leading a life according to the dictates of religion. That is why he must be provided with his upkeep. The canonical texts do not say that we must build him a palace or that he must be given gifts of gold. The Brahmin must be provided with the wherewithal for the proper performance of sacrifices. In his personal life he must eschew all show and luxury. It is by taming his senses—by burning away all de- sire—that he gains mastery over the mantras. All mankind, all creatures of earth, must live in happiness. Everybody must practice his allotted dharma for the good of all with the realization that there is no question of any work being “higher” than any other or “lower”. Pre­ serving the sound of the Vedas must remain the duty of one class so as to ensure plenty in this world as well as to create universal ?tmic uplift. To revert to the question I put to you first. Leaving aside the vocation of the Vedic dharma, let us assume that the hereditary system is beneficial in respect of all types of work. But why should the preservation of the Vedic dharma be the lifelong vocation of one class? It is now established, as I conclude, that however it may be with the other vocations, whether or not they exist, whether or not there is a mix-up in them, the pursuit of the Vedic dharma must remain a separate calling. Our society must be one in which there are no differences of high and low. All will then live in harmony as the children of ??vara without fighting among themselves. They will live as a united family helping one another and spreading a sense of peace and happiness everywhere. My Work It does not matter if you are unable to create conditions in which Brahmins henceforth will make the pursuit of the Vedic dharma their lifelong vocation. All I ask you is the mini­ mum you can do: make arrangements to impart to your children the Vedic mantras, to teach them the scripture for at least one hour a day from the time they are eight years old until they are eighteen. Teach them also the prayoga (the conduct of rites). Do this on a cooperative basis in each locality. If you succeed in this you will have truly honored me with a shower of gold coins. It gives me joy that more and more bhajans (sacred singing ceremonies) are conducted in the towns than before, that work connect­ ed with temples is on the increase, and that pur?nic discourses (discourses on traditional stories) are given more often than before. But we must remember that the Vedas constitute the basis of all these. If our scripture suffers a decline, how long will the activities based on it survive? The Vedas must be handed down from father to son, from one generation to the next. It is because we have forgotten this tradition that our religion itself has become shaky. All the trouble in the world, all the suffering and all the evil must be attributed to the fact that the Brahmin has forsaken his dharma, the Vedic dharma. I am not worried about the system of varnas being destroyed, but I am worried about the setback to the welfare of mankind. I am also extremely concerned about the fact that, if the Vedic tradition which has been maintained like a chain from generation to generation is broken, it may not be possible to create the tradition all over again. The good arising in a subtle form from the sound of the Vedas and the performance of sacrifices is not the only benefit that constitutes the welfare of mankind. From Ved?nta are derived lofty truths that can bring ?tmic uplift to people belonging to all countries. How did foreigners come to have an interest in our Ved?nta? When they came to India they discovered here a class of people engaged in the practice of the Vedic dharma as a lifetime calling. They were curious to find out in what way the Vedas were great that an entire class of people should have dedicated themselves to them all their life. They conducted research into these scriptures and discovered many truths including those pointing to the unity of the various cultures of the world. His Holiness ?ri Jayendra Saraswati at the homam venue "The Vedic Religion: Introductory” features in Introduction to Hindu Dharma: Illustrated Edited by Michael Oren Fitzgerald, Introduction by Arvind Sharma
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I would find it easier to bear if your flattery had, as it usually does, seduced some ordinary dull-witted man; in that case, it would have been no concern of mine. But this man has been educated in the philosophical schools of the Eleatics and the Academy. Get out, you Sirens; your sweetness leads to death. Leave him to be cured and made strong by my Muses.’ And so the defeated Muses, shamefaced and with downcast eyes, went sadly away. My sigh was so dimmed by tears that I could not tell who this women of imperious authority might be, and I lay there astonished, my eyes staring at the earth, silently waiting to see what she would do. She came nearer and sat at the foot of my bed. When she noticed my grief-stricken, downcast face, she bewailed in these words the disorder of my mind: i.2 · Poem Alas! in what abyss his mind Is plunged, how wildly tossed! Still, still towards the outer night She sinks, her true light lost, As oft as, lashed tumultuously By earth-born blasts, care’s waves rise high. Yet once he ranged the open heavens, The sun’s bright pathway tracked; Watched how the cold moon waxed and waned; Nor rested, till there lacked To his wide ken no star that steers Amid the maze of circling spheres. The causes why the blusterous winds Vex ocean’s tranquil face, Whose hand doth turn the stable globe, Or why his even race From out the ruddy east the sun Unto the western waves doth run: What is it tempers cunningly The placid hours of spring, So that it blossoms with the rose For earth’s engarlanding: Who loads the year’s maturer prime With clustered grapes in autumn time: All this he knew—thus ever strove Deep Nature’s lore to guess. Now, reft of reason’s light, he lies, And bonds his neck oppress; While by the heavy load constrained, His eyes to this dull earth are chained. i.2 · Prose ‘But now,’ said she, ‘is the time for cure rather than for complaint.’ Then fixing her eyes wholly on me, she said, ‘Are you the man who was nourished upon the milk of my learning, brought up with my food until you had won your way to the power of a manly soul? Surely I had given you such weapons as would keep you safe, and your strength unconquered; if you had not thrown them away. Do you know me? Why do you keep silence? Are you dumb from shame or from dull amazement? I would it were from shame, but I see that amazement has overwhelmed you.’ When she saw that I was not only silent, but utterly tongue-tied and dumb, she put her hand gently upon my breast, and said, ‘There is no danger: he is suffering from drowsiness, that disease which attacks so many minds which have been deceived. He has forgotten himself for a moment and will quickly remember, as soon as he recognises me. That he may do so, let me brush away from his eyes the darkening cloud of thoughts of matters perishable.’ So saying, she gathered her robe into a fold and dried my swimming eyes. i.6 · Prose ‘First then,’ she continued, ‘will you let me find out and make trial of the state of your mind by a few small questions, that so I may understand what should be the method of your treatment?’ ‘Ask,’ said I, ‘what your judgment would have you ask, and I will answer you.’ Then said she, ‘Think you that this universe is guided only at random and by mere chance? or think you there is any rule of reason constituted in it?’ ‘No, never would I think it could be so, nor believe that such sure motions could be made at random or by chance. I know that God, the founder of the universe, does overlook His work; nor ever may that day come which shall drive me to abandon this belief as untrue.’ ‘So is it,’ she said, ‘and even so you cried just now, and only mourned that mankind alone has no part in this divine guardianship: you were fixed in your belief that all other things are ruled by reason. Yet, how strange! how much I wonder how it is that you can be so sick though you are set in such a health-giving state of mind! But let us look deeper into it: I cannot but think there is something lacking. Since you are not in doubt that the universe is ruled by God, tell me by what method you think that government is guided?’ ‘I scarcely know the meaning of your question; much less can I answer it.’ ‘Was I wrong,’ said she, ‘to think that something was lacking, that there was some opening in your armour, some way by which this distracting disease has crept into your soul? But tell me, do you remember what is the aim and end of all things? what the object to which all nature tends?’ ‘I have heard indeed, but grief has blunted my memory.’ ‘But do you not some how know whence all things have their source?’ ‘Yes,’ I said; ‘that source is God.’ ‘Is it possible that you, who know the beginning of all things, should not know their end? But such are the ways of these distractions, such is their power, that though they can move a man’s position, they cannot pluck him from himself or wrench him from his roots. But this question would I have you answer: do you remember that you are a man?’ ‘How can I but remember that?’ ‘Can you then say what is a man?’ ‘Need you ask? I know that he is an animal, reasoning and mortal; that I know, and that I confess myself to be.’ ‘Know you naught else that you are?’ asked Philosophy. ‘Naught,’ said I. ‘Now,’ said she, ‘I know the cause, or the chief cause, of your sickness. You have forgotten what you are. So now I really understand why you are ill, and I know how to cure you. You are overwhelmed by this forgetfulness of yourself: hence you have been thus sorrowing that you are exiled and robbed of all your possessions. You do not know the aim and end of all things; hence you think that if men are worthless and wicked, they are powerful and fortunate. You have forgotten by what methods the universe is guided; hence you think that the chances of good and bad fortune are tossed about with no ruling hand. These things may lead not to disease only, but even to death as well. But let us thank the Giver of all health, that your nature has not altogether left you. We have yet the chief spark for your health’s fire, for you have a true knowledge of the hand that guides the universe: you do believe that its Stars shed no light Through the black night, When the clouds hide; And the lashed wave, If the winds rave O’er ocean’s tide,— Though once serene As day’s fair sheen,— Soon fouled and spoiled By the storm’s spite, Shows to the sight Turbid and soiled. Oft the fair rill, Down the steep hill Seaward that strays, Some tumbled block Of fallen rock Hinders and stays. Then art thou fain Clear and most plain Truth to discern, In the right way Firmly to stay, Nor from it turn? Joy, hope and fear Suffer not near, Drive grief away: Shackled and blind And lost is the mind Where these have sway. government is not subject to random chance, but to divine reason. Therefore have no fear. From this tiny spark the fire of life shall forthwith shine upon you. But it is not time to use severer remedies, and since we know that it is the way of all minds to clothe themselves ever in false opinions as they throw off the true, and these false ones breed a dark distraction which confuses the true insight, therefore will I try to lessen this darkness for a while with gentle applications of easy remedies, that so the shadows of deceiving passions may be dissipated, and you may have power to perceive the splendour of true light.’ ii.7 · Song, “Love is Lord of all” Why are Nature’s changes bound To a fixed and ordered round? What to leaguèd peace hath bent Every warring element? Wherefore doth the rosy morn Rise on Phœbus’ car upborne? Why should Phœbe rule the night, Led by Hesper’s guiding light? What the power that doth restrain In his place the restless main, That within fixed bounds he keeps, Nor o’er earth in deluge sweeps? Love it is that holds the chains, Love o’er sea and earth that reigns; Love—whom else but sovereign Love?— Love, high lord in heaven above! Yet should he his care remit, All that now so close is knit In sweet love and holy peace, Would no more from conflict cease, But with strife’s rude shock and jar All the world’s fair fabric mar. Tribes and nations Love unites By just treaty’s sacred rites; Wedlock’s bonds he sanctifies By affection’s softest ties. Love appointeth, as is due, Faithful laws to comrades true— Love, all-sovereign Love!—oh, then, Ye are blest, ye sons of men, If the love that rules the sky In your hearts is throned on high! iii.1 · Prose When she finished her lay, its soothing tones left me spellbound with my ears alert in my eagerness to listen. So a while afterwards I said, ‘Greatest comforter of weary minds, how have you cheered me with your deep thoughts and sweet singing too! No more shall I doubt my power to meet the blows of Fortune. So far am I from terror at the remedies which you did lately tell me were sharper, that I am longing to hear them, and eagerly I beg you for them.’ Then said she, ‘I knew it when you laid hold upon my words in silent attention, and I was waiting for that frame of mind in you, or more truly, I brought it about in you. They that remain are indeed bitter to the tongue, but sweet to the inner man. But as you say you are eager to hear, how ardently you would be burning, if you knew whither I am attempting to lead you!’ ‘Whither is that?’ I asked. ‘To the true happiness, of which your soul too dreams; but your sight is taken up in imaginary views thereof, so that you cannot look upon itself.’ Then said I, ‘I pray you show me what that truly is, and quickly.’ ‘I will do so,’ she said, ‘for your sake willingly. But first I will try to picture in words and give you the form of the cause, which is already better known to you, that so, when that picture is perfect and you turn your eyes to the other side, you may recognise the form of true happiness.’ iii.1 · Song, “The Thorns of Error” Who fain would sow the fallow field, And see the growing corn, Must first remove the useless weeds, The bramble and the thorn. After ill savour, honey’s taste Is to the mouth more sweet; After the storm, the twinkling stars The eyes more cheerly greet. When night hath past, the bright dawn comes In car of rosy hue; So drive the false bliss from thy mind, And thou shall see the true. iii.2 · Prose Then she lowered her eyes for a little while, as though searching the innermost recesses of her mind; and then she continued: — ‘The troubles of the many and various aims of mortal men bring them much care, and herein they go forward by different paths but strive to reach one end, which is happiness. And that good is that, to which if any man attain, he can desire nothing further. It is that highest of all good things, and it embraces in itself all good things: if any good is lacking, it cannot be the highest good, since then there is left outside it something which can be desired. Wherefore happiness is a state which is made perfect by the union of all good things. This end all men seek to reach, as I said, though by different paths. For there is implanted by nature in the minds of men a desire for the true good; but error leads them astray towards false goods by wrong paths. ‘Some men believe that the highest good is to lack nothing, and so they are at pains to possess abundant riches. Others consider the true good to be that which is most worthy of admiration, and so they strive to attain to places of honour, and to be held by their fellow-citizens in honour thereby. Some determine that the highest good lies in the highest power; and so they either desire to reign themselves, or try to cleave to those who do reign. Others think that renown is the greatest good, and they therefore hasten to make a famous name by the arts of peace or of war. More, however, measure their enjoyment of the good in terms of joy and gladness, and these think that the happiest man is abandoned to pleasure. ‘Further, there are those who confuse the aims and the causes of these good things: as those who desire riches for the sake of power or of pleasure, or those who seek power for the sake of money or celebrity. In these, then, and other things like to them, lies the aim of men’s actions and prayers, such as renown and popularity, which seem to afford some fame, or wife and children, which are sought for the pleasure they give. On the other hand, the good of friends, which is the most honourable and holy of all, lies not in Fortune’s but in Virtue’s realm. All others are adopted for the sake of power or enjoyment. ‘Again, it is plain that the good things of the body must be accounted to those false causes which we have mentioned; for bodily strength and stature seem to make men more able and strong; beauty and nimbleness seem to give renown; health seems to give pleasure. By all these happiness alone is plainly desired. For each man holds that to be the highest good, which he seeks before all others. But we have defined the highest good to be happiness. Wherefore what each man desires above all others, he holds to be a state of happiness. ‘Wherefore you have each of these placed before you as the form of human happiness: wealth, honours, power, glory, and pleasure. Epicurus considered these forms alone, and accordingly determined upon pleasure as the highest good, because all the others seemed but to join with it in bringing enjoyment to the mind. ‘But to return to the aims of men: their minds seem to seek to regain the highest good, and their memories seem to dull their powers. It is as though a drunken man were seeking his home, but could not remember the way. ‘Now, can those people be altogether wrong whose aim it is to lack nothing? Of course not, there is nothing which can make happiness so perfect as an abundant possession of good things, needing naught that belongs to others, but in all ways sufficing for itself. Surely those others too are not mistaken who think that what is best is also most worthy of reverence and respect. It cannot be any cheap or base thing, to attain which almost all men aim and strive. And is power not to be accounted a good thing? Surely it is: can that be a weak thing or forceless, which is allowed in all cases to excel? Is renown of no value? We cannot fail to see that whatever is most excellent has also great renown. It is hardly worth saying that happiness has no torturing cares or gloom, and is not subject to grief and trouble; for even in small things, the aim is to find that which it is a delight to have and to enjoy. These, then, are the desires of men: they long for riches, places of honour, kingdoms, glory, and pleasure; and they long for them because they think that thereby they will find satisfaction, veneration, power, renown, and happiness. It is the good then which men seek by their different desires; and it is easy to show how great a force nature has put therein, since in spite of such varying and discordant opinions, they are all agreed in the goal they seek, that of the highest good.’ iv.1 · Prose Thus gently sang the Lady Philosophy with dignified mien and grave countenance; and when she ceased, I, who had not thoroughly forgotten the grief with in me, interrupted her as she was about to speak further. ‘Herald of true light,’ I said, ‘right clear have been the outpourings of your speech till now, seeming inspired as one contemplates them, and invincible through your reasonings. And though through grief for the injustices I suffer, I had forgotten them, yet you have spoken to me of things which were not totally ignored by me in former times. But there is this one chief cause of my grief, namely that, when there exists a good governor of the world, evils should exist at all or, existing, should go unpunished. I would have you think how strange is this fact alone. But there is an even stranger attached thereto: ill-doing reigns and flourishes, while virtue not only lacks its reward, but is even trampled underfoot by wicked doers, and pays the penalties instead of crime. Who can wonder and complain enough that such things should happen under the rule of One who, while all-knowing and all-powerful, wills good alone?’ Then she answered: ‘Yes, it would be most terrible, monstrous, and infinitely amazing if it were as you think. It would be as though in a well-ordered house of a good master, the vilest vessels were cared for while the precious were left defiled. But it is not so. If our former conclusions are unshaken, God Himself, of whose government we speak, will teach you that the good are always powerful, the evil are always the lowest and weakest; vice never goes unpunished; virtue never goes without its own reward; happiness comes to the good, misfortune to the wicked: and when your complaints are set at rest, many such things would most firmly strengthen you in this opinion. You have seen now from my teaching the form of true happiness; you know now its place: let us go quickly through all that must be lightly passed over, and let me show you the road which shall lead you to your home. I will give wings to your mind, by which it shall raise itself aloft: so shall disquiet be driven away, and you may return safe to your home by my guidance, by the path I shall show you, and even in my own carriage. iv.1 · Song, “The Soul’s Flight” Wings are mine; above the pole Far aloft I soar. Clothed with these, my nimble soul Scorns earth’s hated shore, Cleaves the skies upon the wind, Sees the clouds left far behind. Soon the glowing point she nears, Where the heavens rotate, Follows through the starry spheres Phœbus’ course, or straight Takes for comrade ’mid the stars Saturn cold or glittering Mars; Thus each circling orb explores Through Night’s stole that peers; Then, when all are numbered, soars Far beyond the spheres, Mounting heaven’s supremest height To the very Fount of light. There the Sovereign of the world His calm sway maintains; As the globe is onward whirled Guides the chariot reins, And in splendour glittering Reigns the universal King. Hither if thy wandering feet Find at last a way, Here thy long-lost home thou’lt greet: ‘Dear lost land,’ thou’lt say, ‘Though from thee I’ve wandered wide, Hence I came, here will abide.’ Yet if ever thou art fain Visitant to be Of earth’s gloomy night again, Surely thou wilt see Tyrants whom the nations fear Dwell in hapless exile here. iv.6 · Song, “The Universal Aim” Wouldst thou with unclouded mind View the laws by God designed, Lift thy steadfast gaze on high To the starry canopy; See in rightful league of love All the constellations move. Fiery Sol, in full career, Ne’er obstructs cold Phoebe’s sphere; When the Bear, at heaven’s height, Wheels his coursers’ rapid flight, Though he sees the starry train Sinking in the western main, He repines not, nor desires In the flood to quench his fires. In true sequence, as decreed, Daily morn and eve succeed; Vesper brings the shades of night, Lucifer the morning light. Love, in alternation due, Still the cycle doth renew, And discordant strife is driven From the starry realm of heaven. Thus, in wondrous amity, Warring elements agree; Hot and cold, and moist and dry, Lay their ancient quarrel by; High the flickering flame ascends, Downward earth for ever tends. So the year in spring’s mild hours Loads the air with scent of flowers; Summer paints the golden grain; Then, when autumn comes again, Bright with fruit the orchards glow; Winter brings the rain and snow. Thus the seasons’ fixed progression, Tempered in a due succession, Nourishes and brings to birth All that lives and breathes on earth. Then, soon run life’s little day, All it brought it takes away. But One sits and guides the reins, He who made and all sustains; King and Lord and Fountain-head, Judge most holy, Law most dread; Now impels and now keeps back, Holds each waverer in the track. Else, were once the power withheld That the circling spheres compelled In their orbits to revolve, This world’s order would dissolve, And th’ harmonious whole would all In one hideous ruin fall. But through this connected frame Runs one universal aim; Towards the Good do all things tend, Many paths, but one the end. For naught lasts, unless it turns Backward in its course, and yearns To that Source to flow again Whence its being first was ta’en. v.6 · Prose ‘Since all that is known is apprehended, as we just now showed, not according to its nature but according to the nature of the knower, let us examine, so far as we lawfully may, the character of the divine nature, so that we may be able to learn what its knowledge is. ‘The common opinion, according to all men living, is that God is eternal. Let us therefore consider what is eternity. For eternity will, I think, make clear to us at the same time the divine nature and knowledge. ‘Eternity is the simultaneous and complete possession of infinite life. This will appear more clearly if we compare it with temporal things. All that lives under the conditions of time moves through the present from the past to the future; there is nothing set in time which can at one moment grasp the whole space of its lifetime. It cannot yet comprehend tomorrow; yesterday it has already lost. And in this life of today your life is no more than a changing, passing moment. And as Aristotle said of the universe, so it is of all that is subject to time; though it never began to be, nor will ever cease, and its life is co-extensive with the infinity of time, yet it is not such as can be held to be eternal. For though it apprehends and grasps a space of infinite lifetime, it does not embrace the whole simultaneously; it has not yet experienced the future. What we should rightly call eternal is that which grasps and possesses wholly and simultaneously the fulness of unending life, which lacks naught of the future, and has lost naught of the fleeting past; and such an existence must be ever present in itself to control and aid itself, and also must keep present with itself the infinity of changing time. Therefore, people who hear that Plato thought that this universe had no beginning of time and will have no end, are not right in thinking that in this way the created world is co-eternal with its creator. For to pass through unending life, the attribute which Plato ascribes to the universe is one thing; but it is another thing to grasp simultaneously the whole of unending life in the present; this is plainly a peculiar property of the mind of God. ‘And further, God should not be regarded as older than His creations by any period of time, but rather by the peculiar property of His own single nature. For the infinite changing of temporal things tries to imitate the ever simultaneously present immutability of His life: it cannot succeed in imitating or equalling this, but sinks from immutability into change, and falls from the single directness of the present into an infinite space of future and past. And since this temporal state cannot possess its life completely and simultaneously, but it does in the same manner exist for ever without ceasing, it therefore seems to try in some degree to rival that which it cannot fulfil or represent, for it binds itself to some sort of present time out of this small and fleeting moment; but inasmuch as this temporal present bears a certain appearance of that abiding present, it somehow makes those, to whom it comes, seem to be in truth what they imitate. But since this imitation could not be abiding, the unending march of time has swept it away, and thus we find that it has bound together, as it passes, a chain of life, which it could not by abiding embrace in its fulness. And thus if we would apply proper epithets to those subjects, we can say, following Plato, that God is eternal, but the universe is perpetual. ‘And so, since every judgment apprehends the subjects of its thought according to its own nature, and God has a condition of ever-present eternity, His knowledge, which passes over every change of time, embracing infinite lengths of past and future, views in its own direct comprehension everything as though it were taking place in the present. If you would weigh the foreknowledge by which God distinguishes all things, you will more rightly hold it to be a knowledge of a never-failing constancy in the present, than a foreknowledge of the future. And this is why it is called Providence (providentia), and not prevision (praevidentia), because it is set far from low matters and looks forth upon all things as from a lofty mountain-top above all. Why then do you demand that all things occur by necessity, if divine light rests upon them, while men do not render necessary such things as they can see? Surely, the fact that you see things present does not confer on them any kind of necessity, does it?’ ‘Surely not.’ ‘If one may not unworthily compare this present time with the divine, just as you can see things in this your temporal present, so God sees all things in His eternal present. Wherefore this divine foreknowledge does not change the nature or individual qualities of things: it sees things present in its understanding just as they will result some time in the future. It makes no confusion in its distinctions, and with one view of its mind it discerns all that shall come to pass whether of necessity or not. For instance, when you see at the same time a man walking on the earth and the sun rising in the heavens, you see each sight simultaneously, yet you distinguish between them, and decide that one is moving voluntarily, the other of necessity. In like manner the perception of God looks down upon all things without disturbing at all their nature, though they are present to Him but future under the conditions of time. Wherefore this foreknowledge is not opinion but knowledge resting upon truth, since He knows that a future event is, though He knows too that it will not occur of necessity. ‘If you answer here that what God sees about to happen, cannot but happen, and that what cannot but happen is bound by necessity, you thereby fasten me down to the word “necessity” and I shall grant that we have a matter of most firm truth, but it is one to which scarcely any man can approach unless he be a contemplator of the divine. For I shall answer that such a thing will occur of necessity, when viewed from the point of divine knowledge; but when it is examined in its own nature, it seems perfectly free and unrestrained. For there are two kinds of necessities; one is simple: for instance, a necessary fact, “all men are mortal”; the other is conditional; for instance, if you know that a man is walking, he must be walking: for what each man knows cannot be otherwise than it is known to be; but the conditional one is by no means followed by this simple and direct necessity; for there is no necessity to compel a voluntary walker to move, though it is necessary that, if he walks, he should be moving. In the same way, if Providence sees an event in its present, that thing must be, though it has no necessity of its own nature. And God looks in His present upon those future things which come to pass through free will. Therefore if these things be looked at from the point of view of God’s insight, they come to pass of necessity under the condition of divine knowledge; if, on the other hand, they are viewed by themselves, they do not lose the perfect freedom of their nature. Without doubt, then, all things that God foreknows do come to pass, but some of them proceed from free will; and though they result by coming into existence, yet they do not lose their own nature, because before they came to pass they could also not have come to pass. ‘ “What then,” you may ask, “is the difference in their not being bound by necessity, since they result under all circumstances as by necessity, on account of the condition of divine knowledge?” This is the difference, as I just now put forward: take the sun rising and a man walking; while these operations are occurring, they cannot but occur: but the one was bound to occur before it did; the other was not so bound. What God has in His present, does exist without doubt; but of such things some follow by necessity, others by their authors’ wills. Wherefore I was justified in saying that if these things be regarded from the view of divine knowledge, they are necessary, but if they are viewed by themselves, they are perfectly free from all ties of necessity: just as everything which lies open to the senses, if you relate it to the reason, is universal, but if you look at it by itself, is particular. “But,” you will say, “if it is in my power to change a purpose of mine, I will disregard Providence, since I may change what Providence foresees.” To which I answer, “You can change your purpose, but since the truth of Providence knows in its present that you can do so, and whether you do so, and in what direction you may change it, therefore you cannot escape that divine foreknowledge: just as you cannot avoid the glance of a present eye, though you may by your free will turn yourself to all kinds of different actions.” ‘“What?” you will say, “can I by my own action change divine knowledge, so that if I choose now one thing, now another, Providence too will seem to change its knowledge?” No; divine insight precedes all future things, turning them back and recalling them to the present time of its own peculiar knowledge. It does not change, as you may think, between this and that alternation of foreknowledge. It is constant in preceding and embracing by one glance all your changes. And God does not receive this ever-present grasp of all things and vision of the present at the occurrence of future events, but from His own peculiar directness. Whence also is that difficulty solved which you laid down a little while ago, that it was not worthy to say that our future events were the cause of God’s knowledge. For this power of knowledge, ever in the present and embracing all things in its perception, does itself constrain all things, and owes naught to following events from which it has received naught. Thus, therefore, mortal men have their freedom of judgment intact. And since their wills are freed from all binding necessity, laws do not set rewards or punishments unjustly. God is ever the constant foreknowing overseer, and the ever-present eternity of His sight moves in harmony with the future nature of our actions, as it dispenses rewards to the good, and punishments to the bad. Hopes are not vainly put in God, nor prayers in vain offered: if these are right, they cannot but be answered. Turn therefore from vice: ensue virtue: raise your soul to upright hopes: send up on high your prayers from this earth. If you would be honest, great is the necessity enjoined upon your goodness, since all you do is done before the eyes of an all-seeing Judge.’
- [“In the Vale of Soul-Making”](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/sheldrake-soul-making) - The soul is the animating principle, that which makes living things alive. In Greek it’s called the psyche. We now think of the psyche as the human mind, but for the Greeks the psyche had a far wider meaning: it was the life principle of all living things, including plants. The Latin word for soul is anima, and is the source of our word animal. The traditional meaning of the word soul is far wider than the human soul. The soul is that which makes things alive. A starting point for any reflection on the nature of life is death, comparing the dead body of a person or animal or plant with the living state that preceded it. The amount of matter in the dead body is the same as in the living body, the form of the body is the same, and the chemicals in it are the same, at least immediately after death. But something has changed. The most obvious conclusion is that something has left the body and since there’s little or no change in weight, that which has left is essentially immaterial. In the animistic traditions of the world it was taken for granted that many things in nature are alive besides ourselves. All plants and all animals, the entire Universe, the planet Earth, the other planets, the Sun, the stars: all of these were thought to be living beings, all with their own kind of soul. The Platonists spoke in terms of the anima mundi, the soul of the world, the whole cosmos as a living being with a body, soul and spirit. Aristotle formulated it in biological terms. He spoke about the soul of a plant as governing the form of the plant as it grows. The soul is the formative principle. According to Aristotle, an acorn grows into an oak tree because it’s pulled towards the final form by its soul. In human beings, there are three aspects or levels of the soul: the vegetative soul responsible for the form of the body; the animal soul, giving us our animal nature; and the intellect or the rational soul, which is the conscious part of our mind, our reason. The conscious mind was part of a much larger psychic system which linked us to the animals and plants. A LOT OF THE present confusion began in the philosophy of René Descartes in the seventeenth century. Descartes said the whole of nature is a machine; it is inanimate. In effect, he withdrew the soul from nature, from all animals and plants, and from the human body as well. Before that, the soul was believed to permeate the whole body and the body had different psychic centres within it. We learn about these today in the context of Eastern philosophies, the chakras. But in the West there was a very similar understanding. We still have it in Christian liturgies in relation to the heart as the centre of the deepest thoughts. But for Descartes and his followers it was merely a pump, part of the mechanism of the body. How the rational soul interacted with the machinery of the body was an utter mystery to Descartes and is still a mystery today, because today we still have the same theory. Cartesian dualism has become the standard theory of our culture. The only difference is that the supposed seat of the soul has shifted a couple of inches from the pineal gland into the cerebral cortex. But we’re still left with an animating principle inside the brain, somehow controlling the body. This is sometimes called the “ghost in the machine” model of consciousness. If you go to the Natural History Museum in London, in the section on human biology there is an exhibit called “How You Control Your Actions” with a model of a man with a Perspex window in his forehead through which you can look. Inside the head is a complex array of dials, controls and levers like the cockpit of a jet aeroplane. Then there are two empty seats, presumably for you, the pilot, and your co-pilot in the right hemisphere. This says it all. I’ve been there when parties of schoolchildren are being led through so that they can understand what contemporary science has to teach us about human nature. I’m sad to say that in my five-year-old son’s kindergarten classroom they have a standard schoolbook called “How Your Body Works.” And there are pictures and diagrams of the body full of conveyor belts, escalators, pumps, tubes and so on. Inside the brain there are lots of little men pushing jack plugs into telephone exchanges, looking at dials on computers, pressing buttons and so on. This is the usual modern view. The so- called mind/body problem is so notoriously intractable that most scientists think: why bother with it? The result is that you can be educated as a biologist, as I was, and you can teach in a medical faculty, as I did, without ever mentioning the word consciousness. It doesn’t come up. When Descartes made this division between the realms of matter and spirit, he established a new demarcation between science and religion, defining their boundaries. Science took the whole of nature, including the human body. All nature was secularized. The arts and religion took the soul. In this way a modus vivendi was established between science and religion. Science was concerned with the objective realm of facts; religion and the arts with the subjective realm of values, aesthetics, morality and belief. Science got the better part of the bargain, since it got practically everything, as defined in its own terms. Well, this is the legacy of Cartesian dualism. But we may be able to go beyond it. To understand how this may be possible, we need to recall the older, pre-Cartesian understanding of the soul. The old view of the soul was very general. It didn’t just apply to animals and plants, it even applied to magnets. Thales, the first of the Greek philosophers, said the lodestone has a soul, the magnet has a soul. A magnet can act at a distance, attracting or repelling things. It can do so without anything in between. If you heat a magnet up, it loses its magnetism. It’s as if there’s an animating principle in a magnet that can disappear, just as the animating principle in an animal or plant can disappear. So in the ancient world it was generally believed that the magnet had a soul. The basis of magnetism and electricity was a psychic reality, a psychic entity. William Gilbert, the founder of the modern science of magnetism, whose great book on the subject was published in 1600, still thought in terms of magnetic souls; the compass needle pointed north because of the magnetic soul of the Earth. The soul was part of the common discourse of science right up until the time of Descartes when souls were banished from every aspect of nature. But magnetism remained. Like Newton’s gravitation it worked at a distance. But how? It was a profound mystery that no one could explain. They just forgot about the problem. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that Faraday replaced the old idea of the soul with the new idea of the field. In the 1920s Einstein extended the field concept to gravitation: the gravitational field co-ordinates and holds together the whole Universe, fulfilling the role of the anima mundi. Then fields were introduced into the heart of matter, in the shape of quantum-matter fields. Fields were introduced into biology in the 1920s in the form of morphogenetic, form-shaping fields. They were invisible formative fields which organized the devel- opment of animals and plants, maintaining them and underlying their regeneration. According to the British biologist C. H. Waddington, morphogenetic fields have within them attractors. The oak tree has a morphogenetic field containing an attractor, in this case the mature form of the oak, which draws the developing acorn towards it. It plays the same role as what Aristotle called entelechy, the attractor within the soul. In effect the vegetative soul was reinvented as the morphogenetic field, so that everything that the soul did before, the field did now. Souls have been brought back into science in the guise of fields. My own work is concerned with morphic fields. The morphic fields of organisms underlie not only their form, but also their behaviour; they play the role of the animal soul. They also underlie the activity of the rational mind. I really love your writing about the soul as field. This is a profound contribution. What is a field? It is a space for playing in. A field is a place for running in, frolicking in, dreaming in, soaring in, stumbling in, investing our passions in. I think all of those are images of the soul. To me the soul is our passions. It’s what we love. As Jesus said, it’s where your treasure is. Our treasures are in the fields. Maybe they’re hidden: the field is not all above ground. That’s part of the invitation to lie down in the field and play in the field. Our souls are where we play and of course also where we suffer, where we fall down and where we fail. The potential of this image of field is untapped. You rightly put it in a non-anthropocentric context. Not only does every individual, plant and animal have soul but mountains and places have soul. Communities have soul and groups create soul. The biosystem itself and Gaia and our Milky Way and cosmos have soul. Our souls shrivelled up during the Cartesian era. If you’re cut off from the souls of all the other animals and plants and stars, you’re just hiding away inside your own little self-created space. No wonder we have acedia (boredom) which is that sin of the spirit that comes, as Aquinas says, from a shrinking of the soul. We have shrunk our souls. That’s why we can tear down rainforests: we can destroy our nest. We are separated from the responsibility for our own actions and our connection to all the joy and pain of the world. All this is about souls that have shrunk up. This is why we’re into addiction: we’re covering up the truth of our shrunken souls with everything from alcohol to drugs to television to shopping to sex. NOW, HOW IS SOUL related to the body? I just want to say this: the soul is not in the body but the body is in the soul. It’s a very important shift of consciousness and it contradicts Plato’s belief of the soul as a bird stuck in a cage that’s not really going to get free until it dies. Believing that our body is in our souls means our souls are as large as the world in which we live, as the fields in which our minds play, and as the field in which our hearts roam. That’s how big our souls are. If our body is in our soul, then our body is an essential instrument that celebrates and praises, expressing the soul’s passions: delight, wonder, joy, desire, grief, pain, suffering. The body is an instrument for our soul. Teresa of Avila’s finest book, I think, is Interior Castle, her book on the rooms in the mansion of the soul. She goes through seven rooms but she ends her book this way: “Now we’ve explored seven rooms in your soul, but in fact your soul has millions of rooms, most of which never have their doors opened. And in every one of them there are labyrinths and fountains and jewels and gems and gardens.” One point about exploring the soul is that it’s an inner journey. This needs visualization. Eckhart says in the innermost depths of your soul God creates a whole Universe. All past, all present and all future come together in the innermost depths of your soul. The soul experience is about going innermost, it’s going to the centre. Rumi says: “There is a forest within, which gives you life. Seek that. In your body lies a priceless gem. If you want to find the greatest treasure, don’t look outside, look inside and seek that.” In the modern world, when people talk about the inner life, they mean a life somewhere inside their body and especially inside their brain. Then there’s the outer life which is the whole of the external realm. We’ve internalized this shrunken soul, and think that the inner means something inside our brains, and the outer is something out there. Well, if the soul is extended or expanded, as you said, the inner isn’t just confined to our bodies: it’s the inner experience of things. Science is based on trying to do everything with the outer experience of things. The objective method is supposed to remove all psychic interests of the scientists from what they’re doing. In fact, most scientists are heavily engaged in what they’re doing if only for reasons of personal ambition. The idea that they’re totally objective, like disembodied minds, is a pretence. This idea of the inner involvement being not just inside but outside us is the key to breaking down the Cartesian division. What you call the shrunken soul I call the contracted mind, the idea that the mind is contracted into the brain, as opposed to the older view which saw our souls as extended all around us. The old view saw the soul as not confined to the head. It not only permeated the whole body, but was involved in all experience and perception. If we admit that our souls are extended all around us, what about the souls of dogs, squirrels, deer, birds and other animals? They’re also looking around them, and their mental fields must be extended outwards into their environment. We live in a world of overlapping mental fields, of a shared space which is not just a so-called objective material reality, but is encompassed by innumerable minds or psyches, including those of animals. The idea that there is an objective reality, totally free from any kind of psychic influence, is an extraordinary illusion. Yet that’s the view on which science has based its beliefs. One corollary of what you’re saying is this: if our souls are all over the place, if we’re projecting them out there all the time, what an incredible invitation to be responsible for taking care of our souls, so that we are projecting the best of ourselves: grace and blessing and not envy, resentment or hostility.
- [The Secret of Pico’s <em>Oration</em>: Cabala and Renaissance Philosophy](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/copenhaver-secret-of-pico) - Brian P. Copenhaver In this important article, Prof. Copenhaver shows that Pico della Mirandola's famous Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), the “Manifesto of the Renaissance”, is not about the modern concept of dignity of man but a manifesto for ascetic mysticism, urging the pious to abandon the body and escape the material world
- [A Prescription for Yoga (<em>Yogavidhi</em>)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/prescription-for-yoga-yogavidhi) - James L. Fitzgerald A study and translation of one of the key philosophical and religious texts found in the Mahabharata. The scene is highly dramatic: the warrior-sage Bhisma, patriarch of the Bharatas, instructs his young kinsman Yudhishthira from a deathbed made of arrows. This portion of Bhisma’s instructions is known as the mokshadharmas, i.e. the
- [Breath, Kiss and Speech as a Source of the Animation of Life](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/kosman-breath-kiss-speech) - Admiel Kosman The inspiration by which man was created is perceived in many sources not simply as inspiration of living spirit, but as the ancient source of the kiss. From this we can easily deduce that the human kiss, as well, is far more than a mere act of etiquette. A kiss transmits the essence
- [Calmness](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/calmness) - Calmness by William Reed, 1997 Shimizu Jirocho was the legendary “Robin Hood” figure of Japan, one of the undefeated swordsmen in Japan whose reputation eventually earned him the highest certificate of ability from the greatest swordsmen of the modern (Meiji) era, Yamaoka Tesshu. The Tesshu line was to have an enormous influence on Tohei Sensei through misogi training at the Ichikukai, and Ki Society students will recognize the meaning of a story about Jirocho's swordsmanship. Aware that Jirocho had never lost a fight, Tesshu asked him for his secret. Jirocho replied that there was no secret, he simply chose not to fight if he knew he would lose. When Tesshu asked him how he knew in advance whether he would win or lose Jirocho replied, “I lightly tap the tip of my opponent’s sword. If it bounces off with a crack, then I know I can win. However, if the tip of the sword whips back like a willow branch, then I know I cannot win so I find a reason not to fight.” Jirocho never lost a fight because he never fought a fight he would lose. On the strength of this insight Tesshu awarded him a kaiden certificate. Bokken, or sword practice in the Ki Society always begins with an exercise in which you move the sword back and forth a few times, each movement diminishing by half, until the sword maintains the vibrant stillness of a tuning fork at rest. A partner then tests the sword in the same way as Jirocho, by tapping the tip of the sword to test the response. If the return of the sword to front center is lively, relaxed and instantaneous, this represents the imperceptible movement in stillness known as seishi, or living calmness. However, if the return of the sword is sluggish or stiff, this represents the weak and vulnerable state of teishi, or dead calmness. It takes an exceptional eye to be able to detect the difference between the two. Dead calmness is often masked by bluff and bravado, which is borne out in experience when the bully turns out to be a coward, and when the giant has feet of clay. Tohei Sensei himself was frequently scolded during his military training in WWII by superior officers who mistook his relaxed manner for laziness. In bayonet practice with wooden rifles a drill officer once challenged the young Tohei to come at him as if he were the enemy. The officer came at him with stiff arms and clenched teeth, using every bit of muscle and technique he had to attack, however he could find no opening in the relaxed willow branch style. In short order Tohei knocked the officer's weapon out of his hand and continued his attack until the officer shouted, “Stop, you fool! What are you doing?!” Tohei answered that, “I was simply following your instructions, Sir." While the coward hides behind a mask of bravado, the truly brave person may appear to others to be too relaxed or too calm for the situation. Being calm in a crisis may mean that you don’t understand the situation, or it may mean that you have had some excellent training. So similar is the outward appearance of living and dead calmness, that even an expert like Jirocho apparently felt the need to test the tip of the sword. This is certainly better than learning from experience, because experience can be fatal. It is said that experience is the worst teacher, because it gives the test before the lesson. In lieu of experience we are fortunate to have one of the best simulations ever devised, the Ki test, which clearly distinguishes between seishi and teishi. The more experience you have with Ki testing, the better you become at learning to see the difference. While Ki testing gives you immediate feedback on mind and body coordination, it is also important to develop a clear conceptual understanding of the difference between living and dead calmness, between relaxation and collapsation. There are many examples and analogies in nature which demonstrate how apparent stillness conceals imperceptibly rapid movement. Both the spinning top and a helicopter propeller appear to be at rest when they are moving at maximum speed. We are not even aware of the turning of the earth, and yet how quickly the sun sets when it reaches the horizon. Wind and water are some of the most powerful forces of nature, and yet surrounded by them we often forget their existence. When was the last time you saw your hair growing? You may wish as someone did, to “Stop the world! I want to get off,” but it cannot be done. Japanese Haiku poetry celebrates this juxtaposition of calmness and movement in nature, particularly the poetry of Matsuo Basho. Into an old pond, Jumps a frog. Sound of water! How quiet the sound Of the shrill cicada, After it penetrates the rock. Without any outside implements you can achieve the same effect of the calm sword through meditation. Correct your posture and rock your body side to side a few times, letting the movement fade by half, half, half… coming to rest in vibrant stillness. After the movement has stopped, a Ki test will immediately show whether you have come to rest in a state of living or dead calmness. You cannot reduce a number by half and ever reach zero. Though the movement may become too small to see, it continues unconsciously. If you try to stop it by saying the word “zero,” you arrive at dead calmness and will fail the Ki test. Living calmness means resting with readiness. After a minute or so have someone suddenly clap to sound the signal to stand up. If you are resting ready you will move with alacrity when required. This is the same state of relaxed readiness you need to receive an attack. If it takes you a moment to gather yourself up, then you have fallen into a slackened state of rest. People complain in the military about having to “hurry up and wait,” which can lead to lethargy. It is difficult to remain calm without losing power, but it is equally difficult to remain calm in the midst of activity. The secret to maintaining calmness in action is to recognize the difference between seishi and teishi. Students ask what they should think about when practicing calmness. Calmness can be practiced, but it must become an unconscious habit if you want to use it in daily life. Ki training leads to unconscious calmness, which frees your conscious mind to become active without losing its bearings. Most people think they are calm, but their true colors come out under stress. You may have many fair weather friends, but who will stand by you when the chips are down? Relaxation and calmness are essential in enhancing performance. An excellent way to practice calmness is the relaxation exercise of rapidly shaking the fingertips. Let the movement rapidly fade until the hands appear to be at rest, but in fact are filled with Ki. Demonstrate the difference with a Ki test, and see how it makes both Aikido and Kiatsu techniques more effective. Shaking tension out of the fingertips is an excellent way to warm up a golf swing, and if the club is then held lightly with Ki it will give you the aura of a veteran golfer. However, you will still have to practice to sink the ball into the cup. A common metaphor for calmness used in Aikido is that of the calm still surface of the lake which reflects alike the moon and the flying bird. Clear awareness is critical to the martial arts, where misjudgment can lead to injury or death. This state of calm reflection is brilliantly portrayed in Miyamoto Musashi’s painting of a lone bird’s shriek on a withered branch. The eye of the bird, no more than a jot of ink, reflects that same mind which could reduce a dozen opponents to a single state of awareness. In Western painting we have the Mona Lisa, whose eyes mysteriously follower the viewer as he moves past. Leonardo da Vinci and Miyamoto Musashi both knew that a calm mind opens a wider field of awareness. Calmness reveals the difference between seishi and teishi, between bravery and bravado, between what is real and what is fake.
- [Meeting God in Friend & Stranger](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/meeting-god-in-friend-stranger) - In Britain today we are engaged in a process of learning how to construct and live in a society made up of people of many different faiths. This is a process from which no-one is excused. Our common good depends on it. I am very pleased to introduce this Teaching Document of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales: Meeting God in Friend and Stranger. Two important convictions lie behind this document. The first is that belief in God, as expressed in the great religious traditions of humanity, is a force for good in our society today. There are those who would have us believe that this is not so, who insist that religious beliefs are divisive and, at worst, belittling. Yet the quest for God is rooted in the spirit of every human being and brings with it the quest for holiness, goodness, compassion, forgiveness, perseverance, humility and truth. Of course, the history of this quest is marked with failure and sin. But so are all of our strivings. The religious quest, properly understood, tackles these failings head on, proclaiming the need for every person to turn away from corruption, selfishness and the misuse of power in the effort to know the mystery of God and the mystery of our common humanity. The second conviction is that the Catholic faith instructs us and guides us not only in the unique pathway to God through Jesus Christ, but also in the manner in which we are to learn about and cooperate with people of other faiths. This aspect of Catholic teaching is fully and faithfully presented in this document. It is, in the first place, for members of the Catholic Church. Yet I am sure that many other people, those who are followers of other religions and those who do not claim a religious allegiance, will also find guidance and insight here. 6 7 I am confident, therefore, that this document is an important contribution to the task of dialogue within our society, a task and a duty which falls to us all. Most Reverend Vincent Nichols President Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales PREFACE From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him – though indeed he is not far from each one of us. (Ac 17:26-27) For a great many people in the world their religious allegiance claims their deepest feelings and loyalties. As a consequence, any activity that promotes respect and better understanding among believers must contribute to peace, at a time when justice and peace are so threatened. We are very conscious nowadays of the smallness of our world, and of how the potential for both understanding and conflict have increased. Today’s means of communication together with increased migration have brought religions and cultures in closer contact than ever before, so that our society in Britain has become in many places multi-cultural and multi-religious. The Catholic bishops of England and Wales, therefore, think it opportune to address Catholics on this matter, and to encourage them to look upon dialogue as an essential, though certainly not an easy, part of their witness in Britain today. The challenge is a real one. Clergy and laity have many calls on their time and energy, and the smaller their number the less time and energy they have to meet the challenge. Dialogue with believers of other religions is a new concept for many Catholics, and they may well feel that it is ‘one challenge too far’. Some will ask how it can be reconciled with Our Lord’s missionary call to proclaim the good news to every creature (Mk 16:15). Others will point out that for members of some other religions there is a similar difficulty: is not dialogue, as a careful listening to another belief, a denial of one’s own? We recognise these difficulties, but we are still convinced that to seek dialogue is the way forward for the Church of our time. Our 9 Meeting God in Friend and Stranger Foreword There are forces of secularism in our society, and this affects all religions, yet religion still remains a vital force within it. This is now acknowledged by government, and we hope that what we offer here may be of service to the wider community as a way of overcoming divisions and fostering social harmony. The use of the word ‘Church’ in this document: The word ‘Church’ in Catholic belief and usage can, of course, refer to a church building – a building ‘belonging to the Lord’, but more fundamentally it refers to the People ‘gathered together’ by the Lord, the ‘People of God’. As the Second Vatican Council emphasised in its documents on the Church and on Ecumenism,5 Christ founded one Church, and one Church only, the people gathered together by the risen Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit: There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling: one Lord, one faith, one baptism (Ep 4:4-5). It is Catholic belief that this one Church has continued to exist, and will continue to exist, in all essentials, in spite of the wounds of human sin, in the Catholic Church – that is, in the community that is in union with the bishops who are in visible communion with the Bishop of Rome. However, it is also Catholic belief that all baptised Christians, in their various communities and traditions at present institutionally separate from the Catholic Church, are in spite of that united in various degrees of communion with the Catholic Church. As the Decree on Ecumenism puts it, all who have been justified by faith in baptism are incorporated into Christ, and therefore have the right to be called Christian, and with good reason are accepted as brothers and sisters by the children of the Catholic Church (UR 5). The word ‘Church’, therefore, can vary in its meaning, and inevitably it varies in this document. Normally it refers to the Catholic Church but the meaning should be clear from the context in which it is used. conviction stems from the need to promote world peace, as Pope Benedict XVI has often said, but it also stems from the fact that the Church is called by Christ to be, like himself, the humble servant of God and of our fellow men and women. The Second Vatican Council described the Church as the ‘sacrament’ or sign and instrument of communion with God and one another in our divided world1, the world that God created and that he loved so much that he gave his only Son as its Saviour (Jn 3:16). Working ecumenically: This is a teaching document of the bishops of the Catholic Church in England and Wales and is naturally addressed to the Catholic community. But dialogue with other world religions is often something we conduct ‘ecumenically’, that is, jointly with our fellow Christians.2 We would therefore like to offer this to our ecumenical partners within the Christian family, to clarify where the Catholic Church stands in this matter and as a way of fostering the cooperation between us. We have much to learn from one another.3 Dialogue with our Culture: It is important to relate this document to another conversation that is taking place, between the Church and the general culture of our time. We draw attention to On the Way to Life: Promoting and Supporting Catholic Education in England and Wales (2005), which is an analysis of our culture, focussing especially on the nature of secularism, and seeks to put forward a vision of Catholic modernity.4 1 Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium (Light of the Nations). Titles of Vatican documents are traditionally taken from the opening Latin words. 2 The word ‘ecumenical’ refers to dialogue between Christians, with the aim of restoring unity in Christ in one visible Church, whereas ‘interreligious dialogue’ refers to that between the various religions of the world. The aim is not complete unity in one body, but a growth in respect and understanding for the purpose of peace and the growth of the Kingdom of God. 3 We would like to mention here a production of the Mission and Public Affairs Council of the Church of England entitled Presence and Engagement (2005), which explores the Church of England’s situation in our multi-religious society. 4 Published by the Catholic Education Service, On the Way to Life is a study by the Heythrop Institute for Religion, Ethics and Public Life commissioned by the Bishops’ Conference. The document provided a starting point for a process of reflection which is ongoing. 5 See LG 8; Unitatis Redintegratio 1-5. 11 8 Meeting God in Friend and Stranger The Authority of this Teaching Document: This text has been approved unanimously by all the bishops of England and Wales. Because of the responsibility we share of leading the Catholic faithful of our two nations, we wish to give guidance on living our Catholic life in the multi-religious society that is ours. The degree of authority to be acknowledged in the different parts of the document will vary: those in the first place to the authority of revealed truth recorded and interpreted in the Scriptures; there is the teaching of the Second Vatican Council and the Popes; there is that of the departments (known as Dicasteries) of the Holy See, especially the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue; and there is the authority embodied in the agreed decisions of all the bishops of England and Wales concerning matters where we have rightful pastoral responsibility. Chapter 1: WHAT IS ‘INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE’? Indeed, the whole history of man’s salvation is one long, varied dialogue, which marvellously begins with God and which he prolongs with men in so many different ways.6 1. In common parlance the word ‘dialogue’ usually means a conversation in words, but in the Church’s teaching interreligious dialogue means far more than that. In 1984 the Holy See’s Dicastery for dialogue with other religions described it in this way: [Dialogue]... means not only discussion, but also includes all positive and constructive interreligious relations with individuals and communities of other faiths which are directed at mutual understanding and enrichment.7 2. In an address to the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue in 1990 Pope John Paul II described it even more briefly: Dialogue is not so much an idea to be studied as a way of living in positive relationship with others.8 3. Interreligious dialogue, then, as the Catholic Church understands it, includes simply living as good neighbours with those of other religions, or working together in matters of common concern, such as in issues of justice, peace, the integrity of creation and so forth. It includes a willingness, according to circumstances, to try to understand better the religion of one’s neighbours, and to experience something of their religious life and culture. In other words, dialogue is above all a frame of mind, an attitude. 6 Pope Paul VI, Encyclical Letter Ecclesiam Suam (His Church) 1970, 70 (See below, n. 90). 7 SecretariatforNon-Christians,ReflectionsandOrientationsonDialogueandMission 1984, 3. The name of the Secretariat was later changed to the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue (PCID). 8 Address to PCID, 26th April 1990. See Gioia, F., (ed.), Interreligious Dialogue: the Official Teaching of the Catholic Church 1963-1995, Pauline Books, 1997, p.431. 12 13 Meeting God in Friend and Stranger What is ‘Interreligious Dialogue’? 4. Another, more ‘in depth’ form of dialogue would be an actual conversation specifically about spiritual, theological or scholarly matters. The ‘Challenge of Difference’ 5. In interreligious dialogue we converse, or relate in some other way, with those whose beliefs and values are, at least in part, different from our own. We try to cross the ‘gulf of difference’, and to be open to the truth and the goodness we might find there, however strange their expression might seem to us. In dialogue we can discover to what extent our teachings and values overlap, and where there are real differences. When there are such differences God may sometimes lead us into further truth about himself, because God’s mystery can never be fully within our grasp, and the journey into it is endless. We are always learners, on a pilgrimage towards a greater fullness of truth. Sometimes, however, in the light of God’s revelation in Christ, we may have to confess that what we are meeting is simply false, and not a glimpse of God’s truth or holiness. It is an essential part of dialogue that, in courtesy, we say so. 6. Those we seek to have dialogue with vary considerably. Their concerns and their self-understanding will often challenge our expectations. Some groups or individuals may not want to collaborate at all, because of objections rooted in their religious or cultural traditions, or because of suspicion or fear. The notion of dialogue, especially in the strictest sense of a conversation where both sides are open to listening and being changed by learning and self-correction, and not merely as a form of bargaining, or of arguing and seeking to persuade, can be an utterly alien one. Sometimes those who do take part in dialogue will be criticised by their co-religionists. Those criticisms often issue from a defective or superficial understanding of the nature of dialogue itself. 7. It is useless to come to dialogue full of presuppositions about the other person or community, already convinced (consciously or not) that we know what they believe and how they behave. As far as we can we have to free ourselves of these premature judgments, ‘empty ourselves’ so to speak, so that the other’s real identity can be disclosed to us and we meet the real person and his or her real beliefs, and not some product of our imagination. We must certainly enter dialogue prepared to be surprised and to change our minds. Love of our neighbour, humility, and a respect for the dignity of the other person made in God’s image demand that we do this – or at least try our best to do it. This is the only way of learning the true nature of another’s beliefs and concerns. 8. We must realise too that the other person will have his or her share of preconceptions about us. We have to listen to these, and with patience make clear what we believe and what our values really are. We have to listen attentively, and speak honestly, in the spirit of Christ, the spirit of love of our neighbour. For a Christian, interreligious dialogue is a profoundly Christ-like work. 9. Conclusion: The challenge of difference, the task of meeting the followers of another religion in true dialogue, is the demanding one of combining genuine love and respect, and openness to unexpected truth and goodness, with a firm grasp of our own Christian faith and a readiness to be led by its light. The Catholic Church today, as we shall explain, recognises the presence of what is true and holy in other religions as being ’rays of the Truth’ and ‘seeds of the Word’; but the Church is also cautious about identifying those ‘rays’ and those ‘seeds’ too hastily. This caution should mark our dialogue, not to undermine it but to ensure its integrity. 14 15 Chapter 2: THE CHANGING FACE OF BRITAIN 10. In many parts of Britain today Catholics will be living and working, not only alongside their fellow Christians and members of the Jewish Community, together with those of no religious belief, but also with followers of many other world religions. 11. The 2001 Census was the first to ask a question about people’s religion. These statistics are by now somewhat out of date, but in round figures this was what emerged:9 41 million described themselves as Christian (72% of the population); 1.6 million as Muslim (3%), 558,000 as Hindu (1%), 336,000 as Sikh (0.6%), 267,000 as Jewish (0.5%), 149,000 as Buddhist (0.3%), 159,000 as members of other religions (0.3%), 8.6 million as of no religion (15%). 4.4 million (8%) did not say. 12. As with Christianity, most of these religions break down into numerous smaller groupings, based on confessional or ethnic factors. 13. The ‘visibility’ of other world religions has increased over the years. In many parts of the country mosques, gurdwaras and temples are a familiar sight, alongside churches and synagogues, all witnessing to the religious, cultural and ethnic identity of those who worship there. 14. Members of these communities have also grown in self-confidence as fellow citizens. They will be more ready to press for provision for their religious needs, and to object to behaviour they regard as offensive. At the same time they have had to adapt to the very different circumstances of modern British society concerning their traditional forms of worship and codes of conduct, and to the importance, or lack of importance, society attaches to these things. This can feel, at least to some, like a challenge to customs which are dear to them, and which they regard as central to their lives and religion. 9 Office for National Statistics, Census, April 2001. 17 Meeting God in Friend and Stranger The Changing Face of Britain The Impact of World Events 15. We often hear talk of ‘globalisation’. This refers to the process by which organisations, especially in the world of business, begin to operate on a global scale. The ‘global village’ is the whole world thought of as a single community, linked by the media and by all the means of communication that are available. We are almost instantly informed about events in other parts of the world, however distant, just as in former times news would travel rapidly from one end of a village to the other. 16. These events, at home as well as abroad, and the way they are reported, shape our attitudes towards people of other religions and cultures, and especially towards those living here in Britain. They also affect the newer communities themselves, and the relations between them. 17. Sometimes this global awareness, in all its immediacy, can have a beneficial effect, making us realise instinctively the unity of all human beings whatever their race or religion. The devastating tsunami of 26th December 2004 led to a world-wide outburst of generosity towards the victims and reminded us all of our solidarity with them. The earthquake in Pakistan in October 2005 also provoked a global response. The threat of climate change is by definition a global one, only effectively met by increased cooperation. 18. Tragically, other events have had the opposite effect. The attack on the United States in September 2001 and the subsequent military action in Afghanistan together with the intervention in Iraq beginning in 2003, have affected attitudes towards Muslims in Britain, and their attitude towards the rest of the population. These events have also influenced feelings towards immigrants and refugees from Muslim majority countries; they have reinforced prejudices and encouraged stereotyping. Innocent people have been victimised because of their appearance, or their ethnic or religious background. Sikhs have been attacked because of the actions of Al Qaeda-linked terrorists, and refugees from Afghanistan or Iraq have been targeted because of the actions of those from whom they were fleeing. Another example is the increase of anti- Semitism in the U.K. over the past few years, as a recent Parliamentary Report shows.10 The Position of Christianity 19. Church attendance has been falling in most Christian communities for some time now. The predominant secular culture looks on religious belief and practice as a private matter. Great weight is put on personal choice, and many are unwilling to commit themselves to any organised form of Christianity, and to any authority structure it might contain. Christianity no longer has the public status it once had. Yet the 2001 Census shows that over 70% of the population still wishes to identify itself as ‘Christian’, whatever meaning an individual might attach to that. 20. The Catholic Community: Fifty years ago Catholics in Britain were still a community clearly distinct from the rest of the population. This was partly because of a long history of anti-Catholic prejudice, and in earlier times persecution, but also because from the mid-nineteenth century onwards the majority of Catholics were immigrants, or immediately descended from immigrants, conscious of their different culture and identity. In addition, after the Catholic-Protestant division of Europe at the Reformation the Catholic Church was anxious to safeguard the Catholic faith of its members by forms of separation (in education, for example) from the institutions of the rest of British society. Nowadays the situation has changed: Catholics in England and Wales have become much more assimilated into mainstream culture. 21. The world-wide Catholic Church is itself a multi-racial community, having a rich diversity of its own. Nowadays the Catholic Church in England and Wales is a reflection of this, embracing the cultural diversity that is so much a feature of Catholicism across the world. Our parishes often include Catholics from Africa, India, Vietnam, South America, the Caribbean and the Philippines, not to mention those who came from Poland and Italy in the 1940s, and the immigrants from Eastern Europe over the past few years. 10 Report of the All-Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism, 2006. 18 19 Meeting God in Friend and Stranger The Changing Face of Britain mentality judges all religious paths as of equal validity, because truth is seen as something that only relates to the believer (that is, it is true for that person, and that is all it means). There are no objective standards of measurement, no public truth that holds good for everyone. There are many who claim that dialogue is only possible if we abandon our Christian belief that in Jesus Christ we encounter the universally valid truth about God, the God who became human, and uniquely revealed, in Christ. In the relativist view this exclusive claim about Christ rules out the very possibility of dialogue. 26. The Church rejects this relativism. The Declaration Dominus Iesus (The Lord Jesus)12 specifically addresses this issue: As a remedy for this relativistic mentality, which is becoming ever more common, it is necessary above all to reassert the definitive and complete character of the revelation of Jesus Christ. In fact, it must be firmly believed13 that, in the mystery of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son of God, who is ‘the way, the truth, and the life’ (Jn 14:16), the full revelation of divine truth is given (DI 5). 27. The Catholic Church’s promotion of dialogue, and its respect for the freedom of all to practise their religion, does not stem from the belief that truth is relative. Quite the contrary, it stems from the conviction that truth is one and universal, that there are glimpses of that one truth and supreme good in other religions, and that it is the one God who, in his loving Providence, is the Creator of those elements of truth and goodness. Pastoral Consequences: Our Need to Reach out to Others 28. We bishops therefore call upon Catholics to bear witness to their love of neighbour when the religious or cultural identities of minorities are the object of intolerance or prejudice. This Christian 22. The document of the Holy See Erga Migrantes11 points out that this serves to heighten our awareness of what it means for the Church to be ‘catholic’, embracing all peoples. The Church’s life in this country has been greatly enriched by this diversity, showing us how the one Gospel can be ‘inculturated’ in many different ways. Catholics, of all people, should respect diversity, not only the diversity among Catholics and Christians in general, but the diversity within the general population of other ethnic groups and religions. Of course immigration must be administered with care for the sake of the common good, but to resent diversity in principle is to exclude ourselves from the possibility of being enriched by what others might have to offer. This does not correspond to a Christian, and especially a Catholic, vision. The Challenge of Pluralism 23. The word ‘pluralism’ has more than one meaning, but in today’s use it can mean the same as ‘plurality’ or ‘diversity’: the co-existence in one society of many cultures, religions, philosophies and outlooks on life. In this sense of the word the Catholic Church does not only recognise pluralism as a fact but also respects it, in the sense that it supports everyone’s right to freedom from persecution and prejudice, to an equal civil status within society, and to liberty and self-fulfilment within the constraints of the common good. Catholics should promote respect for this pluralism, so as to foster the legitimate rights and aspirations of their neighbours of other religions. 24. Within a democratic society this kind of pluralism is the basis necessary for dialogue, but it is also one of the beneficial results of dialogue. Dialogue helps us appreciate the gifts of the dialogue- partner’s religion and culture more deeply and what these can contribute to the good of all. 25. ‘Relativism’: The Catholic Church’s attitude is in marked contrast to the ‘relativist’ understanding, which is such a common response to the religious pluralism we experience in Britain today. The relativist 12 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Declaration Dominus Iesus on the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church, 2000. 13 Emphasis in the original. 11 Pontifical Council for Refugees & Itinerant People, Erga Migrantes Caritas Christi, (The love of Christ towards Migrants), 2004. 20 21 Meeting God in Friend and Stranger The Changing Face of Britain witness may well involve facing up to negative attitudes in ourselves as well as in others. This will not always make us popular, but we need to give a lead in reaching out to our neighbour in this way. 29. One example of this negative behaviour is an open hostility towards migrants and asylum seekers. In his encyclical Redemptoris Missio of 1990 Pope John Paul II drew attention to the migration of people of other religions, especially refugees, into traditionally Christian countries as an opportunity for contacts and cultural exchanges (RM 37). We would add that such love of neighbour is the love of the Good Samaritan, who in the parable in St Luke’s Gospel (Ch.10) offered assistance to a Jew in need, despite the intense hostility between the two peoples.14 30. Catholics should also welcome opportunities for collaborating with members of other religions in fields where they have similar concerns and values. They should be able to engage in activities which protect human life from conception to death, in working for justice and peace and in issues concerning the good of our world as created by God. This kind of collaboration does not require a complete agreement on all matters of faith or morality. 31. Unfortunately many Catholics do not feel sufficiently confident in the knowledge of their own faith to feel they can share it. They should see this new situation as a spur to seek ways of deepening their knowledge of the Catholic faith, in order to share it, in a way appropriate to themselves, with those of other religions. At the very least a smile of greeting, a word of good wishes on religious feasts, or a gesture of sympathy in a time of sadness, can themselves carry the love of Jesus Christ, and be channels of grace without further elaboration. As the Church’s teaching makes clear, dialogue is a matter of being with others in constructive and human ways. 32. We know well that Catholics are already engaged, and generously so, in all kinds of service to their fellow men and women, in their parishes and further afield. We encourage you to extend this neighbourliness to those of other religions. 33. Another Side: The coming together, through widespread immigration, of people from very different backgrounds, especially when it is of such recent origin, cannot be a simple story. For example, not all immigrants or their descendants are well disposed to our society and its values, and not all asylum seekers are genuine. What is more, we have to point out in all honesty the persecution and grossly unjust behaviour against Christians and other minorities in some of the immigrants’ countries of origin, and even in this country such behaviour against Christians is not unknown. Although the majority community must take the lead, holding out the hand of friendship must be a two-way process. We would justly be accused of over-simplifying a very complex issue were we to ignore these things. We do not ignore them, and we call urgently for these matters to be addressed. 34. In this country, civil authorities have the responsibility of protecting the whole population, of whatever ethnic origin, from those who have evil intent, and from those who are dedicated to the overthrow of our society and the values – many of them fundamentally Christian values - on which it is built. We all have the responsibility of supporting the authorities in these vital matters. Immigration and the seeking of asylum most certainly need to be managed with great compassion, but also with careful discernment and a lively appreciation of the social, economic and deeply human problems they can generate. 35. We cannot stress enough, however, that these realities must never be used as an excuse for blanket prejudice and hostility, which can never be right and merely make the evils worse. Christ demands that we hold out the hand of hospitality to the stranger15. What is more, our protests against the ill-will of others is a great deal less 14 Pope Benedict XVI makes the same point, in a more general way, in his Encyclical Letter Deus Caritas Est (God is Love) 2005, 25: The Church is God’s family in the world. In this family no one ought to go without the necessities of life. Yet at the same time ‘ caritas-agape’ (Christ-like love) extends beyond the frontiers of the Church. The parable of the Good Samaritan remains as a standard which imposes universal love towards the needy whom we encounter ‘by chance’. Many migrants in our country fit that description. 15 I was a stranger and you welcomed me (Mt 25:35). 23 22 Meeting God in Friend and Stranger convincing, indeed is hypocritical, if we are guilty of the same sin ourselves. All we have to do is consider our own Christian past to realise that any religion, at its most debased, can use an allegedly divine ordinance for its wicked deeds. 36. Conclusion: We are right, therefore, to rejoice at the great diversity of peoples within the universal Church and we respect the religious diversity of modern Britain, seeing it as an opportunity for dialogue.16 Chapter 3: DIALOGUE IN THE TEACHING OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH INTRODUCTION Interreligious Dialogue: the Catholic Church’s Attitude in Modern Times 37. For some years now there has been much reflection in the Catholic Church on the relationship of interreligious dialogue to its faith and teaching. In 1965, at the Second Vatican Council, the bishops issued a document, entitled Nostra Aetate (In our Age) which was to set the Church on a new path regarding its relations with the other religions of the world. In this they said: The Church therefore urges her sons and daughters to enter with prudence and charity into discussion and collaboration with members of other religions. Let Christians, while witnessing to their own faith and way of life, acknowledge, preserve and encourage the spiritual and moral truths found among non- Christians, also their social life and culture (NA 2). 38. One of the legacies of Pope John Paul II is the example he gave of seeking to engage with people of other religions. In his many journeys across the world he pointed out the path of dialogue. He was the first pope to enter a synagogue, and the first to enter a mosque. In 1986, 1993 and 2002 he was joined at Assisi by leaders of the world’s religions, and by other Christian leaders, in order to pray for peace. 39. Pope Benedict XVI is no less committed to the way of dialogue. He is also very conscious of the deep differences between the religions, and of the need to be as clear as possible in stating the faith of the Catholic Church. In his first public address as Pope in April 2005 he said that while his first priority would be dialogue with other 16 The ultimate Christian hope, of course, is that all people, in their great diversity of race, culture and giftedness, will acknowledge Christ as our one God and Saviour, and will be united in him as one reconciled humanity. 24 25 Meeting God in Friend and Stranger Dialogue in the Teaching of the Catholic Church Christians, his second would be interreligious dialogue.17 When, as Cardinal Ratzinger, he was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, it was he who was responsible for the Declaration Dominus Iesus in the year 2000. While it was careful to draw a clear line between Christianity and other religions, the Declaration still made this point: Interreligious dialogue, which is part of the Church’s evangelising mission, requires an attitude of understanding and a relationship of mutual knowledge and reciprocal enrichment, in obedience to the truth and with respect for freedom (DI 2). 40. During his visit to Turkey in November 2006, Pope Benedict declared that dialogue was not an option but a necessity. In an address to the President of the Turkish Religious Affairs Directorate he said: For more than forty years the teaching of the Second Vatican Council has inspired and guided the approach taken by the Holy See and by local churches throughout the world to relations with the followers of other religions. Following the Biblical tradition, the Council teaches that the entire human race shares a common origin and a common destiny: God, our Creator and the goal of our earthly pilgrimage. Christians and Muslims belong to the family of those who believe in the one God and who, according to their respective traditions, trace their ancestry to Abraham. The human and spiritual unity in our origins and our destiny impels us to seek a common path, as we play our part in the quest for fundamental values so characteristic of the people of our time...18 Resources19 41. To discover the teaching of the Church on this subject we should above all refer to the documents of the Second Vatican Council, and to subsequent papal pronouncements. We must also take note of certain very significant actions by the popes, because deeds can speak louder than words. Among these we mention again Pope John Paul II’s invitations to multi-religious gatherings at Assisi to pray for peace, and his visits to sites held in special reverence by other religions, such as the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem and, as a penitent, to the Western Wall in the same city. In his turn, Pope Benedict XVI has also visited the Western Wall and the Yad Vashem Memorial, and synagogues in Cologne and New York. He has paid a visit to the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, and to the Al-Hussein bin Talal Mosque in Jordan. 42. Much help can be found in the publications of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, such as Dialogue and Mission (1984), referred to above, and Dialogue and Proclamation (1991)20. The previously mentioned Declaration of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus, is of particular importance. The Declaration Nostra Aetate:The special Position of the Jewish People 43. The Second Vatican Council’s document Nostra Aetate, or Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, is the principal statement of the Church’s teaching authority on the general subject of interreligious dialogue. It is important to note, however, that it gives a particularly developed teaching on the Church’s relation to the Jews: in fact for a long time in the preparation of this statement it was simply and solely a statement about the Jews. At the time of the Council in the 1960s, the bishops remembered, in some cases all too personally, the evils of the Nazis and their unspeakable acts of genocide against the Jewish people. They were anxious to condemn unreservedly the injustices done to them, not just 17 First Message of His Holiness Benedict XVI at the end of the Concelebrated Mass with the College of Cardinals, 20th April 2005. See: http//www.vatican.va/holy_ father/benedict_xvi/messages/pont-messages/2005/documents/hf_ben- xvi_mes_20050420_missa-pro-ecclesia_en.html 18 See: www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006/november/documents/ hf_ben-xvi_spe_20061128_pres-religious-affairs_en.html 26 19 A fuller Book List is given at the end of the Document. 20 Full title: Reflections and Orientations on Interreligious Dialogue and the Proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ published jointly by the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and the Congregation for Evangelisation of Peoples, Rome 1991. 27 Meeting God in Friend and Stranger Dialogue in the Teaching of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century, but in all periods of history. They wanted to outlaw, in fact, all forms of discrimination against anyone in the name of race, colour, condition of life or religion. 44. The Council bishops wished to do more than merely condemn. They wanted to reflect positively on the unique relationship, in the mystery of God’s saving love, between the Church of Christ and the Jewish people. Their teaching, the fruit of long debate, is expressed in article 4 of Nostra Aetate. Relying heavily on the eleventh chapter of St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, the bishops set out some guiding principles for understanding this relationship more adequately.21 45. They readily acknowledged that the origins of Christ’s Church are deeply rooted in God’s People of the Old Covenant, and in the revelation God made to them. The Church, they said is nourished from the root of the good olive tree, on to which the branches of the wild olive tree of the gentiles have been grafted (Rm 11:17). Not only Jesus himself and Mary his mother, but the apostles too, the founding pillars of the Church, and many of the first disciples were Jews. The bishops recognise that at the time of Jesus most Jews did not accept the Gospel, and many opposed it; nevertheless the Jewish people remain very dear to God, who never repents of his gifts and calling.22 It is therefore desirable that dialogue and discussion, based on biblical and theological enquiry, should take place between the two biblical faiths. 46. Then the Council makes a statement of major doctrinal significance, i.e. as a matter of Catholic faith, and rejecting out of hand the claim so often used as an excuse for the worst persecutions, that the Jews in general, then and since, are guilty of the death of Christ, and so are an accursed people: Although the Jewish authorities with their followers pressed for the death of Christ, still those things which were perpetrated during his passion cannot be ascribed indiscriminately to all the Jews living at the time, nor to the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be represented as rejected by God or accursed, as if that follows from holy scripture (NA 4).23 47. This close and unique relationship between the Church and the Synagogue was given practical expression not long after the Council. In 1974 Pope Paul VI set up the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, and joined it, not to the Secretariat for Non-Christians24 but to the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity25. This gives recognition to the fact that the division between the Jewish community and the Church of Christ pre-dates the divisions within Christianity itself, and is the deepest wound within the whole People of God of the old and new Covenants. In the understanding of the Catholic Church the healing of this ancient wound is not only a matter of coming to a much greater knowledge of one another – a most urgent need in itself26 - but of reaching out in hope towards a unity, here and now only imperfectly understood, which would be both a new gift of God and the healing of this ancient wound in his People. 48. Although it must be stated clearly that the Jewish Community and the Church of Christ are quite distinct, the relationship between them is unique. This is reflected in the fact that the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews is housed within the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, while remaining functionally distinct from it.27 23 Henceforth, unless otherwise stated, translations of Vatican II documents are from Norman P. Tanner (ed.), Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, Georgetown University Press, 1990, vol. II. 24 Later the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue (see n.1 above). 25 Later the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. 26 See Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, Guidelines on Religious Relations with the Jews, 1974. 27 In England and Wales there is a special committee of the Bishops’ Conference for these matters, the Committee for Catholic-Jewish Relations. On the ecumenical level there is the Council of Christians and Jews, whose aim is to work against discrimination in our society. 29 21 For further documents from the Holy See on Catholic-Jewish relations, see Book List. 22 On 13th April 1986, Pope John Paul II stressed this point when, in Rome, he made the first-ever visit of a Pope to a synagogue. He called the Jews ‘our dearly beloved brothers’, and said, echoing Rm 11, that they were ‘beloved of God’ who has called them with an ‘irrevocable calling’, and whose covenant with them ‘has never been revoked’ (Gioia, p.335). 28 Meeting God in Friend and Stranger Dialogue in the Teaching of the Catholic Church The Broadening of the Declaration 49. The Council bishops eventually decided that their statement needed to have wider application, to encompass interreligious relations in general. The consequence was that for the first time in history a General Council of the Catholic Church recognised elements of truth and holiness in other religions as the work of the one God of salvation, and to that extent recognised the presence and work of grace in the religions of the world. In practical terms this recognition has moved the Church on to new and constructive, yet always carefully considered ways of engaging with the followers of these religions. 50. The Declaration begins thus: In our age, when the human race is being daily brought closer together, and contacts between the various nations are becoming more frequent, the Church is giving closer attention to what is its relation to non-Christian religions. In its task of promoting unity and charity among people, indeed also among nations, it now turns its attention chiefly to what things human beings have in common, and what things tend to bring them together. (NA 1) The Church’s Teaching 51. In all its teaching the Catholic Church keeps a careful balance between insisting that God truly wills the eternal salvation of all people, and insisting with equal force that Christ is the one and only means and mediator of this salvation. The Church also keeps a balance between recognising what is true and holy in other religions, and yet insisting on the importance of an explicit faith in Christ and membership of the Church through Baptism. Thus the promotion of dialogue has not diminished the necessity of proclaiming the Gospel and calling those who do not believe in Christ to conversion while fully respecting the liberty of each person. 52. In all this discussion, of course, we must never forget the fundamental truth that judgment about people’s eternal salvation belongs to God, and to God alone. 53. Three themes recur constantly in the Church’s teaching: the unity of the human race; the need to be open to all that is true and holy in other religions; the call to dialogue. We shall consider these in turn. The Unity of the Human Race 54. The Church’s positive attitude to people and communities belonging to other religions is based on its conviction that the human race is one, one through its origin in the one creative act of God, one in physical descent, one in its predicament caused by sin and need of salvation, and one in God’s saving purposes. This is a profoundly biblical conviction. This is how Nostra Aetate puts it: All nations are one community and have one origin, because God caused the whole human race to dwell on the whole face of the earth. They also have one final end, God, whose providence, manifestation of goodness and plans for salvation are extended to all... (NA 1). 55. The unity of all humanity was very prominent in the thinking of Pope John Paul II. For him, this unity is the best place to begin when reflecting on the plurality of world religions. The unity is not merely a biological one: the Pope refers to a ‘mystery of unity’, a glimpse of God’s loving design for those he created in his own image and likeness. As yet we only understand a little of this divine purpose, but we do know that it is centred upon Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, crucified and risen. In an important address to the Roman Curia after the 1986 World Day of Prayer for Peace at Assisi, he said: Accordingly there is only one divine plan for every human being who comes into this world, one single origin and goal, whatever may be the colour of his skin, the historical and geographical framework within which he happens to live and act, or the culture in which he grows up and expresses himself. The differences are a less important element, when confronted with the unity which is radical, fundamental and decisive. 30 31 Meeting God in Friend and Stranger Dialogue in the Teaching of the Catholic Church The divine plan, unique and definitive, has its centre in Jesus Christ, God and man, ‘in whom people find the fullness of religious life and in whom God has reconciled all things to himself’ (NA 2).28 Human Unity and Religious Freedom 56. Since all human beings are created in God’s image they all have an equal dignity as persons, as images of the personal God, with the rights and duties which flow from this. One of these rights is the right to religious freedom. The Second Vatican Council’s ‘Declaration on Religious Freedom’, known as Dignitatis Humanae (‘Human dignity’), makes this point very clearly: This Vatican synod declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. Such freedom consists in this, that all should have such immunity from coercion by individuals or by groups, or by any human power, that no one should be forced to act against his conscience in religious matters, nor prevented from acting according to his conscience, whether in private or in public, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits. This synod further declares that the right to religious freedom is firmly based on the dignity of the human person as this is known from the revealed word of God and from reason itself (DH 2). 57. The Declaration goes on to speak of our right, and our obligation, to pursue the truth in a properly human way, that is by free enquiry in accordance with our conscience. This freedom includes the right to have places of worship and religious associations. 58. All this is relevant to the whole field of interreligious relationships and dialogue. The right to religious freedom is based on our equal dignity before God; but as a basis for dialogue the recognition of this right must be reciprocal, because dialogue can only work properly as a dialogue between equals. 59. This equality, it must be stressed, refers to the equal dignity of the participants, not to equality in the content of what they believe. Still less does it imply a comparison between the notable men and women of the world’s religions and Jesus Christ, the divine Word made flesh (cf. Jn 1:14). Human Unity in the Questions all have in Common 60. People across the world ask the same ultimate questions about their lives, questions often asked with deep anxiety: What is the meaning and purpose of our life on earth - does it have any meaning at all? Is there a God, and if so what is God like? Why is there suffering – has it a meaning? What is the secret of true happiness? What happens after death? These common questions show how human beings are united in their restless search for meaning29. The Need to be open to what is True and Holy in other Religions 61. Nostra Aetate takes note of the unity people have in their questions, and gives examples of the answers the world’s religions have offered, recognising elements of truth and holiness in those answers: The Catholic Church rejects nothing of those things which are true and holy in these religions. It regards with respect those ways of acting and living and those precepts and teachings which, though often at variance with what it holds and expounds, frequently reflect a ray of that truth which enlightens everyone (NA 2). 62. The Catholic Church believes that our unity is also revealed in the fact that this presence of what is true and holy is not accidental. It is what the Council calls ‘a ray of the one Truth’ and, in the Decree Ad Gentes on Missionary Activity (To the nations), ‘seeds of the Word’ (AG 11). In other words, the presence of what is true and holy is directly related to the revelation of Christ and to his Church. Lumen Gentium states: 29 Cf. Second Vatican Council, Decree On the Missionary Activity of the Church Ad Gentes (To the nations). 28 Pope John Paul II, Address 22nd December 1986 (Gioia, p.361). 32 33 Meeting God in Friend and Stranger Dialogue in the Teaching of the Catholic Church Whatever goodness and truth is found in them is considered by the Church as a preparation for the Gospel, and bestowed by him who enlightens everyone, that they might in the end have life (LG 16). 63. The expression ‘seeds of the Word’ originates in the early Church Fathers, who saw the presence of true and righteous living among the pagans as a participation in the one Truth and Word who would become flesh in Christ. Foremost among these was St Justin, the Christian Apologist, martyred in about 165AD. Among many references to ‘seeds of the Word’ he writes: In moral philosophy the Stoics have established right principles, and the poets too have expounded such, because the seed of the Word was implanted in the whole human race (2 Apol. VIII). Christ the only Saviour and only Source of divine Truth 64. These affirmative statements in no way lessen the Church’s belief in the unique position of Christ as the incarnation and revelation of the Word of God, and the one Saviour of all. Christ is ‘...the way, the truth and the life’ in whom people find the fullness of religious life and in whom God has reconciled all things to himself (NA 2). Christ, and he alone, is the final answer to our fundamental questions and longings. 65. Our faith in Christ gives us the assurance that whatever is true and holy in other religions is not an alternative to the Gospel, but a preparation for it. The aspirations of humanity, and the answers offered by the various religious traditions, all have their fulfilment in Jesus Christ. It is therefore essential for the Church, in faithfulness to the Gospel, to balance the affirmative statements about other religions with an honest confession of what our faith sees as lacking (that is, needing to be completed) in those religions.30 66. As the ancient writers put it, what is true and holy in the religions are ‘a preparation for the Gospel’, waiting to be healed and perfected by the word of the Gospel and the sacraments of Christ. From the viewpoint of Christian faith this ‘waiting’ is in some ways like the state of those living before the time of Christ, whose state of real and serious need we recall in the Church’s liturgy during the season of Advent.31 67. This assertion that Christ is the only Saviour does not imply the superiority of individual Christians over everyone else. What Christians have received is totally unmerited on their part. It is an assertion rather of the bountiful goodness of God, and of the awesome responsibility Christians have of living up to what they have received, of being humbly thankful for it, and of being ever ready to share it with others. Jesus himself gave this warning: From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded (Lk 12:48). The Presence of the saving Grace of Christ in other Religions 68. Christ, and Christ alone, is our Saviour: that is, he is the only way we human beings can come to our common goal in the glory and happiness of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Second Vatican Council, and subsequent papal teaching, affirm the active presence of the freely given, saving power of Christ (‘grace’) outside the visible, institutional confines of the Church: There are those who without any fault do not know anything about Christ or his Church, yet who search for God with a sincere heart and, under the influence of grace, try to put into effect the will of God as known to them through the dictate of conscience: these too can obtain eternal salvation. Nor does divine Providence deny the helps that are necessary for salvation to those who, through no fault of their own, have not yet attained to the express recognition of God yet who strive, not without divine grace, to lead an upright life. For whatever goodness and truth is found in 31 The Declaration Dominus Iesus refers to this situation in DI 22. It expresses ‘sincere respect’ for the world’s religions, and acknowledges that their followers can receive the grace of God, but has to say that from the standpoint of faith in Christ as the Saviour of all humanity their situation is seriously lacking (‘gravely deficient’) compared with the situation of those who have access to all the means of salvation in the Church. It is not the people whom Dominus Iesus sees as ‘deficient’, but their situation. 30 Cf.AG,9 34 35 Meeting God in Friend and Stranger Dialogue in the Teaching of the Catholic Church them is considered by the Church as a preparation for the Gospel, and bestowed by him who enlightens everyone that they may in the end have life (LG 16). 69. This grace is intimately related to Christ, the fruit of his sacrifice on the Cross, and bestowed on those outside the visible Church through the presence of the Holy Spirit. This grace of God, however, is still related to the Church. It does not make members of other religions ‘Christian’, but enlightens them in a way appropriate to their particular situation. The Presence of the Holy Spirit in Members of other Religions 70. A remarkable feature of the teaching of Pope John Paul II is the prominence he gave to the activity of the Holy Spirit in the lives of those who belong to other religions. In the encyclical Redemptoris Missio (Mission of the Redeemer) he says: The Spirit manifests himself in a special way to the Church and in her members. Nevertheless his presence and activity are universal, limited by neither space nor time. The Spirit’s presence and activity affect not only individuals but also society and history, peoples, cultures and religions. Indeed, the Spirit is at the origin of the noble ideals and undertakings which benefit humanity on its journey through history... Again, it is the Spirit who sows the ‘seeds of the Word’ present in various customs and cultures, preparing them for full maturity in Christ (RM 28). 71. Although the Holy Spirit’s presence in history and in other religions cannot be equated with the abundance of the Spirit’s gifts to the Church, it is nevertheless the same divine Spirit who is at work in them, the source of whatever is true and holy, and bringing them into a positive relationship with the Church. 72. It must be stressed that the Spirit who is active in other religions is always profoundly one with Christ, and not an alternative to Christ. He is the same Spirit who was at work in the human coming-to-be of Christ, and in Christ’s life, death and resurrection. He is the Spirit bestowed on the Church at Pentecost as the fruit of Christ’s passion and death (Cf. RM 29). The Church-centred aspect of this Teaching 73. The Spirit, then, who is at work in other religions, and supremely in Christ himself, is one and the same Spirit who gives life to the Church. Because it is the same divine Spirit who is at work in both, the Church and the religions have a positive relationship to each other. By that God-given presence and action we are deeply related, though at the same time sadly distant from each other. 74. The Church is not only ‘passively’ related to other religions because of the Spirit’s presence: the Church has an active role in the salvation of all people. The Church is the sign and instrument of a communion with God and with each other that begins in this life and is completed hereafter. The Church is called to work actively for this by its prayer, by its preaching, by its proclamation of the Gospel and calling people to faith in Christ, and also by interreligious dialogue. Each Religion is related to the Church in its own Way 75. The Second Vatican Council presents the various religions as each having its own distinctive relationship to the Church.32 It follows that our approach to each, and any dialogue with it, will have its own character. We mention here those religions present in this country in relatively larger numbers:33 76. Islam: Despite the fact that there are profound theological differences between the two religions, Islam shares with Christianity many common traditions and ideas, as well as a long history of both creative and hostile encounter. Although Jews, Muslims and Christians within their own respective tradition understand God and relate to him in a different way, they all worship the one God. In various different ways, all claim Abraham as their ancestor and honour his close relationship with God. For reasons that are all too obvious, it has never been more urgent that Christians and Muslims learn how to dialogue with, and better understand, one another. The Second Vatican Council speaks of Muslims in Nostra Aetate 3: 32 Cf. LG 16; NA 3-4. 33 TheuniquerelationshipofJudaismtotheChurchwasexplainedaboveinnn.43onwards. 36 37 Meeting God in Friend and Stranger Dialogue in the Teaching of the Catholic Church India has so much to offer to the world in the task of understanding man and the truth of his existence. What she offers specifically is a noble spiritual vision of man – man, a pilgrim of the Absolute, travelling toward a goal, seeking the face of God. Did not Mahatma Gandhi put it this way: ‘What I want to achieve – what I have been striving and pining to achieve...is self- realisation – to see God face to face. I live and move and have my being in pursuit of this goal.’34 Despite all the powerful forces of poverty and oppression, of evil and sin in all their forms, the power of truth will prevail – the truth about God, the truth about man. It will prevail because it is invincible. The power of truth is invincible! ‘Satyam eva jayate – truth alone triumphs’, as the motto of India proclaims.35 79. Buddhism: For Christians, dialogue with Buddhists is quite different from dialogue with Jews or Muslims because no personal creator God plays a significant part in Buddhism. What makes Buddhists what they are is not a creed, nor even primarily the ascetical practices they follow, but rather their personal commitment to search for truth as the Buddha36 did. Buddhism has attracted many in the West because of its high moral standards, its teaching about meditation, its commitment to compassion, peace and justice, and its great respect for nature and the environment. Nostra Aetate affirms: In Buddhism, according to its various forms, the radical inadequacy of this changeable world is acknowledged and a way is taught whereby those with a devout and trustful spirit may be able to reach either a state of perfect freedom or, relying on their own efforts or on help from a higher source, the highest illumination (NA 2). The Church also looks upon Muslims with respect. They worship the one God living and subsistent, merciful and almighty, creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to humanity and to whose decrees, even the hidden ones, they seek to submit themselves whole-heartedly, just as Abraham, to whom the Islamic faith readily relates itself, submitted to God. They venerate Jesus as a prophet, even though they do not acknowledge him as God, and they honour his virgin mother Mary and even sometimes devoutly call upon her. Furthermore they await the day of judgment when God will requite all people brought back to life. Hence they have regard for the moral life and worship God especially in prayer, almsgiving and fasting. Although considerable dissensions and enmities between Christians and Muslims may have arisen in the course of the centuries, this synod urges all parties that, forgetting past things, they train themselves towards sincere mutual understanding and together maintain and promote social justice and moral values as well as peace and freedom for all people. 77. Hinduism: Hinduism is not strictly a single organised religion, but a whole family of religions rooted in the Indian sub-continent, and its members comprise over 80% of the vast and diverse population of India. There are also Hindus living in other countries around the world, including a large community in Britain. Hindus witness to our human yearning for the divine, to the importance of family life and to the possibility that different religions can live together in peace. The Second Vatican Council thus pays tribute to the ancient, profound and richly varied Hindu traditions: ...Thus in Hinduism the divine mystery is explored and propounded with an inexhaustible wealth of myths and penetrating philosophical investigations, and liberation is sought from the distresses of our state either through various forms of ascetical life or deep meditation, or taking refuge in God with loving confidence (NA 2). 78. In his first visit to India, Pope John Paul II praised the ‘spiritual vision of man’ at the heart of Indian religious culture: 34 Address to the Followers of the Various Religions of India, 1986. Cf. Gioia p.314, with the reference to Mahatma Gandhi, Autobiography, pp 4-5. 35 Gioia p.315, with reference to Mundaka Upanishad, 3,1,6. 36 The Buddha (‘enlightened one’), is the title given to Siddartha Gautama, who scholars now reckon to have been born in N.India in about 480 B.C. 38 39 Meeting God in Friend and Stranger Dialogue in the Teaching of the Catholic Church 83. These religions in their great variety have developed their own patter
- [What Has India Contributed to Human Welfare?](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/what-has-india-contributed-to-human-welfare) - Ananda K. Coomaraswamy We are not all deceived by the illusion of progress, but, like some of our European colleagues, desire “the coming of better conditions of life, when the whole world will again learn that the object of human life is not to waste it in a feverish anxiety and race after physical objects
- [Helping the Cosmos: The Indian Avataras](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/helping-the-cosmos-the-indian-avataras) - A necessary starting-point for this essay is to define the term avat?ra, because it is frequently misunderstood in the West.1 The avat?ra- concept is fundamental to Vai??ava doctrine, but it is not limited to Vai??avas (those who revere Vi??u), nor is it Hinduism’s equivalent of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, although there are some analogies. What the Sanskrit word actually means is, literally and physically, “descent”: in this case, the coming down of a god, usually but not exclusively Vi??u, in a form not his own, from heaven (thought of as up above) on to the earth beneath, to perform a specific task which will benefit the universe, usually seen as rescuing the earth from some kind of catastrophe. The development of the term, and the related concept of “unburdening” the earth, were charted by Paul Hacker (1978 [1960]). The concept is not found in the earliest phases of Indic religion, where the systems now named “Hinduism” had not yet emerged.2 Absent from Vedic thought, it begins to develop in the epics, the R?m?ya?a and the Mah?bh?rata, only in their very latest stages (from perhaps the third century AD onwards), and the word itself is not applied to the concept until considerably later (Brockington 1998: 277-89, 460-3; Brinkhaus 1993). It was then gradually codified with varying numbers of avat?ras, from four to twenty-nine, but the number settled down relatively early as ten, although not always the same ten individuals; it was not until the eighth century AD that general acceptance was accorded to the standard list: (1) Matsya: “fish” (2) K?rma: “tortoise” (3) Var?ha: “boar” (4) Narasi?ha: “man-lion” (5) V?mana: “dwarf” (6) R?ma J?madagnya: “R?ma son of Jamadagni” (7) R?ma D??arathi: “R?ma son of Da?aratha” (8) K???a (sometimes replaced by his brother Balar?ma: “Strong R?ma”) (9) Gautama Buddha: “Gautama the enlightened one” (alternatively the Jina) (10) Kalki[n] The first five and sometimes the last one are all non-human figures (or are at least not fully human) and tell cosmological stories, sometimes using early examples of narrative motifs analogous to those found in later international tale-types. The first three, and arguably the tenth, are examples of the familiar motif of the Animal Helper (the animal who has greater powers than his human or demonic apparent superior); indeed, in the fullest versions the fish- avat?ra plays the role of a Grateful Animal. Numbers 6, 7 and 8 are all human heroes whose stories were made popular by the R?m?ya?a and the Mah?bh?rata. Our sources of knowledge of the avat?ras are early texts (the epics and the Pur??as for the developed form of the stories), but more valuable sources are sculptural, usually in the form of carvings on temple façades. To take only one example, the narrative frieze from the sixth-century AD Da??vat?ra (“Ten avat?ras”) temple at Deoga?h in Madhya Pradesh, south of Jhansi (now in the National Museum, New Delhi), antedates any extant manuscripts by several centuries, so it is all the more regrettable that such valuable evidence is so often overlooked, or admired for its artistic qualities rather than studied for its narrative content. Sculptures or paintings of the avat?ra-figures of various dates can be found in most collections of South Asian art, and are reproduced in all the standard textbooks, catalogues and guides, so I will mention only three that deserve to be better known: the detailed investigation and reproduction of fourteenth- to sixteenth- century sculptures at Vijayanagara in Karnataka, southern India; the catalogue of an album of gouaches painted before the middle of the eighteenth century in the south-east of the neighbouring state of Andhra and now in Warsaw University Library; and the catalogue of an exhibition of eighteenth-century paintings at the Museum Rietberg, rich (Dallapiccola and Verghese 1998: 45-54, figures 25- 35 and plates 43, 44 and 46; Jakimowicz-Shah 1983: particularly pages 70-103, 112-22 and 160; and Holm, Fischer and Fischer 2006 respectively). The avat?ra-figures were not invented or developed ex nihilo along with the concept: they all had some previous existence in a form which was not always entirely compatible with the use to which it was now being put. This process of adaptation and codification also enables us to chart the rise in significance of Vi??u, the Preserver, and the corresponding decline of the earlier “helper” figure, the Creator-god Brahm? or Praj?pati, who had been the original protagonist in the first three stories. In this essay I limit myself to the formative stages, but the concept is still very much alive (Schreiner 1999: 275), although the word is also often used loosely as if it were the equivalent of “reincarnation” (e.g. Smith 1991 passim). In some cases the avat?ra figure has developed a prominent local cult, which may even overshadow his status as an avat?ra of Vi??u; a particular example is the popularity of Narasi?ha in Karnataka, which perhaps reflects and preserves some archaic significance antedating his acceptance into the avat?ra-scheme. An introductory element to a relatively early form of avat?ra-story is that the gods, worried by the depredations of some anti-god, approach Brahm? for help, and he issues appropriate instructions to Vi??u (e.g. R?m?ya?a 1,14.4-15.7 and Mah?bh?rata 3,260.1-5;3 both are versions of the birth of R?ma D??arathi). In the more developed forms the gods approach Vi??u himself and implore him to intervene; see for example Brahmapur??a 213.72-5 and 73.9-22 (Narasi?ha and V?mana)(trans. Soifer 1991: 164-5 and 193 respectively).4 When this scene is represented in painting, rather than verbally, the artist may seize the opportunity, no doubt for sound commercial reasons, to enhance his patrons’ prestige by including them in the deputation;5 by doing so, he incidentally emphasises the dual nature of the avat?ra’s role, to protect gods and to protect mankind. That it was usually Vi??u who should be chosen as saviour is probably due to the generally benevolent role as Preserver that he was to assume in the trim?rti concept – the other two members of this divine triad being Brahm?, the creator, and ?iva, the destroyer. ?iva too can generate avat?ras, but these are of far less prominence, for he is viewed as an outsider, living in the Him?laya, associated with asceticism and destruction and haunting cremation grounds. Whether he and his wife are portrayed as beautiful or ugly, their activity is always fearsome. (1) MATSYA: “FISH” The first avat?ra is usually Matsya, the Sanskrit common noun for “fish”. This story goes back to the sixth century BC or earlier (?atapatha Br?hma?a 1.8.1; Brockington 1998: 279), but according to the Mah?bh?rata version composed a few centuries later the seer Manu cares for a little fish until it grows huge and warns him of an impending flood which will cleanse and destroy the world; instructed by the fish, Manu builds an ark and takes into it Seven Seers and the seeds of all creatures. The fish is conveniently provided with a horn on its head which Manu lassoes using a snake as rope, and tows the ark across the flood to the highest peak of the Him?laya, where it reveals itself to be a god: Praj?pati or Brahm? in the earlier sources, Vi??u in later ones. Manu then re-creates the world and all its creatures (Mah?bh?rata 3,185, cf. MBh 12,300; tr. van Buitenen 1975: 583-85 and Fitzgerald [forthcoming] respectively). The story is developed in various Pur??as, chiefly the Matsyapur??a (Brockington 1998: 279).6 One later extension of the myth involves no fewer than two Vi??u-avat?ras in the same story: Hayagr?va, a demon with a horse’s head, steals the Vedas, and Vi??u takes on a similar form to recover them. The outline of this cosmogonic story is familiar from the early literature of many cultures, and its precise relationship to the Hebrew, Mesopotamian and Classical Flood Myths is a matter of debate among Indologists. The Biblical story is complicated by the fact that Yahweh must be portrayed as all- powerful, but this leads to him contradicting himself twice: he sends the Flood to destroy the earth, but saves the righteous Noah, then repents and promises not to do it again (Genesis 6-8). The position of Indian gods is more ambivalent, and here at least they are subject to natural forces: it is important to note that the Indian flood has not been sent by the gods. (2) K?RMA: “TORTOISE” In the second cosmogonic story the gods and their opponents churn the ocean, hoping to produce the am?ta, the nectar of immortality; in doing so they produce all sorts of objects, many with a cosmological significance, including Lak?m? the goddess of wealth and fortune who in later developments became the consort of Vi??u. They use a mountain as churning stick, and turn it in Indian fashion, but with a snake, not a rope. To stop the mountain sinking into the ocean bed, they pivot it on a tortoise (k?rma), an animal with a significant role in Vedic ritual. Early versions of the story found in the Br?hma?as again identify the tortoise with Praj?pati; at Mah?bh?rata 1,16.10-11 it is Ak?p?ra, king of tortoises, but Vi??u is introduced to direct operations; not until Vi??upur??a 1,9.86 does Vi??u become the tortoise himself (Brockington 1998: 279-80; van Buitenen 1973: 73- 4). (3) VAR?HA: “BOAR” Vi??u’s form as Var?ha, a boar, can be shown with a gigantic anthropomorphic body and a boar’s head, but sometimes wholly as a boar.7 A huge rock-cut example of the first type can be seen at Udayagiri near Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh, and impressive figures of the wholly animal type are preserved in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford (acc. no. 1969.43), in a shrine facing the Lak?ma?a temple in the western group at Khajur?ho, and in the museum at the bottom of the ridge at Gwalior. This myth blends together several different stories of a boar raising the goddess P?thiv? (the earth) from the depths of the ocean; again, at an early stage of development the protagonist is Praj?pati, though the Mah?bh?rata text already identifies him as N?r?ya?a, a figure later himself to become identified with Vi??u (?atapatha Br?hm??a 14,1.2.11; Mah?bh?rata 3,100.19- 22; van Buitenen 1975: 420; Brockington 1998: 280-1, citing Brinkhaus 1991 and Gail 1977b). In a third- to first-century BC passage the R?m?ya?a preserves an early form of the myth in which the earth is raised from the primeval waters by Brahm? as boar as part of creation (R?m?ya?a 2,102.2-3, trans. Pollock 1986: 303; Brockington 1998: 461-2), while other sources have the earth sunk post-creation by various demons; later still (post fourth century AD), the earth has been sunk by the weight of over-population, and death has to be introduced to regulate the numbers (Mah?bh?rata 3 App. 16). Some iconographic texts require the Var?ha figure to be shown with one leg placed upon a tortoise (k?rma) (Rangarajan 1995), but this prescription probably reflects the animal’s importance in Vedic ritual rather than a direct reference to Vi??u’s K?rm?vat?ra role. In the case of these non-human avat?ras it is hardly appropriate to talk about a “descent”, for the setting is mostly some kind of mythical area, not corresponding to a geographical reality. In the case of the boar-avat?ra it depends to a certain extent on whether the narrative is expressed in verbal or visual terms, that is to say, whether the earth is thought of as a material place or as a goddess; and whether men or gods are being helped depends largely on how great a measure of reality is given to the metaphor. In practice these niceties are largely irrelevant. (4) NARASI?HA: “MAN-LION” Unlike the other avat?ra myths, we do not know the first form of the Narasi?ha story, but it must antedate the earliest extant reference at Mah?bh?rata 3,100.20c, since that is a summary (trans. Van Buitenen 1975: 420; Soifer 1991: 73; Brockington 1998: 281-2; for translations of Pur??ic versions see Soifer 1991: 161-91). Hira?yaka?ipu, secure in the possession of a boon of invincibility, is wreaking havoc, usurping the gods, dominating the cosmos, and eventually ignoring the advice of his pious son. He cannot be killed by god or man or animal, with any weapon, by day or night, by dry or wet, so Vi??u appears at twilight, in a form half man, half lion, and tears out his entrails with his claws. This man-lion story is not found in the Vedas, but what is interesting about these later accounts is that they incorporate and develop the motifs associated with the Paradoxical Task, motifs adapted to different contexts in widely collected oral narratives, but first recorded in India in a different Vedic story in the first half of the first millennium BC (Thompson 1955-58: motifs H 1050-77 and M 367.1; ?gveda 8, 14.13, trans. O’Flaherty 1981: 160; ?atapatha Br?hma?a 12,7.3.1-3, trans. Soifer 1991: 38-9). In that story Indra has promised not to kill the anti-god Namuci in any one of a number of possible ways, including “neither dry nor wet”, and “neither with the palm of my hand nor with my fist”; when it becomes necessary for him to take action, Indra wraps his thunderbolt in foam and kills Namuci at twilight. The “neither dry nor wet” proviso appears incongruously in the Narasi?ha story, where it is no longer apposite, and the passage from Brahm???apur??a 2.5.3- 29 (tr. Soifer 1991: 162) makes a self-conscious effort to relate Vi??u’s use of his claws as a weapon to this proviso rather than to the appropriate but here unexpressed “neither with the palm of my hand nor with my fist”. This particularly ferocious form of justice is reproduced with gusto on the pillars of many temples in Karnataka, where the medium of sculpture has enabled its practitioners to represent with dramatic force and accuracy a scene found only at a late stage in the verbally-expressed texts: Narasi?ha appears to be bursting out of the pillar of a temple verandah, as if circumventing a new guarantee that the monster would be killed “neither within a building nor outside” (Soifer 1991: 97, 103). Narasi?ha is widely revered in Karnataka, and is also found depicted as a sage deep in meditation (Dallapiccola and Verghese 1998: plates 45-6), implying the existence of some variant tradition, possibly an archaic local cult; Soifer points out that Narasi?ha is an ambivalent character who also has links with the cult of ?iva, the Destroyer, and in some texts remains a threat (Soifer 1991: 89-93) – an Indic equivalent of letting the genie out of the box. (5) V?MANA: “DWARF” The demonic King Bali had also contrived to dominate the whole of the three worlds, so when an innocent-looking dwarf (V?mana simply means “dwarf”) came and asked for as much land as he could cover in three strides, the unsuspecting Bali granted the request without hesitation. V?mana asked to be sprinkled with holy water, and then suddenly turned back into the gigantic figure of Vi??u. With one stride he covered the whole earth, with a second he covered the heavens. In some versions he won the underworld too for the gods with his third stride, in others he forbore to take the third stride and left lordship of the underworld to Bali (Soifer 1991); versions which later rehabilitate Bali have been studied by Clifford Hospital (1984). A striding exploit, this time ascribed to Vi??u from the beginning had been known from as early as the ?gveda (perhaps 1000 BC), but there it is a simple creation myth; he strode through the universe to subdue it and bring it into the power of the gods. Subsequently the striding was adapted to the defeat of a demon, but the element of deception by a dwarf to achieve this end was not incorporated till later still (R?m?ya?a 1,28.2-11; Goldman 1984:179; Mah?bh?rata 3.100.19-22, van Buitenen 1975: 420 [and 3 App. 27.64-82, but no deceptive dwarf is found at 12,326.74-6]; Brockington 1998: 282-3 and 462,citing Tripathi 1968). This is a very early record of the Deceptive Land Purchase motif (Thompson 1955-58: K 185), which takes many forms throughout the world, the most famous in Europe being the ox-hide cut into strips by Dido to enable her to acquire enough land to found Carthage. (6) R?MA J?MADAGNYA: “R?MA SON OF JAMADAGNI” R?ma J?madagnya (also known as R?ma Bh?rgava: “R?ma descendant of Bh?gu” and Para?ur?ma: “R?ma with the axe”) is a complex character with many different narratives attached to him, including a cosmogonic episode in which he created a tract of land around ??rp?raka (near Mumbai) by frightening the sea into retreating. It is not clear why he became associated with Vi??u (or sometimes with ?iva) and included in pur??ic lists of avat?ras, but the episode that has become accepted as the reason, and has been rationalised as a beneficial action in relieving the overpopulated Earth of a large part of its burden, is that in order to avenge the murder of his father he killed many thousands of men of the warrior class (k?atriyas), repeating the slaughter twenty-one times in a genocidal frenzy. He is particularly noted for his extreme reactions; in another, and later, demonstration of his filial piety, he unhesitatingly beheads his mother in obedience to his father’s over-hasty command.8 (7) R?MA D??ARATHI: “R?MA SON OF DA?ARATHA” R?ma D??arathi is a very different kind of warrior, and a contrasting exemplar of filial piety; he is the hero of the R?m?ya?a, the person usually meant when the name “R?ma” is used on its own. In order to fulfil a rash vow made by his father, the virtuous prince R?ma insisted on leaving his comfortable life at court in favour of a life of hardship in the forest, eventually defeating a demon, R?va?a, who has abducted R?ma’s wife S?t?. This heroic romance, probably composed around the fifth century BC, was developed by later generations into a religious epic in which, by about the third century AD, R?va?a was seen, in addition to being R?ma’s private enemy, as the enemy of the gods, threatening the stability of the whole cosmos, and invulnerable to all supernatural beings; only a man would be able to defeat him, so Vi??u became incarnate, technically taking on the fourfold manifestation of R?ma and his three brothers, although only R?ma is seriously considered to be the avat?ra-figure. R?ma, today popularly known as R?macandra, “R?ma the moon”, or simply as R?m, has as it were outgrown his earlier position as a manifestation of Vi??u and now achieved the role of god in his own right. The contrast between this R?ma and the preceding R?ma J?madagnya is brought out at Rm 1,73-5, a passage probably incorporated into the R?m?ya?a in about the third century AD, in which the two avat?ras illogically but dramatically confront each other, and the young R?ma D??arathi triumphs defiantly over his fearsome previous incarnation. (8) K???A (SOMETIMES REPLACED BY HIS BROTHER BALAR?MA: “STRONG R?MA”) K???a is another character whose origin is difficult to unravel. He is not even the hero of the epic in which he is first recorded, the Mah?bh?rata, where he plays a non-combatant role as adviser and comforter to the heroes, as charioteer to Arjuna, and most famously, but only in the later stages of redaction, as expounder of the Bhagavadg?t?; what gave rise to his avat?ra-status, and possibly to the avat?ra-concept as a whole, was the inclusion, at a late stage, of his theophany in the Bhagavadg?t? (which is itself a late part of the Mahabh?rata).9 His story was subsequently expanded in other directions, notably in the Bh?gavatapur??a, and so elevated is his status now that it is sometimes thought inappropriate for him to appear merely as one among the avat?ras, and his place in the scheme is then given to his elder half-brother, Balar?ma. K???a can even generate avat?ras of himself, as Peter Schreiner has noted for recent times, although understanding of the concept and its major figures can sometimes be hazy (Schreiner 1999: 275; Smith 1990: 6). (9) GAUTAMA BUDDHA: “GAUTAMA THE ENLIGHTENED ONE” (ALTERNATIVELY THE JINA) By contrast, avat?ra number 9 is a semi-historical figure. To find the Buddha, or sometimes the Jina (the founder of the Jain faith), reckoned among these incarnations of a Hindu god seems rather strange, but their role is to preserve the purity of Hinduism by leading the unwary to perdition (Brockington 1998: 286-7; Gail 1969); these leaders of heterodoxy have been turned into “helpers” of orthodoxy. (10) KALKI / KALKIN Kalki, the last avat?ra, has not yet appeared. Vi??u will again descend to earth, this time as a swordsman riding a white horse, alternatively just as the white horse, to purge and destroy the world at the end of this present degenerate age in a process which might be thought to stretch the usual definition of “help”, but nonetheless contributes to the overall cosmological plan. This millennial figure may have been inspired by the idea of Maitreya, the future Buddha, an idea itself influenced by Zoroastrian sources brought into northwest India during a period of invasions between the second century BC and the second century AD (Brockington 1998: 287). Unlike the eschatological events in other cosmological schemes such as Christianity or Scandinavian religion, this destruction is not final, for the Indian view of time is not linear but cyclical. Vi??u spends some time sleeping on the cosmic snake before a lotus stem springs from his navel and from its bud there emerges again the creator-god Brahm?, ready to restart the whole process of creation, degeneration, intervention, dissolution and re-creation. The term “helper” pre-supposes a second party, the person or group to be “helped”. In the context of Brahmanical observance under which the avat?ra-concept was developed, the implicit understanding is normally that the status, needs or interests of the “helped” are superior to those of the “helper”; the “helper” is an “assistant” rather than “one who confers a benefit”: bottom-up, rather than top-down. The human avat?ras, though gifted with superhuman strength, have voluntarily given up their divine attributes when they take birth on earth, and the process by which they are made aware of their divinity is a complex one, given that the outline plot and characterisation of their stories had been fixed several centuries before the whole concept of the avat?ra emerged. Given too the stature of the avat?ras, the situations remedied are of correspondingly cosmic importance, a threat to the universe as a whole (not even just to humanity), for instability and lack of order on earth are bound up with instability and lack of order in the natural world. The gods’ fears of domination by the anti-gods do not spring from class-selfishness alone, and even the Buddha or the Jina have a valid role to play in this process. In the avat?ra-system, Vi??u himself appears to be above the problems of the cosmos, acting not on his own behalf, but in response to the supplication of the other gods, as if he is not quite one of them. The avat?ras do not intervene in private struggles, however great their impact on individual human beings. This causes something of a problem in the case of both R?ma and K???a, the most prominent of the human avat?ras. Accordingly, R?ma’s quarrel, originally personal and lacking even national implications, was transformed into a cosmic struggle when it was adapted to accommodate Vi??u’s descent on to the scene,10 and K???a’s actual deeds, whether his participation in the action of the Mah?bh?rata or his vengeance on his wicked uncle, make little contribution to his status as avat?ra. It is the contrasting mediaeval bhakti devotional tradition that reverses the process and introduces the top-down element, the gracious, approachable god, R?ma or K???a, who intervenes to help individual worshippers overcome their personal difficulties. From almost the earliest stages of the Ram?ya?a’s development some of R?ma’s military exploits had raised uneasy moral questions: eventually in 1932 the Hindi poet Maithil??ara? Gupta published S?ket, presenting a bhakti-influenced view of R?m as born to show people the right way to a fulfilled existence, while accommodating this view to R?m’s epic role with the underlying implication that this will involve freeing India from British rule (Stasik 2002). In the developed form of the K???a story as presented by the Bh?gavatapur??a, K???a is first a rascally, adorable baby growing up incognito among a group of cow-herders, then a wild, defiant and charming teenager with whom all the young wives of the area fall helplessly in love. He is physically precocious and accomplished too, and defeats a number of deadly demons before killing his uncle, a tyrant who has usurped K???a’s father’s throne. His popular charm and graciousness as a herdsman flute-player have led to him, like R?ma, becoming one of the major gods of modern Hindus; whether his romantic and erotic escapades are to be taken at face value or interpreted as an allegory of the soul’s union with the divine is largely a matter for the devotee. As with R?ma, the dichotomy between the concepts of avat?ra and bhakti is not complete. K???a’s personal victories are supplemented by an episode reflecting the triumph of a new form of religion over the old Vedic gods. The youthful cowherd persuades his tribe to stop worshipping Indra, the rain god, in favour of the mountain Govardhana; Indra, outraged, retaliates with storms and floods, so K???a picks up the mountain, balances it on the tip of the little finger of his inauspicious left hand – a studied insult – and shelters people and cattle beneath it like an umbrella until Indra acknowledges the boy’s superiority; this protective gesture is minor compared to the exploits of the true avat?ras, but it reflects a considerable development from his original Mah?bh?rata role as non-combatant charioteer and adviser of his friend Arjuna in a devastating but essentially personal battle; it was the incorporation into that epic, at a late stage, of his Bhagavadg?t? theophany that gave rise to his avat?ra-status, a starting-point which can act equally as the summation of the whole concept: “Whenever there occurs a decline in righteousness and a surge in unrighteousness, then I send forth myself. To protect the good and to destroy evil-doers, in order to establish righteousness, I come into being from age to age.” (Bhagavadg?t? 4.7-8, trans. Brockington 1998: 273; cf. van Buitenen 1981: 87)
- [The Acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-acquisition-of-the-holy-spirit-of-god) - A conversation between St Seraphim of Sarov and Nikolay Motovilov. Motovilov wrote down many of his conversations with St Seraphim, including this famous Talk On the Purpose of the Christian Life, that took place in November 1831 in the forest near Sarov. This event has been depicted in several different icons of St Seraphim, and
- [Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth: From Ancient Egypt to Neoplatonism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/philosophy-as-a-rite-of-rebirth) - PHILOSOPHY AS A RITE OF REBIRTH FROM ANCIENT EGYPT TO NEOPLATONISM Algis Uždavinys The Prometheus Trust The Prometheus Trust 28 Petticoat Lane Dilton Marsh, Westbury Wiltshire, BA13 4DG, UK A registered charity, number 299648 PHILOSOPHY AS A RITE OF REBIRTH FROM ANCIENT EGYPT TO NEOPLATONISM Algis Uždavinys Published 2008 ISBN 978 1 898910 35 0 Algis Uždavinys asserts the moral right to be indentified as the author of this work Cover illustrations copyright Jenny Carrington British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group, Bodmin and Kings Lynn. The author and Prometheus Trust gratefully acknowledge the support of the Matheson Trust in the production of this work. THE MATHESON TRUST Promoting the Study of Comparative Religion The Matheson Trust promotes the study of comparative religion by supporting the publication and dissemination of scholarly works which elucidate the philosophical, metaphysical, cosmological and aesthetic dimensions of the great religious traditions of the world. The cover design includes Jenny Carrington?s „Golden Horus? with the kind permission of the artist. www.geocities.com/jennycarrington/ArtWorks PHILOSOPHY AS A RITE OF REBIRTH Table of Contents PREFACE .......................................................................................................i INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................iii I - UNDERSTANDING ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 1. Philosophy and the Eternal Wonder ................................................................ 1 2. Learning to Live and Learning to Die .............................................................. 4 3. Ancient Practices of Wisdom ............................................................................ 7 4. The True Ancient Philosophy and the Way of Pious Living ....................... 11 5. Understanding of Ancient Philosophy by Porphyry and Augustine .......... 15 6. From the Egyptian Soil to Hellas ...................................................................... 18 7. Translatability of Divine Names in Ancient Civilizations ............................ 23 8. Heracles and Philosophical Ascent ................................................................... 26 9. From Akhenaten to Thales ................................................................................ 30 10. ThalesandtheEgyptianMyths.........................................................................36 11. Water as Metaphysical Principle and Divine Substance ................................ 41 12. Metaphysical Meaning of Ancient Mythologies ............................................. 45 13. PythagoreanNumbersandtheirParadigms....................................................49 14. Standing on the Solar Barque............................................................................. 53 15. CelestialNileastheCauseofGeometry..........................................................58 16. The Apollonian Road to Rebirth....................................................................... 61 17. Philosophy as Divine Mystagogy and Beneficial Madness ........................... 66 18. Philosophy and the Power ofFaith: Towards the Final Union...................74 II - ETERNAL MEASURES AND SYMBOLS OF EGYPTIAN SAGES 1. On the Back of the Heavenly Cow ................................................................... 85 2. Proteus and the Egyptian Wisdom ................................................................... 88 3. Allegorical Myths and Philosophy in the Temples ........................................ 90 4. Porphyry De abstinentia IV.6-9............................................................................ 93 5. Sacred Animals, Philosophers, and Cosmic Numbers .................................. 95 6. Hieratic Powers and Symbols of the Ineffable Father .................................. 98 7. Philosophical Life of the Egyptian Priests ...................................................... 102 8. Proximity of the Gods and the Bau of Amun................................................. 105 9. Perfumes, Images, and Contemplations .......................................................... 108 10. Divine Knowledge and Paradigms for Philosophical Mysteries.................. 112 11. Priests and Spiritual Guides ............................................................................... 116 12. EgyptianScribesandtheWayofImhotep......................................................118 13. AmenhotepandTheologyofAmun................................................................121 III - IN THE REALM OF DIVINE SEMIOTICS 1. The Ramesside Icon and Three Hypostases of Plotinus .............................. 127 2. Back to One?s Native Star .................................................................................. 130 3. Archetypal Foundation of Hieroglyphic Signs and Colours ........................ 132 4. Divine Ideas and Symbols .................................................................................. 134 5. Symbolic Interpretation of Hieroglyphic Script ............................................. 137 6. Return to the Golden Age and Paradigms to be Imitated ............................ 139 7. Hieratic Myths and Symbols .............................................................................. 142 8. All Things and All Hieroglyphs ......................................................................... 144 9. Ancient Theories of Ideas .................................................................................. 146 10. Proclus? Conception of Divine Forms and Unities ....................................... 148 IV - BEING IN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN AND NEOPLATONIC THOUGHT 1. From Eidology to Metaphysics of Being and Beyond-Being....................... 153 2. Hierarchy of Priority and Posteriority .............................................................. 154 3. Indivisible and Divisible Being .......................................................................... 155 4. The One as Foundation of Being ..................................................................... 157 5. Incomprehensible Divine Unities ..................................................................... 159 6. Images of Divine Light ....................................................................................... 162 7. The One and Many according to Egyptians ................................................... 163 8. Levels of Being and Non-being......................................................................... 166 9. The Lord of Totality and His Magic................................................................. 168 10. Cosmogonical and Ontological Principles....................................................... 170 11. InvisibleGodandHisTheophanies.................................................................174 V - RITUALS OF DEIFICATION AND THEURGIC ASCENT 1. Depreciation of Hieratic Rites ........................................................................... 179 2. Rituals and Sacred Masks ................................................................................... 180 3. Climbing to the Divine State ............................................................................. 183 4. Cosmos and the Sacred Harmony of Strings .................................................. 186 5. On the Wing of Thoth: the Theurgic Way of Ra ........................................... 188 6. Divine Triads in Egyptian and Neoplatonic Thought................................... 191 7. Theurgic Assimilation to the Gods ................................................................... 196 8. Deification through the Eye of Horus ............................................................. 198 9. Spiritual Teachers and Sacred Masters ............................................................. 200 10. Radiant Power of Names and Flight to the Throne ...................................... 202 11. TheurgicUnionwiththeDivinePrinciple......................................................204 12. Intellect of the Father and His Cosmic Drama .............................................. 206 13. Elevating Powers in the Pharaonic State-Body .............................................. 210 14. The Perfect Man who Slew the Lords .............................................................. 212 15. Theurgic Rites and Sacramental Theologies.................................................... 214 VI - ANIMATION OF STATUES IN ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS AND NEOPLATONISM 1. Sacred Images and Idols ..................................................................................... 219 2. Vehicles of Divine Forces .................................................................................. 222 3. The Living Images of Everlasting Gods .......................................................... 223 4. Animation as Ritual of Union with the Descending Rays of Ra ................. 225 5. Opening of the Mouth and Awakening to Light ........................................... 227 6. The Sacramental Birth of Statues in Mesopotamia and Egypt .................... 228 7. The Way of the Golden Falcon......................................................................... 230 8. When the Womb-like Tomb is Opened .......................................................... 231 9. Divine Beauty and the Inner Golden Statue: From Egyptian Theology to Plotinus ................................................................................................... 233 VII - TELESTIC TRANSFORMATION AND PHILOSOPHICAL REBIRTH 1. Philosophy in the Tomb-Sanctuary .................................................................. 237 2. The Tomb as a Threshold of Light .................................................................. 238 3. Sacrificial Alchemy of Tombs and Altars ........................................................ 242 4. Alchemical Passage through Death .................................................................. 244 5. Mummification and Dialectic ............................................................................ 246 6. Musicians, Lovers, and Philosophers ............................................................... 248 7. Divine Knowledge and Theurgic Prayers ........................................................ 250 8. Intellect as the Spirit of Light ............................................................................ 254 9. The Osirian Initiation and Separation from the Mortal Body ..................... 256 10. ResurrectionoftheGoldenPhoenix................................................................259 11. TwoWaysoftheAmduat....................................................................................263 12. TheUnionofOsirisandRa...............................................................................266 13. The Inner Alchemical Work and Return to Itself.......................................... 269 14. MetaphysicsoftheHeart....................................................................................274 15. UnderstandingofSoulandBody......................................................................277 16. The Homecoming of Odysseus......................................................................... 278 17. From the Homeric Ghost to the Immortal Soul of Plato ............................ 280 18. Reawakening of Intellect and Rehabilitation of Images ................................ 284 GLOSSARY ....................................................................................................289 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................................323 INDEX.............................................................................................................333 CATALOGUE................................................................................................339 PHILOSOPHY AS A RITE OF REBIRTH FROM ANCIENT EGYPT TO NEOPLATONISM Preface This book issues a serious challenge to the orthodox view of philosophy, and its accompanying narrative of development. Ancient understanding viewed reality as a series of descending steps, starting with the most ineffable and most simple which is first unfolded through divinity and then moves down through varying conditions of existence – the highest of which are closest to the originating simplicity and are purely intelligible, but the lower being increasingly complex and changeable, ultimately becoming perceptible to the senses. These lower conditions of existence were not rejected as evil or illusive, but they were seen as deriving their worth and trustworthiness from their relation to the highest. Each plane of reality had its answering correspondence in the nature of the human being. Since the highest levels possessed the greatest intelligibility and stability, it was here that philosophers sought to centre the art and science of philosophy. For this reason philosophy was seen as an interior discipline which allowed a conscious and active participation in a divine and intellectual drama – in more modern terms it was considered to be a spiritual path, or a yoga of enlightenment. But at some point in the passage between the ancient and modern era, this view of philosophy and its purpose was largely lost, and today we find that that what is still called philosophy has allowed its centre to slip down the levels of reality. And, of course, the human faculties upon which modern philosophy is based are necessarily at the lower levels of thought: where philosophy was meditative, contemplative and even unitive, it is now confined to a narrow form of logical reason – forever stuck in the temporal world. Reason, once valued as a launching point to the realm of eternal intellect and thence super-eternal divinity, is now an end in itself. Modern philosophy has lost its nerve: like a pilot who no longer trusts his aircraft the forward thrust of reason races us along the ground but is never transferred to an upward movement into the free air. We now have the worst of both two possible worldviews: modern philosophy, generally speaking, no longer values metaphysics and theology (it considers both to be purely constructs of the human mind, with no basis in reality) and yet since the material world is no longer thought to be a manifestation of providential divinity, modernism cannot rid itself of a deep suspicion that body and matter are ultimately empty of goodness and meaning. We do not need to accept the present errors: what has been diminished by centuries of neglect can be restored. This book is not the start of a radical reappraisal of western philosophy and its origins, but it is by far the most coherent and strongest call to this task that has been written in recent times. Once we step back with its author and examine the external and internal evidence for European (in other words Greek) philosophy having grown out of that of the Egyptians, the unbiased reader must conclude that it is incredible that any other possibility should have been entertained. Why should the ii writers of antiquity have so consistently claimed that the best of their wise men had visited and learnt from the priests of Egypt unless there was a widespread and deeply held reverence for that land and its teachings? To appreciate how philosophy?s origins have been so thoroughly misrepresented, we need to follow Algis Uzdavinys? exposition of the way in which the true and original nature and purpose of philosophy has fallen from both the scholarly and the common view over these many centuries past. And while ultimately the failure to recognise the Egyptian roots of western philosophy may be considered as a problem largely confined to historical accuracy, the failure to understand its nature and purpose has had – and still has – the most profound, extensive and worrying consequences for the whole of humankind. This is why Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth is such a welcome contribution to the thought life of today. As with every radical change of position in any subject, there are likely to be details which will need to be readjusted once the dust has settled, so to speak, and other thinkers have added their own efforts to the task of exploring this new vista. Clearly the challenge this book lays down to the philosophers of today is to consider the very essence of philosophy as a participation in divine reality and, therefore, its activities as being primarily those of inner vision rather than mere logic. Once this position is seen as valid – and this may take time, as inner vision is itself a discipline which requires gradual development – we can then move back across the writings of the tradition dating from between its Egyptian and Neoplatonic phases in order to consider them in this light. At present several writers, for example, see Plato himself as part of the movement away from divine vision towards the limitations of purely logical reason. We need to ask whether this is really so, or whether modern rationalistic schools have so thoroughly misrepresented him as a sceptical logician that this has been accepted too readily by those who are moving towards this radical revision of philosophy: if this questioning is approached with an open mind, we may well find that Plato?s dialogues, replete as they are with passages of mythic images, with descriptions of Socrates in meditative states, and with their constant references to traditional myth and initiation, are in reality central to philosophy as rebirth. This is an exciting exploration awaiting further research and deep thought. Leaving this aside, we can see in Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth that a sympathetic exploration of Ancient Egyptian high culture so clearly connects with the last flowering of Greek philosophy in the teachings of the late Platonists as well as with Eastern doctrines that we must again consider the now unfashionable concept of the existence of a perennial and universal philosophy. The truths of this philosophy, as Thomas Taylor says, “which though they have been concealed for ages in oblivion, have a subsistence coeval with the universe, and will again be restored, and flourish, for very extended periods, through all the infinite revolutions of time.” Tim Addey, October 2008 PHILOSOPHY AS A RITE OF REBIRTH INTRODUCTION The title of our monograph may appear rather strange and paradoxical to those who are uncritically tied to the prevailing modern systems of classification and presentation of “reality”. Since philosophy now is irremediably reduced to an abstract philosophical discourse, itself frequently viewed as “an illness of language” by academic would-be- therapists, it is often very difficult to realize that an essential aspect of all ancient philosophy consists in the living praxis which faithfully follows the course of already established spiritual exercises and imitates archetypal patterns. The art of living demanded by the spiritual and material economy of the ancient theocratic state (itself regarded as an image of the celestial kingdom) and, eventually, by philosophy, understood as “love of wisdom”, was not only a lived exercise, but, first and foremost, a lived and correctly performed sacred ritual of the great divine Mysteries, that is, the Mysteries of existence as played out by Being, Life, and Intellect themselves. It would be unwise to pay too much attention to certain particular terms, for example, to argue that “philosophy” is exactly that term which should be applied to every manifestation of coherent human thought at all costs, or that it needs to be saved from the modern abomination by all means. However, a consistent logic allows us to use this term in different historical and cultural contexts, in spite of the conventionally accepted usage restricted, as a rule, to certain exceptional methods of investigation or to particular fields of knowledge. This scholarly freedom of interpretation is not to be viewed as a frivolous voluntarism, for the simple reason, at least, that so-called philosophical rationalism can itself be traced back to the hieratic systems of ancient semiotics which are logically coherent meta-structures of metaphysical knowledge. In this respect, one should remember that even empirical and positivistic studies may be regarded as “fantasies elaborated in the genre of objective science and technical formula”.1 By extension, one can speak of the genres and topoi not only in literature, but also in all aspects of human social and individual life, including philosophical reasoning, creative imagination, and any kind of “experience”. Even so-called scientific research and, as a consequence, contemporary technologies have their own “literary style” and contain hidden ontological premises that are utterly mythical, if not fantastic. Therefore James Hillman argues: “Our lives are the enactment of our dreams; our case histories are from the very beginning, archetypally, dramas; we are masks (personae) through which the gods sound (personare)... All ways of speaking of archetypes are translations from one metaphor to another. Even sober operational definitions in the language of science and logic are no less metaphorical than an image which presents the archetypes as root ideas, iv Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth psychic organs, figures of myth, typical styles of existence, or dominant fantasies that govern consciousness”.2 Instead of asking “what is philosophy?”3, one should perhaps ask what kind of contents, i.e., what kind of mental activities, spiritual dimensions, methods, attitudes, practices, or even behavioural and ritual patterns may be subscribed under the name of “philosophy” when understood in the ancient sense of the way leading to wisdom. Therefore our present intention is to show that philosophia in its Pythagorean, Platonic, and Neoplatonic form is structurally, thematically, and even genetically related to the ancient traditions of the Middle East, and especially those of Egypt. The main distinction which characterizes Hellenic philosophy is not rationality as such (because the mythological world-views and related philological or hermeneutical strategies are even more rational, systematic and coherent wholes), but its, partial at least, devaluation of images and adherence to the reasoning in abstract categories and “naked facts” of logic. However, the main task of this philosophy remains essentially the same: to change perverted human nature, to transform it, eventually leading it to happiness and to a restored divine identity. This task is in fact directly inherited from the ancient “philosophies”, that is, from the mysteries of death, transformation, and spiritual rebirth, and the related cosmogonical theories, systems of archetypal symbolism, and ritualized exercises of the “normative divine life”. The conventional story of “Western philosophy”, established and canonized in the 18th and 19th centuries, tells us that philosophy consists in replacing myth by reason and thereby raising a rational society with rational laws. For the European Enlightenment, it means the elimination of religion and of all irrational superstitions. Here “philosophy” is identified as a secular and rationalistic enterprise, directed against the “idols” of religious imagination and faith, or, if a compromise should be involved, as a rational apology for Christian sentiments, morality, and the “natural” right of world dominion. This very compelling post-Kantian identification of philosophy with an abstract philosophical discourse still dominates both scholarly and popular consciousness and provokes different reactions, especially those raised by Traditionalists from one side and by Postmodernists from another. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, one of the leading expositors of contemporary Traditionalist thought, nonetheless defines philosophy as “a wisdom about knowledge”, maintaining that “the problems of philosophy are evidently those of rationalisation”, aimed at correlating the data provided by empirical experience through a reduction of particulars to universals. He says: “Beyond this, however, philosophy has been held to mean a wisdom not so much about particular kinds of thought, as a wisdom about thinking, and an analysis of what it means to think, and an enquiry as to what may be the nature of the ultimate reference of thought. In this sense the problems of philosophy are with respect to the ultimate nature of Introduction v reality, actuality or experience; meaning by reality whatever is in act and not merely potential... Knowledge is not then of individual presentations, but of types of presentation; in other words, of things in their intelligible aspect, i.e., of the being that things have in the mind of the knower, as principles, genera and species. Insofar as knowledge is directed to the attainment of ends it is called practical; in so far as it remains in the knower, theoretical or speculative”.4 In addition to being abstract, philosophy must be systematic so as to make one logical whole.5 Now it is fairly clear that any of the great mythological and religious systems constitutes a closed logical whole, based on strictly metaphysical premises. Therefore A. K. Coomaraswamy, partly following the Peripatetic example, actually speaks of two philosophies. The First Philosophy, which stands in accord with “revealed truth” (or simply serves as its rational vehicle), is“no longer in the first place deductive and secondarily inductive, but inductive from first to last, its logic proceeding invariably from the transcendental to the universal, and thence as before to the particular. This First Philosophy, indeed, taking for granted the principle „as above, so below? and vice versa, is able to find in every microcosmic fact the trace or symbol of a macrocosmic actuality, and accordingly resorts to „proof? by analogy; but this apparently deductive procedure is here employed by way of demonstration, and not by way of proof, where logical proof is out of the question, and its place is taken either by faith (Augustine?s credo ut intelligam) or by the evidence of immediate experience (alaukikapratyaksa)”.6 Accordingly, the subject of metaphysics is described as being that “of the Supreme Identity as an indissevarable unity of potentiality and act, darkness and light...”7 The definition of metaphysics as invariably related to the monistic concept of an absolute Supreme Identity is not self-evident without a considerable hermeneutical attempt to explain it or construct such universal meta-theory which would be able to satisfy one?s “philosophical mind” in accord with particular speculative premises. Those premises include certain specific notions of immortality and eternity, death and rebirth, as well as an elaborated (often mythologized) hierarchy of being and a more or less explicit theory of divine archetypes. All these philosophical concepts, albeit expressed in a language of myth, symbol, and ritual, are attested in the ancient Egyptian civilization and stand at the roots of Hellenic modernization of that ancient “philosophy” which is based on identifications with the divine names and qualities that imply alchemical transformations within the officially established frame of the theurgic semiotics and royal iconology. In this respect, Franz Rosenthal speaks about “a common variation of the I-am- you concept” which (as the paradigmatic mystical assertion “I am you”) is widespread in the ancient Egyptian, Assyrian, and Indian spiritual milieu. F. Rosenthal, being a faithful modernist, attributes its origins to “the murky world of magical longings” and argues as follows: vi Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth “Magic identification was a kind of standard procedure for solving the mysteries of both the natural and supernatural worlds. It was stated that this god is that god, a is b, and immediately, power was gained and difficulties were removed. The Sanskrit Brahmanas are replete with statements of this sort: „All the deities are Agni; all the deities are Vishnu...? The newcomer who is examined by the Brahman with the question „Who are you?? is supposed to answer „I am yourself?... Gnostic religions, in particular, are characterized by the fact that they reconstruct the power system that holds the world together or may tear it apart by means of an intricate series of mutual identifications of all known physical and historical data and metaphysical abstractions. The understanding of the system is the first and decisive step toward salvation”.8 Knowledge of the divine becomes possible only through identification with it, and this identification (or gradual transformation and moving through the series of identities), culminating in union, is the ultimate goal of the Egyptian philosophical way of life. This is a path which implies purification, correct performance of hieratic rites, moral perfection, contemplation, and knowledge which proved to be the main driving force of illumination, alchemical transformation and restoration of one?s true divine identity. Pythagorean and Platonic philosophy, though operating on a different level of epistemology and dialectic, reveals the same hidden patterns. Therefore our aim is to explore these patterns and (as far as possible) indicate the ways of esoteric transmission, although the latter question is always secondary and rather marginal, mostly important for those naïve enthusiasts of historical research whose scope is limited to supposed empirical or mechanical “influences”. In short, certain aspects of Hellenic (especially Neopythagorean and Neoplatonic) metaphysics consist in designation and philosophical description of the same divine principles and cosmogonical manifestations (the same in a universal sense of philosophia perennis, not of exact coincidence in the realm of historical facts) which are already explicitly or implicitly presented in the hieroglyphic images and symbols employed by the Egyptian priests. The Greek philosophers themselves traced the seeds of their haireseis back to the Egyptian hieratic tradition. The Neoplatonists recognized the divine origin of philosophia and compared it to metaphysical rites, or mysteries, aimed at the ascent of the soul and its final reunion with the demiurgic Intellect (Nous) and the One. This mystical task (the pathway of gods, devayana, in Upanishadic terms) implied just such an ontological, cosmological, and imaginal context of human existence which was inseparable from the overwhelming noetic network of divine energies. The word and image, or any other theurgic symbol, were taken as essential to the process of joining the human soul to its paradigms. The universe itself was regarded as a kind of multi-dimensional text written by the divine sophia. Therefore “to philosophize” means to be in accord with this world-governing providence and employ certain sacramental esoteric Introduction vii hermeneutics for the correct reading of the ontological hieroglyphs. As Pierre Lory says: “By naming a thing of the world, the human being awakens because the name brings forth the internal reality which corresponds to what exists in himself”.9 Since human languages, in certain ideal respects, are taken in traditional societies to be the refraction in the human mind of the noetic cosmos and its organization, the correct creative and ritualized cultic use of sacred language itself (along with all possible riddles, puns, metaphysical etymologies, associations, and exegetical twists) may be regarded as tantamount to “philosophizing”. The end of this transforming speech and this “reading” is one?s transformation, awakening, and rebirth. Accordingly, even moving across the qualitative and symbolic days of a sacred calendar is no less than following the “philosophical way” towards the desired integration by imitating the circumambulation of the Year. This both demiurgic and theurgic circle of the Year not only represents the individual?s piligrimage to the archetypal principles (and his dramatic experience of the sacred), but serves as an actual model of one?s philosophy in all its mystical, social, political, economical, ethical, and aesthetic aspects. If this traditional way of participation, of direct mythical experience and “surrender” (which, nonetheless, may involve the heroic aspect of initiation and trial) should be called “philosophy”, then to philosophize means not to belong to the case of an extraordinary exception, but to follow one?s own “predestined” path – as if moving through the archetypal Text of theophanies, masks, and changing ranks of identities to the polarities (those of Horus and Seth, of deva and asura) which transcend all duality. When radically formulated in terms of metaphysical “identities”, this final goal of philosophy – like the final goal of the ascent accomplished by the golden Horus in the Pyramid Texts – may be regarded as the building up of the tomb or the altar of sacrifice. Thus A. K. Coomaraswamy says: “What metaphysics understands by immortality and by eternity implies and demands of every man a total and uncompromising denial of himself and a final mortification, to be dead and buried in the Godhead... For the Supreme Identity is no less a Death and a Darkness than a Life and a Light, no less Asura than Deva... And this is what we understand to be the final purport of the First Philosophy.”10 To call this hieratic enterprise – initially related to the particular trends of ancient thought – by the term of the “First Philosophy” is a matter of mere convention inherited from the tradition of Western scholasticism. However, the same idea of spiritual rebirth and final union dominated both Egyptian cultic practices and sophisticated Neoplatonic thought. It is no wonder that Modernism (partly based on the Protestant legacy) rejects altogether this kind of sacramental philosophy and, instead, presents as philosophy its own way of explaining things and of imposing reductionist ideological fantasies. It is even more interesting, however, viii Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth that so-called Postmodernism enjoys breaking with the entire philosophical tradition (classified, idolized, and cherished by Modernism) which, presumably, runs from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes and Hegel. Certain critics of modern social institutions describe this breaking as a rebellion against the totalitarian tendency in Western philosophy, thereby affirming as salutary the mind?s powerlessness to “think” the so-called Other and, consequently, instead of negative theology promoting all kinds of sheer irrationalism and stupidity. Michel Foucault argues: “The death of God sent all the stable forms of previous thought up in flames and used their charred remains to draw strange and perhaps impossible faces.”11 Richard Rorty, another influential writer, speaks of the utter bankruptcy of traditional philosophizing and of what he calls “epistemologically centred philosophy”.12 His ruthless criticism is mainly directed against the whole epistemological project of modernity, initiated by the followers of Descartes and Kant. However, at the same time and by the same stroke, the Postmodern relativists ridicule all traditional metaphysical systems (especially those belonging to the Neoplatonic stream), viewing their claims for divine truth and beauty as being utterly groundless ideological fictions. Philosophy itself is said to be coming to its unglorious end, since the “post-philosophical” attitude finds its solipsistic pleasure in rejecting any form of universal theory. The world is turned upside down. Therefore it would be rather incorrect to think that one of the main characteristics of Postmodern thought consists of its insistence on the primacy of the practical over the theoretical. The praxis of self-indulgence, forgetfulness, deviation, and sin (if not an actual crime in the name of pseudo-humanism and democracy) is surely not the same as the spiritual praxis of purification, askesis, contemplation, self-sacrifice, remembrance, and virtue. The Postmodern fighters against the metaphysical order of things and against any shari„ah (that is, the sacred law) think that the dragon represents the values of the modern administrated and disciplinary world; therefore “these values must be destroyed if the spirit is to become the value-creating, life-affirming child”.13 When spiritual sanity itself is turned into a fantasy, one thing is forgotten and neglected, namely, that, as Frithjof Schuon pointed out: “Intelligence has, on the one hand, no effective worth unless its contents are the fundamental and saving truths; on the other, intelligence must be in balance with virtue and faith”.14 Accordingly, the philosophical relativism of the “life-affirming child” (to whom wisdom is tantamount to a seductive and wild public woman) is capable only of laughter and irony with their compelling logic of theatre. And the crazy Postmodern theatre is not that which presents the mysterious story of al-Khidr and Moses (even if seen through the eyes of Mulla Nasreddin), but that which shows the ugly traits of a trivial sado- masochist play. This is because “an intelligence devoid of truth remains beneath itself”, according to the apt remark made by F. Schuon.15 As Gary B. Madison says: “We are inevitably condemned to relativism when, rejecting like Rorty the metaphysical notion of Truth, we reject also all metanarratives, when, that is, we reject the legitimacy of theory, which always seeks some form of universal validity. And, similarly, we find ourselves in a state of nihilism when, rejecting the metaphysical notion of Reality, we go on to assert as well that everyone?s „truths? are merely their own private „fictions?, when, that is, we equate fiction with mere semblance (simulacrum) and deny it the power to recreate or refigure, and thus enhance, what is called „reality?.”16 Our present task is not to argue against the mental acrobatics of those who follow R. Rorty or to claim that we are in possession of certain exclusive “formal” truth, whatever this word may mean for different audiences. On the contrary, our purpose is quite humble: to discuss certain parallels between ancient Egyptian and Hellenic thought, and to show that philosophia (apart of other important aspects) is directly or indirectly based on the hieratic patterns of ancient cults and may itself be regarded as a rite of transformation and noetic rebirth. This hermeneutical rite of “philosophizing” (which partly consists in moving through the ontological text, that is, through the cosmic maze of ideas, thoughts, words, images, symbols, and deeds) is not simply a playful metaphorical enterprise that belongs to the realm of rhetoric, but involves the restoration of one?s right mind and promises the final reunion with divine principles. The metaphysical discourse thereby produced is based on noetic intuitions, ambivalent terms, and paradoxical images, thus constituting the closed “hermeneutical circle” of its own. It cannot be simply rendered into the positivistic language of “facts” or turned into the “merely dead fiction” of the contemporary historical museum, without losing its hidden theurgic dimension, imaginative appeal and transformative barakah. Although every hermeneutical perspective constructs and reconstructs more or less coherent and meaningful pictures of the past, always based on the particular spiritual needs and expectations of their real or imagined audiences, it would be unwise and incorrect to disregard most of them or to neglect them altogether simply because one?s mental horizon is ruled by learned “scientific” tales of a different kind. Always keeping in mind the larger metaphysical picture and accepting that different variations of hierarchy, far from being simply Platonic or Neoplatonic “inventions”, are valid for their wider ontological contexts, one can equate par analogiam, for example, the solar Atum-Ra to the Neoplatonic Nous, or one can use the terms sekhem, shakti, and dunamis as being, in certain cases, inter- changeable. However, such rather loose comparisons are not meant to claim the strict coincidence of their objects (figures of thought, literary Introduction ix x Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth forms, underlying symbols, myths, and philosophical categories) in every respect or to “prove” that, historically speaking, any particular concept of a certain tradition straightforwardly “derives” from another one which is similar but belongs to a foreign culture. To quote J. Hillman again (despite his persistent wish to reduce and transfer noetic realities to the level of psychic imagination): “The mind from the beginning must be based in the blue firmament, like the lazuli stone and sapphire throne of mysticism, the azure heaven of Boehme, philos sophia. ...it is a mythical place that gives metaphorical support to metaphysical thinking. It is the presentation of metaphysics in image and form.”17 The present monograph consists of seven parts which are unequal in length and subdivided into chapters. Parts IV and VI were initially written as separate essays, then revised and integrated into the book. This project would never have been accomplished without the kind support of the Matheson Trust. For their considerable assistance I am grateful to Reza Shah-Kazemi, Khalid Naqib, and my wife Virginia. 1 The Essential James Hillman. A Blue Fire, ed. by Thomas Moore, London: Routledge, 1994, p.3 2 Ibid., p.82; p.83 3 See: Pierre Hadot Qu?est-ce que la philosophie antique?, Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1995 4 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy On the Pertinence of Philosophy.- What is Civilization? And Other Essays, Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1989, p.14; p.13 5 Ibid., p.15 6 Ibid., p.17 7 Ibid., p.18 8 Franz Rosenthal “I am you” – Individual Piety and Society in Islam.- Muslim Intellectual and Social History. A Collection of Essays, London: Variorum, 1990, ch. IX, p.34; p.36 9 Pierre Lory Know the World to Know Yourself.- The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn et al., Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2001, p.721 10 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, ibid., p.28 11 Michel Foucault The Order of Things, New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1973, p.263 12 Richard Rorty Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979, p.357 13 Deborah Cook Amor Fati and Spirit of the Lion.- Joyful Wisdom: A Post Modern Ethics of Joy, ed. by M. Zlomislic et al., St. Catharines, Ontario: Joyful Wisdom Publishing, 1991, p.101 14 Frithjof Schuon Islam and the Perennial Philosophy, tr. by J. Peter Hobson, London: World of Islam Festival Publishing Company, 1976, p.72 15 Ibid., p.86 16 Gary B. Madison Coping with Nietzsche?s Legacy: Rorty, Derrida, Gadamer.- Joyful Wisdom: A Post Modern Ethics of Joy, ed. by M. Zlomislic et al., St. Catharines, Ontario: Joyful Wisdom Publishing, 1991, pp.74-75 17 The Essential James Hillman. A Blue Fire, pp.34-35 UNDERSTANDING ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 1. Philosophy and Eternal Wonder One must be careful in thinking that philosophia first appeared with Pythagoras (who visited all the Egyptian priests, acquiring all the wisdom each possessed, according to Iamblichus in De vita Pythagorica 4)1, simply because he invented this term, according to the ancient Hellenic tradition. For Pythagoras, philosophy, associated with the way of Apollo, consists in a purification, in becoming aware of the divine principles and in assimilation to God. This Pythagorean way of life (bios Puthagorikos: Rep.600ab) cannot be opposed to sacred rites, because the true and immortal divine nature is achieved not only by means of theoria, or contemplation of the universal principles of harmony, but through praxis which is both askesis and therapeia. Pythagoras himself conducted the hieratic rituals behind a veil, but only those who had passed all five-year tests, initiations and necessary purifications were privileged to see the face of the Philosopher, their divine hegemon (spiritual guide and leader). Thus, with certain subtle reservations, we should accept the claim made by David R. Fideler: “Yet while Pythagoreanism remains closely related to the Orphic thought of the period, the clearly distinguishing factor between the two is that for the Pythagoreans liberation from the wheel is obtained not through religious rite, but through philosophy, the contemplation of first principles. Hence, philosophia is a form of purification, a way to immortality. As others have observed, whereas the Eleusinian mysteries offered a single revelation, and Orphism a religious way of life, Pythagoras offered a way of life based on philosophy”.2 However, philosophia, or rather philosophizing – understood in the ancient sense as a special way of life and paideia, as seeking of truth – is modelled on the inner theurgic patterns and cosmic rhythms. It is a grave mistake to regard “ritual” (telete, or ritus, the last word being closely connected with the Vedic concept of rta, the universal order maintained by the constant theia erga, divine works) merely as an external ceremony which injures the Protestant and Modern iconoclastic sensibilities. Perhaps the “wonder” which, according to the ancients, provokes the “birth of philosophy” has nothing arbitrary and “spontaneous” as understood in the Modern liberal sense, because this secondary wonder repeats the primeval cosmogonical wonder. In Pharaonic Egypt, the wonder hymned by the Eastern Bau (the spiritual manifestations of Thoth) at the rise, or rebirth, of the Sun reflects the eternal wonder which constitutes the blissful divine Self-consciousness at the appearance of the noetic Sun, of Atum-Ra, who stems from the abyss of ineffable waters. And this wonder at sunrise is not complete without the wonder at sunset 2 Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth when the mystery of death is revealed and Anubis leads to the tomb and the inner Osirian temple of alchemical transformation. If human wonder (thaumazein), when facing life and death, divine glories and terrestrial miseries, is the true origin of philosophizing, then we should agree with Ch. Evangeliou that philosophical speculation can go as far back as the appearance of Anthropos.3 But the related passage from the Theaetetus of Plato proves that this wonder is discussed along with the concept of initiation: “This sense of wonder is the mark of the Philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin, and he was a good genealogist who made Iris daughter of Thaumas... Then just take a look around and make sure that none of the uninitiated overhears us. I mean by uninitiated the people who believe that nothing is real save what they can grasp with their hands and do not admit that actions and processes or anything invisible can count as real” (Theaet.155dc). Plato clearly states that philosophical wonder is wonder raised by things real and invisible, i.e., the Forms, or noetic realities, and this “miraculous” philosophical knowledge regarding the ascent to the Intelligible realm is not arrived at or learned at random, but constitutes the essence of initiation. In addition to initiation and guides, philosophy requires leisure, understood as a necessary condition for the contemplative life, as long as this “leisure” does not consist of the regular toil of the “liturgic life”, conducted in the Egyptian temples nor, by extension, the daily life dictated by pious ascetic attitudes. According to the testimony provided by Aristotle: “That philosophy is not a science of production is clear even from the history of the earliest philosophers. For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize... And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of wisdom, for the myth is composed of wonders” (Metaph.982b11-19). “Hence when all such inventions were already established, the sciences which aim neither to give pleasure nor to procure the necessities of life were discovered, and discovered first in the places where men first began to have leisure. This is why the mathematical arts were founded in Egypt; for there the priestly caste was allowed to be at leisure” (ibid., 981b 19-24). Those contemporary scholars who have a strong ideological bias (especially when the academic scepticism itself becomes a sort of sinister ideology), a bias based on the Modern and Postmodern “scientific” mythology, are condemned to blindness and may quickly dismiss the following claim of Isocrates about Pythagoras: “On a visit to Egypt he became a student of the religion of the people, and was first to bring to the Greeks all philosophy, and more conspicuously than others he seriously interested himself in sacrifices and in ceremonial purity...” (Bousiris 28). According to Isocrates, the ancient Egyptians, who are strong in their piety and in practical wisdom (eusebeia kai phronesis), introduced the practice of philosophy (philosophias askesin) for the soul, “a pursuit which has the power, not only to establish laws but also to investigate the nature of the universe” (ibid.21ff). This perspective shows Pythagoras as merely the inspired and gifted imitator who played a role of philosophical avatar for the young Hellenic civilization and built up his philosophy on the already firmly established tradition. To assert that philosophy (and it has many different forms beyond that of discursive Western rationalism) begins with wonder means to trace it back to the tep sepi (the Egyptian “first time”), to the noetic revelations and the archetypal Ancestor of humanity itself. In fact, philosophy deals with just a few essential questions: (1) Who we are, and (2) What we ought to do, in order to improve our being and escape the threat of perdition. Knowledge of our identities and relations to the archetypal realm is not necessarily produced by fluctuating human opinions and fancies: more frequently it is regarded as God-sent from the beyond, revealed from above or from within. It is therefore no wonder that for Arabs and Muslims in general Adam is the first among prophets. This theme is elaborated and developed by the eminent Andalusian Sufi Ibn al-„Arabi (sometimes called Ibn Aflatun, Son of Plato) who regards Adam as the very first principle of reflection and the spirit of the reflected form. For the shaykh al-akbar, Adam is equivalent to the archetype of humankind, the principle of the creative process, close to the Plotinian Intellect (Nous) or, perhaps, its image at the level of the universal Soul. Adam integrates in himself all cosmic realities and their individual manifestations, and all the Names of God; therefore he is an agent of eidetic knowledge. Ibn al-„Arabi says: “Were it not that the Reality permeates all beings as form [in His qualitative form], and were it not for the intelligible realities, no [essential] determination would be manifest in individual beings. Thus, the dependence of the Cosmos on the Reality for its existence is an essential factor... You are now acquainted with the Wisdom involved in the corporeal formation of Adam, his outer form, as you have become acquainted with the spiritual formation of Adam, his inner form, namely, that he is the Reality [as regards the latter] and that he is creature [as regards the former]. You have also learned to know his rank as the all- synthesizing [form] by which he merits the [divine] Regency”.4 According to Neoplatonic philosophy, the divine Intellect thinks of the totality of the universe of Forms to which it itself has given rise. He is the eternal creator and sustainer of all subsequent ontological manifestation, therefore at any specific time and any place one by necessity can glimpse Understanding Ancient Philosophy 3 4 Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth the same truths and construct similar metaphysical doctrines, though expressed in different terms, styles, and images. Such perspective provides a firm foundation for the “perennial philosophy” in its countless outflows. The boundless noetic world (kosmos noetos) consists in complete non- spatiality and contains in itself the principles of any possible wisdom, regardless of their sometimes distorted earthly reflections and historical trajectories. The only problem is that most of the so-called Modern thinkers cannot accept the “hypothesis” of the Forms or the divine Intellect. According to their presumption, any philosophy that approaches or claims to approach the divine presence, unity, or wisdom, ends in the struggle of absolute truths and confronts only its own deadly violence. Positivistic optimism gives promise for salvation through ever increasing information, sometimes worthless and even harmful for spiritual integrity. In a certain sense J. Derrida may be correct in describing violence as the ideological dominance exercised by metaphysics (in the Modern distorted sense of this term), but his own linguistic grammatology exercises a similar, if not greater violence.5 With permanent cynicism and laughter one cannot cope with contradictions which are present at the level of discursive thought, and so eventually one may depart from “philosophy” altogether. However, our present task is to analyse ancient ways of thought which are inseparable from noetic certainty, revelation and ascent to the divine. 2. Learning to Live and Learning to Die The traditional Egyptian paideia (education) consisted in energizing superior and integral wisdom for the good of the entire body-like state (permeated and sustained by the royal ka, the vital principle) and for the soul (ba), both governed by the sacred principle of maat (truth, right measure, justice). This paideia had been under the rulership of the priests, or philosophers, as Isocrates maintained, because the priests had a leisure (schole), which allowed learning (schole), aimed at producing the contemplative man (aner theoretikos). If we accept the fact that the ancient Hellenes (not only the Pythagoreans) revered the Egyptian form of government and imitated their teachings regarding the soul and their spiritual exercises, there is no reason to doubt that philosophia (at least in a certain special sense) is indeed a product of Egypt. The term itself (Isocrates is among the first of those who started to use it) may simply be a rendering of an analogous Egyptian term, now unknown, but probably related to some compound of meri (love) and rekh (knowledge). It is not necessary to be a cultural hero to understand that the term “philosophy” may cover and include different ways of thought which cannot be reduced to the “monomythic” Hellenic rationalism, praised by those who thereby try to conceal their own intellectual crimes and excuse some Modern superstitions. As John P. Anton observes, while discussing the philosophical trust in eros and in the power of logos (which cannot endure without the divine language of Being and sacred Mythology): “I feel certain that the right to philosophize, to gain access to this intellectual virtue is not something one secures by paying annual dues to the American Philosophical Association”.6 It is difficult to decide whether the Greek term nous (intellect, intuition, perceiving, essential and non-discursive understanding) may really be derived from the Egyptian verb nu, nua (see, look), related to the Greek noeo (see, perceive, observe), or the Greek sophia (wisdom) – from the Egyptian seba (teaching, learning, star), as Martin Bernal boldly asserts.7 However, such philological uncertainty cannot prevent us from recognizing the Egyptian “philosophy”, or love of wisdom and learning. The term sebayt, teaching, employed by the Egyptians themselves, was used to designate various texts of instructions, complaints and praises, including those belonging to the wisdom-literature. Such ancient sages (sometimes turned into the archetypal authorities) as Hardjedet, Imhotep, Neferty, Khety, Ptahemdjehuty, Khakheperresonbe, Ptahhotpe and Kaires, mentioned by the Papyrus Chester Beatty IV of Ramesside date, may be regarded as spiritual guides and philosophers. Also we suspect that some kind of “philosophy” may be deduced from the symbolism of sacred art and the temple rites, because the later Platonic philosophy is consciously or unconsciously modelled according to the hidden ritualistic patterns. The wisdom-literature as such constitutes only a small and perhaps “modernized” part of the abundant writings produced in ancient Egypt. It assigned the central position to Neter (“God” as an anonymous term), regarded as Creator and Sustainer of all things, the sovereign Lord, supreme Judge and ever-present Helper, the invisible and omnipotent Shepherd of mankind. Man?s responsibilities towards Him consist of worship, obedience and trust, especially emphasized in the Ramesside age, when personal piety becomes an exemplary virtue. The ideal of the truly silent man (ger maa), first found in early wisdom-literature and developed by the New Kingdom (1550-1070 B.C.) theologies, is really the Pythagorean ideal. This concept of silence is not only the prerogative of initiates who face the ineffable Principle, but includes the proper attitude before a deity in the temple and in the worshipper?s heart, good manners in the presence of teacher, higher official and friend, self-control (ger) and subduing of passions, exercised by the “rational soul”, to put it into the later Hellenic terms. Sometimes this ruling principle is understood and represented as the overwhelming ka of the Pharaoh, who himself is the Son of Ra. Understanding Ancient Philosophy 5 6 Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth The ancient Egyptian texts not only deal with the fate of the soul (ba) in the Netherworld, but provide the motivation for the good life here and now by doing the will of God (sekheru en neter). The admonitions inscribed in the tomb of Petosiris, the renowned sage and priest of Thoth (around 4th century B.C.), appeal to the living: “O you who come afterwards, O every man who reads writing, come and read these inscriptions which are in this tomb that I may guide you to the path of life and tell you your conduct, [in order that you may moor at the harbour of the ci]ty of generations. Should you hold firm to my sayings, you will discover their value and will thank me for them.”8 This one and other similar texts (sebayt) advise the reader to follow truth and wisdom in every pursuit, i.e., to live and depart to the beautiful West (to die) according to the established patterns of a pious and righteous servant of God. A student of ancient civilizations must remember constantly that even in Graeco-Roman antiquity philosophy was regarded as spiritual guidance toward a happy life as well as initiation, successful transformation and integration into the “divine chorus” after death. I. Hadot describes it briefly as characterized by two paradigmatic formulas: learning to live and learning to die, where the latter formula can be regarded as the logical presupposition of the former.9 Seen in this light, philosophia is a method aimed at the elimination of irrational fears, ambitions, and passions, at transformation and recovering of our essential identity. It requires the aspirant to act in a pious and holy fashion (eusebos kai hosios), realizing that all initiations and visions are conferred on intellect by the hidden powers within the immense temple of the gods, which is the universe itself. “Everything is full of gods”, according to Thales of Miletus (fr.22DK); therefore in order to philosophize it is necessary to be pious. Since a parallel is established between (1) a temple of initiation like that of Eleusis and (2) the cosmos, the most holy of temples, human beings observe many wonders and initiatory spectacles (mustika theamata) in both of them. For this reason, the ancient Egyptians present the image of the stability of principles in “the holiest of temples which is the world” (Proclus In Tim. I.124.16-19). The time between birth and death is an uninterrupted feast and liturgy which must be properly performed: “For the world is a very holy temple and most worthy of God; man is introduced into it by birth and there he does not contemplate statues (agalmaton) made by the hand of man and deprived of movement, but the sensible realities which the divine Intellect has brought into being in imitation of the intelligible realities, as Plato says... Our life which is an absolutely perfect admission and initiation into these mysteries (muesin onta kai teleten teleiotaten) must be full of confidence and joy... But these feasts which God offers to us and in which he is the mystagogue are profaned if we spend the best part of our lives in lamentation, recriminations and exhausting anxieties” (Plutarch De tranquillitate animi 20.477cd). In antiquity, the theoretical side of philosophy, if this specific side existed at all apart from the general theological and mythical outlook, was subordinated to the practical side. This practical side (which included contemplation) was regarded as “philosophizing” proper, and applied to all aspects of life - political, ethical, liturgical and mystical. Being considered as spiritual guidance and education toward all goodness, beauty, and wisdom, ancient philosophy was only secondarily seen as a theoretical explanation of the world. And this explanation itself, along with the knowledge of epistemology and logic, served as an icon in order to provide the necessary intellectual conditions for a happy life, and for spiritual transformation and ascent (anagoge), or return (epistrophe), to the first Principle, the source of all being, life, and intelligence. However, the philosophical schools which emerged in the 4th to 3rd centuries B.C. and introduced a new type of spiritual guidance (“an organized work of love”, aimed at rationalization of thought and conduct) considered that moral and ontological self-knowledge must precede all spiritual progress in the philosophical discovery of the hidden truth (aletheia). But every philosophical tradition expected to teach its adherents how to die. This aim was achieved through the critical analysis of phenomena, self-examination, and askesis, largely derived from Egyptian and Pythagorean sources. The different kinds of commentary, allegorical explanation and symbolic interpretation were used – some found in the privileged texts written by the founders of haireseis, others in divine oracles and sacred rites. Such hermeneutical practices were thought to lead to inner transformation and spiritual rebirth. Nevertheless, the written texts and logical systems of thought, constructed using powers of discursive reasoning, were regarded only as a temporary measure in place of personal instructions of the spiritual guide (kathegemon, hegemon). He shows the way and therefore must be trusted and treated as a godlike father. Thus, according to this line of traditional thinking, the Stoic Epictetus presents an acute and revealing question: “Do I go to my teacher prepared to obey him like an oracle? Or am I not also one of those, who in their folly only go to school in order to learn the history of philosophy, to understand books which they did not understand before and to explain them to others should the occasion arise?” (Discourses 2.21.10). 3. Ancient Practices of Wisdom Contrary to current opinion, expressed as rationalistic dogma which holds ancient philosophy (or philosophy as such) to be an exclusively intellectual, theoretical, system-building or system-demolishing activity, recent investigations are able to show that it consists primarily in Understanding Ancient Philosophy 7 8 Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth contemplation of cosmic beauties and noetic archetypes of being as well as in fulfillment of the telos which is present in the human soul. As Ch. Evangeliou emphasizes, for Plato and Aristotle, the genuine Hellenic philosopher is most beloved of the Hellenic gods (theophilestatos). This author cites the assertion made by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan that “the Upanishads speak to us of the way in which the individual self gets at the ultimate reality by an inward journey, an inner ascent” and adds: the same goal pervades the Hellenic philosophical tradition from Pythagoras to Proclus, if correctly understood.10 A. H. Armstrong also insists that, for ancient philosophers, philosophy as preparation for death was an extremely demanding way of life requiring the intense study of the whole of reality, not simply “scientific” understanding of things.11 Philosophy is concerned not only with human well-being, but with the search for soul-transforming wisdom. For Plotinus, this means to recover the so
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- [Flowers](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/flowers) - Lord Northbourne If the priorities are kept in the right order, the beauty of flowers, seen as the expression of a principle and not as an accident, can teach us directly, intellectually, and without recourse to sentiment of any kind, that this philosophy of despair is rubbish. But can one thus metaphorically consign to the
- [The Reform of the Modern Mentality](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/reform-of-modern-mentality) - Modern civilisation appears in history as a veritable anomaly; of all those we know about, our own is the only one which has developed in a purely material sense, and is also the only one which is not supported by any principle of a higher order. This material development which has been pursued for several centuries now, and at an ever accelerating pace, has been accompanied by an intellectual regression which this same material progress is quite unable to neutralize. It is of course a genuine and true intellectuality which is in question here, which could also be called spirituality; for we refuse to give the name intellectuality to what is currently so called today, namely, the cultivation of the experimental sciences in view of the practical applications to which these sciences lend themselves. A single example will allow us to measure the extent of this regression: the Summa Theologica of St Thomas was, in its time, a manual for the use of students. Today, where are the students who would be capable of fathoming and assimilating it? This decay has not come about all at once; one can follow its stages throughout modern philosophy. It is the loss or the forgetting of genuine intellectuality which has made possible two errors, apparently in opposition but in reality correlative and complementary: rationalism and sentimentalism. Once all purely intellectual knowledge had come to be denied or ignored as it has been since Descartes, the end was logically bound to be in positivism and agnosticism together with all manner of ‘scientistic’ aberrations, and on the other hand in all those contemporary theories which, not content with what reason can bestow, seek for something else, but on the side of sentiment and instinct, that is, beneath reason and not above it, until with William James, for example, the point is reached at which the subconscious is conceived as the means by which man can communicate with the Divine. The notion of truth, after having been reduced to nothing more than a mere representation of sensible reality, is finally identified with utility by pragmatism, which amounts purely and simply to its suppression. For what is the importance of truth in a world whose aspirations are solely material and sentimental? It is not possible to develop here all the consequences of such a state of affairs; we will simply point out some of those which relate more particularly to the religious perspective; and first of all, let it be noted that the contempt and repugnance that other peoples, especially Orientals, feel with regard to Westerners stem in large part from the fact that Westerners generally appear to them to be men without tradition, without religion, which in their eyes is a real monstrosity. An Oriental cannot admit a social organisation which does not rest upon traditional principles; for a Muslim, to take one example, legislation in its entirety is no more than a mere appendage of religion. It used to be so in the West also—we have only to think what Christianity was like in the Middle Ages; but today the relationships are reversed. Religion is now looked upon as nothing more than a social fact; instead of having the entire social order attached to it, religion is, on the contrary, no longer regarded as anything but just one element among those that constitute the social order, if indeed it is still allowed to hold there any place at all, and how many Catholics, alas, without the least difficulty, accept this way of viewing things. It is high time to react against this tendency, and in this respect the affirmation of the social Reign of Christ is a particularly opportune manifestation. But to make this a reality, today’s mentality must be altogether reformed. A blind eye must not be turned to the fact that even those who believe themselves to be sincerely religious have nothing, for the most part, but a greatly diminished idea of religion. It has hardly any actual influence on their behaviour or on their thought; it is as if separated from the rest of their existence. Practically, believers and unbelievers behave in almost the same way; for many Catholics, the affirmation of the supernatural has no more than a completely theoretical value, and they would be quite embarrassed to have to take note of a miracle. This is what might be called a practical or de facto materialism. Is it not still more dangerous than an avowed materialism, precisely because those whom it infects are not even aware of it? On the other hand, religion for most people is only an affair of sentiment, without any intellectual import. Religion is confused with a vague religiosity, or is reduced to a morality. The function of doctrine is diminished as much as possible, despite the fact that it is the essential from which everything else ought to be but a logical consequence. In this respect Protestantism, which is on its way to becoming no more than a ‘moralism’ pure and simple, is very representative of the tendencies of the modern mind. But it would be a great mistake to believe that Catholicism itself is not affected by these same tendencies, not in its principle, certainly, but in the way in which it is ordinarily presented. Under the pretext of making it acceptable to the contemporary mentality, the most disturbing concessions are made, concessions that encourage what on the contrary should be energetically fought against. We will not insist on the blindness of those who, under the pretext of ‘tolerance’, make themselves unconscious accomplices of counterfeits of religion, the hidden intentions of which they are far from suspecting. But in this connection, let us just note in passing the deplorable abuse which is frequently made of the word ‘religion’: is there not a ceaseless use of such expressions as ‘religion of patriotism’, ‘religion of science’, or ‘religion of duty’? This is not simply carelessness in language; rather such abuses are symptomatic of the confusion that permeates the modern world, for in truth, language is a faithful representation of states of mind, and such expressions are incompatible with the true sense of religion. But let us move on to what is more essential. We wish to speak of the weakness of doctrinal teaching, which is replaced almost entirely by vague moral and sentimental considerations. These developments may please some, but at the same time they can only rebuff and estrange those with any Intellectual aspirations, of whom there are still some in our time in spite of everything. The proof of this is that more people than one might think deplore this lack of doctrine. A favourable sign, in spite of appearances, is the fact that this lack is now more widely recognized than it has been for some time. It is certainly wrong to claim, as we have often heard it claimed, that nobody could understand an exposition of pure doctrine. First of all, why wish to remain on the lowest level on the pretext that it is that of the greatest number, as if it were necessary always to consider quantity rather than quality? Is not this a consequence of that democratic spirit which is one of the characteristic aspects of the modern mentality? Should it not be recognized that even those who would not understand everything would nevertheless derive a perhaps greater benefit from doctrinal exposition than might be supposed? But the gravest obstacle is doubtless this kind of mistrust towards intellectuality that one generally finds in so many Catholic circles, even among ecclesiastics. We say gravest, because this mistrust is a mark of incomprehension that is to be found even among those on whom the task of teaching is incumbent. They have been touched by the spirit of modernity to the point of no longer knowing, any more than the philosophers named above, the nature of true intellectuality, to the point, at times, of confounding intellectuality with rationalism and thus unintentionally playing the game of the enemy. We think that what is important above all else is precisely the restoration of true intellectuality and with it the sense of doctrine and of tradition. It is high time to show that religion is something other than a matter of sentimental devotion, something other than mere moral precepts, or the consolations available to souls weakened by suffering, and that one can find in it that ‘solid nourishment’ of which St Paul speaks in the Epistle to the Hebrews. We know well enough that this goes against certain fixed habits that are difficult to throw off; but nevertheless, it is not a question of innovation, far from it—but on the contrary of returning to the tradition that has been strayed from, of finding again what has been all too willingly lost. Would this not be better than making the most unjustified concessions to the modern mind, such as are to be found, for example, in so many apologetical works that strive to reconcile dogma with all that is most hypothetical and least well founded in current science, an effort that has to be repeated all over again whenever these so-called scientific theories are replaced by others? It would, however, be quite easy to show that religion and science are not really in conflict, for the simple reason that they do not concern the same domain. Why is there no perception of the danger of even seeming to seek corroboration, in what is most changeable and most uncertain, for doctrine that concerns immutable and unchangeable truths? And what is one to think of those Catholic theologians who are so affected by the ‘scientistic’ mentality that they feel obliged to take into account, in more or less large measure, the results of modern exegesis and ‘textual criticism’, when it would be so easy, for anyone who had just a reasonably sure doctrinal foundation, to show their inanity? How can one not see that the so-called ‘science of religions’, such as it taught in the universities, has never been anything else in reality but an instrument of war directed against religion and, more generally, against all that may still subsist of the traditional spirit, which those who are guiding the modern world in a direction that can only end in catastrophe naturally want to destroy? There is much more that could be said on all this, but we only wanted to indicate very summarily a few of the points about which a reform is urgently necessary; and now to conclude with a question that is of especial interest to us in this domain, why is there so much more or less avowed hostility towards symbolism? Assuredly, because it is a mode of expression that has become entirely foreign to the modern mentality, and because man is naturally prone to distrust what he does not understand. Symbolism is the means best adapted to the teaching of higher religious and metaphysical truths, that is, of all that the modern mind spurns or neglects. Symbolism is entirely contrary to rationalism, and all its adversaries behave, some without even being aware of it, as true rationalists. For our part, we think that if symbolism is not understood today, this is one more reason to insist upon It, expounding as completely as possible the real significance of traditional symbols by restoring to them all their intellectual meaning instead of making them simply a theme of sentimental exhortations—for which, moreover, the use of symbolism is quite pointless. This reform of the modern mentality, with all that it implies, namely the restoration of true intellectuality and of traditional doctrine, which for us are inseparable from one another—this certainly is a considerable task. But is that a reason for not undertaking it? It seems to us, on the contrary, that such a task constitutes one of the biggest and most important ends that can be proposed for the activity of a society such as the Society for the Intellectual Propagation of the Sacred Heart, so much the more in that all the efforts accomplished in this direction will necessarily be orientated towards the Heart of the Incarnate Word, the spiritual Sun and Centre of the World, ‘in which are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and science’, not of that empty, profane science which is the only one known to most of our contemporaries, but of the veritable sacred science which opens, to those who study it in the proper way, unsuspected and truly unlimited horizons.
- [The Underlying Religion (Introduction)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-underlying-religion-introduction) - The essays compiled in this anthology are intended to provide an accessible introduction to the “traditionalist” or “perennialist” school of comparative religious thought. This current of thought, which saw the light of day in the early twentieth century in the pioneering writings of the French metaphysician and symbologist René Guénon (1886-1951), and which was amplified by the prodigious scholarship of the Anglo-Ceylonese orientalist and art historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), received its fullest exposition in the writings of the German-Swiss metaphysician, painter, and poet, Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998).1 In the pages that follow, the reader will encounter the penetrating writings of these major authors, as well as many other prominent “perennialist” writers such as Titus Burckhardt,2 Lord Northbourne, Marco Pallis, Martin Lings (co-editor of this volume), Whitall Perry, William Stoddart, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr. What we intend to offer now is a broad outline of the essential features of the perennial philosophy in the hope of providing the reader with a clear compass and sure orientation in approaching both the arrangement and the content of the essays here included. The perspective of the “traditionalist” or “perennialist” school of thought has variously been called the philosophia perennis (perennial philosophy), sophia perennis (perennial wisdom), or religio perennis (perennial religion). These terms, which are essentially identical, each contain a distinctive nuance or accentuation. For instance, the term sophia is to be preferred to philosophia when “philosophy” is under- stood in its purely modern sense of “rationalist or skeptical thought” and not, as its etymology and ancient practice suggests, the “love of wisdom.” Similarly, the term religio is to be preferred to sophia or philosophia when it is necessary to emphasize that it is not only intellectual doctrine or belief that constitutes “wisdom” or the “love of wisdom,” but, in addition, the methodical or ritual practices that religion provides in order to effectively realize that wisdom. It must be acknowledged, however, that “perennial philosophy” has proved the most popular of the three terms, and it will therefore be employed most frequently in what follows. ????????????????What then is the perennial philosophy? It is both absolute Truth and infinite Presence. As absolute Truth it is the perennial wisdom (sophia perennis) that stands as the transcendent source of all the intrinsically orthodox religions of humankind. In the words of St. Augustine, it is that “uncreated Wisdom, the same now, as before, and the same to be for evermore” (Confessions, 9:10). As infinite Pres- ence it is the perennial religion (religio perennis) that lives within the heart of all intrinsically orthodox religions. In the words of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa: “There is . . . one sole religion and one sole worship for all beings endowed with understanding, and this is presupposed through a variety of rites” (De Pace Fidei, 6). Now it is precisely this “sole religion” that Frithjof Schuon has called the “underlying religion”3 or “religion of the heart” (religio cordis), which is the heart of all religion.4 It should be clearly under- stood, however, that the “underlying religion” is of an essentially supra-formal, universal, or spiritual nature. Although it resides as an immanent and underlying presence within the religions, it is not itself a formal or particular religion (as are the various religions of humankind, e.g. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and the Native American religion of the Sun Dance and the Sacred Pipe). In other words, the “underlying religion” remains transcendent vis-à-vis the religions, even while being a vivifying presence within them. It is in no way a “new religion.” The perennial philosophy thus has a transcendent dimension, and this is absolute Truth or Wisdom, and an immanent dimension, and this is infinite Presence or Union, the first aspect referring to the intel- ligence and the second to the will. As Frithjof Schuon notes: The essential function of human intelligence is discernment between the Real and the illusory or between the Permanent and the imper- manent, and the essential function of the will is attachment to the Permanent or the Real. This discernment and this attachment are the quintessence of all spirituality; carried to their highest level or reduced to their purest substance, they constitute the underlying universality in every great spiritual patrimony of humanity, or what may be called the religio perennis.5 These specifications allow for an initial definition of the perennial philosophy as: (1) metaphysical discernment between the Real and the unreal, or the Absolute and the relative (i.e. the aspect of Truth or metaphysics); and (2) mystical concentration on the Real (i.e. the aspect of Presence or unitive prayer).6 This twofold definition also contains “the criteria of intrinsic orthodoxy for every religion and all spirituality”: In order to be orthodox a religion must possess a mythological or doctrinal symbolism establishing the essential distinction in ques- tion, and it must provide a path that guarantees both the perfec- tion of concentration and its continuity; in other words a religion is orthodox if it provides a sufficient, if not always exhaustive, idea of the Absolute and the relative, and thus of their reciprocal relation- ships, and a spiritual activity that is contemplative in its nature and effectual with regard to our ultimate destiny.7 It might be wondered, though, if the heart of religion can indeed be reduced to the simple polarity “discernment-concentration.” Are there not a multitude of differences between the religions and is it not contrary to truth to overlook these same differences? Or again, are the religions not being placed in a strait-jacket—one that takes no account of their unique spiritual contours—in order to make them conform to a putative definition of the heart of religion? Let us quote at length a passage from Frithjof Schuon dealing with the perennial philosophy— in this case speaking on Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism—keeping in mind the twofold definition of the perennial philosophy mentioned above: In Christianity—according to Saint Irenaeus and others—God “became man” that man might “become God”; in Hindu terms one would say: atma became Maya that M?y? might become atma. In Christianity, contemplative and unifying concentration is to dwell in the manifested Real—the “Word made flesh”—in order that this Real might dwell in us, who are illusory, according to what Christ said in a vision granted to Saint Catherine of Siena: “I am He who is; thou art she who is not.” The soul dwells in the Real—in the kingdom of God that is “within us”—by means of permanent prayer of the heart, as is taught by the parable of the unjust judge and the injunction of Saint Paul.8 In Islam . . . discernment between the Real and the non-real is affirmed by the Testimony of Unity (the Shah?dah):9 the correla- tive concentration on the Symbol or permanent consciousness of the Real is effected by this same Testimony or by the divine Name [All?h] which synthesizes it and which is thus the quintessential crystallization of the Koranic Revelation. . . . The Real “descended” (nazzala, unzila); it entered into the non-real or illusory, the “per- ishable” (f?nin), in becoming the Koran—or the Shah?dah that summarizes it, or the Ism (the “Name”) that is its sonorous and graphic essence, or the Dhikr (the “Mention”) that is its operative synthesis—in order that upon this divine barque the illusory might return to the Real. . . . In this reciprocity lies all the mystery of the “Night of Destiny” (Laylat al-Qadr), which is a “descent,” and of the “Night of Ascension” (Laylat al-Miraj), which is the comple- mentary phase. . . . In Buddhism the two terms of the alternative or of discernment are Nirv?na, the Real, and Sams?ra, the illusory; in the last analysis the path is the permanent consciousness of Nirvana as Shunya, the “Void,” or else it is concentration on the saving manifestation of Nirvana, the Buddha, who is Shunyamurti, “Manifestation of the Void.” In the Buddha—notably in his form Amitabha—Nirvana became Sams?ra that Sams?ra might become Nirvana; and if Nirv?na is the Real and Sams?ra is illusion, the Buddha is the Real in the illusory. . . . The passage from the illusory to the Real is described in the Prajn?p?ramit?-hridaya-s?tra in these terms: “Gone, gone— gone for the other shore, attained the other shore, O Enlightenment, be blessed!”10 For those with “eyes to see” the reading of this passage will unveil a very satisfying dimension of “transcendent unity.”11 Moreover, it will be understood that this unity transcends the differences between the religions without in any way denying those same differences on their own level. Unity is not uniformity just as synthesis is not syncretism. Thus, Christianity is very clearly different from Islam or Buddhism qua form; but it is one with them qua essence (or qua perennial philosophy). Readers should consult Section V (“The Perennial Philosophy”) for a more detailed exposition of the “transcendent unity of the religions.” This crucial section provides both a synthesis and a sum- mation of the whole book. Doctrine (metaphysical discernment) and method (unitive concentration) are dealt with more fully in Section III (“Metaphysics”) and Section VII (“Prayer and Virtue”) respectively. Readers should also note that Section II (“Traditional Cosmology and Modern Science”) carries the dimension of discernment into the cosmological realm where a thorough critique of modern scientism—and particularly transformist evolution—is presented, while in Section IV (“Symbolism”) the age-old science of symbolism and the doctrine of the multiple degrees of Reality is reaffirmed. If metaphysical discernment refers to the Truth, and unitive concentration to the Way, what then of virtue, which pertains to the spiritual Life? Do not doctrine and method, discernment and union, suffice unto themselves? Assuredly not, for as Frithjof Schuon says, Spiritual realization [i.e. method] imposes on the soul an immense disproportion owing to the fact that it introduces the presence of the sacred into the darkness of human imperfection; this inevitably provokes disequilibrium-producing reactions which in principle carry with them the risk of an irremediable fall, reactions which moral beauty, together with the graces which by its very nature it attracts, can largely prevent or attenuate. It is precisely this beauty that ambitious dilettantes without imagination believe they can disdain.12 Without conformity of the soul to the Real—through virtue—the spiritual life risks becoming merely a mental play of the mind or a technical effort of the will. For the integral human being is comprised of an intelligence, a will, and a soul (or sentiment):13 while the Truth requires the deployment of the intelligence (“with all thy mind”), and the Way (or Prayer) requires the activity of the will (“with all thy strength”), the Life (or Virtue) requires conformity of the sentiment (“with all thy soul”).14 In the spiritual life the fundamental virtues are: humility, or the effacement of the ego; charity, or the giving of oneself to others; and veracity, or pure objectivity. These correspond respectively to the fundamental spiritual stages of purification, perfection, and union. The above twofold definition of the perennial philosophy (i.e. discernment-concentration) can thus be expanded to include three pillars: Truth, Way (or Prayer), and Virtue (or Life). The first part of Section VII (“Prayer and Virtue”) deals with this subject in more detail, making a clear distinction between intrinsic virtue and social morality. Beauty—which will now be considered as the fourth pillar of the perennial philosophy—is a support of incalculable value in the spiritual life; far from being a mere “sensible consolation” or an expendable luxury, it has on the contrary the fundamental role of being, in the words of Frithjof Schuon, an “exteriorization with a view to an inte- riorization.” Now this message of interiorization “is both intellectual and moral: intellectual because it communicates to us, in the world of accidentality, aspects of [divine] Substance, without for all that having to address itself to abstract thought; and moral, because it reminds us of what we must love, and consequently be.”15 As the “splendor of the truth,” Beauty provides the intellective soul with the occasional cause for a Platonic “recollection”—i.e. an objective “vision”—of the heavenly archetypes; and as “external goodness,” Beauty provides the contemplative soul with an existential—and not merely mental or conceptual—reminder of its original nature of primordial perfec- tion (i.e. its pure state of virtue before the fall).16 Among the most direct manifestations of Beauty and its message of interiorization are firstly virgin nature,17 then sacred art,18 and lastly holy company; as “‘exteriorizations of the Inward’ they encourage the ‘interiorization of the outward.’”19 But Beauty must also reverberate in our immediate environment: in dress, comportment, and the ambience of the home, all of which should echo or evoke our heavenly homeland. Readers will find a fuller elucidation of the spiritual role of Beauty in Section VI (“Beauty”). Truth, Prayer, Virtue, Beauty: these four constituent elements of the perennial philosophy must, however, be inaugurated upon the basis of a traditional Religion. Why? Because the truths conferred by the Intellect—that supra-rational faculty of transcendent knowledge within man—have been occluded since the time of the fall. And it is precisely the role of divine Revelation to remind us of these truths from the “outside,” namely to “‘crystallize’ and ‘actualize’ . . . [the] nucleus of certitudes that not only abides forever in the Divine Omni- science, but also sleeps by refraction in the ‘naturally supernatural’ kernel of the individual [i.e. the Intellect].”20 The religious traditions are thus the providential vehicles—because instituted by Heaven and not at the initiative of fallen man—for Truth, Prayer, Virtue, and Beauty, though of necessity they are presented in a mode suited to the particular cultural, ethnic, or linguistic community to which they are addressed. The religious traditions are thus the vehicle of a heavenly Grace which man could not possibly draw from himself. Traditional Religion thus stands as an indispensable fifth pillar of the perennial philosophy. Section I (“Tradition and Modernity”) provides the reader with a detailed explanation of the necessity of traditional Religion, the role of revelation and “tradition” (which should not be confused with mere custom or habit), and the requirements of orthodox belief and practice. A question that imposes itself at this point is: why are there mul- tiple revelations? Does not one revelation suffice for all? Humanly speaking, it can be said that a multiplicity of revelations is necessitated by the diversity of racial, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic communities, as well as by the gradual degeneration of these communities over time. Metaphysically speaking, it can be said that it is the “overflowing” divine Infinitude (and a fortiori the divine Mercy) which calls forth multiple revelations.21 For although Truth is one and absolute, it is “situated beyond forms, whereas Revelation, or the Tradition derived from it, belongs to the formal order . . . [and] to speak of form is to speak of diversity, and thus plurality.”22 But does not the diversity of revelations also imply their relativity? In respect of their form “yes,” though not in respect of their supra-formal and universal content (or essence). For by their transcendent essence religions enunciate the absolute Truth, but not in respect of their particular forms, which, qua forms, inevitably partake of limitation and diversity, and hence of relativity. Nevertheless, the religious forms are providential vehicles of the transcendent essence; they are, so to speak, finite receptacles that “contain” the Infinite. They thus perform the fundamental role of communicating the Truth to man (doctrine), and of providing him with the means to assimilate its sacramental and sanctifying Presence (method). For fallen man identifies primarily with his formal nature (his body and his soul) and not with his supra-formal or transcendent nature (his spirit); he has thus to approach the Real through the hal- lowed forms willed by Heaven and not otherwise. In consequence, these same forms cannot simply be repudiated or dismissed in the name of a pretentious and wholly unrealistic desire to realize the “pure spirit.” In this regard it is important to distinguish the “traditionalist” or “perennialist” understanding of religious forms—which acknowledges both their relativity and their necessity—from the views of the so-called “religious pluralists” and “new age” cults. The “religious pluralists,” who are much given to dialogue and are susceptible to fragmentary notions of universality, seem ever willing to compromise the forms of religion in order to further their pointedly postmodern political and sentimental agendas. They forget that the religious forms—as inalienable symbols of the essence—are dispensed with at great spiritual peril. In fact, so-called “religious pluralism” is nothing more than a “horizontal” and worldly caricature of the “vertical” and spiritual perspective of the “transcendent unity of the religions.” Even worse are the modern syncretistic cults, who, in the name of a vague ideal of “universal truth”—and influenced by anti-traditional progressivist and evolutionist ideas—proclaim a so-called “new age” of the spirit.23 In their blind presumption they would seek to dispense with the age-old religious forms and establish a new universal “reli- gion” (or “society”), henceforth free from all “divisive dogma” and “exclusivist formalism.”24 With an ego-flattering “self-realization” as their goal they invariably seek to develop “latent powers,” which, needless to say, are of a decidedly psychic and not spiritual nature. In order to see how dangerously heterodox are the subjectivist beliefs and improvised practices of these groups, it suffices to expose the central flaw of their counterfeit spirituality: the claim—common to all false mysticisms—that would equate the fallen and unregenerate soul with the Divine.25 To the contrary, all genuine spirituality insists on the purification and perfection of the soul, along with the grace of God, as indispensable prerequisites for union with the Divine. Let us now leave these aberrant groups and return to the authentic perennial philosophy. An important final question remains: what is the relationship of the perennial philosopher—whose nature is irresistibly drawn to the “underlying religion” or the “religion of the heart”—to the various formal elements of the religion to which he belongs by birth? The perennial philosopher will seek to esoterize and universalize these religious forms from within, rather than bemoan their “restrictiveness” from without; for “Truth does not deny forms from the outside, but transcends them from within.”26 Thus, when Jesus proclaims in the Gospel that “no man cometh unto the Father but by Me” (John, 14:6), or when the Prophet of Islam says that “no man shall meet God who has not first met the Prophet,” the perennial philosopher will understand these sayings to mean (in addition to their all-too-evident exoteric and exclusivist meanings): access to the Real is to be attained through the universal Logos, one particular manifestation of which is Jesus Christ and another of which is the Prophet of Islam; but others of which include: Abraham, Moses, Zoroaster, Krishna, Rama, the Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu, and Pte San Win (the “White Buffalo Cow Woman,” celestial revealer of the Sacred Pipe to the Native American Lakota Indians). By proceeding in such a manner—both universalist and esoterist—the perennial philosopher discerns the “underlying religion” within the religious tradition to which he is called by divine Providence; he sees with the eye of his heart that Truth, Prayer, Virtue, and Beauty are the heart of religion and thus the “religion of the heart.” 1 See Kenneth Oldmeadow, Traditionalism: Religion in the Light of the Perennial Philosophy (Colombo: Sri Lanka Institute of Traditional Studies, 2000) for an excellent introduction to the “perennialist” perspective. 2 Frithjof Schuon also acknowledged the importance of the writings of the German- Swiss art historian and orientalist Titus Burckhardt (1908-1984) in saying that the “traditionalist” or “perennialist” school had two “originators” (Guénon and Schuon) and two “continuators” (Coomaraswamy and Burckhardt). If this view ostensibly clashes with chronology it should be recalled that Coomaraswamy’s mature and properly “perennialist” writings only began at around 1935, whereas Guénon’s works began to appear in 1921 and Schuon’s in 1933 (William Stoddart, “Four Spokesman of the Perennialist or Traditionalist Current of Intellectuality and Spirituality,” unpublished). The “originality” of Schuon is especially evident—apart from his masterful exposition of integral metaphysics—in his treatment of art, beauty, prayer, and virtue, subjects on which Guénon did not touch. The works of Schuon are drawn on extensively in this introduction. 3 See Frithjof Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds (London: Perennial Books, 1965), p. 143 and Christianity/Islam: Essays on Esoteric Ecumenism (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom Books, 1985), p. 138. Schuon was also the author of a private, unpublished text called “The Underlying Religion.” 4 This is an adaptation of William Stoddart’s saying, “Mysticism is the heart of religion and the religion of the heart” (“Quotations: A Personal Collection,” unpublished), itself a paraphrase from Goethe. 6 See Patrick Laude (ed.), Pray without Ceasing: The Way of the Invocation in World Religions (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2006) for a wide selection of writings dealing with prayer, particularly of the quintessential or invocatory kind. 8 Editor’s Note: The parable of the unjust judge (Luke, 18:1-8) begins: “And he [Christ] spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint.” The well-known injunction of St. Paul is: “Pray without ceasing” (I Thessalonians, 5:17). These verses form the basis of the method of ejaculatory prayer in Eastern Christianity, also known as the Jesus Prayer. 9 Editor’s Note: The Islamic Testimony of Unity is: “There is no god but God” (L? il?ha illa’ Ll?h), which enunciates the fundamental discernment between the Absolute and the relative, or (less rigorously) between God and the world. 10 Frithjof Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, pp. 122-124. In Hinduism, this twofold definition of the perennial philosophy is most succinctly expressed in the Vedantic maxim: “Brahman is Reality; the world is appearance; the soul is not other than Brahman.” 11 See Frithjof Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions (Wheaton, Ill: Quest, 1993) for a foundational elucidation of this key “perennialist” idea. See also Whitall Perry’s monumental A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom (Louisville: Fons Vitae, 2000), which presents a vast array of sayings from the world’s religions to illustrate the idea of “transcendent unity.” 14 “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God . . . with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength” (Mark, 12:30). 15 Frithjof Schuon, Esoterism as Principle and as Way, p. 179. 16 It is said that the exceptional outward beauty of the Virgin Mary—she who personifies the pure and immaculate soul—was a cause, not of concupiscence, but of profound interiorization. 17 “There is a concordance between the religio perennis and virgin nature and by the same token between it and primordial nudity, that of creation, birth, resurrection, or the high priest in the Holy of Holies, a hermit in the desert, a Hindu s?dhu or sanny?sin, a Red Indian in silent prayer on a mountain. Nature inviolate is at once a vestige of the earthly Paradise and a prefiguration of the heavenly Paradise; sanctuaries and garments differ, but virgin nature and the human body remain faithful to the initial unity” (Frithjof Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, pp. 25-26). For primordial peoples such as the Native American Indians, virgin nature is the primordial “book” of revelation; it is also the Divine art. 18 See especially Frithjof Schuon, Art from the Sacred to the Profane: East and West, edited by Catherine Schuon (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2007) and Titus Burckhardt, Sacred Art of East and West (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2002) for remarkable insights into the meaning of sacred art. 20 Frithjof Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, p. 119. 21 “When righteousness is weak and faints,” says Krishna, “and unrighteousness exults in pride, then my Spirit arises again on earth. For the salvation of those who are good, for the destruction of evil in men, for the fulfillment of the kingdom of righteousness, I come to this world” (Bhagavad G?t?, 4:7-8). 22 Frithjof Schuon, Gnosis: Divine Wisdom (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2006), p. 17. 23 Anti-traditional exponents of a new so-called “universal truth” include: Anthroposophy, Baha’i, Aurobindo Ghose, G.I. Gurdjieff, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Rajneesh (Osho), Subud, the Theosophical Society, Vivekananda (disciple of Ramakrishna, the great Hindu saint), Alan Watts, and Mahesh Yogi. See Whitall Perry, Challenges to a Secular Society (Oakton, VA: The Foundation for Traditional Studies, 1996), pp. 7-16, 65-79 for a thorough critique of these authors. Among this group must also be placed the author Aldous Huxley, well known for his anthology The Perennial Philosophy (1945). This work, despite its many excellent selections, is flawed through its individualistic commentary, wherein the author “picks and chooses” whatever in religion is to his liking, and on the contrary dismisses all that is not in keeping with his idiosyncratic tastes. 24 “A vine has been planted without the Father and, as it is not established, it will be pulled up by its roots and be destroyed” (The Gospel According to Thomas, Logion 40).
- [The <em>Shinza</em> or God-seat in the <em>Daijosai</em>](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/shinza-in-the-daijosai) - Carmen Blacker Spiritual power, if it is to grow and mature, needs a period in the darkness of a sealed vessel. Within this vessel it grows until it bursts its covering and is “born” into the world. Certain vessels are imbued with the necessary power of con­taining and nurturing a supernatural principle. The quality is
- [The Prayer of Abu Bakr](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/prayer-of-abu-bakr) - Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, the closest friend of the Prophet Muhammad and the first Caliph of Islam according to Sunni tradition, is also, with Ali ibn Abi Talib, one of the fundamental links in the chain of transmission of all Sufi lineages. This prayer, taught to him by the Prophet, is reported by Imam al-Ghazali in
- [The Language of the Birds](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/guenon-language-of-the-birds) - THERE is often mention, in different traditions, of a mysterious language called the "language of the birds". The expression is clearly a symbolic one since the very importance which is attached to the knowledge of the language—it is considered to be the prerogative of a high initiation—precludes a literal interpretation. The Quran for example says (XXVII, 15) “And Solomon was David's heir and he said, ‘O men, we have been taught the language of the birds ( ullimn? mantiq at-tayr) and all favours have been showered upon us’.” Elsewhere we read of heroes, like Siegfried in the Nordic legend, who understand this language of the birds as soon as they have overcome the dragon, and the symbolism in question may be easily understood from this. Victory over the dragon has, as its immediate consequence, the conquest of immortality which is represented by some object, the approach to which is barred by the dragon, and the conquest of immortality implies, essentially, reintegration at the centre of the human state, that is, at the point where communication is established with the higher states of being. It is this communication which is represented by the understanding of the language of the birds and, in fact, birds are often taken to symbolise the angels which are precisely the higher states of being. That is the significance, in the Gospel parable of the grain of mustard seed, of "the birds of the air" which came to lodge in the branches of the tree[1]—the tree which represents the axis that passes through the centre of each state of being and connects all the states with each other.[2] In the Quranic text given above the term as-s?ff?t literally designates the birds but symbolically refers to the angels (al-mal?’ikah), and thus the first line signifies the constitution of the celestial and spiritual hierarchies.[3] The second line denotes the struggle of the angels against the demons, the celestial powers against the internal ones, that is, the opposition between the higher and the lower states.[4] In the Hindu tradition this is the struggle of the D?vas against the Asuras and also, according to a symbolism which comes very close to the symbolism of our theme, the fight of Garuda against the Naga which is, moreover, none other than the above mentioned serpent or dragon. Garuda is the eagle and elsewhere his place is taken by other birds such as the ibis, the stork or the heron,[5] all enemies and destroyers of reptiles. Finally, in the third verse, the angels recite the dhikr which normally means the recitation of the Quran—not, needless to say, the Quran expressed in human language but its eternal prototype inscribed on the Guarded Tablet (al-lawh al-mahf?z) which stretches from heaven to earth like Jacob's Ladder throughout all the degrees of Universal Existence.[6] Similarly, in the Hindu tradition, it is said that the D?vas in their struggle against the Asuras protected themselves (acchandayan) by reciting Vedic hymns which, for this reason, were given the name of chandas, a word which denotes rhythm. The same idea is contained in the word dhikr which, in Islamic esoterism, is used of the rhythmic formulae that correspond exactly to Hindu mantras. The repetition of these formulae is intended to bring about the harmonization of the different elements of the being and to cause vibrations which, by their repercussions throughout the whole hierarchy of the states, are capable of opening up a communication, with the higher states. This is, moreover, generally speaking, the essential and primordial purpose of all rites. This brings us back directly to what was said at the outset about "the language of the birds", which can also be called "angelic language", and which is symbolized in the human world by rhythmic language, for the science of rhythm, which has many applications, is in fact ultimately the basis of all the means which can be brought into action in order to enter into communication with the higher states of being. This is why it is said in an Islamic tradition that Adam, whilst in the Earthly Paradise, spoke in verse, that is, in rhythmic language. It is also why the Sacred Books are written in rhythmic language, which clearly makes them some-thing altogether different from the mere "poems" (in the purely profane sense) which the antitraditional prejudice of the "critics" would have them to be; nor was poetry itself, in its origins, the vain literature it has now become as a result of the degeneration which is part of the downward march of the human cycle.[7] It had on the contrary a truly sacred character. Examples can be found as far back as classical Western antiquity, of poetry being called the "language of the Gods", an expression equivalent to that we have already used since the "Gods", that is, the D?vas,[8] represent, like the angels, the higher states of being. In Latin, verses were called carmina, a name connected with their use in the accomplishment of rites, for the word carmen is identical with the Sanskrit Karma which must be understood here in its special sense of "ritual action".[9] The poet himself, the interpreter of the "sacred language", which is as a transparent veil over the Divine Word, was vates, a word which implies a certain degree of the prophetic inspiration. Later, by a further degeneration,[10] the vates became no more than a common “diviner”[11] and carmen (whence the word "charm") no more than a "spell", that is something brought about by low magic. We have here yet another illustration of the fact that magic—we might even say sorcery—is the last thing to be left behind when traditions disappear. These few indications should be enough to show how inept it is to make fun of stories which speak of the "language of the birds". It is all too easy and too simple to disdain as "superstitions" everything one cannot understand; but the ancients themselves knew very well what they meant when they used symbolic language. The true superstition in the strictly etymological sense (quod superstat) is what outlives itself, that is, the "dead letter"; but this very survival, however lacking in interest it may seem, is none the less not so totally insignificant, for the Spirit which "bloweth where it listeth" (and when it listeth) can always come to breathe fresh life into the symbols and the rites, and give them back their lost meaning and the fulness of their original virtue. NOTES [1] See Man and His Becoming according to the V?d?nta, p. 41, note 1. [2] In the medieval symbol of the Peridexion (a corruption of Paradision) one sees birds on the branches of a tree and a dragon at its foot (see The Symbolism of the Cross, Ch. IX). In a study of the symbolism of "the birds of Paradise", Charbonneau-Lassay has reproduced an illustration of a piece of sculpture in which the bird is shown with only a head and wings, a form in which angels are often represented. [3] The word saff, "rank", is one of the many which have been suggested as the origin of the word sufi and tasawwuf (Sufism). Whilst this derivation does not seem to be acceptable from the purely linguistic point of view, it is none the less true that, like many other derivations of the same kind, it does represent one of the ideas actually contained in these two terms, for the "spiritual hierarchies" are essentially identical with the degrees of initiation. [4] This opposition exists in all beings in the form of the two tendencies, one upward and the other downward, called respectively sattva and tames in the Hindu tradition. It is also what is symbolized in Mazdeism by the antagonism between light and darkness, personified respectively by Ormuzd and Ahriman. [5] See, in this connection, the remarkable works of Charbonneau-Lassay on the animal symbols of Christ (in Le Bestiaire du Christ). It is necessary to point out that the symbolic opposition between the bird and the serpent exists only as long as the serpent is seen in its malefic aspect. In its benefic aspect it is sometimes united with the bird as in the figure of Quetzalcohuatl in the ancient American tradition. On the other hand the combat between the eagle and the serpent is also mentioned in Mexican myths. In connection with the benefic aspect we may recall the Biblical text "Be ye therefore as wise as serpents and harmless as doves" (St. Matthew, X, 16). [6] As regards the symbolism of the book, with which this is directly connected, see The Symbolism of the Cross, ch. XIV. [7] One can say, in a general way, that art and science have become profane by a similar degeneration which has stripped them of their traditional character and consequently of everything that has a higher meaning. This subject has been discussed at length in L'Esotérisme de Dante, ch. II, The Crisis of the Modern World, ch. IV, and The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, ch. VIII. [8] The Sanskrit Deva and the Latin Deus are one and the same word. [9] The word “poetry” is derived from the Greek word poiein which has the same meaning as the Sanskrit root Kri from which Karma stems, and which is to be found in the Latin verb creare understood according to its primal significance. The idea in question was thus originally quite different from the mere production of artistic or literary works in the profane sense which Aristotle seems to have had exclusively in mind when speaking of what he called "poetic sciences". [10] The first degeneration was the isolation of the vates from the generality, that is, his becoming an exception rather than a norm. (Translator's note). [11] The word"diviner" itself has deviated just as much in meaning, for etymologically it is no less than divinus, that is "the interpreter of the Gods". The "auspices" (from ayes spicere, meaning to "observe the birds"), omens drawn from the flight and song of birds, are more particularly related to the "language of the birds" understood here in the literal sense but none the less identified with the "language of the Gods" since the Gods were held to make known their will through these omens. The birds thus played the part of messengers analogous (but on a very much lower plane) to the part that is generally attributed to the angels (hence their name, since "messenger" is precisely the meaning of the Greek angelos).
- [Discovering the Interior Life](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/pallis-discovering-interior-life) - This title was originally chosen by the Lama Trungpa for a talk he was to have given at a conference of Catholic religious headmistresses just after New Year 1968 at "Spode House" near Rugeley, Staffs. Being unexpectedly prevented from keeping this date, the Lama asked me to act in his stead; this new version of the talk was afterwards published in the monthly "Spode House Review" and is reproduced here with the kind concurrence of its editor. Given the nature of the audience, no attempt was made to stick to a Buddhist terminology; Pali and Sanskrit words have been replaced by expressions more familiar to Christians. Both sources have been freely drawn on in the shape of quotations and other illustrative material. Emphasis all along has been less on anti-thesis than on intelligible dialogue. REVEREND MOTHERS AND SISTERS, When the Venerable Lama Trungpa asked me to stand in for him at this conference I confess to having felt some dismay at the prospect of replacing one whose whole training, from early childhood, was conditioned by the aim of developing the Interior Life to the fullest possible extent. Schooled in the tradition of Tibetan Buddhism under its most contemplative form with saints for his instructors, the Lama Trungpa is unusually qualified to discourse on the means whereby a human soul may be opened to its own latent possibilities of illumination—to the "Kingdom of Heaven that is within you," to quote the phrase used by Christ Himself. It is a real pity that a conjunction of unforeseen causes prevented the Lama from attending your meeting, but this could not be helped; he wishes me to say how sorry he is to have disappointed you. He had, however, told me something about the line he intended to take when addressing you and this evidently has been some guidance to me. I can only express the hope that what I am going to say ties up sufficiently with the specific question raised in your Conference prospectus, namely how to help the young people placed under your care to form themselves in the love and knowledge of the Lord in a manner that will be, not merely conceptual, but also effective. This in fact is a question that concerns us one and all, be we young or old, clever or simple, European or Asian, religious or lay; quite simply, the supplying of an answer to this question is the purpose of religion under all its forms. Buddhism expresses this truth by saying that, for any human enterprise to be brought to proper fulfilment, Wisdom and Method must operate together, as one conjoint principle; they must keep in step with one another, otherwise the enterprise will be frustrated as a result of its own inherent unbalance. The Tibetans convey this lesson by the following parable: two men were both trying to get to the City of Nirvana, but neither of them could make much headway because the one was blind while the other was lame, so they decided to join forces; the lame man climbed on the blind man's back and pointed out the way (this is Wisdom) while the man who had sound legs (this is Method) carried his companion along the road. This sets the pattern of every spiritual life; all the rest is but a matter of variable circumstance and detail. The same idea is expressed traditionally by saying that Method and Wisdom are husband and wife, who may never be divorced. In the Buddhist iconographical symbolism Method is always depicted as a male figure, Wisdom by a female; when the two appear together on the same ikon they are usually shown in conjugal embrace, a fact which in the past has often been misinterpreted in an obscene sense by uninformed European observers; had they but known it, it was their own minds that were thus affected, since these particular ikons illustrating what might be called the "mystical marriage of Wisdom and Method" are regarded by Buddhists as conveying a message of austerest purity; to suspect anything different would, for them, savour of blasphemy. It is noteworthy that though Method is represented as playing the male part in the Divine Alchemy, that is to say in the process of trans-muting the lead of our creatural ignorance into the gold of the saving Enlightenment, it is Wisdom, female counterpart of Method, who will first be encountered by the human aspirant and the reason for this is evident; there must be some kind of initial vision of the Truth, a first glimpse of Wisdom, before any man will feel impelled to alter the direction of his life by turning his back on the world and its manifold allurements in order to seek God. This change of direction, which the word "conversion" by its etymology expresses, itself implies an initial grace thanks to which one suddenly becomes aware of the futility of one's present state and, by the same token, becomes aware of the possibility of reaching a better and happier state. This grace, the gift of faith, marks the first awakening of Wisdom in the soul; automatically it will give rise to the question "what must I do (or avoid) in order to reach a goal I now discern in the dim distance? What road am I to follow?" This very word "what?" implies a prayer for Method: all the prescriptions, positive or negative, of Religion can in fact be grouped under one or other of our two main headings: its doctrinal formulations indicating what is to be realized and why, correspond to wisdom under various aspects; while the ritual, moral and artistic equipment provided by religion may properly be grouped under the heading of "methodic supports" at various levels. The supreme instrument of Method is the Life of Prayer, taken in the widest sense; Buddhists would rather say "the practice of Meditation," a matter of terminology that indicates a certain difference of viewpoint but certainly not any essential incompatibility. In this same connection it should be pointed out that, from a Buddhist standpoint, a too preponderantly abstract presentation of theological truth is dangerous inasmuch as this can easily degenerate into mere philosophising, into a mental art for art's sake. A theology offered without its concurrent means of active verification in the soul, that is to say as an isolated wisdom, will at best lead the mind into an intellectual dead end; at worst, it will engender its own opposite, since typically the world's heresies have all arisen from an unbalanced presentation of some truth or other; error—a failure in respect of wisdom—always will imply a parallel failure in respect of method and vice versa: one cannot afford to forget for a minute the essential interdependence of the two great spiritual factors. The great value of tradition is that it serves to maintain the polar balance between theory and practice, between wisdom and its effective realization, through calling into play the appropriate spiritual means. If wisdom is by definition concerned with knowing, method for its part is concerned with being. In fact, one can only really claim to know some-thing by being that thing; to mistake a merely mental appreciation for knowledge is the classical trap of the philosophers. Realization can be said to take place at the moment when being and knowing coincide. If one were called upon to describe the process of spiritual regeneration or enlightenment as a whole, one could perhaps best qualify it in terms of a circuit, with wisdom calling forth its appropriate method at each stage of the way with the result that this same wisdom will become integrated in the soul as a henceforth inalienable element of one's being. The Way starts from wisdom and ends in wisdom: Buddhism by its own showing offers itself as a series of methods calculated to lead suffering beings more or less directly to Enlightenment; this is Buddhism's specific "note." To give the parallel version: Christ offers Himself to men both as "Light"—another name for Wisdom—and as "the Way"; "I am the Way"—He could equally well have said "I am the Means": the prayer "light up our way, O Lord !" sums up man's most essential needs. What we call the "Interior Life" is but an answer to that prayer. *** Before entering on a discussion of Method under its more technical aspects, it were well to give our attention briefly to two important conditions attaching to any form of contemplative discipline if it is to be fruitful; the first of these conditions relates to the attitude a man should take up versus Nature and the things of nature, whereof he himself is one thing among others; while the second relates to what may be called "the mythological mantle of Truth," this being one among several means whereby divine wisdom has chosen to reveal its secrets in intelligible form, either in certain parts of Holy Scripture or else through the medium of a traditional folklore, for both these ways of conveying certain truths have been in evidence throughout the world. If our own rationalistic education has rendered us largely impervious to this mode of communication, then it is important for us to re-animate the missing faculty, since a mind that has become closed in this respect will certainly be gravely hampered in its discovery of the Life Within. To take the question of man's place in Nature first of all: quite obviously mankind, in order to exist, are compelled to draw on the things around them for their sustenance and in various other ways; as far as that goes man does not differ greatly from the cow or the tiger or any other living thing, except that his ingenuity in procuring what he wants exceeds theirs and so do his appetites, a fact which, religiously speaking, is hardly a cause for self-satisfaction; rather should it be deemed a cause for self-questioning. To suggest, as has been far too commonly the case, that the right to use the fruits of this world's garden, as recorded in Genesis, can be equated with permission to indulge an irresponsible and limitless cupidity, destructiveness and even cruelty towards our non-human fellow-creatures is an insult to the Creator, firstly because it makes nonsense of the statement that "God hateth nothing of what He has made" and secondly, because it restricts the idea of the usefulness of things to their material possibilities alone, and even to only a part of these: their illuminative uses, as signs or reminders of God's merciful presence are ignored. The beauty of animals and plants, for instance, and the intrinsic qualities which make of each created thing a unique and irreplaceable witness to one or other Divine aspect—all this is food for the Intellect, chosen instrument of intuitive contemplation where-with man is enabled to behold mysteries far beyond the reach of his discursive reason. It is this transcendent faculty, which since Adam's fall has been as if asleep, that needs reawakening in such a way as to allow all our other faculties of perception and action to group them-selves harmoniously around it: the word "Buddha," which means "the Wake," testifies to this crowning need. For Buddhists, goodness is first of all intelligent, since it leads to God; sin, on the other hand, is stupid, it proceeds from ignorance and leads back to ignorance and its mere "badness" pales beside its principal disadvantage, which is to thicken the veil between ourselves and the Divine. Buddhism always tends to see in sin a greater or lesser degree of incompetence and in virtue a proof of skill; a Buddhist would readily agree with the statement that Christian "love," that which makes a man yearn to know God and experience His constant presence already here in this world, is firstly and lastly an activity of awareness. As for the love of neighbour, in which Buddhism includes all that shares in man's capacity to suffer—itself a consequence of separation from the Divine Centre—this is both a logical and indispensable condition of deliverance from suffering through a clear discerning of its root-cause: Christ's words "inasmuch as ye have done so to the least of these, ye have done it unto Me" will always find a ready echo in any Buddhist heart. A compassionate attitude both in thought and practice towards all that lives is one of the keys of a true contemplation: it is preceded, in a Buddhist religious training, by intense meditation on the theme of the impermanence, including suffering and death, which man and all other creatures have to share. This thought is inculcated early in the Buddhist child; such a remark as "look at that horrid moth, let's kill it" would be quite unthinkable in a Buddhist home. In Tibet, to swear at a horse or mule was a thing unknown let alone to beat it. Wild animals and birds were mostly half-tame because they had so little cause to fear their human neighbours and their peaceful proximity was in fact a particularly powerful factor in moulding the spiritual outlook of the people at large—an object-lesson in what Eden must have felt like for Adam. Let me quote you one passage from the writings of a great saint which perfectly sums up the attitude I have just been describing: "What is a charitable heart? It is a heart aflame with charity for the whole of Creation, for men, for birds, for beasts, for devils, for all creatures. He who has this heart will be unable to remember or see a creature without his eyes filling with tears because of the compassion that grips his heart; and that heart is softened and cannot endure to see even a slight pain inflicted on a creature or to hear of it through others; this is why such a man does not cease praying also for animals, for the enemies of the Truth, for those who do evil to him, so that they may be protected and purified; he even prays for reptiles, moved by an infinite pity which is awakened in the heart of those who assimilate themselves to God." Surely a world so schooled would be a world far less contentious and destructive than the one we know: but now, I must make a confession, since I have been playing something of a spiritual practical joke on you all, if such an expression be not far-fetched! The quotation I have just read out to you does indeed well express the Buddhist spirit; but it is in fact taken from a Christian saint, St. Isaac the Syrian. The Desert Fathers, the Celtic hermits, St. Francis all represent a similar trend. Contemplation of the divine mysteries and a fellowship with Nature go hand in hand; this is the point I have been trying to make. And now for the second condition alluded to above, the function of "mythological communication": this need not occupy us long, yet some mention of the subject is indispensable. Latterly a widespread movement has made itself felt in the Christian West the aim of which, as its supporters put it, is to "demythologise" the Church's teachings: this is a most sinister development, one fraught with peril both to faith and to the object of faith which is none other than Truth. This anti-mythological bias proceeds from two evident causes, namely, first a feeling of defeatism versus modern science, its discoveries and its gibes and secondly, an inability to see that it is quite in the nature of things for Revelation to use various means of communicating its message, traditions having a mythological form being one kind of means among others and indispensable in their own place. Every religion contains this element to some extent, while in certain religions—Hinduism for instance—this enters in very largely as I was myself able to observe when living in the hills of North Bengal: my gardener, for instance, had a strongly developed sense of the omnipresence of God of which the evidence, for him, was for the most part vehicled by Scriptural narratives of a mythological character, therefore also timeless; historical considerations hardly entered in. Like Christianity and Islam, Buddhism has a strongly affirmed historical framework; the life of the Founder can be timed and featured and its episodes provide the prototype whereon a man's spiritual life is to be modelled. However, even in these traditions there are to be found other concordant ways of conveying the saving message and the respective Scriptures all include portions which are neither ascribable to the historical unfolding of the religion in question nor yet to its purely doctrinal side; they narrate mythological happenings which, to be understood, have to be read not physically but meta-physically. This does not mean, of course, that these stories are of human invention and therefore lacking in truth—indeed quite the contrary; their place in the corpus of revealed truth is guaranteed by the fact that certain lessons can best be conveyed by this means and thanks to the very fact that they take one into a metaphysical dimension that is as real today as yesterday and will remain equally so tomorrow. The Old Testament, in particular, is rich in this kind of ever-actual narrative; a mind that can respond aright to such a teaching has to be free of a certain self-imprisonment in time and space. Many people are apt to confuse the miraculous with the mythological, which is wrong inasmuch as miracle, whenever it occurs, belongs by definition to the order of historical happenings; a miracle is an exceptional manifestation in this world of an influence of a transcendent order on a particular occasion. Those who say they wish to remove the mythological element from the Church's inheritance may not admit, even to themselves, that after mythology miracles will be their next target; a false mental association of these two elements will nevertheless make this likely. Where possible, miraculous happenings will be explained away, as by saying of the Virgin Birth that the mother of Jesus was so pure a soul that her purity was "tantamount to virginity" or some such thing: I fully expect this to happen—if this warning proves to have been needless, so much the better! Common prudence, however, requires us to be prepared for this and other similar attempts, for pointers in this direction are now too many to be overlooked by anyone who is not blind. In the case of happenings that could properly be qualified as pertaining to a sacred mythology, such as the story of the Ark or the Tower of Babel, those who wish to discredit them start off from an assumption that such happenings are either historical or else mere fiction; they can discern no other choice. What they fail to see is that even if these stories be accepted as literal fact, as was the case with our ancestors, this in no wise deprives the stories of their power to convey truth. Where a genuine myth is concerned its illuminative effectiveness operates outside the alternative "belief or disbelief"; whosoever cannot receive it thus will fail to understand it. Let the two afore-mentioned examples from the old Hebrew mythology tell us what they can: firstly the Ark. From its description in Genesis XI, complete with measurements given in cubits, it is obvious that a person in the Middle Ages, for instance, had he felt so minded, could easily have found out that a vessel of that size could not possibly have accommodated all the known kinds of animals, let alone the food needed to keep them and also Noah's family alive for forty days or more. Since there is not the slightest reason for supposing that people then were stupider than nowadays and many reasons for believing the contrary, one has to explain their apparent lack of interest in certain questions of probability or otherwise by the fact that, for them, the dimension of sacred happenings was accepted as a whole, for what it plainly told them; its intrinsic truth shone too brightly to require corroborating through a meticulous canvassing of details. The medieval mind, for all the presence there of human defects as well as virtues, was a whole mind and so was its view of the Cosmos; the Gospel references to receiving the truth "as a little child" well describe this attitude. For such a mentality, the story of the Ark retains all its intrinsic validity quite apart from any possibility that at a certain moment in time an extensive flood might in fact have overwhelmed part of the inhabited world and thus given rise, in retrospect, to this marvellous story: its lesson is for all time, for the flood (or its equivalent) is always on the point of overwhelming some section of humanity—today it might well be humanity as a whole that is thus threatened—and escape from the disaster is always by way of an ark of sorts to which only those who fear the Lord can gain admission because this very fear spells intelligence: the fate of those who become oblivious of God (they may appear to be quite kindly people) is always to be drowned in the consequences of their own forgetfulness. The Tower of Babel is another such universal myth, also peculiarly applicable to our own time, as it happens. Here again, it is irrelevant whether some ruler in ancient Mesopotamia may or may not have inaugurated an ambitious project of constructing an edifice bigger than ever before and describable as "reaching to heaven"; the Empire State building at New York almost answers to that description, especially on days when the top is swathed in cloud while the street below is clear—in this respect it can emulate many a natural hill. All this remains beside the point, however, because the spirit of Babel is some-thing that is repeating itself continually in human history, in the form of megalomaniac plans wherein Man sees himself as the "conqueror of Nature" and as the archplanner who can manipulate the future at his own sweet pleasure. The day some Russian or American space-man first sets foot upon the Moon you can be sure that the world will be treated to a babel of blasphemous boasting exceeding all that has been heard hitherto; for the "confusion of tongues" one has but to substitute "confusion of minds" and the Bible story will be lived over again with almost literal similarity. It is moreover noticeable that those who have taken part in recent cosmonautical exploits have been alike in one thing, namely that their comments relayed from the heights of space have been of a uniformly abysmal triviality that contrasts disconcertingly with the supposed greatness of their achievement, let alone with the courage these people undoubtedly have shown: this is the story of Babel repeating itself with a vengeance! Who then shall say that this story has lost its relevance for us moderns and should now be "demythologised" into oblivion? *** As you doubtless are expecting, the latter part of this discussion will contain some reference to the question of "method" in its positive sense of aids to concentration or, to give it also its negative sense, of hindrances to distraction. Needless to say, this is where the Venerable Trungpa himself will be most sadly missed by us today, for though still young he has already had a wide and varied experience of handling this matter of practical training in the contemplative art, both in relation to the ever-varying needs of individual disciples and, at a more external level, when offering general guidance to groups. Though I cannot hope to emulate him in this respect, I can at least suggest that consider-able profit may be derived through reading his book Born in Tibet which was published not long ago by Allen and Unwin. Though this is presented as a personal account of the Lama's early life and training leading gradually to his adventurous escape with a band of refugees in 1959, the book episodically contains much that throws light on the power of a steady Contemplation to regulate Action even under the utmost stress of danger and hardship— a lesson to our contemporary activists. Whoever will but read between the lines will find in this book much that speaks to his condition. Since we are on the subject of books, I take this opportunity of drawing your attention to another book by a contemporary Catholic author, Dom Aelred Graham, an English Benedictine who spent many years in America as director of a large boys' school. As a result of experience in the practice of meditation in company with some Buddhist friends, Dom Aelred wrote a book1 to show how certain current Buddhist techniques might be adapted advantageously for Christian use with the aim of deepening the contemplative awareness of Christians at this time when the pull is mostly in the opposite direction: as you see, his motives and your own are much the same in this respect. With much sagacity, Dom Aelred Graham has arranged his material according to the plan that is traditional in the Buddhist East; that is to say, he has presented it under the two-fold heading of theory or wisdom and of practice or method whereby that same wisdom may be experienced in one's inmost being—the only way to know, as has been said already. Every initiatic teaching, in Tibet or Japan, has always rested on the authority of a particular sûtra or group of sûtras, that is to say on certain inspired treatises or selected portions of the Scriptures related directly to the method in question and from which the method itself draws its technical apparatus in appropriate form; normally these sûtras would be memorized before embarking on the corresponding course of meditation. In Dom Aelred's book this wisdom-function is filled by a quite remarkable series of quotations mostly drawn from St. Thomas Aquinas and disposed in such a way that the subsequent comments about ways and means will at once be recognisable as "enactments" (if one may so use the word) of the truths expressed specifically by those quotations. I feel sure that this book will be of interest to many of you here and it may well be that its author, when he eventually returns to this country, can usefully be consulted in connection with this whole question of meditational practices suited to the present needs of the Church. Incidentally, in a talk on this same subject given by Dom Aelred Graham to the Anglican Congregation of St. John the Divine in Boston he mentioned one fact which will surely interest you greatly: in his school, quite unprompted by himself, a number of the boys came and asked to be allowed to join in a session of what they called "Catholic Zen meditation" each Sunday for half an hour of their free time—Dom Aelred said this had been one of the most moving experiences of his life at the school. What this shows above all is that the young, given the right example exerted through the presence of a revered teacher even more than through any spoken exhortation, may well discover in themselves that very possibility of contemplation which provides faith with its inward dimension and with an unshakable defence. This does not mean, of course, that the spoken or written word has ceased to count, where these profound matters are concerned; what it means is that wherever wisdom at any degree is content to shine with its own light, by an "activity of presence," its communication will be both more clear and more far-reaching. To return to Buddhists and their practices: certain methods of inducing a habit of attention or "mindfulness," as it is most commonly called, have been in current use since the beginning whereof an example is the practice of watching the alternate in-coming and out-going breaths over a longer or shorter period; this method remains classical where beginners are concerned and it has many variants. Similarly in Hinduism exercises in breath-control are in common use, as also a whole body of quasi-gymnastic movements and posturings whereby rhythm and poise are promoted in body and mind together: a number of instructors in these methods have found their way to the West many of whom, however, offer them as a means of promoting bodily and psychic health apart from any religious purpose; whatever benefits may accrue from such a restricted application of these methods, the results will always suffer from a taint of profanation, as indeed happens with many things familiar to us today—tobacco smoking, for instance, started as the profanation of a sacramental rite of the Red Indians which the white settlers in America prostituted to a mere luxury of the senses. Carried out under proper direction, however, this kind of physical or psychological adjunct to meditation can have great uses, provided the indispensable link with a traditional wisdom is maintained from start to finish. It is not, however, about this kind of method that I wish to speak today, not being expert in this field. Nor is there much point in discoursing on some of the more elaborate meditative schemes belonging to the Tantrik form of spirituality, as found in India and Tibet, for the simple reason that these methods require conditions such as would not easily be realizable in a Western framework, save by exception. The Venerable Trungpa is in fact qualified to initiate disciples in several of these methods; but I do not think that these would transpose into a Christian medium just as they stand, though theoretic-ally the possibility of adaptation in certain cases need not be excluded altogether. What can be said, however, in a more general way is that in a time of growing alienation and disbelief apparatus of a very complex kind hardly fits the need, which calls for a discipline that is at once "central," that is to say expressive of the most central truths of the tradition, and at the same time extremely concise as to the instruments it sets in motion, thus allowing of their methodic exercise under all kinds of circumstances, be it even the most unfavourable. Such an instrument is typically represented by the invocation of a Sacred Name (the Indian japa) or else of a short formula in which a Sacred Name is found enshrined: all the great traditions are agreed in saying that this way of concentrating attention and pervading a person's whole being with continual reminders of God is a spiritual means particularly suited to the needs of the Dark Age, when religion is at a low ebb and the forces of godless subversion seem to be a mounting tide. In Buddhist Japan, for instance, this method is associated with the school known as Jodo or "Pure Land," in which the name of the Buddha Amitâbha (meaning Infinite Light) is the invocatory means provided. In Tibetan Buddhism a similar means exists in the form of the six-syllabled phrase OM MANI PADME HUM, of which the manifold and complex mystical correspondences has caused it to be described as "the quintessence of the wisdom of all the Buddhas"; but time does not allow of more than a bare mention of the sacred formula in question. In the Islamic tradition the Name of God (in Arabic Allah) is recognised as the spiritual means, par excellence: its invocation, in the Sufi confraternities which exist for the sole purpose of fostering the Inward Life, is known as dhikr, remembrance; the Sufi initiations, instituted for this purpose of bringing about the "divine encounter" in the heart, all trace back their lineage to the Prophet himself. Perhaps some inkling of how an invocatory method is intended to operate in the soul may be afforded by recalling the words of a Lama whom I met near Shigatse in Tibet when I was staying in the district in 1947; after describing some other methods of a more specialised kind he offered the following advice: "If a man has been given a particular task to accomplish, this should be carried out with diligence according to the needs of the moment. This having been done, one's remaining time should be filled up with the invocation, leaving no gaps." Thinking afterwards about that Lama's advice, it came into my mind that here was a case for applying the lesson of the Gospel story about the man whom an unclean spirit had just quitted. The text goes on to relate how this unclean spirit wandered away through dry places vainly seeking rest until it began to feel homesick for its previous haunt within the man, so it came back there to find the place empty and nicely tidied up—the text says "swept and garnished"—as if awaiting a new occupant. Then that evil spirit proceeded to recruit seven more wickeder than itself and they all came to dwell there so that the last state of that man was worse than the first. Here we have a perfect picture of the process of distraction in the mind. If one distracting thought be expelled, a horde of other distracting thoughts will crowd in to fill the vacant place, for will-power alone will not suffice to fight them off. What is needed is a wholesome presence that will leave no room for anything else of a harmful kind: this presence is the Name and its continual invocation. So long as the Name is there, no unclean spirit can gain access to that soul; let but this state become an established habit of unbroken attention, and the distractions will give up the struggle, leaving the man in peace. After what has been said about the Oriental religions, it will be no cause of surprise to find an analogous spiritual method in the Christian tradition itself; indeed it could scarcely be otherwise, since such a way corresponds to a basic human need, outside all questions of religious form. In fact a quintessential formula of the kind referred to above exists in the Churches of the Eastern Rite under the name of the Jesus Prayer, being invoked there in much the same way as in the traditions of the farther East and giving rise to a whole spiritual method that goes under the name of "Hesychasm" from the Greek word hesychia, meaning "tranquillity," that peace in Christ which is the recompense of saints in this world and the next. Probably a good many of those here present will have read a small book published under its English title of The Way of a Pilgrim, its author being an unidentified Russian of the mid-Nineteenth century at that time the Jesus Prayer and its invocation was the lamp lighting up the way of salvation for many pious men and women both in Russia and the Balkan countries; monastic centres or hermitages where eminent Masters of this spiritual art were known to reside attracted a continuous stream of pilgrims drawn from all sections of the population. Such a Master was called Geron in Greek and Staretz in Russian, both of which mean "old man." The "Elder" Zosima, in Dostoievsky's Brothers Karamazov is a somewhat fanciful portrait of such a Master. The most famous centre where the Hesychast methods were practised and taught was the Holy Mountain of Athos, having been so since Byzantine times; but the roots of this form of Christian yoga, as it may well be called, can be traced much further back, to the hermit communities of the Desert Fathers in Egypt and other parts of the Christian East. In the Eighteenth Century a specially selected collection of Greek texts from the Fathers was compiled and first printed in Venice under the name of Philokalia, its purpose being to provide the appropriate sapiential foundation for those following the Hesychast way; this collection was soon translated into Russian, being also slightly modified in the process. Two sizeable volumes of extracts from this book exist in English, translated by E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer, the publisher being Faber and Faber. I recommend this book to your notice with all my heart. The Jesus Prayer itself consists of a single sentence which runs as follows: Lord Jesus Christ Son of God have mercy on me (or "on us" or "on me a sinner," since all three variants exist); quite evidently, this formula sums up the essentials of the Christ-given wisdom in relation to human need: as a Buddhist would say, this is an upaya or spiritual means of the greatest efficacy and power. It is equally evident that, as far as the prayer itself goes, it is accessible and appropriate to every baptised person as such; moreover its conciseness makes it suitable for all possible occasions—even in the presence of scoffers and persecutors it can be pronounced unobtrusively, just as it also lends itself to being whispered by the dying with their last conscious breath. Seeing that the Jesus Prayer belongs historically to Eastern Christianity, it may be asked by some whether its transplantation to the West at this late hour would be entirely appropriate, using it of course in its Latin translation of Domine Jesu Christe Fill Dei miserere nobis. Could not the Rosary, as an existing Western form, fill the same purpose? This is a question I do not feel prepared to answer outright; all one can say is that "Invocation," in the methodic sense given to its practice in the East, seems to require a maximum of concentration in the form so used, so that a more extended formula, though not inferior per se since it relates to the same wisdom, may not in practice lend itself quite so well to the purpose the invocation is intended to foster. According to one Spiritual Master, the natural equivalent for a Western follower of the method might well be either Christe eleison (which in effect is a compressed form of the Jesus Prayer) or else simply the twofold name Jesu-Maria, whereof the concentration of both light and power is too evident to require comment. Another point to note in this connection, one that has an important "technical" bearing on this whole method, is that the less the formula used lends itself to rational analysis, the better will it match that inward synthesis of which it is destined to become the operative support: it is the Holy Name, sonorous presence of the divine grace enshrined in the formula, which is both the source of its power to illuminate and a sharp sword to cut off ignorance and distraction at the root. The Name when treasured in the heart may be likened to a spark of that same Untreated Light which shone into the faces of the three Apostles on Mount Tabor and out of which, as the Hesychast tradition itself teaches, the crowns of God's saints both here and hereafter are made. In point of fact, a number of Catholics known to the writer have long been using the Jesus Prayer and there is no reason why others should not follow their example, if so minded. In Greece and Russia the Prayer can be invoked on a rosary or else aloud or silently according to circumstances: with those in whom the invocation becomes fully operative, the formula begins to repeat itself spontaneously in the heart, by night as well as day. Christian saints have testified to this fact, and so have Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim saints who have followed corresponding methods: in every case it is a Divine Name that is at the centre of the process, being first the apparent object of invocation and then becoming its subject, until finally the subject-object distinction disappears altogether. This, as Buddhists would say, is the consummation of the marriage of Wisdom and Method in the heart—but here words fail entirely and only silence remains to express this supreme experience. One question relating to the Invocation is likely to be put by some: those who have written from actual knowledge in this connection have been almost unanimous in emphasising the need to practice this method under direction of a Spiritual Master who has himself proceeded far along this way; as in the case of those following one of the Indian forms of yoga, an intending Hesychast disciple is warned of dangers that might arise from an unguided use of a spiritual instrument of such great inherent potency, for instance through the development of unusual psychic powers whereby attention might be diverted from "the one thing needful" to the ego of the person himself, as proud possessor of the powers in question: this is always a danger, especially when a man is passing from the elementary to the more advanced stages of a spiritual training, when the bodily faculties have been considerably disciplined but the far more elusive psychic faculties are still half out of control. For this reason, it is far better to work under direction of a qualified Master who thus becomes, for the disciple, the earthly representative of Christ in relation to the method and should, as has been said again and again, be treated as if it was the Saviour Himself who was imparting the instruction. Given this need for qualified direction, it may well be asked where today is such direction to be sought? For it is in no wise to be supposed that qualification for this spiritual office somehow goes with the priestly office, the latter being sacrificial and ritual but not per se connected with the initiatic function of a "director of souls": if the sacerdotal office represents the organised side of the tradition, the office of Spiritual Master represents "the Spirit that bloweth where it listeth"; if the Spiritual Master happens to be a priest and monk (as in fact has usually been the case in practice) this must nevertheless be accounted an "accident" in respect of his special vocation. When I saw the Lama Trungpa some time ago I put the question to him "what shall I answer if I am asked where qualified guidance may be found?" His reply was that if those who are now seeking will take up the practice of meditation in faith and hope or, to put it still better, in an active spirit of "prayerful expectancy," teachers will spring up when the moment is ripe for their presence. This is a characteristically Tibetan attitude. But in fact, the Hesychast Fathers had already foreseen this contingency long ago; after dwelling at length on the imperative need to find a Master and put oneself under his direction they add that if despite all efforts no Master is found, the aspirant is not to despair but is to practice the Jesus Prayer with fear and love, instructing himself where possible through reading: as they say, he must throw himself confidently upon the mercy of Christ the Lord, imploring him to be his teacher and, if the aspiration be a genuine one, surely God's grace will come to his aid. As you see, this reply does not differ essentially from what the Lama Trungpa advised; one is never justified, however discouraged one may feel, in behaving like the man in the parable who only received one talent; one cannot compel the Grace of God, but one can always keep oneself in the disposition of responding to it if and when it chooses to manifest itself. Properly speaking, it is the Interior Life itself that chooses the man, not the contrary, let this also be remembered. To wait upon the Lord by day and by night is already to be well on the way: there is no time or place where man is left devoid of all spiritual opportunity, unless it be that he himself refuses or ignores the divine mercy that surrounds him.
- [The Marriage of Wisdom and Method](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/pallis-marriage) - only we could presently be transported, as on a magic carpet, to some Tibetan temple where the monks have gathered for their daily office we should notice that each monk, while taking part in the deep-throated psalmody, was also executing certain symbolical gestures with the aid of two objects, namely a bell held in his left hand and something looking like the thunderbolt of Jupiter in his right. These gestures actually reproduce the conjugal play of Wisdom and Method which the two ritual objects so used respectively represent. The bell (dilbu in Tibetan) stands for Wisdom, while Method is represented by the dorje (vajra in Sanskrit), a root that is also present in the name Darjeeling, which means “the place of the Dorje”. The same two emblems also frequently figure in sacred art, pictorial or sculptural, where they are to be seen either separately or else grasped in the hands of various divinities as they retrace the same gestures as the monks of our imaginary temple scene. According to the traditional symbolism Wisdom, the bell, is female and Method, the dorje, is male. The lamas say that both these principles must be brought into play and harmoniously blended if ever spirituality is to ripen its proper fruit in enlightenment; they must not be allowed to get out of step, otherwise some degree of spiritual lop-sidedness will result, impeding the purpose in view. Usually this idea is expressed by saying that Wisdom is the eye and Method the legs and that if one of these fails the man will be helpless. There is a happy parable current in Tibet pointing this moral, which runs as follows: two men set out to reach the city of Nirv?na, but neither could make much headway because the one was blind while the other was lame. Eventually they decided to join forces, so the lame man climbed on to the blind man’s back and so they set out together, with the man who had eyes pointing out the way while the man with sound legs advanced along it, and thus they arrived safely in the city. Insistence on the guiding principle that Wisdom and Method must keep close company and not be allowed to outstrip one another means, among other things, that disciples undergoing training with a spiritual master are not encouraged to over-stimulate an appetite for abstract theorizing or to spend effort on anything but strictly necessary tasks. Economy of instruction is the rule in Tibetan spirituality—the word “economy” is here to be understood according to its primitive meaning of “good housekeeping”, which includes both storing and spending. Wisdom, when acquired, should not be kept in store too long, lest it go stale on you. It must be used while it is still fresh (and this is where Method comes in), providing food, as it does, not only for the mind but also for the body; every element in man, be it even the most outward, is able to participate in the regenerative process, and indeed must do so if that process is to be complete. One must be as chary of useless activities as one is generous of necessary ones; which means, in effect, a proper rationing of thoughts, speech, reading and the like, as well as of the more obviously bodily occupations. As for effort and its strenuous demands, these must be rightly guided, other-wise they too will exhaust themselves by dispersion; here again it is Method that will help to canalise them, by enclosing the effort within wisely determined limits, in which even bodily factors such as breathing, posture etc. may play a part. When a stream has to pass through a narrow channel its force increases thanks to this very constriction: it is this idea which lies behind many of the contrivances resorted to by Tibetan and other contemplatives and which at first sight might seem unaccountably external and elementary as supports for an experience destined to take place in the innermost heart of man. In fact this kind of discipline, though it makes demands on perseverance and therefore, necessarily, on the will, once accepted is able, by compensation, to relieve the will of quite a considerable burden by establishing a rhythm in effort; human propensity to habit can thus be turned to good account, since nothing is more wasteful of energy than spasmodic attempts requiring ever renewed impulses of will to keep them going. If this is true, for instance, of an art like music, it is doubly true of the supreme art of contemplation, hence the importance of a sound spiritual technique or method. In the eyes of the lamas any doctrine, therefore, which is communicated minus an accompanying method calculated to attune the whole being, and not merely the thinking mind, to its reception, presents dangers and these will increase in proportion as the doctrine itself grows more profound. Only metaphysical realization can eliminate these dangers altogether and this cannot be guaranteed unilaterally by any human expedient; a grace will always be implied which is not in itself an evocation of the methods applied. Yet without some kind of spiritual discipline there is small hope of anyone’s becoming aware of what is being offered him by the divine hand of mercy; otherwise all one would have to do would be to sit and wait in a state of complete passivity, a quietism in the wrong sense. Such an attitude is at the very antipodes of the true state of contemplative repose—Tibetan Yogins are called Naljorpas=obtainers of tranquility; that state represents, in fact, the most intense state of activity open to man, that in which all his powers of attention are brought to bear on a single point and maintained there, with every out-facing agent of dispersion or agitation entirely stilled. All this explains why the best Tibetan teachers, like their fellows in India and elsewhere, are on the whole suspicious of erudition and ratiocinative virtuosity; for though these characteristics can some-times go hand in hand with spiritual insight, the opposite is far more often the case, hence the need, in all but exceptional cases, to discourage any tendency to mental gluttony as also the tendency to over-stimulate the thinking faculty; the former tends to foster a quantitative conception of knowledge, while the latter tends to confine knowledge to the field of relationships, in all their endless combinations, to the exclusion of any understanding of things in themselves, in their essential Suchness, this being beyond the resources of the discursive mind as such. When the thinking mind single-handed abusively attempts such a thing the result is but a series of abstractions that have parted company with their archetypes. Knowledge, in the real sense, the one invariably given to it by the Tibetan lamas, is always to be regarded as “concrete”, that is to say, it always implies an equating of knowing with being, intellect with existence, theory or vision with realization. It is with the former that Wisdom is specifically concerned, and Method with the latter. Here again, it were well to be reminded that Wisdom, to remain such, demands the latent presence of Method and vice versa: the Taoist symbol of the yin-yang, with its dark and light halves, interlocked and with each showing a speck of the opposite hue, provides an admirable illustration of this mutual dependence. The distinction of Wisdom and Method, apart from its obvious convenience of expression, does in fact correspond to a reality which will persist, at least in a certain degree, so long as the world of relativities (which is also the world of illusions) has not been abandoned. As long as there is yet a way to be followed each member of the syzygy has his or her distinct part to play; though they co-operate in the closest manner, their influence remains, as it were, parallel. But just as parallel lines are said to meet in infinity—used thus, the latter term is rather loose—so in Enlightenment, the goal of all spiritual ways, does the distinction of Wisdom and Method disappear, this being the final consummation of their marriage and its issue, the two in one.[1] * * * Let us now return for a moment to consider the two objects previously mentioned as symbolising the partners of our chosen theme, namely the bell and dorje. The bell, which always bears the same device and is cast from a special alloy yielding a clear and beautiful tone, is, as we said, regarded as the female principle. The handle is crowned with the head of the goddess Prajn? Paramit? or Wisdom Transcendent, here equated with Tara, the mother of the Bodhisattvas or beings dedicated to Enlightenment. As for the dorje, its symbolism is multiple: chiefly it is an axial symbol signifying the thread of Enlightenment passing through the centre of every being or world and especially of man, who is a central or axial being by definition: hence the frequent reference, in the Buddhist scriptures, to “human birth hard to obtain”, with the added injunction that this rare opportunity should not be wasted, but turned to profit while the going is good. The axis itself is flanked by four (sometimes further subdivided into eight) phlanges, with a constriction where the hand lays hold of the dorje in the middle. These phlanges correspond to the four directions of space which between them “encompass” the universe. A precisely similar symbolism attaches to the three-dimensional cross of which the dorje is but a variant: Christians should always remember this metaphysical meaning attaching to the central emblem of their tradition, for the cross, by thus “measuring” the worlds, already pre-affirms the truth that He who is raised thereon is One who shall be both Judge—to measure something implies sitting in judgment—and Saviour. Regarded from another point of view the central axis corresponds to the Way, spiritual life. This is its cosmic aspect, of which the counterpart, in the human microcosm, is the intellect or true intelligence, the organ wherewith it is possible to contemplate the divine mysteries, of which each station in the line of vision marks a degree of understanding. This transcendent faculty is commonly indicated, in Indian and Tibetan images, by the third or frontal eye. With most beings this eye is as if asleep, or rather it is the being itself that takes its own blindness for granted until one day, by the “opening of the third eye”, it becomes aware that it has had the power to see all the time and had not noticed the fact! The third eye has no other meaning but this; it is not connected, as some would have us believe, with the acquisition of unusual psychic powers—indeed, any addiction to their pursuit, as the Lamas are continually reminding people, will create a fatal obstacle to the opening of the intellectual eye. To point this out would not be necessary but for the fact that Tibet has long been a favourite hunting-ground for those whose aim it is to explain—I should have said, to explain away,—the traditional symbols and myths in psychological terms. If materialism whether dialectical or merely de facto is the enemy religion is most obviously having to face in the world today, this confusing of spiritual and psychic is like a secret plundering of the arsenal in the rear by self-styled allies: for, needless to say, whatever pertains to the psycho-physical vehicle belongs to the “physical” world, in the Aristotelian sense, and there-fore falls under the reproach of being but an aggregate, impermanent and vowed to old age and eventual decomposition—I have here used Buddhist language; this means, in effect, that it is devoid of any transcendent character or selfhood—here again I have stuck to the Buddhist expression of a truth which, in other traditions, will necessarily assume a different form, according to the characteristic “economy” of each tradition in question, by which its various modes of expression are determined. * * * We must now make a brief digression in order to deal with certain accusations that have often been levelled by hostile religious propagandists against the practice of a “spiritual method” as understood in India and Tibet, as also among the Sufis: the accusations in question amount to this, namely that in the Eastern traditions Method, spiritual technique, is regarded as operating in a quasi-mechanical way as if postures, breathing exercises, repetition of formulas and so on could, as efficient cause, be guaranteed to produce a given result in the sphere of the spirit, thus by-passing Grace; and secondly, that in these same traditions the moral perfections are neglected as being more or less irrelevant to knowledge. One can only start off by giving the lie to both the above strictures which contradict all the known facts, as proved by any number of sacred texts and instruction books for aspirants in all manner of languages, as well as by the personal testimony of still living teachers and their disciples. It is interesting to recall a similar scandal that took place in the Christian world in the fourteenth century, when Barlaam the Calabrian attacked the Hesychasts of Mount Athos and their yogic practices. Their defence by St. Gregory Palamas might serve as a precedent in all similar cases. What has previously been said about the function of Method should suffice to answer the first accusation, at least in part. Method cannot of itself compel knowledge, but it can help to create favourable conditions for its revealing. Its action is twofold: positively, it will provide adequate “supports” for meditation’ (or for prayer, wherever that word applies); negatively, it strives by various skilful devices to inhibit any movements of body or mind that might divert the stream of attention into side-channels or disperse it in eddies. By definition, Method when applied is concerned with the world, the environment, the way, not with the goal itself; it is Wisdom that takes care of the latter. Given, however, that the methodic prescriptions are faithfully carried out it is only a very small abuse of language to promise a result and even to describe that result as fruit of the method; that the expression is loose is proved, if by nothing else, by the self-evident disproportion between the means deployed and the result to which these means are conducive. The same argument applies to prayer: when it is said that if a man prays sincerely and with centred attention God will surely hear him, is one then to be accused of prejudging the decisions of God? The basic assumption is the same in both cases, namely that if existing veils be withdrawn the Light, which is ever shining, will instantly light up the intellect, whose very nature it is to serve as its transmitter; if prayer be offered with wholehearted love, then pre-existing Grace will not withdraw itself. Nothing is more paradoxical than the idea of prayer, since it seems to make man into the subject and God into the object. It is in the very nature of things that the cosmos, which is mirror as well as illusion, should thus reverse the image. Enlightenment is the restoration of the true relationship. The second accusation is still easier to answer: the Eastern traditions yield to none in the attention they give to the virtues and their cultivation, charity, humility, purity and the like. Differences of emphasis exist, but basically all religions stand together in this respect. In fact the cultivation of the virtues is a sine qua non of Method, so much so that it is often taken for granted and therefore hardly mentioned. Nevertheless, any number of allusions, often elucidated at great length and detail, are to be found in the traditional books: one has only to mention the frequent statement that any kind of sexual perversion renders the methods of concentration nugatory—this is but one example of the kind, but these could be multiplied to cover compassion and all the other virtues. At every turn one is told that the ego is the chief enemy to be overcome; subduing the ego does not go without moral effort, everybody knows that. To attribute absurdities to people reckoned in other respects intelligent is decidedly disingenuous! If all religions are alike in the importance they give to the virtues in relation to spiritual aims, they differ somewhat in the character they attribute to each virtue: for instance the Buddhist compassion and Christian charity, though overlapping to a very great extent, are not quite identical either as regards their intellectual premises or in practice. The same applies in other cases; the “flavour” is different. In the Christian ethic emphasis is all along on the will, its right and wrong exercise; hence also the almost obsessive reference to sin. Sin is a human fact; Buddhists do not underrate its importance, far from it, but with them, as also with Hindus, there is always a certain suggestion of bad management about sinning, that accords well with the perspective of gnosis, jn?na, whereas the perspective of love sees in sin primarily a betrayal of the divine Lover by his human counterpart, to the prejudice of the hope of their eventual union. It might sound rather far-fetched were one to suggest, for instance, that charity is also a kind of skill, one that can be properly or improperly exercised, a conception which automatically relates it to Method. Such a suggestion, however, would not astonish a Tibetan since, for him, spirituality always has an element of art about it; hence also his own avoidance of the extremes of moralistic exaggeration into which some others so easily slip. After all, is it so unreason-able to argue that uncharitableness, inasmuch as it exacerbates the ego-forming tendency, is a form of incompetence, opposed as it is to man’s proper destiny? There is nothing in this attitude to prejudice the ultimate result, even though few, in practice, go so far as to reduce all their moral problems to a question of skill. All I have wished to show, by stretching this example somewhat, is that a virtue can be treated as an element of Method without forfeiting one bit of its intrinsic character: it is all a question of perspective and, as was said in another context, of spiritual “economy”. Tibetans as a rule are not very “sin-conscious”, if one may so put it, though they certainly are not indifferent to the question: there is indeed one respect in which they might even claim, with some small show of plausibility, to go further than their Christian fellows, as I will illustrate from my own experience. When talking to them I had often noticed the fact that when any ethical breach happened to be mentioned they invariably described it as “a very great sin”, whether one was discussing murder or some minor act of irreverence or the like. This habit of theirs rather tickled me, so one day I said to a friend: “if what you have just mentioned amounts to a great sin, what then would you describe as a small one?”—I was thinking at the time of the Catholic definition of mortal and venial sins, as applying to the case in question. “It is rash so to label any sin”, my friend answered, “for one neither knows the dispositive causes which rendered that sin possible nor its eventual consequences. In the absence of such knowledge, how can one presume to label it as small? Better to keep on the safe side”. There is a story, classical in Tibet, which is meant to bring out just this point, it runs as follows: A certain man, through some inadvertence, had fallen into the clutches of a demon, who threatened him with some horrible punishment unless he agreed to commit at least one sin; the only concession he was prepared to make in answer to the man’s pleading was to allow him a choice out of three possible sins, to wit: taking life (by killing a goat), having illicit sexual intercourse with a woman, or getting drunk. The poor man debated long before arriving at a decision, for he came of a right-living family and all three sins were equally repugnant to him. At last he said to himself: to take life, that is unthinkable! And to defile myself with that woman, how could I ever face the shame? I hate the idea of getting drunk, but after all, many decent people occasionally take a drop too much, this is clearly the one to choose as being the lesser evil; it’s only common sense!” So he took the cup of strong-brewed barley whisky from the hand of the demon and drained it, though with disgust. No sooner had the whisky gone down than the man began to feel merry; a few minutes later he was making violent love to the woman and soon after that, seizing a knife, he was slaughtering the goat in order to provide them both with a good dinner. “How then”, said my friend, “dare one make a distinction between a small sin and a great?” * * * Till now we have been speaking of the marriage of Wisdom and Method under various aspects; it is time something was said about their divorce, since this too is a possibility. Firstly, what are the consequences of trying to pursue Wisdom in isolation? The Tibetans will answer that this is just the error of the so-called “Self-Buddhas”, conventional butt of all Mah?y?nist writers, those who seek Enlightenment for themselves alone, ignoring the interests of other suffering beings: an intellectual blind alley therefore, an escape from the world without a compensating reintegration of the world. In contrast to this, the Bodhisattva, who embodies the Mah?y?na’s ideal, is described as “deferring” his own exit into Nirv?na until the last blade of grass shall have reached enlightenment. Such comparisons must of course not be taken too literally, for it is more a question of contrasted attitudes than of actual fact. The real point of the above confrontation is that such an abstracting of Wisdom will lead, almost inevitably, to a confusing of Wisdom itself with what are merely its reflections in the discursive mind, mental formulations, conceptualism in general. All Buddhist schools agree that here lies the danger; in Zen we have the extremest expression of this condemnation. Once such a confusion has gained a hold, the tendency to replace metaphysical Knowledge, joint fruit of Revelation and Intellection, by a “philosophy” in the ordinary sense of the word will be well-nigh irresistible: already one can discern here the first outlines of that “science according to the flesh” against which St. Paul has given warning. First, sacred doctrine loses its “concreteness” by the suppression of the corresponding means of realization and then, by progressive stages of abstraction, it sheds, imperceptibly but inescapably, more and more of its transcendent elements until it has become wholly profane and arbitrary, a mere market for human opinions devoid of any possibility of verification. Doctrinal materialism, a relativism treated as absolute and axiomatic, but marks an advanced stage of this process; what further may still lie ahead it would be hard to guess. Secondly Method, when divorced from Wisdom: this, as the Tibetans will agree, has the effect of chaining men fatally to sams?ra, the World of Birth and Death, without hope of escape. Once man ceases to connect technique with transcendent principles and aims, or in other words with Wisdom, there is nothing to keep his native inventiveness from running to seed; the more it is indulged the quicker it will become man’s master, and, incidentally, it will extinguish in him the true creative instinct, which is bound up with a sense of the sacred, replacing art by a monstrous display of ingenuity and manipulative dexterity that stops at nothing. With man’s tastes and tendencies becoming daily more sophisticated, virgin nature, nursery of the contemplative spirit since time immemorial, by dint of continual inroads, well-nigh disappears. As for man himself, he becomes identified, to all intents and purposes, with his sole animality, with the belief, that is to say, that it is possible both to live by bread alone and be at peace. But such bread never satisfies, for do what man will, the spiritual urge is there, frustrated and gnawing at his heartstrings. That is his hell, but, strangely enough, it is also his last hope, since one day he may yet awaken to the real cause of his discontents and this, for every man in whatever situation or state of mind, is the first step into the Way. But meanwhile, till this happens, the nightmare must needs continue. On this note we will conclude the first, more general portion of this essay. It now remains for us to examine a number of examples, all based on personal observation or experience in the Tibetan world, of how the conjoint principle of Wisdom and Method operates in various circumstances of spiritual life. * * * There are two main currents into which the religious life of Tibet divides itself, respectively associated with the Gelugpa, the Order of Virtuous Usage or “Yellow-hats”, as they are familiarly called, and the rest of the monastic community labelled together as “Red-hats” but really containing three separate associations, namely the Nyingmapa or Order of Ancients, the Kagyüdpa or Order of the Oral Tradition and the Sakyapa: the latter Order takes its name from Sakya, an ancient monastery in a high valley some eighty miles north of Everest, which in the thirteenth century occupied premier place in the Tibetan world, with its hierarch acting as representative of the Mongolian Khan who then, and for some time after, held distant suzerainty over Tibet. The temple of Sakya, which I and my friend Richard Nicholson visited in 1947, was of unbelievable splendour, a treasure-house of all the arts at their very purest, and its library of manuscripts, many of them in Sanskrit, is likewise magnificent;[2] but the Sakyapa Order itself has nothing very specific to tell us as far as our present discussion is concerned; it goes in with the three others, all of which will be drawn upon in turn for examples. The Gelugpa, who were mentioned first, have for the last four or five centuries been the dominant Order in Tibet, numbering as they do both the Dalai and the Panchhen Lama among their members. The former has been the temporal ruler of the country, as well as its senior abbot, since the seventeenth century. The Gelugpa are the result of the reform carried out at the end of the fourteenth century by a great saint, Tsong Khâpa by name, who came from the province of Amdo east of the Koko Nor; he started life as a Sakyapa, but later initiated a movement designed to counteract the laxity he perceived among the monks of his own and kindred orders, on much the same lines as occurred repeatedly during the Christian Middle Ages. In some ways the Gelugpa, with their very large monasteries, rather remind one of the Cistercians, though the universities which are also a feature of the Order are more reminiscent of the great scholastic institutions run by the Dominicans at a somewhat later date. It must be understood, when classifying Tibetan spirituality under these monastic headings, that this does not mean that only professing monks are included under any given label. The Orders merely provide a framework, because each represents a distinct type of spirituality, with doctrinal emphasis on some ideas rather than others, with its own books and artistic themes, as also with its own characteristic methods. Each ideal, moreover, expresses itself in the choice of particular divinities or, to be more accurate, divine aspects, the attributes and symbolism of which correspond, visually, to ideas which, for that Order, are central. Every lay person in Tibet is the follower of one or other of these Orders and participates with more or less of intensity in the graces inherent in that particular spiritual current. When a member of a family is about to embrace the monastic life—every family dedicates at least one child in this way—he will naturally be sent to a monastery belonging to the Order of which that family are devotees. What we are chiefly concerned with here is the character and form variously assumed by Wisdom when viewed as doctrine, and by Method, viewed as spiritual discipline or practice; classification according to the chief monastic Orders is an obvious convenience for this purpose. It goes without saying that all these Orders have many features in common; they share all the basic things of Buddhism and most of the traditional practices specific to Tibet. Nevertheless, there is a considerable difference of outlook, as between the various Orders and especially between the older foundations (the “Red-hats”) and the Gelugpa, amounting to a difference of “spiritual genius” and imprinting its unmistakeable stamp on Sage and ordinary disciple alike. We have seen that the Gelugpa were the outcome of a reform, chiefly in the moral field, hence the name of “Virtuous Usage”. Visible results of this reform were: a very detailed rule aiming at a return to primitive Buddhist usage, strict enforcement of celibacy and total prohibition of alcoholic drink, and lastly a marked insistence upon reading and study generally, on lines closely reminiscent of the mediaeval Scholastics of Europe. The Geshe or doctor of divinity is a typical Gelugpa figure, absent in the other Orders, and his is the mentality that dominated the scene in the established church, if one may so describe the Yellow Order because of its association with the government—many officials were monks and in the theocratic arrangements of modern Tibet all high offices were held jointly by a monk, who was always a Gelugpa, and a layman, drawn from the nobility; history has even known a monk commander-in-chief and there would doubtless also have been a monk-admiral if Tibet had possessed a seaboard. Nevertheless, it must not be thought that the Gelugpa, despite their greater proneness to organisation (which is always the mark of a reform, its strength but also, after the initial momentum has passed, its weakness in so far as this may tend to favour a too secure mediocrity)—it must not be thought, however, that the Gelugpa have in principle renounced the contemplative ideal, and many of them proceed far along that road, just like their red-hatted rivals. In no case is a Buddhist monk formally dedicated to external works of various kinds, as in the case of many foundations of Latin Christianity; if scholastic study is also an external work in its way, its object, as forming part of Method, is to provide the aspirant with theoretical preparation to be subsequently “realized” in the contemplative life. In respect of its ideals, Tibetan monasticism stands much nearer to the Greek East than to the Roman West. “Works of Charity”, as understood amongst us, are not for the monk, save incidentally, or rather his chief work of charity is to attack evils and errors, not in their symptoms, but in their very root so that, for him, anything less must be reckoned a distraction from “the one thing needful”. All Tibetans look on the true contemplatives as protectors of mankind, qualified physicians for its ills and as its one and only insurance. For those who achieve this purpose in any high degree whether they still be monks or, as often happens, have exchanged the monastic habit for the tattered garment of the wanderer, the people’s reverence is unbounded and no one would ever dream of asking such a naldjorpa (obtainer of tranquility, the same meaning as “Hesychast”) why he acts thus and not otherwise or where he intends to go next. In this way even the ignorant are able to recognize the presence of Wisdom when they meet it, and this, even more than any formal reminders, is a means of ensuring that all men share, at least to some extent, in the gifts of the Spirit. Indeed it can never be said of any Tibetan, even one seemingly worldly, that he is quite immune to a sudden call into spiritual life; these things may by now have ceased in Tibet as a result of the invasion, but they were still very much alive when we were there in 1947/48 and even the landscape seemed to be bathed in. silent contemplation, as if inviting each passer-by to participate. To return to the Gelugpa: their spiritual method can be summed up in three words: study, meditation, contemplation. According to the Lamrim (=“stages of the way”), a standard treatise of the Order compiled by its founder, the object to be striven for is the simultaneous acquisition of hlak-thong or Transcendent Vision and shi-ne, Abiding Tranquility, which respectively correspond to the active and passive poles of contemplation. An ordinary monk is known in Tibet as trapa which means “schoolman”—the title “lama” properly belongs to three kinds of people only: firstly, Lama Tulkus, those who, like the Dalai Lama, are regarded as providential vehicles of a given celestial influence for which they provide the bodily support, each successive descent of this influence being described as a “rebirth”; secondly, heads of initiatic lines; and thirdly, one’s own spiritual guide, one’s personal Lama. Any loose use of the word “lama” is foreign to the Tibetans. A typical Gelugpa centre of learning which I have visited is Tashilhunpo, near Shigatse, the seat of the Panchhen Lama and one of the four great universities of Tibet, the other three being close to Lhasa. On first coming to the place it immediately made one think of Oxford, with its many students living several to a staircase where also a larger room was occupied by a tutor who instructed his pupils in small groups. The personal tie between tutor and students is always a very close one, as happens throughout the Orient. Among the students themselves mutual courtesy is the rule, apart from which they display the normal liveliness of young people everywhere, though never to the point of boisterousness such as would run counter to the monastic ideal. Study itself consists, for the Gelugpa apprentice, in memorizing the Scriptures as well as various commentaries and metaphysical treatises—and also in analysing the meaning of what has thus been fixed in the memory, under tutorial guidance; there is a certain approximation to philosophy in the way this is carried out. This course of study can last from three or four up to ten years or more—it is said that at least that long is required in order to obtain a doctorate or “gesheship”. As for contemplation, the declared object of all this study, it can well be imagined that many, indeed the majority, stop somewhere short of fulfilment, which rather justifies the scornful comments of a Red-hat friend of mine when he said: “A Gelugpa always has his nose in a book, but he never gets anywhere”. This criticism is not altogether just: the best of the Gelugpa—and they are not a few—do try and apply the learning they have acquired as intended, by spending longer or shorter periods in secluded meditation at one of the mountain retreats (rito) which every important monastery maintains for this purpose; but nevertheless the tendency to exteriorise one’s point of view, as a result of so much purely mental activity, exists among the Gelugpa when viewed as a whole, and this is evidenced in a less flexible, more moralistic attitude to things generally, wherein they show themselves on average more hide-bound, in an intellectual sense, than their opposite numbers among the Red-hats. Taken at its most typical, the Gelugpa spiritual programme starts out from the idea of impermanence. This, in the Buddhist view, is the very corner-stone of Wisdom and a constant point of reference whenever attention shows any signs of flagging. Continual dwelling on this theme with the aid of all kinds of moving illustrations lets the aspirant eventually see that he himself and the rest of the beings in the universe share a common fatality in the ephemeral nature of their joys and the continual recurrence of suffering and death, extending even to their personal consciousness, the thing they all call “I”. The logical effect of regarding things in this way is a powerful welling up of compassion which then becomes the driving force behind all subsequent effort: at its highest this sense of kinship in suffering becomes an irresistible call to Bodhisattvahood, self-dedication to the cause of all beings, with a view to their deliverance from the Round of Birth and Death through their Enlightenment. That is why, in the Gelugpa teaching, compassion is actually identified with Method itself. This, coupled with a pushing of impermanence to the point of recognising the voidness or lack of self-nature of all things (which is the key-note of wisdom in this tradition), brings the spiritual traveller to that sublime station where vision transcends all possible expression and when every agitation is stilled in the peace that passeth understanding. * * * Turning now to the Red-hat Orders, one meets here a great variety of methods pursued against a background that is much less of a pattern than with the Gelugpa. Though Nyingmapa and Kagyüdpa monasteries, mostly small, are to be found scattered all over Tibet, as well as in the cis-Himalayan Buddhist states where they predominate, there are also numbers of their adherents who do not belong to a monastic community; these include laymen who, after spending several years under instruction by the lama of their choice, return home to lead dedicated lives for the rest of their days; to whom must be added others, fewer in number, who have felt called to a life of heroic contemplation, men and women leading a solitary existence in some retired spot where herdsmen or villagers will periodically bring them food, asking no questions and speaking only if first spoken to, knowing full well, as they do, that these people above all others are benefactors of mankind by their very presence and that “the terrible resolution to seek the solitudes and meditate all the rest of one’s life for the sake of suffering creatures” (as Mila Repa put it) is the greatest gift anyone can share with his fellows. These hermits could be found, in ones and twos, throughout the Tibetan world, living in caves close to the glaciers, or else wandering along one of the endless tracks that cross the high plateau, leaves borne hither and thither before the wind of the Spirit, that bloweth where it listeth; some of them even returned after a time to the neighbourhood of human settlements where they lived quietly, teaching a few chosen disciples, and it is in their ranks that the greatest Lamas are mostly to be found. As far as practice is concerned, the disposition of these so-called “unreformed” foundations remains very fluid, as compared with the highly organised Gelugpa, and even monastic communities some-times exhibit exceptional features: for instance, one small Kagyüdpa centre up in the mountains near Shigatse where I was a frequent visitor, consisted of a convent of nuns with a male Lama at their head, and a kindlier or more cheerful set of people I have never met. Another such example was Samding, on the Yamdok lake right in the middle of Tibet; but here relations were reversed, for the Lama was a woman and all the other inmates were men. If these things are apt to shock the prudery of some, they do not astonish the Tibetans, all of whom start out from a basic assumption that a profound spiritual awareness must deeds possess different criteria of what is or is not expedient, as compared with the average mind for whose sake rules and safeguards chiefly exist. The one thing to avoid, as all agree, is any hampering of those who, spiritually speaking, mean business; is not the freedom of this spiritual élite in the common interest of all and would it not be folly for the unqualified to try and limit its scope in terms of their own ignorance? And if some, or even many of those who set out on this path fall out somewhere by the wayside having proved unequal to the great demands made upon them, well, mediocrity can quietly be left to stagnate in its own fashion and no one worries. A common feature of both the Nyingmapa and Kagyüdpa Orders is that many of their Lamas are married and also that alcohol is permitted on the strength of an alleged dispensation given by Padma Sambhava, the Apostle of Tibetan Buddhism; what exactly that dispensation was meant to cover is not clear, however. Judging by what one has seen in some Nyingmapa centres outside Tibet, heavy drinking there is far too common and many a vocation must have been hopelessly blurred from this cause. In Tibet itself this evil was far less in evidence than in the Himalayan regions. A point about the Nyingmapa needing mention is their expertise in various traditional sciences: for this reason they were much consulted by the population, as calculators of horoscopes, exorcists and especially as performers of propitiatory rites of all sorts. One Nyingmapa lama, a most delightful person with whom we were on friendly terms during our stay at Shigatse, was employed by the government as a hail-warden, whose duty it was to watch from a specially constructed tower for storm-clouds that might empty .themselves in hail on growing crops, always a fear in Tibet at certain seasons. Whenever a suspicious-looking cloud appeared the lama hastened to the top of his tower and there performed the appropriate rite, which included the display of a complicated ‘geometrical diagram most cunningly fashioned. This lama once inquired of me whether England ever suffered from hailstorms and when I answered that sometimes this did happen he asked gravely what measures the government there took to guard against the danger; he was surprised when we told him that our welfare services did not provide for this! Though, as explained above, many members of the older Orders belong to monasteries, the unit that really counts in this particular world is the gyüd or initiatic line which, by its diverse membership cuts across all other arrangements. At the head of each such spiritual family stands the Gyüd Lama, through whom the direct line, of the “apostolic succession” is transmitted. These gyüds originate in many different ways. Some have been founded by noted saints of antiquity or even of quite recent times, men whose pre-eminent wisdom and virtue have won spontaneous recognition from the people, many of whom have come to them asking for spiritual guidance, which in Tibet is tantamount to discipleship. Others again trace their origin directly to celestial inspiration: this applies to the Kagyüdpas as a whole, though subsequently this Order, once accounted a single gyüd, has given rise to many separate initiatory lines each of which now counts as a gyüd in its own right. The story of one Nyingmapa gyüd that arose in our own time will best illustrate the way these things are apt to happen. Many years ago in the city of Lhasa a woman from Western Tibet used to go round with her daughter chanting certain sacred sentences in a very beautiful voice. By dint of this daily invocation the daughter became strongly drawn towards the contemplative life, so she decided to retire into a cave that had once belonged to Padma Sambhava aforementioned, the founder of the Nyingmapa Order. There she spent many years in silent meditation until gradually, no one quite knows how, disciples began to gather round asking for her doctrine till quite a little community of cave-dwelling hermits grew up there. Soon pious hangers-on from the city, some of them belonging to the high nobility, found their way to the place, bringing their offerings; if they could not face that life themselves, at least they could participate in this indirect way. Eventually the fame of the Precious Reverend Mother, as she came to be known (“functional’ names are always preferred to personal ones in such cases; the people coin these for themselves), spread far and wide. This woman Lama lived to close on a hundred, so I was told by one of her adherents, teaching the common run of her disciples during the day but reserving the night hours for the elite. This case is a typical one; but for the Chinese invasion her chosen successor would doubtless now be carrying on the line as Gyüd Lama, bestowing initiation and teaching even as he or she had been taught by the sainted foundress of the line. Something must now be said about the prevailing ideas among the Red Orders concerning the moral law and its applications, since this too is a most characteristic feature of their perspective. Though they accept, like all Buddhists, the idea of “gathering merit” (or avoiding demerit), closely connected, as it is, with the idea of karma, concordant action and reaction as the determinant of birth, it does not play, in its ordinary form at least, as great a part in their calculations as it does with the Gelugpa, for whom it remains central. All Tantrik followers (from tantra=a methodic treatise, one or more of which belong to each gyüd) look on every vice as the shadow, as it were, of its corresponding virtue and as a source of power which, though it has been misused, should not be so much eliminated as trans-muted into the virtue it is by rights. Thus, instead of applying the will, by frontal attack, to the mere repression of the vice in question they prefer to look round for a spiritual method whereby the desired transmutation can be brought about and it is to perseverance in this method, when found, that the will is properly to be applied. As it is usually expressed by the Tantrik teachers, the poison itself must be converted into Amrita, the Elixir of Immortality. It will readily be recognised that this point of view is properly an alchemical one, a fact which bears out the generally intellectual nature of the Red-hat perspective; this point of view is such as to exclude that sentimentalism, which in proportion as a standpoint becomes externalised and moralistic, is sure to intrude itself more or less. * * * The initiatic side of the Tibetan tradition is known as “the Way of the Mantras” (Tibetan: Ngaki Lam), to contrast it with Doi Lam, the Way of the Sutras, the canonical Scriptures with their commentaries and theoretical treatises generally. The latter is the common appanage of all men and the subject-matter of scholastic studies. The Way of the Mantras, on the other hand, is only accessible under safeguards because of its essentially practical or “operative” character, which might lend itself to abuse. Alchemy of the soul is not a field in which arbitrary experimentalism is either safe or desirable. Therefore access to this way requires, as its first condition, regular attachment to an initiatic line (gyüd) in which it is possible to receive instruction from a qualified lama who then becomes one’s own Spiritual Master or guru. In order to join the gyüd a postulant’s qualifications must first be considered by the Gyüd--Lama or his representative, who may accept or reject the candidate without giving any reasons; rejection does not, however, exclude the possibility of renewing the request at a later date. Before the newcomer is ready to become a regular disciple of the lama in the fullest sense, he must undergo a preliminary training known as “the prelude” (ngün-dro) which chiefly consists of four specified exercises known as the four bum from the fact that each exercise has to be repeated one hundred thousand times. This introductory course, apart from its general purpose of conditioning body and mind to the higher things to come, can also serve in some sort as a filter against those who are attracted out of mere passing fancy, lacking perseverence. Nevertheless once a person has become attached to the line by a conferring of the initiatory lung (=authorisation) it always remains open to him, however faint-hearted he may have shown himself at the start, to return to the attack by taking up his spiritual task where he left off. The effect of any initiatic grace is ineffaceable in itself, however it may be received or acted upon. ‘To belong to an initiatic family is to participate, whether actively as intended, or else more or less passively, in a stream of spiritual influence flowing downwards and onwards from the original source of revelation, through the dynasty of lamas, celestial or human, which providentially has been entrusted with its transmission. In a sense such a gyüd (the word literally means “lineage”) corresponds, in a specific form, to what tradition itself is in a more general and all-inclusive way; an initiatic line is, as it were, a given artery through which the traditional spirit flows with peculiar intensity. If the Way of the sutras primarily is the vehicle of traditional wisdom in its more general sense, the way of the mantras is concerned with the best means of “realizing” that to which the sutras have already drawn attention, in other words, with Method. Each further step in the initiatic path will require its appropriate lung or wang (wang=power or faculty) allowing the exercitant to renew his strength on the completion of one big effort and before he faces another. The whole process should be looked upon as one journey, whether long or short, punctuated with convenient halting-places which will vary in importance according to the degrees of knowledge to which they correspond. Such a journey is never without its perils, and for its accomplishment it calls for effort well sustained and well directed; whatever may happen on the way, the time must finally come when the traveller will be asked to stake all he possesses in a single throw for the purpose of gaining the pearl of great price; as for the rest, he must be content to rely on his Lama’s grace, as the saying goes. In any case, no spiritual journey is ever taken alone, whatever may be the appearances; there is always a downflow of grace, but for which no such journeying would either begin or continue. The inaugural lung often relates to the use of a book, special to the gyüd concerned, containing all the instructions necessary for the four bum; this book has to be memorized, an easy operation for most Tibetans whose education always includes a good deal of learning by heart, but difficult for the casual foreigner; for greater ease of memorizing, many of the Tantrik treatises are given in verse. Until the lung has been duly conferred it is unlawful to read the book or even to turn its pages. Despite this salutary prohibition a certain amount of information concerning the contents of these books has reached the West, which can only mean that some of those entrusted with this “initiatic secret” have broken their trust, either by handing the texts to foreigners or else by divulging details about them: a text like the Tibetan “Book of the Dead”, to give one instance, might have been better left unpublished, for taken out of its proper context it has only served to feed the curiosity of all kinds of sensation-mongers as well as to provide material for the dubious interpretations of profane psychology. This book ostensibly concerns two classes of people, namely the dying, for whose express benefit it exists, and lamas whose special task it is to attend on the dying and who, in order to perform this office, have to receive both an initiation and training in its ritual. There is, however, some authority for supposing that this text is also designed to serve as a guide to a methodic process of “initiatic death”, as a prelude to “spiritual regeneration”; in which case its profane disclosure, in violation of the traditionally imposed conditions, must be regarded as still more undesirable than if it had been a question of funeral rites alone. . The lung itself, in the case of a book, consists in a reading of the whole work aloud by the empowering Lama in the hearing of the disciple. In practice, however, there are various admitted ways of abbreviating the task; even so, such a reading takes a considerable time, so that a pause at half time is usual when tea is served and all the participants are allowed to relax. Such a break for tea is also usual in temple services, being typical of the matter-of-fact way in which the Tibetans regard all these things. The above description, bare as it is, will, it is hoped, have given some inkling into the workings of the initiatic life as lived in Tibet; many parallels can doubtless be found in other traditions but the Tibetan spirituality possesses, as we have seen, some features of its own. Coming back to more general considerations, the chief spiritual means in vogue among the Tantrik schools fall roughly under two headings: visualisation, and mantra or incantatory formula; these methods may either be employed singly or else in combination according to the tradition of each particular gyüd. Visualisation consists, essentially, in the imaginative evocation of various divinities, and the Tantrik books are largely taken up with detailed instructions for constructing such and such a mandala or circle centred on a given divine aspect, of which the attributes, colours, attendant deities, names, etc., together with their symbolic correspondences have to be memorized in their proper order and correctly grouped round the presiding figure at the centre. To construct a mandala requires a combination of sacred geometry and figurative imagery, and many examples exist, beautifully drawn either on scrolls or on the walls of temples, to serve as mnemonic aids for those who practise this kind of meditation; one of the most splendid series of such mandalas was to be found painted on the wall of the upper cloister of the great temple at Sakya. They are also sometimes depicted on the ground, using coloured earths and pebbles, in connection with certain rites at the termination of which these marvellous symbolic designs will be effaced; one could compare them, perhaps, with the sand-paintings of the Navajo Indians of North America. Two complementary phases are recognised in the creation of a mândala respectively called kyepa (=producing) and dzogpa (=exhausting or perfecting). By drawing the divinities, as it were, out of himself and then reabsorbing them in the order described (a process which will be repeated as often as the instructing lama thinks fit), the exercitant is led to awareness that “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you”, but also that whatever partakes of form, be it even divinely informed, is in the last analysis illusory, leaving room only for THAT which has no form, no name and no expressible attributes. The above gives a very inadequate picture of the principle behind the methods of visualisation but at least it affords an inkling of how such methods are expected to work. With mantra the process is analogous, inasmuch as a mantra represents a sonorous form of the divinity, parallel to the visual forms already mentioned. A mantra can consist of a single syllable or name or else it may be formed out of several words which do not always, however, connect up into a sentence that can be logically analysed, in fact the opposite is more commonly the case. For the most part these formulas are of the kind called zung (dharani in Sanskrit) and because of their seemingly haphazard character foreign commentators have readily described them as “gibberish” only fit to deceive the heathen. In reality, their virtue is in some measure bound up with their “non-logical” (not illogical) character, since one of the objects of meditating on such a formula is to penetrate its meaning without engaging the mind in a rationcinative operation to the detriment of intellection. Discovering the “secret” sense of a zung therefore is something comparable with the koan or “spiritual conundrum” of the Zen adepts, in China and Japan. A mantra can either provide a theme for meditation or else it can be “invoked”, that is to say repeated whether aloud or silently and this practice, the Indian japa, is widespread in Tibet; the word used to describe it is deba which literally means the purring of a cat. It has been universally recognised that invocation, as a spiritual “support”, is peculiarly suited to the needs of the Dark Age forming the closing phase of a human cycle, when many spiritual means that were avail-able in more favoured times have become impracticable. Deeper reasons apart, it is easy to see that the very simplicity and conciseness of this method, requiring no extraneous apparatus for its exercise, recommends its use in unusually difficult circumstances: a man might invoke even in the presence of scoffers and persecutors without their being aware of the fact, whereas any other method would attract attention and consequent reprisals. Needless to say the concentrated use of mantra is no facile expedient intended for the simple-minded (though they too can use it after their own fashion) but on the contrary it demands an intellectual preparation of no small consequence; the element of repetition is merely incidental, valuable as this is to ensure both continuity and rhythm. In Tibet, as in other places where mantra is methodically used, a lung or initiatic empowerment must precede the use of any given formula, otherwise its invocation will remain at best rather ineffective and at worst dangerous, because of the irregular emission of the mantra’s inherent power. All mantras now in use in Tibet were originally brought from India by the Tantrik initiates of the first centuries following the introduction of Buddhism into the Land of Snows; they invariably remain in their Sanskrit form because a mantra, being as it were an ikon composed of sound, will not suffer mispronunciation, and still less translation into another language. The Indian science of mantra is insistent on this point. However, in practice and by dint of their repetition by people unacquainted with the phonetics of Sanskrit, many of the mantras used in Tibet have by now parted company with their spelling so that an Indian hearing them would be quite shocked by their present rendering on the part of the Tibetans, which to his ears would sound truly barbarous! In this connection there are some good stories to tell; but before doing so, it should be explained that Tibetans, as also Hindus, have a happy way of occasionally turning even a hallowed rule upside down, just to make sure that peoples’ minds do not get so imprisoned in the rule as to render it self-contradictory, which can easily happen where “the spirit of either…or”, so ingrained in European minds, is pushed to the point of pedantry. Many stories exist in which even highly venerated saints have had the tables turned on them by seemingly inferior or sinful people, stories in which, by a paradoxical reversal, the saint has been made to stand for “the letter which killeth” and the sinner for “the spirit which saveth”. This ability to laugh at the things one venerates, though without losing one’s veneration in the process, provides spiritual life with a healthy outlet; but it does not go with a sentimental outlook and this probably accounts for the fact that this kind of humour has rarely found a place here in the West. But now for a story: It is related of the fifth Dalai Lama, commonly known as the “Great Fifth”, that after he had completed his splendid monastery-cum-palace on Potala Hill overlooking the city of Lhasa, he often used to sit at his window watching people making their circumambulation of the sacred edifice, a pious practice that had continued to our time: the circuit is always taken in a clockwise direction as it is considered disrespectful to turn one’s left side towards any eminence or building that becomes an object of pilgrimage; it must always be passed on the left, with the right side turned towards it. One day, while the great pontiff was sitting by his window as usual he perceived a female figure of radiant appearance apparently doing the circuit; her attributes were those of the goddess Dölma (=Saviouress, her Sanskrit name is Tara). Moreover on several successive days the same thing happened, so the Dalai Lama instituted an inquiry and found out, to his astonishment, that the divine Mother was not alone in her circumambulation, she was in fact accompanying a poor old man. The Dalai Lama ordered the man to be brought before this: “Do you know”, he asked, “that each day as you walk round the Potala the Lady Dölma bears you company? Also the air above you is filled with propitious signs, rainbows, Banners of Victory, Wheels of the Doctrine, flowers and many others. How do you explain this favour you have received?” The old man felt far from reassured by the sovereign’s interest in his affairs; indeed this terrified him. All he could say was that he had been quite unaware of any of these supernatural manifestations. When questioned further he declared, however, that for some forty years it had been his daily practice, as taught him by his own spiritual master, to recite the litany of Dölma which he had combined with the sacred tour; this was all the light he could throw on the matter, since till that moment he had not given it any thought but that of carrying out his teacher’s instructions. Filled with admiration at the old man’s piety, the Dalai Lama asked him to recite the litany in his presence but was rather taken aback to find that the text, as repeated by this simple soul, was full of mistakes; and as for the mantras included in the litany, they were almost unrecognisable. He therefore told the man that he must learn to recite it properly, since it was hardly respectful to the goddess thus to distort words composed in her praise. Much abashed at his own ignorance the old man promised to do as the Pontiff had directed and hurried home to look up the text and memorize it afresh. Several days later the Dalai Lama was back at his window whence he perceived the old man walking round as usual; but of the goddess there was no sign; and in the sky not a single rainbow or flower was to be seen! Hastily word was sent to the old man telling him to recite the litany just as he had been accustomed, mistakes and all. The next day Dölma reappeared at his side while the air was filled once again with all kinds of resplendent symbols. Then the Dalai Lama realized what had been the matter; prior to his interference, well meant as it was, the old man’s mind had been absorbed in Dölma to the exclusion of all extraneous attachments, hence the sublime realization that was vouchsafed him. Another tale couched in the same vein was told me by my friend Rai Bahadur Densapa, Sikkim’s distinguished elder statesman; he himself is a mine of traditional lore and one of his sisters was married to the Sakya Lama whose spiritual ancestor figures in this story. The said lama, whose vast learning earned for him the title of “Sakya Pandita”, was once on his way to India, probably for the purpose of collecting books for the library that was one of the glories of his abbey, which takes its name of “Sa-kya” (=tawny earth) from the lonely valley where it is situated, on a level with the highest summits of the Alps. As he was approaching the frontier of Nepal the lama ran into another Tibetan, a dubtob or yogi endowed with supra-normal powers, who likewise was bound for India, so they decided to continue the journey together. As they walked along the Sakya Pandita asked the dubtob how he managed to gain such remarkable powers and the latter said it was thanks to a certain mantra; by dint of its concentrated invocation the powers had developed of their own accord. Whereupon he repeated his mantra to the lama. Now, as we said before, that Sakya Lama was a great Sanskritist in whose ear the distorted version of the Sanskrit formula as uttered by his rather rustic companion struck a most discordant note, so much so that he could not forebear from saying to the dubtob: “Though your mantra has brought you undoubted benefits, I am bound to point out that you are mispronouncing it badly and with a mantra, this simply won’t do. I myself speak Sanskrit fluently, so do let me show you the correct way to say the words”. The dubtob, who had no pretentions to being a scholar, was only too glad to be coached by his learned companion; after some little practice he got the words right to the satisfaction of his instructor, following which the pair of them continued their way towards Nepal. Just as they were arriving at the frontier, however, there suddenly appeared before them the menacing figure of a gigantic Hindu yogi, his face and body all smeared with ashes, who called out in a voice of thunder: “Not a step further! No Buddhists shall pass here! By years spent in austerities I have gained irresistible powers; you will defy them at your peril, so go back to where you came from”. Stung by his words the dubtob answered: “I am sure my own powers are greater than yours. I accept your challenge! Let each of us do what he can, we will soon see which of us is the stronger”. “Before we two engage in such a contest” sa
- [Christian Theology and Other Faiths](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/christian-theology-other-faiths) - Christian Theology and Other Faiths ROWAN WILLIAMS A lecture given at Birmingham University. 11 June 2003 Imagine you’re looking up some statistics about an African country – population, main exports, ethnic groupings and so on; there’ll probably be an entry for ‘religions’, and it may read like this – ‘Muslims 40%, Christians 38%, Hindus 3%, traditional religions 19%’. It looks very straightforward, rather like a run-down of political allegiances or tribal distribution. It is one defining activity or characteristic among others. But one thing I want to suggest in this lecture is that it’s the sort of formula that can suggest significant misunderstanding, a misunderstanding that affects both popular thinking and public policy in our own country; and I think we need a bit of theology to help us to a more sensible position. So what’s actually wrong with this breakdown of religious loyalties? The problem is roughly this. We westerners tend to think that a ‘religion’ is a distinct system of ideas, beliefs that connect the world as we see it with a whole lot of non-visible powers or realities, which have to be paid attention to, worshipped or at least negotiated with, in order to have the maximum security in life. Religions express themselves in beliefs but also in distinctive practices like periods of selfdenial, meetings for ritual actions and festivals. So far so good, in one sense. The dangerous assumption follows, though, that the world as we see it is pretty clear; we can agree about it – whereas the powers that religion tries to connect with are invisible, so that we can’t expect to agree about them. What they have in common is claims that can’t be proved by appealing to the world as we all see it. So a Christian, a Muslim, a Buddhist and a Ghanaian or Papuan villager performing rituals handed down from time immemorial are all performing variations of the same thing; and that same thing is always set over against the obvious, ‘public’, shared world of what we can see. Life divides between things that are common to everyone and things that are unclear and therefore don’t belong in the public and everyday. What ‘religion’ you belong to is simply a matter of which set of beliefs you happen to entertain in that bit of your life which is left over for this kind of thing. But when we try to talk with the Muslim or the villager in particular, things get to look more complicated. The villager will undoubtedly say that performing rituals is as routine and necessary and uncontroversial a thing as milking cows; indeed, it may well be that the way you milk cows is dictated by rituals that seem to the outsider to have not very much to do with cows as we see them. Dylan Thomas memorably quotes in the preface to his Collected Poems the Welsh shepherd who was asked why he still performed rituals in fairy rings to protect his sheep; he replied (doubtless with scorn for the silliness of the question), ‘I’d be a damn fool if I didn’t’. There just isn’t an ordinary world from which this villager takes time off to practice his ‘traditional religion’. The same with the Muslim, in a more sophisticated way: the ordinary day you have to get through is marked in time intervals every bit as natural or obvious as the hours of the clock to us, the intervals between the five prayer times. There isn’t a neutral time that needs interrupting to do religious things: the ordinary is the religious. And just to take one more example of possible confusion: Buddhists have festivals and temples and statues, so they are obviously people who do this religious thing. But what are the invisible forces they deal with? For the strictest southern Buddhist at least, though in one sense for all Buddhists, the invisible forces are inside us; doing ‘religious’ things is not a matter of how to negotiate with an invisible world outside us at all, but of learning an all-inclusive set of mental habits that gradually changes the way you relate to this world and frees you from inner suffering and frustration. So my imaginary African country can’t after all be split up into four neat segments of religious belief, four varieties of one thing, that thing being a set of more or less chosen beliefs about invisible states of affairs alongside the ordinary world. What we have instead is rather a variety of styles of living, each of which has a very different account of the world as a whole, life as a whole. And although this may be rather obvious when you think about it, it does have some far-reaching consequences. Think for a moment about the old Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant – one grasps its tail and says, ‘It’s a rope’, one grasps its leg and says ‘It’s a tree’, and so on. This is often used as a way of saying that we can never really tell the truth in religious matters, we all see things only from a limited perspective and so on. But we are missing the point; someone knows it’s an elephant, and the force of the metaphor is not so much that no-one can know what the invisible sacred reality is actually like as that we are all painfully capable of reaching for the easiest language, the language that fits our own individual experience, when speaking of God, and fail to compare notes with each other or to submit what we say to an acknowledgement that the scale of what we’re talking about should teach us some caution. The one thing the parable isn’t really about is a distinction between what everyone can see and what some people unreasonably argue about. Now this is where theology begins to come into the picture. The model that draws all those very different kinds of life together as varieties of one thing called religion assumes, as I’ve said, that there is an open space in which people can meet when they’re not being religious. When public policy documents talk about involving faith communities in this or that piece of social regeneration, the assumption is likewise that these particular special interest groups can all be harnessed to doing useful work in the open public space, where their disagreements can be buried for a while; they can be persuaded to co-operate in working with what everybody sees, what no-one argues over. I’m not denying that there is something in this, and I’ll come back to it later. But theology, the religious use of the mind, whether Christian or not, is going to start from somewhere else. Religious language talks about the entire environment in terms of its relation with the holy. As Wittgenstein said, it is more like talking about colour – something that affects everything (literally) in sight – than talking about an item in a list of things. Theology, the work of religious intellect, tries to work out what 2 the implications are of seeing everything in relation to a holy reality that is never absent. It is not about advice as to what we should do when in the territory marked off as religious, where we do business with invisible rather than visible things; it is about what lives should look like when they find their meaning as a whole in relation to holy reality. To put it a bit differently, theology tries to make connections between the stories told about the holy or the fundamentally real and the words and actions people use in order to let those stories take hold of their lives and give them shape in every detail and aspect. I know the difficulties in using ‘theology’ to describe certain Muslim or Jewish, let alone Buddhist intellectual activities; the word feels most at home in a Christian context. But every tradition of faith has a tradition of reflecting on the normal words and acts that make up a life of faith. Jews, Christians and Muslims all connect this with reflection on holy books, sorting out the consistency of passages that don’t immediately seem consistent, settling what are agreed to be the implications of a story or a formula or a rule. Buddhists likewise use a set of holy texts, but, in some Buddhist traditions at least, are interested in working out the implications for how we think about knowledge and language of the basic instructions given to help us purge our minds of greed and fantasy. So I recognise that in implying that ‘theology’ can cover all of this, I may be pushing things rather; but my basic point is that all religious practices go along with habits of disciplined thinking, exploring interrelated ideas or metaphors, making connections and searching for consistencies. Even where practice is what we unhelpfully call ‘primitive’, reflection goes on, sometimes in the generation of new stories; mythology often reflects ways of solving problems or suggesting connections by storytelling. If in Greek myth Athena springs fully-armed from the head of Zeus, this encodes a recognition that wisdom or the sense of order is completely contained in and intimately related to the source of creative power; and that is a ‘theological’ point. Ultimate power can’t be stupid; wisdom can’t be just a lucky human guess. So as reflection matures and more connections are made, what comes to light is a map of how things are on which people attempt to ‘plot’ human behaviour. And what this means is that disagreements between religious traditions are very significantly disagreements about the kind of universe we inhabit, what that universe makes possible for human beings; and what is the most truthful or adequate or even sane way of behaving in the universe. The passion in religious disagreement comes not simply from abstract differences as to how the holy is to be talked about, but from differences as to how human life is to be lived so as to be in fullest accord with ‘the grain of the universe’. A different view on this means a life lived less fully in accord with truth, and so a life deprived of significant happiness. Inevitably, then, the disagreements are profound; to the extent that a religious tradition has the generous belief that it is given something of health-giving relevance for all human beings, it will be strong in its arguments with other traditions. This may at first sound an unwelcome approach. But I think it is of enormous importance to see why religious disagreement is serious, and why it can’t be reduced to that realm of essentially private difference, outside the clear light of neutral day, where modern secular society is comfortable leaving it. And what I am going to try and argue is that once we are clearer about the nature and scope of religious disagreement, we are actually more rather than less likely to develop a respectful and collaborative practice in inter-faith relations. This has something to do with the fact that when we see our differences as theological in the sense I’ve outlined, as differences about what a fully meaningful, sane or truth-revealing life looks like in the light of convictions about the universe itself and its source, we begin to see that not all religious claims are answers to the same questions. If, say, Islam and Christianity were two sets of solutions to one problem, their relation would be one of simple rivalry, systematic mutual exclusion. But in fact the two faiths work with importantly different accounts of creation and humanity. It will not do to say either that they are essentially the same or that they are utterly incompatible. What needs to be avoided is, for example, a Christian approach which says simply that Islam is a failed solution to the question satisfactorily answered by Christianity. The difficulties of such an approach appear most clearly when we look at Christian-Jewish relations. The appalling history here is in large part the result of a Christian claim to be the correct answer to a question wrongly answered by Jewish faith and practice – ‘Who is the Messiah?’ As a great deal of modern scholarship makes clear, the greater part of Jewish reflection, ‘theology’ if you will, for two thousand years has not begun from any such question. For the Jew to be told that in Christian eyes he or she has wrongly answered a question either not asked or asked in a wholly different context is in effect for the Jew to be told that there is no fundamental difference between them and the Christian; the Christian way of talking has included the Jew, quite irrespective of what the Jew is actually saying. Similarly with Islam, where the Christian may sometimes feel a bit like the Jew in the preceding paragraph. In the light of the witness of Muhammad as the seal of prophetic revelation, all previous history, including that of Jesus, comes together in a single pattern. If the question is ‘What is the climax of prophecy, where in divine word and human example is the will of God most completely made known?’ the Muslim naturally answers in terms of the Qur’an and the Prophet; the Christian has to struggle to explain that the unique relation of Jesus to God and the incorporation of Christian believers into that relation are beliefs that connect with different questions and need a different narrative structure. A conversation some years ago with an articulate and evangelistic Muslim taxi driver has left a deep impression on me in this regard: it was very clear to him that the mere fact of Islam having appeared later than Christianity provided a powerful case for Christians to change their frame of reference. It should be obvious that here at last was the hitherto unrevealed end of the story. To be a Christian was to leave the theatre at the interval. So quite a bit of interreligious encounter, historically and at the casual level, tends to settle for this basic idea, that the representative of another faith is really, as it were, speaking the same language but making appalling mistakes which render proper communication in the language impossible. I could multiply examples, but let me just mention in passing the implication, for a Westerner, of calling Buddhism ‘atheistic’; the same kind of problem. A properly theological approach, I’m suggesting, is one in which we first try to clarify what question it is to which my own religious language seeks to give answers, and so to engage with other traditions in relation to what their fundamental questions are. And when we come to consider the truth of religious statements, at least we shan’t be trapped into seeing this as a process of comparing a series of answers in a kind of examination. But what does this say about religious truth? There is no vantage point above all traditions and theologies from which some completely detached person can decide; no board of examiners. But this also means that there is no perspective from which someone can say, ‘These are all different ways of looking at the same material’. If I am a person of faith, a person whose life is lived in a comprehensive relationship with what I understand to be the source and context of all life, I cannot appeal to someone out there in the neutral public world to provide me with credentials. So I don’t think that religious relativism or pluralism will do, as this seems always to presuppose the detached observer (the one who sees the whole elephant); but neither can we expect to find a tribunal to assess right and wrong answers. Yet our traditions claim to be true, and, just as importantly, to be about how lives are to be led that are in accord with how the universe is; they are about happiness as well as truth, or rather, they are about truthfulness as the condition of happiness and happiness as the fruit of truthfulness. They do not simply claim to give a correct description of the world in relation to holy reality, they sketch in greater or lesser detail how that relation is to be made specific in daily practice, so that each human life is shaped into an appropriate response. Such response may be characterised as covenantal obedience, self-sacrifice, self-dissolution or whatever else, depending on the basic story told about the universe and its source. But how do we get to assessments of truth from such a perspective? The question is raised in its most sensitive and painful form by the phenomenon of conversion. Very often, when people move from one religious tradition to another, when they recognise a fuller or more final truth in another language and practice of faith, it’s because of a sense that the universe portrayed in this other tradition is a more full or resourceful environment, or that the humanity imagined here is one with greater possibilities and beauties. But this only happens when someone begins to experience the world differently – not simply when a new set of ideas is presented. Sharing a different sort of life makes all of us wonder about the questions and answers we have taken for granted; they may seem misconceived or even subtly oppressive. A different tradition is attractive when it makes you think that this is the all-important question you’ve never asked, so that this kind of life now appears as transparent to a greater truth. It isn’t that a person suddenly sees the right answer to a question that has previously been wrongly answered, but that the new world exposes a whole frame of reference as somehow inadequate. And change from one tradition to another is painful for your former fellow-believers precisely because there is an implied judgement on a whole life, a whole language. Its positive effect, though, ought always to be a deeper self-critical understanding of why someone might find this tradition too limiting to inhabit, an urgency about exploring the resources given. The point I am moving to, however, is that the ‘contest’ over religious truth happens most effectively and authentically when a real sharing of worlds is possible. And that in turn happens only when we do not live in a social order that totally controls the possibilities of experiencing the Other. To this extent, the modern revolt against theocracy, against the religious control of social options, is justified. But I think that the implication is actually the opposite of what is usually thought. We’re used, as I said at the beginning of this lecture, to thinking of the modern social space as one in which it’s impossible to have any very meaningful talk about religious truth because there is a neutral public arena in which truth can be argued about and a private area of commitment to unprovable beliefs. But in fact a non-theocratic society allows real contention about religious truth by the mere fact of giving space for different experiences and constructions of the universe to engage with each other, to be themselves. This is the practical outworking of my earlier point that when we see our differences as theological we may have better and more collaborative relations. If religious faith is not just a set of private beliefs about supernatural things but a comprehensive ground for reflection on how the world and human life hang together, then to establish the truth of any set of religious claims must be a form of showing that this sort of religious language rather than another has the resource to hold together the greatest spread of human experience. There can be no final and unanswerable mode of establishing this by argument. We can only ask if there could ever be convergence about the character of the world and humanity such that we could better see the ‘fit’ of certain words or images. In that sense, the awareness in modern culture of the plurality of religious practice is a positive matter. We have become more aware of the range of what any religious talk has to cope with, the cultural variety, the historical reach, the challenges in catastrophe, pain and tragedy to certain kinds of claim. The point was expressed poignantly by Simone Weil when she said that an indigenous American who had lived through the genocidal terror of the age of the Conquistadors, who had seen massacre and plague and the destruction of a culture, might or might not retain an allegiance to their ‘traditional religion’; but if they did, they would nonetheless think differently about the holy from any thoughts they could have had before. It is an insight taken up by a good many indigenous peoples in our own age. Perhaps one could also point to something similar in the crises and agonies of modern Jewish thought. In the fiction of Isaac Singer – to take only one example – we read about the ‘timeless’ world of faith in the shtetl, the East European Jewish village, with its piety, its folklore, its proverbial wisdom and petty folly, its absolute spiritual solidity; and we read about the lives of rootless post-war emigres, happy neither in the USA nor in Israel, trying to understand what the truth of their Jewish identity and loyalty means in the wake of the most nightmarish disruption imaginable. If that truth can be vindicated in the ‘new world’ after the camps, its truth claims must be taken more seriously and understood more deeply. And thus what we come to see in each other as religious communities in the context of the variegated world of modernity, of ‘global’ society, is a range of behaviours each of which seeks to understand how it is to include, to ‘narrate’ (if I can use a fashionable term), the whole range of a world which is no longer the property of any one of them. This does not mean that every religious tradition seeks to adjust and accommodate itself to modernity or that truth is reduced to the capacity to cope with global culture without tears. Far from it: each will, if it knows its business, sharpen its critique of the myths of secular neutrality, each will seek to show how it can contain and effectively transform the particular challenges to its account of humanity thrown up by the new environment; each will struggle to show that it is not reduced to impotence by the complexity of modern discourse. So, although the pressure of modernity may often produce a powerfully reactionary strategy in some religious believers, the sort of thing we generically and not very helpfully call fundamentalism, the pressure is also visible to demonstrate how a tradition in its full integrity can make intelligible order of the chaos around by extending and renewing its repertoire of image and concept. We could think of the history of the Brahma Samaj in India, of the Sufi-influenced Western Islamic apologetic of writers like Gai Eaton or Martin Lings, or of the revival of Russian Orthodox social and philosophical energy at both the beginning and the end of the twentieth century. Seeing each other like this in the non-confessional, non-theocratic state and culture of modernity, we are better able to avoid the errors I spoke of earlier, the errors that arise from supposing that other faiths have bad answers to the questions for which you have good answers. The issue is now how we exhibit in practice the claims we all in different ways make about our tradition’s ability to tell a truth which will comprehend any human situation it may encounter. Precisely because this is a complex, humanly unpredictable business, in which none of us is going to be able to pronounce a final conclusion acceptable to all, precisely because this is not in any ordinary sense a competition with winners and losers, we need time and space for it. And such time and space are in principle given in societies that assume religious freedom as fundamental, that do not close down the variegated possibilities of the modern. If we start retreating to theocracy, we are by implication admitting that our religious tradition can’t sustain itself in a complex environment; states (Christian, Muslim or Hindu) that enact anti-conversion laws or penalise minority faith groups may have an understandable wish to resist unfair pressure or manipulation in proselytising, but they confess a profound and very disturbing lack of confidence in their own religious resourcefulness. This is one reason why I see no problem in the fostering of faith schools of different complexions in our own country. Christian faith is no longer legally protected here as the only legitimate religious activity; but the existence of church 7 schools forces Christians to engage actively with public life, with how society forms its new generations. It forces Christians, you could say, to try to be credible, professional, articulate, in the public arena. Similar partnerships between statutory authority and other religious communities should have the effect of drawing those communities into public conversation, pressing them to become publicly credible in new ways. And this must be healthy for both society at large and the communities in question, since it ought to be the opposite of ghettoisation. It educates faith communities as it educates the managers of our educational systems, and it obliges us to take each other more seriously as faith communities. Significant interfaith encounter arises from our being able to see each other doing whatever it is we do as well as possible – teaching, worshipping , reflecting, serving. For me, one of the most important such encounters I have ever had was this spring in Qatar, when I was part of an international group of Muslims and Christians meeting to read their scriptures together and discuss them; we Christians were able to benefit enormously from watching Muslims doing what Muslims do with love, intellectual rigour and excitement. It proved a deeper and more truly respectful meeting of minds than any attempt to find a neutral common ground. We met as theologians, committed to exploring the reality of what truthful and holy lives might look like and how they might be talked about. And so we were able not to see each other as competing to answer the same exam paper. At times there was deep convergence, at times monumental disagreement. But I suspect we all emerged with a sharper sense of what our traditions had to deal with, of the complexity of our world and the difference of our questions. My hope for the future of dialogue is for more such exchanges at every level. But I want to turn in conclusion to two specific issues, already hinted at in what I’ve said thus far. I want briefly to say something about the general relation of faith communities to the wider society; and I want to add a few reflections specifically as a Christian theologian on the ideas sketched here. On the first issue: it is true that faith communities have something in common over against a secular frame of reference. They all have disciplines of examining the honesty and consistency of believers, ways of encouraging self-scrutiny; they all assume that we are likely to be deceived about ourselves for quite a bit of the time. They all assume that what we are finally answerable to is something other than just the majority vote in a society at any one time. They all teach us to look critically at what seem to be our instinctive choices, and they all warn us against thinking that the material environment (including the human body) is just there to serve such instinctive human choices. There is a basis for what some like to call a ‘global ethic’ in all this, even if it is primarily negative rather than positive. However, when there are attempts by governments or international agencies to harness this in support of this or that programme for human improvement, it is important that there should not be misunderstanding. Sometimes there can be an expectation that religious communities will simply follow a broadly liberal social agenda, and a consequent anger and disappointment when this doesn’t materialise. This may be when Islamic and Roman Catholic bodies 8 join to resist a programme which assumes that abortion is a naturally just means of population control; when Christians and Hindus join in objecting to genetically modified crops in Asia; when Muslims condemn globalisation because of its dependence on un-Islamic means of handling money through interest and speculation; when people of a wide variety of religious commitments unite to challenge embryo research. All these issues are complex, and my point is not to suggest that there is a single religious ‘line’ on any of them. What matters is to recognise that the religious person or group starts from a perspective which on some questions will deliver conclusions similar to those of the secular progressive, and on some questions most definitely will not. The secular progressive tends to think it is a happy chance that makes religious folk agree with the self-evident goals of human justice and welfare. If we are to avoid deep anger, frustration and anti-religious animus, it is important for the secularist to acknowledge that they may find themselves working alongside religious believers who look to the same goals for radically different reasons; and thus to recognise that the goals of secular justice are not after all so self-evident. One of the most important tasks of religion in our culture, I’d dare to say, is to challenge the secularist to produce good and coherent grounds for their goals. And this is made all the harder by the assumption which this lecture has been devoted to challenging – that ‘religion’ is a subdivision of human activity which belongs among the optional extras, after you have attended to the clear imperatives of non-religious public life. The secular assumption too must strive to make itself credible; when it refuses this, we have a mirror image of theocracy – an uncriticised ideology defining the terms of public life. This is why the partnership between faith communities and public agencies, as in education, is good for both. And finally: where would I put Christian theology on the sort of map I have been outlining? Christian theology says that the world exists because of the utterly free decision of a holy power that is more like personal life than anything else; that we can truthfully speak of as if it had mind and will. It says that the purpose of this creation is that what is brought into being from nothing should come to share as fully as possible in the abundant and joyful life of the maker. For intelligent beings, this involves exercising freedom – so that the possibility is there of frustrating one’s own nature by wrong and destructive choices. The purpose of God to share the divine life is so strong, however, that God acts to limit the effects of this destructiveness and to introduce into creation the possibility of an intensified relation with the divine through the events of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, above all in his sacrificial death. This new relation, realised by the Spirit of God released in Jesus’s rising from the grave, is available in the life of the community that gathers to open itself to God’s gift by recalling Jesus and listening to the God-directed texts which witness to this history. So what matters for the Christian? That the world is for joy and contemplation before it is for use (because it comes from God’s freedom and delight, not to serve the purpose of a selfish divine ego); that our account of our own human nature and its needs is dangerously fallible and that we are more limited than we can know in our self-understanding; that it is God’s gift in a particular and unique set of events in the world that it becomes possible for us to be released from some of the most lethal effects of this fallibility; and that the new possibility is bound in with life in community centred on praise and listening and mutual nurture. This is the Christian universe in (very) small space. It must argue against other traditions that the world comes from and as deliberate gift (Buddhists would disagree), that our self-deception is so radical and deep-seated that we cannot be healed by the revelation of divine wisdom and law alone (Jews and Muslims would disagree), that our healing is a ‘remaking’ effected through a once and for all set of events (Muslims and Hindus would disagree). The Christian must argue that because this picture of the universe makes the fullest allowance possible for human failure and self-deceit and gives the most drastic account possible of divine presence in addressing this failure (God coming to inhabit creation in Jesus), it has a good claim to comprehensiveness as a view of how things are. But it is assailed by those who say that its doctrines of original sin are self-indulgent excuses for the weakness of the will, that its concentration on history limits it to parochial perspectives or ties it to a remote and disputed past, that its view of the common life is weak and fails to make the necessary bid for social transformation in a comprehensive way (a particularly strong Muslim point). And meanwhile, the Christian is struck and challenged by the fact that outside the visible fellowship of faith, lives are lived which look as though they are in harmony with the Christian universe – which give the right place to contemplation and joy, to self-forgetfulness and the awareness of gift. The theological task is not only to go on patiently clarifying the implications of the Christian universe and reflecting on the sort of critiques I have sketched, but also to think about how such lives outside the frame are made possible and sustained. There is no quick answer to this, certainly no answer that would justify us in saying, ‘Forget the doctrine, all that matters is the practice’, since the doctrine is what nourishes and makes sense of the practice. Our doctrine is still in formation; and the question of how holy lives can exist outside our own tradition has throughout Christian history led to some of the most searching and far-reaching extensions of our language about the significance of Jesus. I trust that this will go on being the fruit of such questioning. But my aim in this lecture has been primarily to plead for our dialogue to take place at the level of how we place ourselves in the whole universe of our systems, and how we imagine lives that are holy, that are in the fullest sense ‘natural’, in accord with how things are. At this level, we do not see others either as bad or unsuccessful copies of ourselves or as people who have a few casual variants on a single shared truth. We have to see how very other our universes are; and only then do we find dialogue a surprise and a joy as we also discover where and how we can still talk about what matters most – holiness, being at peace with what most truly is. © Rowan Williams 2003
- [Mahayana Essence as Seen in the Concept of ‘Return to This World’](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/mahayana-essence-in-the-return-to-this-world) - Michio Tokunaga Simultaneity is defined as a ‘unity of time and eternity’. It is an ‘atom of eternity’ in time, or a moment in which we touch something eternal. ‘Present’ and ‘moment’ are that on which such simultaneity is established. A ‘moment’ is in linear time and yet beyond it. Click here to view the
- [Stray Camels in China: Islam’s Attitude Towards Other Religions with Special Reference to Confucianism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/chittick-stray-camels) - William C. Chittick All prophets come with messages of furqan, but, given the nature of furqan, which is differentiation and distinction, each message must deal directly with the world of multiplicity and difference. Each must differentiate between right and wrong, true and false, absolute and relative, in specific and particular terms. But the goal of
- [Indian Music](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/indian-music) - MUSIC has been a cultivated art in India for at least three thousand years. The chant is an essential element of Vedic ritual; and the references in later Vedic literature, the scriptures of Buddhism, and the Brahmanical epics show that it was already highly developed as a secular art in centuries preceding the beginning of the Christian era. Its zenith may perhaps be assigned to the Imperial age of the Guptas -from the fourth to the sixth century A. D. This was the classic period of Sanskrit literature, culminating in the drama of Kalidasa: and to the same time is assigned the monumental treatise of Bharata on the theory of music and drama. The art music of the present day is a direct descendant of these ancient schools, whose traditions have been handed down with comment and expansion in the guilds of the hereditary musicians. While the words of a song may have been composed at any date, the musical themes communicated orally from master to disciple are essentially ancient. As in other arts and in life, so here also India presents to us the wonderful spectacle of the still surviving consciousness of the ancient world, with a range of emotional experience rarely accessible to those who are preoccupied with the activities of over-production, and intimidated by the economic insecurity of a social order based on competition. The art music of India exists only under cultivated patronage, and in its own intimate environment. It corresponds to all that is most classical in the European tradition. It is the chamber music of an aristocratic society, where the patron retains musicians for his own entertainment and for the pleasure of the circle of his friends: or it is temple music, where the musician is the servant of God. The public concert is unknown, and the livelihood of the artist does not depend upon his ability and will to amuse the crowd. In other words, the musician is protected. Under these circumstances he is under no temptation to be anything but a musician: his education begins in infancy, and his art remains a vocation. The civilisations of Asia do not afford to the inefficient amateur those opportunities of self-expression which are so highly appreciated in Europe and America. The arts are nowhere taught as a social accomplishment: on the one hand there is the professional, proficient in a traditional art, and on the other the lay public. The musical cultivation of the public does not consist in "everybody doing it," but in appreciation and reverence. I have indeed heard the strange objection raised that to sing the music of India one must be an artist; and this objection seems to voice a typically democratic disapproval of superiority. But it would be nearly as true to say that the listener must respond with an art of his own, and this would be entirely in accord with Indian theories of aesthetics. The musician in India finds a model audience-technically critical, but somewhat indifferent to voice production. The Indian audience listens rather to the song than to the singing of the song: those who are musical, perfect the rendering of the song by the force of their own imagination and emotion. Under these conditions the actual music is better heard than where the sensuous perfection of the voice is made a sine qua non: precisely as the best sculpture is primitive rather than suave, and we prefer conviction to prettiness-"It is like the outward poverty of God,' whereby His glory is nakedly revealed." None the less the Indian singer's voice is sometimes of great intrinsic beauty, and sometimes used with sensitive intelligence as well as skill. It is not, however, the voice that makes the singer, as so often happens in Europe. Since Indian music is not written, and cannot be learnt from books, except in theory, it will be understood that the only way for a foreigner to learn it must be to establish between himself and his Indian teachers that special relationship of disciple and master which belongs to Indian education in all its phases: he must enter into the inner spirit and must adopt many of the outer conventions of Indian life, and his study must continue until he can improvise the songs under Indian conditions and to the satisfaction of Indian professional listeners. He must possess not only the imagination of an artist, but also a vivid memory and an ear sensitive to microtonal inflections. The theory of scale is everywhere a generalisation from the facts of song. The European art scale has been reduced to twelve fixed notes by merging nearly identical intervals such as Eb and D#, and it is also tempered to facilitate modulation and free change of key. In other words, the piano is out of tune by hypothesis. Only this compromise, necessitated in the development of harmony, has made possible the triumphs of modern orchestration. A purely melodic art, however, may be no less intensely cultivated, and retains the advantages of pure intonation and modal colouring. Apart from the tempered instruments of modern Europe there scarcely exists an absolutely fixed scale: at any rate, in India the thing fixed is a group of intervals, and the precise vibration value of a note depends on its position in a progression, not on its relation to a tonic. The scale of twenty-two notes is simply the sum of all the notes used in all the songs-no musician sings a chromatic scale from C to C with twenty-two stopping places, for this would be a mere tour de force. The 'quarter-tone' or sruti is the microtonal interval between two successive scale notes: but as the theme rarely employs two and never three scale notes in succession, the microtonal interval is not generally conspicuous except in ornament. Every Indian song is said to be in a particular raga or ragini —ragini being the feminine of raga, and indicating an abridgement or modification of the main theme. The raga, like the old Greek and the ecclesiastical mode, is a selection of five, six, or seven notes, distributed along the scale: but the raga is more particularized than a mode, for it has certain characteristic progressions, and a chief note to which the singer constantly returns. None of the ragas employs more than seven substantive notes, and there is no modulation: the strange tonality of the Indian song is due to the use of unfamiliar intervals, and not to the use of many successive notes with small divisions. The raga may be best defined as a melody mould or the ground plan of a song. It is this ground plan which the master first of all communicates to the pupil; and to sing is to improvise upon the theme thus defined. The possible number of ragas is very large, but the majority of systems recognise thirty-six, that is to say six ragas, each with five raginis. The origin of the ragas is various: some, like Pahari, are derived from local folk-song, others, like Jog, from the songs of wandering ascetics, and still others are the creation of great musicians by whose names they are known. More than sixty are mentioned in a Sanskrit-Tibetan vocabulary of the seventh century, with names such as 'With-a-voice-like-a-thunder-cloud,' 'Like-the-god-Indra,' and 'Delighting-the-heart.' Amongst the raga names in modern use may be cited 'Spring,' 'Evening beauty,' 'Honey-sweet,' 'The swing,' 'Intoxication.' Psychologically the word raga, meaning colouring or passion, suggests to Indian ears the idea of mood; that is to say that precisely as in ancient Greece, the musical mode has definite ethos. It is not the purpose of the song to repeat the confusion of life, but to express and arouse particular passions of body and soul in man and nature. Each raga is associated with an hour of the day or night when it may be appropriately sung, and some are associated with particular seasons or have definite magic effects. Thus there is still believed the well-known story of a musician whose royal patron arbitrarily insisted on hearing a song in the Dipak raga, which creates fire: the musician obeyed under protest, but as the song proceeded, he burst into flames, which could not be extinguished even though he sprang into the waters of the Jamna. It is just because of this element of magic, and the association of the ragas with the rhythmic ritual of daily and seasonal life, that their clear outlines must not be blurred by modulation: and this is expressed, when the ragas are personified as musical genii, by saying that 'to sing out of the raga' is to break the limbs of these musical angels. A characteristic story is related of the prophet Narada, when he was still but a learner. He thought that he had mastered the whole art of music; but the all-wise Vishnu, to curb his pride, revealed to him in the world of the gods, a spacious building where there lay men and women weeping over their broken arms and legs. They were the ragas and raginis, and they said that a certain sage of the name of Narada, ignorant of music and unskillful in performance, had sung them amiss, and therefore their features were distorted and their limbs broken, and until they were sung truly there would be no cure for them. Then Narada was humbled, and kneeling before Vishnu prayed to be taught the art of music more perfectly: and in due course he became the great musician priest of the gods. Indian music is a purely melodic art, devoid of any harmonised accompaniment other than a drone. In modern European art, the meaning of each note of the theme is mainly brought out by the notes of the chord which are heard with it; and even in unaccompanied melody, the musician hears an implied harmony. Unaccompanied folk-song does not satisfy the concert-goer's ear; as pure melody it is the province only of the peasant and the specialist. This is partly because the folk-air played on the piano or written in staff notation is actually falsified: but much more because under the conditions of European art, melody no longer exists in its own right, and music is a compromise between melodic freedom and harmonic necessity. To hear the music of India as Indians hear it one must recover the sense of a pure intonation and must forget all implied harmonies. It is just like the effort which we have to make when for the first time, after being accustomed to modern art, we attempt to read the language of early Italian or Chinese painting, where there is expressed with equal economy of means all that intensity of experience which nowadays we are accustomed to understand only through a more involved technique. Another feature of Indian song-and so also of the instrumental solo-is the elaborate grace. It is natural that in Europe, where many notes are heard simultaneously, grace should appear as an unnecessary elaboration, added to the note, rather than a structural factor. But in India the note and the microtonal grace compose a closer unity, for the grace fulfils just that function of adding light and shade which in harmonised music is attained by the varying degrees of assonance. The Indian song without grace would seem to Indian ears as bald as the European art song without the accompaniment which it presupposes. Equally distinctive is the constant portamento. In India it is far more the interval than the note that is sung or played, and we recognize accordingly a continuity of sound: by contrast with this, the European song, which is vertically divided by the harmonic interest and the nature of the keyed instruments which are heard with the voice, seems to unaccustomed Indian ears to be "full of holes." All the songs, except the 'alaps' are in strict rhythms. These are only difficult to follow at a first hearing because the Indian rhythms are founded, as in prosody, on contrasts of long and short duration, while European rhythms are based on stress, as in dance or marching. The Indian musician does not mark the beginning of the bar by accent. His fixed unit is a section, or group of bars which are not necessarily alike, while the European fixed unit is typically the bar, of which a varying number constitute a section. The European rhythm is counted in multiples of 2 or 3, the Hindu in sums of 2 or 3. Some of the countings are very elaborate: Ata Tala, for example, is counted as 5+5+2+2. The frequent use of cross rhythms also complicates the form. Indian music is modal in times as well as melody. For all these reasons it is difficult to grasp immediately the point at which a rhythm begins and ends, although this is quite easy for the Indian audience accustomed to quantitative poetic recitation. The best way to approach the Indian rhythm is to pay attention to the phrasing,and ignore pulsation. The Indian art-song is accompanied by drums, or by the instrument known as a tambura, or by both. The tambura is of the lute tribe, but without frets: the four very long strings are tuned to sound the dominant, the upper tonic twice, and the octave below,which are common to all ragas:the pitch is adjusted to suit the singer's voice. The four strings are fitted with simple resonators—shreds of wool between the string and the bridge—which are the source of their 'life': and the strings are continuously sounded, making a pedal point background very rich in overtones, and against this dark ground of infinite potentiality the song stands out like an elaborate embroidery. The tambura must not be regarded as a solo instrument, nor as an object of separate interest like the piano accompaniment of a modern song: its sound is rather the ambient in which the song lives and moves and has its being. India has, besides the tambura, many solo instruments. By far the most important of these is the vina. This classic instrument, which ranks with the violin of Europe and the koto of Japan, and second only to the voice in sensitive response,differs chiefly from the tambura in having frets, the notes being made with the left hand and the strings plucked with the right. The delicate nuances of microtonal grace are obtained by deflection of the strings, whole passages being played in this manner solely by a lateral movement of the left hand, without a fresh plucking. While the only difficulty in playing the tambura is to maintain an even rhythm against the variation of the rhythm of the song, the vina presents all the difficulties of technique that can be imagined, and it is said that at least twelve years are required to attain proficiency. The Indian singer is a poet, and the poet a singer. The dominant subject matter of the songs is human or divine love in all its aspects, or the direct praise of God, and the words are always sincere and passionate. The more essentially the singer is a musician, however, the more the words are regarded merely as the vehicle of the music: in art-song the words are always brief, voicing a mood rather than telling any story, and they are used to support the music with little regard to their own logic--precisely as the representative element in a modern painting merely serves as the basis for an organisation of pure form or colour. In the musical form called alap—an improvisation on the raga theme, this preponderance of the music is carried so far that only meaningless syllables are used. The voice itself is a musical instrument, and the song is more than the words of the song. This form is especially favoured by the Indian virtuoso, who naturally feels a certain contempt for those whose first interest in the song is connected with the words. The voice has thus a higher status than in Europe, for the music exists in its own right, and not merely to illustrate the words. Rabindranath Tagore has written on this: When I was very young I heard the song, 'Who dressed you like a foreigner?',and that one line of the song painted such a strange picture in my mind that even now it is sounding in my memory. I once tried to compose a song myself under the spell of that line. As I hummed the tune, I wrote the first line of the song, 'I know thee, thou stranger,'and if there were no tune to it, I cannot tell what meaning would be left in the song. But by the power of the spell of the tune the mysterious figure of that stranger was evoked in my mind. My heart began to say, 'There is a stranger going to and fro in this world of ours-her house is on the further shore of an ocean of mystery- sometimes she is to be seen in the autumn morning, sometimes in the flowery midnight-sometimes we receive an intimation of her in the depths of our heart-sometimes I hear her voice when I turn my ear to the sky.' The tune of my song led me to the very door of that stranger who ensnares the universe and appears in it, and I said: 'Wandering over the world I come to thy land: I am a guest at thy door,thou stranger.' One day, many days afterwards,there was someone going along the road singing: 'How does that unknown bird go to and away from the cage? Could I but catch it, I would set the chain of my mind about its feet!' I saw that that folk-song, too, said the very same thing! Sometimes the unknown bird comes to the closed cage and speaks a word of the limitless unknown—the mind would keep it forever, but cannot. What but the tune of a song could report the coming and going of that un- known bird? Because of this I always feel a hesitation in publishing a book of songs, for in such a book the main thing is left out. This Indian music is essentially impersonal: it reflects an emotion and an experience which are deeper and wider and older than the emotion or wisdom of any single individual. Its sorrow is without tears, its joy without exultation and it is passionate without any loss of serenity. It is in the deepest sense of thewords all-human. But when the Indian prophet speaks of inspiration, it is to say that the Vedas are eternal, and all that the poet achieves by his devotion is to hear or see: it is then Sarasvati, the goddess of speech and learning,or Narada, whose mission it is to disseminate occult knowledge in the sound of the strings of his vina, or Krishna,whose flute is forever calling us to leave the duties of the world and follow Him-it is these, rather than any human individual, who speak through the singer's voice, and are seen in the movements of the dancer. Or we may say that this is an imitation of the music in heaven. The master musicians of India are always represented as the pupils of a god, or as visiting the heaven world to learn there the music of the spheres-that is to say, their knowledge springs from a source far within the surface of the empirical activity of the waking consciousness. In this connection it is explained why it is that human art must be studied, and may not be identified with the imitation of our everyday behaviour. When Siva expounds the technique of the drama to Bharata-the famous author ofthe Natya Sastra-he declares that human art mustbe subject to law, because in man the inner and outer life are still in conflict. Man has not yet found Himself, but all his activity proceeds from a laborious working of the mind, and all his virtue is self-conscious. What we call our life is merely artificiality,far from the harmony of art, which rises above good and evil. It is otherwise with the gods, whose every gesture immediately reflects the affections of the inner life. Art is an imitation of that perfect spontaneity-the identity of intuition and expression in those who are of the kingdom of heaven, which is within us. Thus it is that art is nearer to life than any fact can be; and Mr. Yeats has reason when he says that Indian music, though its theory is so elaborate and its technique so difficult,is not an art, but life itself. For it is the inner reality of things, rather than any transient or partial experience that the singer voices. "Those who sing here," says Sankaracarya,"sing God": and the Vishnu Purana adds, "All songs are a part of Him, who wears a form of sound." We could deduce from this a metaphysical interpretation of technique. In all art there are monumental and articulate elements, masculine and feminine factors which are unified in perfect form. We have here the sound of the tambura which is heard before the song, during the song, and continues after it: that is the timeless absolute, which as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. On the other hand there is the song itself which is the variety of Nature, emerging from its source and returning at the close of its cycle. The harmony of that undivided Ground with this intricate Pattern is the unity of Spirit and Matter. We see from this why this music could not be improved by harmonisation,even if harmonisation werepossible without destroying the modal bases:for in breaking up the Ground into an articulate accompaniment,we should merely create a second melody, another universe competing with the freedom of the song itself, and we should destroy the peace of the Abyss on which it rests. This would defeat the purpose of the singer. Here in this ego-conscious world we are subject to mortality. But this mortality is an illusion, and all its truths are relative: over against this world of change and separation thereis a timeless and space-less Peace which is the source and goal of all our being-"that noble Pearl," in the words of Behmen, "which to the World appearsNothing, but to the Children of Wisdom is All Things." Every religious teacher offers us those living waters. But the way is hard and long: we are called upon to leave houses and lands, fathers and mothers and wives to achieve an end which in our imperfect language we can only speak of as Non-existence. Many of us have great possessions, and the hardest of these to surrender are our own will and identity. What guarantee have we that the reward will be commensurate with the toil? Indian theory declares that in the ecstasies of love and art we already receive an intimation of that redemption. This is also the Katharsis ofthe Greeks, and it is found in the aesthetic of modern Europe when Goethe says For beauty they have sought in every age He who perceives it is from himself set free-- aus sich entrückt. We are assured by the experience of aesthetic contemplation that Paradise is a reality. In other words the magical effects of a song in working mere miracles are far surpassed by its effects upon our inner being. The singer is still a magician, and the song is a ritual, a sacred ceremony, an ordeal which is designed to set at rest that wheel of the imagination and the senses which alone hinder us from contact with reality. But to achieve this ordeal the sycophant must cooperate with the musician by the surrender of ?the will, and by drawing in his restless thought to a single point of concentration: this is not the time or place for curiosity or admiration. Our attitude towards an unknown art should befar from the sentimental or romantic,for it can bring to us nothing that we have not already with us in our own hearts: the peace of the Abyss which underlies all art is one and the same, whether we find it in Europe or in Asia.
- [Oneness of Being](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/oneness-of-being) - Oneness of Being?(chapter V from A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century,?Cambridge, Islamic Texts Society, 1993) “Since Mysticism in all ages and countries is fundamentally the same, however it may be modified by its peculiar environment and by the positive religion to which it clings for support, we find remote and unrelated systems showing an extraordinarily close likeness and even coinciding in many features of verbal expression… Many writers on Sufism have disregarded this principle; hence the confusion which long prevailed.” In the light of this timely remark by Nicholson,1 no one should be surprised to find that the doctrine of the Oneness of Being (Wa?dat al-Wuj?d), which holds a central place in all the orthodox mysticisms of Asia, holds an equally central place in Sufism. As is to be expected in view of its centrality, some of the most perfect, though elliptical, formulations of this doctrine are to be found in the Qur’?n, which affirms expressly: Wheresoe’er ye turn, there is the Face of God.2 Everything perisheth but His Face.3 All that is therein4 suffereth extinction, and there remaineth the Face of thy Lord in Its Majesty and Bounty.5 Creation, which is subject to time and space and non-terrestrial modes of duration and extent which the human imagination cannot grasp, is “then” (with reference to both past and future) and “there”, but it is never truly “now” and “here”. The True Present is the prerogative of God Alone, for It is no less than the Eternity and Infinity which transcends, penetrates and embraces all durations and extents, being not only “before” all beginnings but also“after” all ends. In It, that is, in the Eternal Now and Infinite Here, all that is perishable has “already” perished, all that is liable to extinction has “already” been extinguished leaving only God, and it is to this Divine Residue, the Sole Lord of the Present, that the word remaineth refers in the last quoted Qur’?nic verse. From this verse, amongst others, come the two Sufi terms fan?’ (extinction) and baq?’ (remaining)6 which express respectively the Saint’s extinction in God and his Eternal Life in God, or rather as God. The doctrine of Oneness of Being is also implicit in the Divine Name al-?aqq, the Truth, the Reality, for there could be no point in affirming Reality as an essential characteristic of Godhead if anything other than God were real. The word “Being” expresses this Absolute Reality, for it refers to That which is, as opposed to that which is not, and Oneness of Being is the doctrine that behind the illusory veil of created plurality there lies the one Divine Truth—not that God is made up of parts,7 but that underlying each apparently separate feature of the created universe there is the One Infinite Plenitude of God in His Indivisible Totality. The Treatise on Oneness8 says: “When the secret of an atom of the atoms is clear, the secret of all created things both external and internal is clear, and thou dost not see in this world or the next aught beside God.”9 If there were anything which, in the Reality of the Eternal Present, could show itself to be other than God, then God would not be Infinite, for Infinity would consist of God and that particular thing.10 This doctrine is only concerned with Absolute Reality. It has nothing to do with “reality” in the current sense, that is, with lesser, relative truths which the Sufis call “metaphorical”. Ghaz?l? says: “The Gnostics rise from the lowlands of metaphor to the peak of Verity; and at the fulfilment of their ascent they see directly face to face that there is naught in existence save only God and that everything perisheth but His Face, not simply that it perisheth at any given time but that it hath never not perished… Each thing hath two faces, a face of its own, and a face of its Lord; in respect of its own face it is nothingness, and in respect of the Face of God it is Being. Thus there is nothing in existence save only God and His Face, for everything perisheth but His Face, always and forever… so that the Gnostics need not wait for the Resurrection in order to hear the summons of the Creator proclaim: Unto whom this day is the Kingdom? Unto God, the One, the Irresistible,11 for this proclamation is eternally in their ears; nor do they understand from His Utterance God is Most Great (All?hu Akbar) that he is greater than others. God forbid! For there is nothing other than Himself in all existence, and therefore there is no term of comparison for His Greatness”.12 This doctrine is necessarily present whenever there is explicit reference to the Supreme Truth—the Absolute, the Infinite, the Eternal. In Christianity the goal of mysticism is most often conceived of as union with the Second Person of the Trinity. Here the Supreme Truth is not explicit but implicit: who has Christ has indeed All; but for those who follow the path of love this Totality is not usually the direct object of fervour. Yet when it is conceived more directly, then in Christianity also13 we find inevitably the doctrine of the Oneness of Being. On the other hand, when the Supreme Truth recedes into the background, then in all religions this doctrine also necessarily recedes, since apart from the Infinite and Eternal Present it is meaningless. No one can hope to understand the formulations of the mystics without bearing in mind that there is liable to be a continual shifting of the centre of consciousness from one plane to another. One of the first things that a novice has to do in the ?Alaw? ?ar?qah—and the same must be true of other paths of mysticism—is to unlearn much of the agility of “profane intelligence” which an ?Alaw? faq?r once likened, for my benefit, to “the antics of a monkey that is chained to a post”, and to acquire an agility of a different order, comparable to that of a bird which continually changes the level of its flight. The Qur’?n and secondarily the Traditions of the Prophet are the great prototypes in Islam of this versatility. Three distinct levels of intelligence are imposed methodically twice a day in the three formulae of the ?Alaw? rosary which are (each being repeated a hundred times) firstly asking forgiveness of God, secondly the invocation of blessings on the Prophet, and thirdly the affirmation of Divine Oneness.14 The first standpoint, which is at what might be called the normal level of psychic perception, is concerned with the ego as such. This is the phase of purification. From the second standpoint this fragmentary ego has ceased to exist, for it has been absorbed into the person of the Prophet who represents a hierarchy of different plenitudes of which the lowest is integral human perfection and the highest is Universal Man (Al-Ins?n al-K?mil),15 who personifies the whole created universe and who thus anticipates, as it were, the Infinite,16 of which he is the highest symbol. The disciple aims at concentrating on perfection at one of these levels. From the third point of view the Prophet himself has ceased to exist, for this formula is concerned with nothing but the Divine Oneness. All mysticism necessarily comprises these different levels of thought, because it is, by definition, the passage from the finite to the Infinite. It has a starting point and an End, and cannot ignore what lies between. It follows that the formulations of any one mystic are unlikely to be all from the same standpoint,17 and this is especially true of the more spontaneous utterances such as those of poetry. But it is natural that spiritual Masters should stress Wa?dat al-Wuj?d above all, because it is the Supreme Truth and therefore the ultimate goal of all mysticism, and also because, for that very reason, it is the point of view that is “furthest” from the disciple and the one he most needs help in adopting. Relentless insistence upon the doctrine has therefore a great methodic, not to say “hypnotic” value,18 for it helps the disciple to place himself virtually in the Eternal Present when he cannot do so actually. The Treatise on Oneness says: “Our discourse (that is, the formulation of Oneness of Being) is with him who hath resolution and energy in seeking to know himself in order to know God, and who keepeth fresh in his Heart the image of his quest and his longing for attainment unto God; it is not with him who hath neither aim nor end.” It has been remarked—I forget by whom—that many of those who delight in the poems of ?Umar ibn al-F?ri? and Jal?l ad-D?n ar-R?m? would recoil from them if they really understood their deeper meaning. The truth is that if the author of this remark and Western scholars in general really understood the deeper meaning of such poetry, that is, if they really understood the doctrine of the Oneness of Being, they would cease to recoil from it. Massignon attacks it because it seems to him to deny both the Transcendence of God and the immortality of the soul. Yet in affirming the Transcendence and immortality in question he implicitly affirms the Oneness of Being. The difference between him and the Sufis is that he does not follow up his belief to its imperative conclusions, but stops half way. For if it be asked: “Why is the soul immortal?”, the answer lies in Meister Eckhardt’s “There is something in the soul which is uncreated and uncreatable… This is the Intellect.” The soul is not merely immortal but Eternal, not in its psychism but in virtue of the Divine Spark that is in it. The Shaykh Al-?Alaw? says in one of his poems: Thou seest not who thou art, for thou art, yet art not ‘thou’. and he quotes more than once Shushtar?’s lines: After extinction I came out, and I?Eternal now am, though not as I.?Yet who am I, O I, but I?19 As to the Divine Transcendence, I will leave him to show that far from denying It, the doctrine of the Oneness of Being comes nearer than any other doctrine to doing justice to It. Massignon writes20 that this doctrine was first formulated by Ibn ?Arab?. It may be that the term Wa?dat al-Wuj?d was not generally used before his day, but the doctrine itself was certainly uppermost in the minds of his predecessors, and the more the question is studied the further it recedes along a purely Islamic line of descent. The already quoted passage in Ghaz?l?’s Mishk?t al-Anw?r is closely followed up by: “There is no he but He, for ‘he’ expresseth that unto which reference is made, and there can be no reference at all save only unto Him, for whenever thou makest a reference, that reference is unto Him even though thou knewest it not through thine ignorance of the Truth of Truths… Thus ‘there is no god but God’ is the generality’s proclamation of Unity, and ‘there is no he but He’ is that of the elect, for the former is more general, whereas the latter is more elect, more all-embracing, truer, more exact, and more operative in bringing him who useth it into the Presence of Unalloyed Singleness and Pure Oneness.”21 The Shaykh Al-?Alaw? quotes22 from the end the Man?z?l as-S?’ir?n of ?Abd All?h al-Haraw? (d. ad 1088) with regard to the third and highest degree of Taw??d: “None affirmeth truly the Oneness of God, for whoso affirmeth It thereby setteth himself in contradiction with It… He, He is the affirmation of His Oneness, and whoso presumeth to describe Him blasphemeth (by creating a duality through the intrusion of his own person)”. This recalls the almost identical saying of Al-?all?j (d. ad 922): “Whoso claimeth to affirm God’s Oneness thereby setteth up another beside him.”23 Al-Kharr?z, in his Book of Truthfulness, quotes the Companion Ab? ?Ubaidah (d. ad 639) as having said: “I have never looked at a single thing without God being nearer to me than it.”24 Only one who stops short at the outer shell of words could maintain that there is a real difference between this and the following more analytical formulation from the thirteenth century Treatise on Oneness: “If a questioner ask: ‘Supposing we see refuse or carrion, for example, wilt thou say that it is God?’, the answer is: ‘God in his Exaltation forbid that He should be any such thing! Our discourse is with him who doth not see the carrion to be carrion or the refuse to be refuse; our discourse is with him who hath insight (ba??rah) and is not altogether blind.”25 Al-Kharr?z’s quotation, made about ad 850, spans the first two centuries of Islam with the Qur’?nic doctrine of Nearness–Identity–Oneness. We have seen that in the early Meccan Surahs the highest saints are referred to as the Near, and that what the Qur’?n means by “nearness” is defined by the words We are nearer to him than his jugular vein. In the following already quoted Holy Tradition this nearness is expressed as identity: “My slave seeketh unremittingly to draw nigh unto Me with devotions of his free will until I love him; and when I love him, I am the Hearing wherewith he heareth and the Sight wherewith he seeth and the Hand wherewith he smiteth and the Foot whereon he walketh.” It cannot be concluded from this Tradition that this identity was not already there, for the Divinity is not subject to change. The “change” in question is simply that what was not perceived has now been perceived.26 These two levels of perception are both referred to in the verse: We are nearer to him than ye are, although ye see not.27 The lower of these two is perception of the merely relative reality of God’s absence which is pure illusion in the face of the Absolute Reality of His Presence. For there is no question of relative nearness here. We are nearer to him than his jugular vein and God cometh in between a man and his own heart28 mean that He is nearer to him than he is to his inmost self. The Oneness here expressed exceeds the oneness of union. It may be convenient for certain theories to suppose that these flashes of Qur’?nic lightning passed unperceived over the heads of the Companions, and that they were only noticed by later generations; but is it good psychology? No men have been more “men of one book” than the Companions were, and there is every reason to believe that no generation of Islam has ever surpassed them in weighing the phrases of that book and in giving each one its due of consideration. They would have been the last people on earth to suppose that the Qur’?n ever meant less than it said. This does not mean that they would necessarily have interpreted as formulations of Oneness of Being all those Qur’?nic verses which the Sufis so interpret, for some of these verses admit more readily of other interpretations. But there are some which do not. If we take, for example, in addition to the already quoted formulations of “Nearness”, the verse: He is the First and the Last and the Outwardly Manifest and the Inwardly Hidden,29 it is difficult to conceive how the Companions would have understood these words other than in the sense of Ghaz?l?’s, “there is no object of reference other than He”, though they may never have formulated the truth in question except with the words of the Qur’?n itself, or with expressions such as Ab? ?Ubaidah’s: “I have never looked at a single thing without God being nearer to me than it,” or the Prophet’s: “Thou art the Outwardly Manifest and there is nothing covering Thee.”30 ---- 1. A Literary History of the Arabs, p. 384. 2. II, 115. 3. XXVIII, 88. 4. In the created universe. 5. LV, 26–7. 6. “The spiritual state of baq?’, to which Sufi contemplatives aspire (the word signifies pure ‘subsistence’ beyond all form), is the same as the state of moksha or ‘deliverance’ spoken of in Hindu doctrines, just as the ‘extinction’ (al-fan?’) of the individuality which precedes the ‘subsistence’ is analogous to nirvana taken as a negative idea” (Titus Burckhardt, An Introduction to Sufi Doctrine, p. 4, published by Mu?ammad Ashraf, Lahore, 1959—a book which is almost indispensable to anyone who wishes to make a serious study of Sufism and who does not read Oriental texts). 7. It is probably a failure to grasp this point which is at the root of most Western misunderstandings. Massignon for example says that Wa?dat al-Wuj?d—which he unhappily translates “existentialist monism”—means that “the totality of all beings in all their actions is divinely adorable” (Encyclopaedia of Islam, Ta?awwuf). But there is no question here of the sum of things being any more divine than each single thing. The least gnat has a secret which is divinely adorable with total adoration. In other words, for those possessed of mystical vision, there is the Face of God. 8. Ris?latu ’l-A?adiyyah, also entitled Kit?b al-Ajwibah or Kit?b al-Alif. It is ascribed in some manuscripts to Mu?yi ’l-D?n Ibn ?Arab? and in others to his younger contemporary ?Abd All?h al-Baly?n? (d. 1287—see the prefatory notes to the French translation by ?Abd al-H?d? in Le Voile d’Isis, 1933, pp. 13–4, and to the English translation by Weir, from which I quote, in the Journal to the Royal Asiatic Society, 1901, p. 809). It is one of the most important of all Sufi treatises. Hence the large number of existing manuscripts, although until now it has only been published in translations. 9. We may compare the following Buddhist formulation: “When a blade of grass is lifted the whole universe is revealed there; in every pore of the skin there pulsates the life of the triple world, and this is intuited by prajna, not by way of reasoning, but “immediately”. (D. T. Suzuki, Studies in Zen }, p. 94.) 10. This is implicit in the following formulation of Wa?dat al-Wuj?d by Al-?all?j, who literally takes the ground from beneath the feet of those who accuse the Sufis of localizing God (?ul?l):?“It is Thou that hast filled all ‘where’ and beyond ‘where’ too. Where art Thou then?” (D?w?n, p. 46, 1.4.)?The Shaykh Al-?Alaw? quotes at some length (Al-N??ir Ma?r?f, pp. 112–5) Mu?ammad ?Abduh’s formulations of the doctrine in question from pt. 2 of his W?rid?t, ending with the words: “Do not think that this is a doctrine of localization, for there can be no localization without two beings, one of which occupieth a place in the other, whereas our doctrine is: ‘There is no being but His Being.’”¶ Over 2000 years previously the Taoist Chuang Tzu had said: “A boat may be hidden in a creek; a net may be hidden in a lake; these may be said to be safe enough. But at midnight a strong man may come and carry them away on his back. The ignorant do not see that no matter how well you conceal things, smaller ones in larger ones, there will always be a chance for them to escape. But if you conceal Universe in Universe, there will be no room left for it to escape. This is the great truth of things” (ch. 6, Yu-Lan Fung’s translation). 11. Qur’?n, XL, 16. 12. Mishk?t al-Anw?r, pp. 113–4 in Al-Jaw?hir al-Ghaw?l? (Cairo, 1343 ah); in Gairdner’s translation, which however I have not followed, pp. 103–5. 13. “However vile the dust, however small its motes, the wise man seeth therein God in all His Greatness and Glory.” (Angelus Silesius, Cherubinischer Wandersmann). 14. According to ?asan ibn ?Abd al-?Az?z, one of the Shaykh’s disciples, this triple rosary is used in all branches of the Sh?dhil? ?ar?qah (Irsh?d al-R?ghib?n, p. 31). The same formulae are also used, with some variations, by many branches of the Q?dir? ?ar?qah and others. See Rinn, Marabouts et Khouan, pp. 183–4, 252–3, 441, 503. 15. See Titus Burckhardt’s introduction to his De l’Homme Universel (translated extracts from J?l?’s Al-Ins?n al-K?mil), P. Derain, Lyons, 1953. 16. The first formula of the rosary may also open on to the Infinite, but in a negative sense, for the end of purification is extinction (fan?’). The Shaykh Al-?Alaw? often quotes the saying attributed to R?bi?ah al-?Adawiyyah, one of the greatest women Saints of Islam (d. 801): “Thine existence is a sin with which no other sin can be compared” (Mina?, p. 41). It is this point of view which Al-?all?j expresses in the words: “Between me and Thee is an ‘I am’ which tormenteth me. O take, by Thine Own I am, mine from between us” (Akhb?r Al-?all?j, Massignon’s edition, no. 50). 17. The refusal to see that mysticism is never a “system” and that mystics are consciously and methodically “inconsistent”, taking now one standpoint, now another, has led to much confusion, especially as regards Wa?dat al-Wuj?d. In his preface to his translation of Mishk?t al-Anw?r (p. 61). Gairdner says: “The root question in regard to al-Ghazzali, and every other advanced mystic and adept in Islam, is the question of Pantheism (i.e. Wa?dat al-Wuj?d, now usually translated, with some advantage, ‘monism’): did he succeed in balancing himself upon the edge of the pantheistic abyss?… Or did he fail in this?” Massignon, for his part, has devoted much of his output to exculpating Al-?all?j from the “unorthodoxy” in question, that is, to pinning him down to the dualism expressed in certain of his verses, and turning a blind eye to his affirmations of the Oneness of Being, or in other words denying that he ever made the transcension from what Ghaz?l? calls the metaphor of union (itti??d) to the truth of the realization of the Oneness (taw??d—Mishk?t, p. 115). Nicholson pleads for Ibn al-F?ri? (Studies in Islamic Mysticism, pp. 193–4). Gairdner, feeling that Ghaz?l? is in great “danger”, pleads for him and by charitable extension for all other Muslim mystics on the grounds that they do not mean what they say! (Ibid., pp. 62–3). The truth is that all the Sufis are “dualist” or “pluralist” at lower levels; but it is impossible that any of them should have believed that at the highest level there is anything other than the Divine Oneness, for though the Qur’?n changes the plane of its utterance more often even than the Sufis themselves, it is absolutely and inescapably explicit as regards the Eternal that all things perish but His Face and all that is therein suffereth extinction, and there remaineth the Face of thy Lord in Its Majesty and Bounty. This last word is a reminder that for the Sufis Oneness of Being is That in which there is no loss but only pure gain or, otherwise expressed, That in which all that was ever lost is found again in Infinite and Eternal Perfection. Therefore let those who shrink from this doctrine as a “pantheistic abyss” or what Nicholson calls “blank infinite negation” ask themselves if they really understand it. 18. When Ibn ?Arab? for example criticizes some of the formulations of his great predecessors, such as Junayd and Al-?all?j, as regards the Supreme State, it is clearly not because he thought that they had not attained to that State, but because the formulations in question are not sufficiently rigorous to be, in his opinion, methodically effective. 19. Wa-man an? y? an? ill? an?. 20. Encyclopaedia of Islam, Ta?awwuf. 21. pp. 117–18. Although written at the end of Ghaz?l?’s life (he died in ad 1111), this treatise is about 100 years earlier than Ibn ?Arab?’s Fu??? al-?ikam. 22. Al-N??ir Ma?r?f, p. 99. 23. Akhb?r, no. 49. 24. Arabic text, p. 59; Arberry’s translation, p. 48. 25. We may compare the following third century bc formulation: “asked Chuang Tzu: ‘Where is the so-called Tao?’ Chuang Tzu said: ‘Everywhere.’ The former said: ‘Specify an instance of it.’ ‘It is in the ant.’ ‘How can Tao be anything so low?’ ‘It is in the panic grass.’ ‘How can it be still lower.’… ‘It is in excrement.’ To this Tung Kuo Tzu made no reply. Chuang Tzu said: ‘Your question does not touch the fundamentals of Tao. You should not specify any particular thing. There is not a single thing without Tao.’” (Chuang Tzu, ch. XXII, Yu-Lan Fung’s translation). 26. It has been perceived only because the agent of perception is God, not the mystic. “I am… his Sight”, or to use the Qur’?nic phrase: The sight overtaketh Him not, but He overtaketh the sight (VI, 103). 27. LVI, 85. 28. VIII, 24. 29. Qur’?n, LVII, 3. 30. Muslim, Da?w?t, 16; Tirmidh?, Da?w?t, 19. This is not incompatible with other Traditions in which he speaks of “veils” between man and God. It is simply a question of two different points of view, the one being absolute and the other relative.
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- [The Blessed Passion of Holy Love: Maximus the Confessor’s Spiritual Psychology](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/neil-blessed-passion) - Bronwen Neil Prayer is a state rather than an activity… prayer is “the state of the soul illuminated solely by the light of the Holy Trinity in ecstasy.” This is the state of spiritual perfection. The irrational parts of the soul are not rejected but redirected: desire is transformed into divine eros, and incensiveness is
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- [Primordial Meditation: Contemplating the Real](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/primordial-meditation-contemplating-the-real) - by Frithjof Schuon, 2015, translated by Gillian Harris and Angela Schwartz This is the first time that Schuon’s youth journals (1928–1935) are published as a book in English. Aside from his poetry collections, it is the only work of the author written in his mother tongue, German. Primordial Meditation affords a fascinating insight into the
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- [The Power of a Melancholy Humour: Divination and Divine Tears](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/voss-power-of-melancholy) - Angela Voss Dowland called these pavans ‘passionate’… I would suggest again that they are passionate in the most fervent religious sense, in the intensely personal context of heartfelt prayer. The music is inward, private, certainly not intended for public display, but encouraging a focussed concentration more akin to participation in a ritual. Click here to
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- [Primordial Meditation (selections)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/primordial-meditation-excerpts) - Frithjof Schuon Before meditation, as before prayer, man must forget all else. After meditation or prayer he must forget them, so that he is not absorbed or possessed by the mere contents of his consciousness; and so that meditation and prayer can act beyond his waking consciousness. For what enters man, as in meditation, and
- [Womanhood, an Islamic Perspective](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/cleary-womanhood) - Thomas Cleary A lecture given in 2011 by the distinguished translator of the I Ching and other Far Eastern Classics. To understand why in Islam a woman is sacred to man, you have to understand most of all this relationship in which we experience muwadda, love and affection, and rahma, mercy and compassion, and sakina,
- [Tianming, Yijing and the Metaphysical Roots of the Classical Confucian Political Ideal](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/tianming-yijing-and-the-metaphysical-roots-of-the-classical-confucian-political-ideal) - ABSTRACT Classical Confucianism, through its repository of canonical texts, offers a compelling political vision that promotes the exemplary treatment of persons and a society in which human potential is maximized and government is held accountable to a standard greater than itself. Embedded within a picture of the ideal functioning society in the Da Xue ??, (conventionally translated “Great Learning”) and explicated as exemplary personhood (junzi ??) within the Lun Yu ?? (the “Analects”) are the rudiments for a universal, normative political standard of exemplary treatment of persons and the accountability of government. This paper examines the metaphysical roots of this standard located within Classical Confucian literature. Exemplars of this literature include the Shujing ?? (“Book of History”) and most notably the Yijing ?? (“Book of Changes”) in which principles such as the harmonization and creativity of nature are understood also as human processes which society is called to cultivate within all individuals. Through the application of Onto-hermeneutics (a hermeneutical method developed by Professor Chung-ying Cheng) to the relevant texts, the concept Tianming ??(conventionally, Mandate of Heaven), as moral authority, emerges as the universal, normative political standard for the exemplary treatment of persons and the standard for the proper behavior of governmental leaders. The effective implementation of the Classical Confucian political ideal, resulting in widespread personal cultivation at the level of self-actualization (as in Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs), leads to a polity of empowered individuals united through leadership that is accountable to Tianming ??. ?? INTRODUCTORY NOTE: THE BACKGROUND LITERARY SOURCES WHICH INFORM CLASSICAL CONFUCIANISM Although the sources attributed to Confucius and his immediate disciples comprise an explicit statement of early Confucian doctrines, they fail to render a complete understanding of the context that informs and pervades Classical Confucianism. Confucius is reputed to have both transmitted and edited a corpus of ancient documents that has attained canonical status in the history of Chinese thought. Known today as the Confucian Classics, these documents include such works as the Yijing ?? (Book of Changes), the Shujing ?? (Book of History), the Shijing ?? (Book of Songs), the Li Ji ?? (Record of Ritual), and the Chun Qiu ?? (Spring and Autumn Annuals). The significance of these classics is that they provide a metaphysical and historical backdrop to the later works attributed to Confucius. In particular, the numerous concepts articulated within the Lun Yu ?? (Analects), the Da Xue ?? (Great Learning), the Zhong Yong ?? (conventionally, ‘Doctrine of the Mean’) and the Mengzi ?? (the Mencius) take on metaphysical and ontological import when interpreted in light of the Yijing ??. It is the transmission of a received philosophical tradition that reinforces Classical Confucianism’s status as authentically and anciently Chinese. THE RELEVANCE OF TIANMING ?? TO POLITICAL THOUUGHT An essential concept for Confucian political understanding which illustrates the continuity between Classical Confucianism and the earliest sources of Chinese philosophy is the notion of tianming ?? (conventionally, the ‘Mandate of Heaven’). Throughout the student demonstrations of 1989, Chinese students, intellectuals and workers made frequent reference to the belief that their government had forfeited any legitimate claims to possess the tianming ??mandate to rule. The human rights scholar and activist Luo Longji2 had earlier compared tianming ?? to John Locke’s idea of the “right of revolution.” According to Locke, a citizenry has the right to dissolve and replace a government that acts in a manner that is “...contrary to their Trust.”3 Most Confucian references to tianming ?? (e.g., Lun Yu ?? 2.4, 16.8) admonish the ruler to live in awe of and maintain respect for this mandate as a matter of moral self- cultivation. The right to rule is not absolute, but may be forfeited by moral or ethical lapse leading to the loss of tianming ??. ?2 Born in 1896, Luo Longji participated in the 1919 ‘May Fourth’ student uprising and eventually completed his doctorate at Columbia before returning to Shanghai to take a position at Guanghua University. From there, he wrote prolifically in popular media on the state of human rights in China. See Howard L. Boorman. Editor. Biographical Dictionary of Republican China. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967-71. II. pp. 435-438. 3 John Locke, Two Treatises on Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960. p. 412. See Treatise II, Section 221, 2-5 and Section 222, 23-24. ?? TIANMING ?? AND THE PROBLEM OF TRANSLATION The concept of tianming ?? raises a significant issue for understanding the sources which have influenced and shaped Classical Confucianism. Imbedded within the word tianming ?? is the Chinese character tian ?. To this day, most native Chinese translators render tian ? as heaven for lack of a more precise term in English to embody the Chinese understanding of what is ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ earth. Chinese philosophers frequently speak of chaoyue ??,4 when referring to ‘transcendence.’ There is no consensus, however, over the meaning of chaoyue ??, which, literally, is the verb “to exceed.”5 This imprecision is exacerbated whenever chaoyue ?? is equated with Western conceptions of ‘transcendence,’ whether found in the doctrines of Pythagoras, Plato, the Scholastics, Kant, Husserl, or more recent philosophers. An initial tendency from a Western perspective is to regard the term ‘transcendent’ as a reference to “out there-ness” and to understand heaven as a spatially or spiritually distant realm. Later in this thesis, I will suggest that chaoyue ??, if understood vis-à-vis the sources that inform Classical Confucianism, evokes an understanding of the inter-connectedness of individuals with one another (i.e., as family and society), with nature and with all that is real. What is transcended in chaoyue ?? is individual isolation, reflecting John Donne’s declaration that, “No man is an island.” 4 Chaoyue ?? is not a term found in the primary Confucian literature, but in the contemporary vocabulary of Chinese philosophers. 5 John DeFrancis, editor. ABC Chinese-English Dictionary. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996. p. 68. ?? Human existence manifests both a social dimension and participation with all of reality through relational principles or dynamics. Some of these principles or dynamics will be examined in our discussion of the Yijing ?? (Book of Changes) and its relevance to Classical Confucianism. In this light, Tianming ?? underscores the symbiotic relationship between government, the governed and the metaphysical structure of the universe. Just as the people are not autonomous, neither is the ruler. Chinese translators of tian ? as ‘heaven,’ following the convention established by their counterparts from the West, have often failed to recognize the ideological motivations of Western translators. As a missionary, the Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) innovatively sought to synthesize Christianity and Confucianism through the fusion of disparate Chinese metaphysical and Western theological concepts. Ricci held that, “from the very beginning of their [the Chinese people’s] history it is recorded in their writings that they recognized and worshipped one supreme being whom they called King of Heaven or designated by some other name indicating his rule over heaven and earth.”6 Starting from this premise, Ricci and other Jesuits translated concepts such as tian ? as Heaven as well as ?? shangdi as God. One of Ricci’s journal entries reads as follows: Men like to raise their eyes to look at the physical sky [tian ?]. While they are in the act of doing so, they all sigh and say, ‘There must be someone who is operating all this [in the universe].’ This someone is called the Master-of-T’ien, or Deus in our country.7 6 Louis J. Gallagher, S.J., China In The Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci: 1583-1610. New York: Random House, 1953, p. 93. Following the Jesuits, Protestant missionary James Legge became the most well- known and prolific English translator to make consistent use of the word heaven for tian ?, a practice that has helped to foster the importing of Western theological concepts into Chinese philosophy. David Hall and Roger Ames argue that the words heaven, truth and self appear in translations of Confucian works as a result of the “Western ethnocentricism...” of “missionizing Christians” responsible for late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century translations.8 According to Hall and Ames, these terms promote “connotations of transcendence and spirituality” that are not present in Chinese thought.9 Thus, in order to avoid linguistic incommensurability, Professor Ames refrains from translating potentially problematic terms in the translations on which he has collaborated.10 For example, a typical passage from the Ames and Rosemont version of the Lun Yu ?? (Analects) reads: “...Does tian ? speak? And yet the four seasons turn and the myriad things are born and grow within it. Does tian speak?” (17.19).11 This simple, yet useful practice, aided by computerized typesetting, helps to minimize the imposition of Western interpretations upon Chinese texts. 7 Matteo Ricci. The True Doctrine of the Master of T’ien. Taichung (Taiwan): Kuang- ch’i, 1966. p. 3. 8 David L.Hall and Roger T.Ames. Anticipating China. New York: State University of New York Press. 1995. p. xvi. 9 Ibid. p. xvi. 10 See Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont, Jr. The Analects of Confucius – A Philosophical Translation. New York: Ballentine Books. 1998. p. 46: “Tian is a term that we have chosen not to translate, largely because we believe its normal English rendering as” Heaven” cannot but conjure up images derived from the Judeo-Christian tradition that are not to be found in China.” 11 Ibid. p. 208. ????? UNDERSTANDING TIANMING ?? IN CONTEXT It would be mistaken to suggest, however, that everywhere tian ? is translated as ‘heaven’ a Christian or Western interpretation applies, even in popular literature. Taoist Master Alfred Huang is a typical, non-academic example of a Chinese translator who consistently uses the word ‘heaven’ in his translation of phrases from Confucian literature: In ancient times, the Chinese believed that the Tao of Heaven was also the Tao of Humanity, especially for an emperor... Confucius said that “with vitality and endurance Heaven acts without ceasing! Heaven’s motion is the healthiest”... The nature of Heaven is to follow the central path with no excess and no insufficiency. Applied to human lives, all our actions should follow the way of Heaven, maintaining an equilibrium. In other words, every action should be in accord with proper time and circumstances.12 Nothing in Huang’s commentary or in his translations suggests that, by ‘heaven,’ he is referring to the Christian theological concept. Similarly, scholars unable to read Classical Chinese who have used James Legge’s translations as their link to the primary sources have been able to contextualize their interpretations. 12 Alfred Huang. The Complete I Ching. Rochester: Inner Traditions Interational, 1998. pp. 26-27. ?? WHY TIANMING ?? IS MORE THAN A SOCIAL CONTRACT Therefore, while it is helpful to clarify that Western conceptual categories make poor starting points for translating Chinese philosophical vocabulary, ruling out transcendence altogether imposes a metaphysical and moral naturalism upon the Chinese texts. In particular, an analysis of tianming ?? derived from translations stripped of all vocabulary for transcendence could suggest that the concept is essentially secular. In this respect, tianming ?? could be viewed as the equivalent of a secularized13 version of John Locke’s doctrine of ‘trust’ in the compact (generated by the social contract) between government and the people.14 Locke’s is a trust between two parties that can be kept or broken. When the trust is broken by governmental leaders, they, “...forfeit the Power, the People had put into their hands, for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the People, who have a Right to resume their original Liberty, and by the Establishment of new Legislative (such as they shall think fit) provide for their own safety and security, which is the end for which they are in society.”15 An analysis of literary and philosophical references to tianming ?? will show, however, that it is not essentially a version of the secularized social contract. With respect to domestic human rights issues, a valuable backdrop for understanding tianming ?? is in the ancient literature addressing its violation by a ruler. Excerpts from Mengzi ?? (Mencius) and the Shujing ?? (Book of History) will serve this purpose. 13 I use the qualifier ‘secularized’ here to recognize that John Locke personally understood the social contract within the context of Natural Law as established by God, to whom he considered governments were ultimately accountable. This is the understanding that Thomas Jefferson would later reflect in the language of the Declaration of Independence. 14 On the compact that exists between government and the people, see Locke, op.cit. Treatise 2, Section 14, 8-10; Treatise 2, Section 97, 5-8; Treatise 2, Section 99, 5- 10. 15 Locke, op. cit. Treatise 2, Section 222, 20-25. 9 ? MENCIUS ON THE VIOLATION OF TIANMING ?? While the Lun Yu ?? (Analects) contains no specific instructions concerning the deposing of a ruler who has forfeited the mandate to rule, the Mengzi ?? (Mencius) includes a handful of passages that address the legitimacy of overthrowing such a ruler without assassination. King Hsuan [Xuan] of Ch’i [Qi] asked, “Is it true that T’ang [Tang] banished Chieh [Jieh] and King Wu marched against Tchou [Zhou]?” “It is so recorded,” answered Mencius. “Is regicide permissible?” “A man who mutilates benevolence is a mutilator, while one who cripples rightness is a crippler. He who is both a mutilator and a crippler is an ‘outcast.’ I have indeed heard of the punishment of the ‘outcast Tchou [Zhou],’ but I have not heard of any regicide.” (Mengzi ??, Book I, B8; D.C. Lau translation)16 Here, Mencius affirms the deposing of a king who has violated the virtue of ai ren ??(humane benevolence) toward the people. He does not, however, advocate anarchy or direct overthrow of a ruler by the masses. Rather, the representatives or champions of the people (i.e., benevolent leaders) act on their behalf: “[Mencius answered King Xuan], ‘If the prince made serious mistakes, they [government ministers] would remonstrate with him, but if repeated remonstrations fell on deaf ears, they would depose him’” (Mengzi ??, Book V, B9; D.C. Lau translation).17 16 D.C.Lau, translator. Mencius. London: Penguin Books, 1970. p. 68. 10 ?? At first glance the preceding Mencian passage could be marshaled to support a social-contract reading of tianming ??, similar to that in the post-Christian West, with no metaphysical referent. According to Thomas Hobbes, the people have a right to arrange a new contract when the government to whom they have surrendered their sovereignty deteriorates into an oppressive regime.18 Locke, as well, holds that both parties in the social compact owe obligations to the other and, when one party fails to fulfill its obligation, the other party may reconstitute the contract. But, when read in the context of earlier historical and philosophical tradition, the Mencian passage reflects a motivation that is deeper than a contract between human parties. SHUJING ?? (BOOK OF HISTORY) METAPHYSICS AS A BACKGROUND FOR MENCIUS Mencius’ reference to the just deposing of a ruler (Book I, B8) draws both its conceptual framework and language from China’s oldest historical record, the Shujing ?? (Book of History). Reputed to have been abridged and edited by Confucius, the Shujing ?? was considered a major textbook by Confucian scholars during the pre-Qin period. Eventually, the work assumed its place amongst the five Confucian Classics. The “Speech of Tang” constitutes one of the five sections of the Shujing ?? and records the circumstances leading to the establishment of China’s first archaeologically attested dynasty, the Shang (ca. 1600-1027 BCE). The Shang Dynasty, characterized by its system of writing and the practice of divination, furnished primitive diagrams and texts that were later incorporated into the Yijing ?? (Book of Changes), also known as the Zhou Yi, during the Zhou Dynasty (ca. 1027-256 BCE). 17 Ibid. p.159. 18 On the formation of the social contract, see Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, English Works, 3, p. 1x, 158. ??? The “Speech of Tang” records the historical milestone to which the Shang dynasty traces its origin, the deliverance of the common people from the unjust oppression of Jie, the last King of Xia. Obviously, history is written by the victors of such battles, and the account paints the heroism of Tang in the most favorable light. Nonetheless, the principles to which the story appeals are an overt expression of the values by which the reign of Tang was justified to the people. The fact that the “Speech of Tang” answers an implicit need for such rationalization indicates that tianming ?? is deeply rooted in the earliest stages of China’s developing political and cultural self- understanding. The king said: “Come, all of you. Come over and hear what I have to tell you. It is not that I, the humble man, who have the audacity to declare war. It is because the prince of Xia has committed monstrous crimes that Heaven has given me the mandate [tianming ??] to exterminate his kingdom.” (Translation by Wang Shishun and Du Ruiqing)19 19 Wang Shishun and Du Ruiqing, translators. The Book of History. Shandong: Shandong Friendship Press, 1993. p. 103. ?? The oration continues with a statement of the evidence by which Jie is indicted as having forfeited the mandate to rule: “You may also wonder: ‘What atrocities has the king of Xia committed?’ He has exhausted the strength of his people and practised ruthless exploitation...”20 This said, Tang, no less than four times in the short speech, declares that the mandate has passed to him and that his cause to depose the king of Xia is just: “Not daring to disobey orders from Heaven [tian ? ], I cannot but set off on this punitive mission.”21 One need not make recourse to later notions of Western transcendence to recognize that tian ? has been regarded throughout Chinese history as more than a socially mandated imperative. While Heaven remains a problematic translation of tian ? whenever it entails reference to Western theologies, a metaphysical understanding of tian ? and other Confucian notions does emanate from the Yijing ?? and its associated pre-Confucian classics. THE PROBLEM WITH NATURALIZING TIAN ? The assertion that tian ? conveys no sense of transcendence whatsoever is generally rooted in the necessary effort to de-Christianize or de-Westernize translations of the Confucian Four Books. This effort to eliminate Western impositions on the text is essentially an exercise in deconstruction. A growing postmodern trend in Confucian studies can be seen in the work of the historian Lionel Jensen. Jensen takes deconstruction to its logical end and deconstructs not only the text, but also the person of Confucius. According to Jensen, Confucius is the contrived invention of Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Jesuit priests, most notably Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci. Jensen writes, “In Jesuit hands the indigenous Kongzi [??] was resurrected from distant symbolism into life, heroically transmuted and made intelligible as ‘Confucius,’ a spiritual confrere who alone among the Chinese – so their version had it – had preached an ancient Gospel of monotheism now forgotten.”22 Although Jensen believes Hall and Ames do not go far enough in their deconstruction efforts, he views their work as a “significant rejoinder both to previous contemporary interpreters/translators of Confucian texts such as de Bary and Wing-tsit Chan and to the Anglo-European philosophical tradition.”23 While much can be commended in Jensen’s effort to counter co-optations of Confucianism, there is an omission in his work. Beyond an extended note introducing the Yijing ?? as a book of divination and hexagrams,24 Jensen makes virtually no mention of the background sources from which Classical Confucian draws its metaphysical understanding. His conclusion that the Confucian texts embody no concept of transcendence is based upon exposing later constructs such as those of Western religious interpreters, not on expositing prior sources such as the Yijing ?? or Shujing ??. 22 Lionel M. Jensen. Manufacturing Confucianism. Durham: Duke University Press. 1997. p. 33. Although the original teachings attributed to Confucius and his disciples make scant explicit reference to metaphysics, it would be inaccurate, for that reason, to characterize them as purely naturalistic. Confucius is described as the compiler and transmitter of an ancient philosophical tradition consisting of those works that would eventually be recognized as the five Confucian Classics. The Lun Yu ?? (Analects) portrays him as saying, “A transmitter and not a maker, believing in and loving the ancients, I venture to compare myself with our old P’ang” (Lun Yu ?? 7.1). Concerning the highly metaphysical Yijing ??, Confucius proclaimed, “If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yi [Yijing ??], and then I might come to be without great faults” (Lun Yu ?? 7.16). The Lun Yu ?? conveys a picture of Confucius as having attained such a condition in the statement, “At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right” (Lun Yu ?? 2.4.6). Accordingly, the Yijing ?? played a background role in the development of Confucian thought. CLASSICAL CONFUCIANISM AS RECEIVER AND TRANSMITTER OF METAPHYSICS Why then are references to metaphysics in general, and to the Yijing ?? in particular, so infrequent within the texts of the Lun Yu ??, the Da Xue ??, the Zhongyong ??, and the Mengzi ??? Although there is no consensus as to the actual role Confucius played in editing the Five Classics, he is portrayed as holding them in high esteem throughout the Analects: “The Master said, ‘I am not one who was born in the possession of knowledge; I am one who is fond of antiquity, and earnest in seeking it there’” (Lun Yu ?? 7.19). The Confucian works create no new metaphysics, but incorporate the metaphysics of the Yijing ??. What Classical Confucianism does not state explicitly, it presents implicitly by virtue of the historical-philosophical unity it seeks to maintain with its antecedents. The distinctive contribution Confucius makes to Chinese thought is not as an innovator of metaphysics, but as the unifier of ancient philosophical antecedents with new and original ethical practices. In the Yijing ??, one will find a metaphysical structure of the universe and the ontological foundations of di ? (universal source, order, power, etc.) as well as dao25 ? (literally, way or path). The Yijing ?? thus gives rise to both Confucianism and Daoism. Within the Confucian writings, di ? and dao ? are never isolated from immanent human application, nor is great attention drawn to them as discrete concepts. Instead, the words attributed to Confucius suggest a proclivity to minimize extraneous “metaphysical talk.” While the Yijing ?? presents the universe as cosmic, the Lun Yu ?? (Analects) naturalizes and humanizes it. The implication is that concepts affecting human rights such as tianming ?? possess, at once, both social and 25 Reference to ‘dao’ without a singular article (i.e., ‘the’) reflects the linguistic fact that ? may be either singular or plural. To speak of ‘the dao’ presupposes singularity. ? metaphysical dimensions. A proper understanding of the human person in relationship to the tian ? of tianming ?? must precede any development of rights for humans. THE YIJING ?? AS BACKGROUND PHILOSOPHY FOR CLASSICAL CONFUCIANISM Without the Yijing ??, the Confucian writings are truncated from their source for understanding the universe and the human person. The sixty-four gua ? (hexagrams or double trigrams) of the Yijing ?? and classical Confucian commentaries upon them, chiefly the Yizhuan ?? (the Ten Wings) provide the fertile soil from which the Chinese worldview emerges. Within their pages, the foundational notion of creativity and change via yin ? and yang ? is introduced and developed as a characteristically Chinese understanding of all processes and relationships. Unique amongst ancient Chinese literature, the Yijing ?? not only furnishes a theory of reality, but, equally important, a way of interpreting that reality. ONTO-HERMENEUTICS AS INTERPRETIVE METHODOLOGY A hermeneutic methodology that does justice to the content and the spirit of the Yijing ?? is required for a proper interpretation of its text and an understanding of its major themes such as the natures of reality and the human being. To this end, Chung- ying Cheng has developed onto-hermeneutics, a distinctively Chinese method for 17 interpretation that emerges from the Yijing ??. In the West, attempts at Yijing ?? interpretation are not new. Leibniz was fascinated by the mathematical complexities of the Yijing (?? )’s hexagrams, and Carl Jung wrote of its “synchronicity” in his influential forward to the Wilhelm and Baynes translation.26 However, Cheng’s onto- hermeneutics is the first systematic presentation to modern Western scholarship of a Yijing ??-generated interpretation of Confucian thought. The operant and distinguishing term in onto-hermeneutics is the prefix onto-, suggestive of the branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being, reality and ultimate substance. Whether the object (or ‘process’) under consideration is a text or a phenomenon in the world, onto-hermeneutics provides a framework for interpretation based upon the holistic integration of all reality. Furthermore, onto-hermeneutics makes the a priori presupposition that a thing in the world, like a text, is given meaning and context by a metaphysical referent. Professor Cheng writes: By onto-hermeneutical reflection I have in mind a reflection that would seek an understanding in terms of the meaningful connection of basic notions of a given text, with both intended and factual references to a reality which one could also experience and appeal to independently of the text.27 26 Jung held that the Yijing demonstrates that the Chinese mind “seems to be exclusively preoccupied with the chance aspects of events.” He coined the term ‘synchronicity’ to describe what he held to be the Yijing’s perspective on the coincidence of events in contrast to the Western view that events happen in sequence. See Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes. The I Ching or Book of Changes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950. pp. xxii-xxv. 27 Chung-ying Cheng. “Confucian Onto-hermeneutics: Morality and Ontology”. Op. Cit., p. 33. ??? Using the hermeneutic circle,28 onto-hermeneutics can be viewed as a dynamic and dialectical process that originates from, returns to and continues to proceed out of reality. I leave the term ‘reality’ unmodified by the adjective ‘objective’ to avoid the polarization of the objective and the subjective that occurs in much of the Western philosophic tradition that privileges a reductionist tendency.29 A simple and typical diagram of the hermeneutic circle helps to introduce onto-hermeneutics: ?Reader Text Reality ??? Here, the reader interacts simultaneously with reality and text, experience and tradition. Onto-hermeneutics avoids the extreme, on the one hand, of isolating the text as a fixed repository of knowledge inaccessible to the reader, except perhaps by a special revelation as in Gnosticism. It also avoids the postmodern extreme of holding the text hostage to the reader with meaning superimposed by a cultural or personal construct. In essence, onto-hermeneutics resolves what Gadamer calls the two “experiences of alienation” the reader encounters in confronting reality.30 The first alienation is that of the aesthetic consciousness in which we are “no longer open to the immediate claim of that which grasps us.”31 The second alienation is that of the historical consciousness, what Gadamer refers to as, “the noble and slowly perfected art of holding ourselves at a critical distance in dealing with witnesses to past life.”32 Onto-hermeneutics resolves the problem of these alienations by acknowledging the dynamic, symbiotic and holistic process of interaction between human being, ultimate reality and whatever may be encountered as text for interpretation. In a debate-style exchange of essays with Richard Rorty on the limits of interpretation, Umberto Eco writes: “If there is something to be interpreted, the interpretation must speak of something which must be found somewhere, and in some way respected.”33 While Eco pleads for the concession of respect for a notion of reality beyond a reader’s construct, onto-hermeneutics proclaims a robust, unified engagement between reader, reality and text. As a distinctive of onto-hermeneutics, this engagement is active, creative and transformative. 28 For an insightful application of the circle metaphor to various hermeneutic traditions, see: Ronald Bontekoe. Dimensions of the Hermeneutic Circle. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1996. 29 See Chung-ying Cheng. “The Origins of Chinese Philosophy.” In Brian Carr and Indira Mahalingam. Companion Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy. New York: Routledge. 1997. p. 501. Here, Professor Cheng writes: “In separating reality from appearance, objectivity from subjectivity, the ancient Greeks sought the immutable and unmoved as the essence of the real and objective. In contrast, the ancient Chinese from the very beginning recognized and accepted change and transformation as irreducible attributes of the world, including both things and human selves. In fact, when we now look at the main differences between western and Chinese philosophy, we have to point to this fundamental divergence.” ??? 30 Hans-Georg Gadamer. “The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem.” Reprinted in Gayle Ormiston and Alan Schrift. The Hermeneutic Tradition From Ast To Ricoeur. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. pp. 147-158. 33 Umberto Eco. “Interpretation and History.” Umberto Eco, Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler, and Christine Brooke-Rose. Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. p. 43. ??? THE SIX PRINCIPLES OF ONTO-HERMENEUTICS A basic outline of Professor Cheng’s onto-hermeneutical theory34 would consist of the following six principles35 that ostensibly pertain to and emerge from pre-Confucian thought. The six principles are: (1) the principle of ontological reference by way of unification and harmonization; (2) the principle of practical application and constructive participation;36 (3) the principle of comprehensive observation; (4) the principle of congruence of reciprocal feelings (i.e., the unity of feelings and experience); (5) the principle of practice and self-cultivation; and (6) the principle of unity of virtues and reasons.37 The first two of these principles are constructive principles upon which all of onto-hermeneutics rests, and they are derived from the onto- (i.e., ontological) emphasis addressed above. Before proceeding to examine the first of these principles, a note on terminology may be in order. In Western philosophy, ontology (that field which deals with questions of being or existence) is considered a branch of metaphysics. One of metaphysics’ concerns (in addition to its concern for universals, space and time, essence, causality, etc.) is questions of existence. The overlap of issues within ontology proper and metaphysics in general has led to an interchangeability between the terms ontology and metaphysics. 34 For the definitive collection of Professor Cheng’s essays on various aspects and applications of onto-hermeneutical theory, see Chung-Ying Cheng. New Dimensions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. 35 The six principles are enumerated in: Chung-ying Cheng. “Confucian Onto- hermeneutics: Morality and Ontology.” Op. Cit. Especially, pp. 41-53. As A.W. Sparkes observes: Ontology is an important part of metaphysics. In fact, when philosophy courses have titles like ‘Metaphysics and Epistemology,’ the word ‘metaphysics’ is being used as a virtual synonym for ‘ontology.’38 In Cheng’s vocabulary for onto-hermeneutics, it appears that metaphysics and ontology are interchangeable concepts. This would be consistent with the onto- hermeneutical principle of unification and harmonization in which becoming (for the individual and humankind) is inextricably linked to all of reality. Ontological reference, in this context, is the same as metaphysical reference. Similarly, any reference to transcendence should be understood as metaphysical. The principle of ontological reference by way of unification and harmonization begins with the premise that a metaphysical context (the basis for ontology) is necessary for understanding that which is immanent. According to Cheng, “...unification and harmonization of any subject matter require a unique ontological reference in order to bring together all the differences into one unity and unity must be capable of comprehending all the differences and collecting them into a harmony.” A significant example of a concept that depends upon ontological reference is xing ?, the Confucian term denoting “human (or a human’s) nature”. Onto-hermeneutics views xing ? as “an ontological reality that not only makes the ontology of the human person possible but makes the transformation of the human person possible.” An understanding informed by the Yijing ?? recognizes that, without ontological reference, “human nature” (xing ?) has no unity or harmony with ultimate reality. Expressed positively, through xing ?, individuals link their lives, families, and society to the source of reality, thereby generating knowledge, language and morality as a function of human becoming. It must be borne in mind that, in Yijing ?? metaphysics, there is no absolute opposition between cosmos and earth, reality and manifestation. The cosmos is not “out there,” but unified and harmonized with the immanent. All cosmic processes are to be understood in light of their relationship to dao ? (the way or path on earth) as a unified whole, somewhat like the later Heideggerian notion of Being (Sein), which gives meaning to being (sein). Dao ?, however, is not separate from tian ?. In fact, their consanguinity is one reason that tian ? frequently appears in translations as ‘nature’ rather than ‘heaven.’ Chaoyue ?? (conventionally, but not accurately, translated ‘transcendence’), as applied to a Classical Confucian understanding is not the idea of externality or otherness as in Platonic formalism or theism. Rather, chaoyue ?? unifies reality, ontology, nature, human relationships, and all of life. A proper view of xing ? (human nature) in the everyday world as part of dao ? requires reference to tian ?. The first onto-hermeneutical principle calls for the interpretation of human nature and, for that matter, all reality, as part of a whole. The second principle (practical application and constructive participation) relates all philosophical concepts to the practical and experiential as the ground upon which their meaning is constructed. Actual practices and experiences are the basis for analysis and the lens through which abstract notions are to be viewed and clarified. Thus, onto- hermeneutics avoids the dichotomy between Platonic idealism and radical empiricism by fusing metaphysical reference with naturalistic observation in the construction of phenomenological concepts. Cheng describes his second principle as the practice of “...extending goodness of human nature to goodness of a humane society.”41 Goodness and other virtues have their origin in metaphysical phenomena (i.e., principles) such as tian ?, but have their manifestation in immanent phenomena such as xing ?. Dao ? of goodness (and other virtues) is an integration of tian ? and xing ?. The remaining four principles, (3) comprehensive observation, (4) congruence of reciprocal feelings; (5) unity of practice and self-cultivation; and (6) unity of virtues and reasons, pertain to interpretation and understanding in the world. They speak to the significance of incorporating all relevant resources into the practice of interpretation so that the experience of interpretation is “totalistic.” These resources include the primary 41 Ibid. p. 52. ? texts as well as the historic scholarly tradition of commentary upon and reinterpretation of the text, cultural response to the text, and personal engagement of the text as a source for virtue and divination. The spirit or essence of these four principles is to approach interpretation as a creative, living enterprise, one that is anchored in the text and its ontological referent, and yet open to holistic experience and practical encounter with reality. METAPHYSICS IN THE YIJING ?? AND CLASSICAL CONFUCIANISM According to Professor Cheng, the metaphysical backdrop to the Yijing ?? and Classical Confucianism is pervasive throughout the primary texts. The central concept of tian ? (translated in the Yijing ?? as heaven by most Western sinologists, notably James Legge42 and Richard Wilhelm and Carey Baynes43) carries with it a metaphysical status that informs the text. As to the element of tian [?], there is obviously good reason to believe that Confucius treated the spiritual and transcendent belief in tian [?] as an ultimate source of support and justification, and also as a supreme model of the power and virtue of creativity... This deeper level of onto-cosmology is ever present in Confucius’ thinking even in the Analects and it is intended beyond a historical reference.44 42 See James Legge. I Ching: Book of Changes. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1971. 43 See Richard Wilhelm and Carey F. Baynes. The I Ching. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1977. 44 Chung-ying Cheng. “Confucian Onto-hermeneutics: Morality and Ontology”. Op. Cit. p. 38. ???? One of the most significant contributions of Confucius to the interpretation of the Yijing ?? is the discernment of an onto-cosmological perspective within the text. The suffix -logical suggests that the Yijing ?? clarifies the way in which the universe is structured and organized around a rational principle. The prefix cosmo- directly refers to the universe and relates onto-cosmology to cosmogony (the origin of the universe) and cosmography (the picture of the universe). Onto-hermeneutics thus draws upon a unified understanding of the universe’s origins, image and logic as the ever-present context for interpretation of the text and the experience of the reader. Ultimately, Professor Cheng argues that Confucius generates an onto-hermeneutics that presents a “totalistic” context that gives rise to a non-reductionistic philosophy of reality: “... it is Confucius who transforms the understanding of heaven and earth of the Yi into an understanding of the full creative power that would give rise to life and sustain life toward a grand harmony and that [the] human being must emulate this creative harmonization and harmonious creativity in his own development of humanity and human society.”45 Onto-hermeneutics as an interpretive practice is concerned with understanding the whole system in light of its inter-relatedness and organic nature by way of penetrating analysis and naturalistic observation. ?45 Ibid. pp. 38-39. ONTO-HERMENEUTICS APPLIED TO THE YIJING ?? TO ELUCIDATE TIANMING ?? When applied to the Yijing ?? and the Confucian concept of tianming ??, onto-hermeneutics helps to establish that tianming ?? carries with it a conceptual force that extends beyond the purely social. To demonstrate this, it is only necessary to apply the first principle of onto-hermeneutics, for it reveals the ontological backdrop of tianming ??. While the remaining onto-hermeneutical principles contribute insight into the outworkings of tianming ?? in the human and social context, their role is secondary in establishing the relevance of tianming ?? to human rights. As noted above, tianming ?? has been approached as a secularized, Western- style social contractarian notion. Onto-hermeneutics develops a vision of tianming ?? as a metaphysical and ontological dynamic that calls forth accountability to the Chinese view of the nature of reality and the human person. A conceptualization of human rights anchored in tianming ?? has the capacity to resonate within the collective Chinese mind as culturally sensitive and culturally informed. Moreover, it can provide the rationale for appeal against a government by its citizens as a philosophical resource for any development of a legal basis for such appeal. TIANMING ?? AS A MORAL CONCEPT Application of the first principle of onto-hermeneutics (ontological reference by way of unification and harmonization) will show that tianming ??, as a moral concept, is a manifestation of the whole of morality. That whole is represented in dao ?. Xunwu Chen summarizes the hermeneutical claims that Confucianism makes upon dao ? as follows. Despite Chen’s problematic use of the word ‘transcendent’ in combination with ‘immanent,’ his summary is useful for its implicit reference to onto-hermeneutical principles: The dao is immanent in human history, culture, and human practices; thus the dao is both transcendent and immanent. The dao expresses itself in the moral principles that we abide by, in rites and institutions within which we operate; thus, the dao is the universal that is embodied in the particular. The dao is embodied in the ways of the ancient sage kings or present good rulers and princes, etc.; thus the dao is the universal that evolves historically. The dao is the truth; in terms of it all other truths are understood and interpreted. To understand the dao, one must reflect what is near at hand, that is, what one experiences daily and culturally in real life.46 ?46 Xunwu Xhen. Philosophy. Vol. 27. No. 1. March 2000. pp. 106. “Hermeneutical Reading of Confucianism.” Journal of Chinese 28 ?? In practice, tianming ?? is a manifestation of dao ? of tian ?. Closely aligned with the principles of onto-hermeneutics, tianming ??, like dao ?, is (a) unified with all reality by ontological reference (or, as Chen states it, “is both transcendent and immanent”), (b) expressed in moral principles, rites and institutions, (c) historically evolving, (d) integrated with all truth, and (e) apprehended in daily life. The ultimate ontological referent of tianming ?? is explained in the two initial gua ? (hexagrams) of the Yijing ?? and their attendant explanations and commentaries. THE BASIC METAPHYSICS OF THE YIJING ?? The Yijing ??, a collection of sixty-four gua ? (hexagrams or double trigrams), provides the philosophical foundation of all Chinese thought. The central theme of the Yijing ?? is creative change, and that theme is most expressly developed in the philosophical idea of yin ? and yang ?, illustrated in this familiar ancient symbol: Yin ? (i.e., the dark region of the symbol) and yang ? (i.e., the light region) comprise the two complementary and symbiotic principles (alternatively, forces or modalities) whose perpetual interaction generates the physical and non-physical universe, 29 ? including nature and human nature. While Tsou Yen (305-240 BCE) is often credited for the formulation of yin-yang ?? philosophy,47 its origins are so ancient that it is not possible to speak of Chinese thought at any historical point without reference to it. Generally, yang ? stands for that which is creative, initiating, active, positive, light, hot, hard, dry, etc. Yin ?, correspondingly, stands for that which is receptive, responsive, passive, negative, dark, cold, soft, wet, etc. Tian ? may provisionally be understood as the initiator yang ? acting upon nature (and human nature) as the responder yin ?. In this interaction, yin ? and yang ? give rise to all reality, what the Chinese call “the ten thousand things” (wanwu ?? or wanyou ??). AN EXPOSITION FROM THE YIJING (?? )’S FOUNDATIONAL CHAPTERS Onto-hermeneutics calls for the organic treatment of the Yijing ??, with particular attention to interconnections within the text. The two initial gua ? (hexagrams), qian ? and kun ? (described in the opening chapters of the Yijing ??) lend themselves readily to such holistic interpretation. Specifically, they were written in a manner that demonstrates their interconnectedness. The cosmogenic role of qian ? as pure yang ? and kun ? as pure yin ? is established by pervasive reinforcement in the Yijing ?? through frequent restatement and literary structure. 47 Tsou Yen is probably associated with yin-yang ?? philosophy due to his contributions to the development of wu xing (The Five Elements) which, in conjunction with yin-yang ??, affect changes in nature and human nature. For reference, see Clarence Burton Day. The Philosophers of China. New York: Citadel Press, 1962. p. 10 and 347 ff. ?? The literary structure used in the development of the notions qian ? and kun ? is a parallelism in which explanations and commentary entries concerning one notion deliberately parallel those of the other. Through this parallelism, the Yijing ?? presents a “totalistic” picture of the human person in relationship to the origin of all things. The structure also portrays the material universe as generated by the acting of qian ? (i.e., pure yang ?) upon kun ? (i.e. pure yin ?). Examples of parallel statements will illustrate this. In qian ?, we read: How great is the fundamental nature of Qian! The myriad things are provided their beginnings by it, and, as such, it controls Heaven [see note on ‘Heaven’].48 (Qian ?, Commentary on the Judgments)49 In kun ?, we read: How great is the fundamental nature of Kun! The myriad things are provided their births by it, and in so doing it compliantly carries out Heaven’s will. (Kun ?, Commentary on the Judgments) 48 The term ‘Heaven’ in this translation by Richard Lynn does not refer to the Western theological concept. Lynn follows the practice of the majority of native Chinese translators such as Wing-tsit Chan who have used the term ‘heaven’ as the closest English language approximation to tian ?. Two worthwhile features of Lynn’s version are his organization of the text so as to show its development by successive redactors and the incorporation of the commentaries of Wang Bi. 49 Unless otherwise specified, quotations of the Yijing are taken from: Richard John Lynn. The Classic of Changes – A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi. New York: Columbia University Press. 1994. ??? The Judgments and their commentaries do not depend on technical vocabulary, but demonstrate the relative meanings of qian ? and kun ? by elucidating the interaction between the two. In qian ?, we read: The Dao of Qian forms the male... Qian has mastery over the great beginnings of things... (Qian ?, Commentary Upon the Appended Phrases) In kun ?, we read: The Dao of Kun forms the female... Kun acts to bring things to completion. (Kun ?, Commentary Upon the Appended Phrases) As the parallel statements continue, the process of creativity becomes evident. Through the interaction of qian ? and kun ?, the universe proceeds from formlessness to form, from non-image to image. In qian ?, we read: When [dao] forms images we call it Qian... (Qian, Commentary Upon the Appended Phrases) In kun ?, we read: When [dao] duplicates patterns, we call it Kun... (Kun ?, Commentary Upon the Appended Phrases) This on-going parallelism establishes that qian ? and kun ? are symbiotic and interdependent principles. Qian ? is the initiator, originator and creative principle. Kun ? is the responsive, compliant and completing principle. Together, as the agents of change, they are responsible for the existence of the material world as efficient causes in the Aristotelian sense. Qian and Kun, do they not constitute the arcane source for change! When Qian and Kun form ranks, change stands in their midst, but if Qian and Kun were to disintegrate, there would be no way that change could manifest itself. And if change could not manifest itself, this would mean that Qian and Kun might almost be at the point of extinction! (Qian, Commentary Upon the Appended Phrases) DAO ? IN CONTEXT AND FUNCTION As its central theme, the principle of creative change permeates the Yijing ??. The rationale for change itself is located ontologically prior to qian ? and kun ? in the one principle that appears in the parallel statements as a constant. This is dao ?, whole, undifferentiated and unified. The specific translation of the term dao ? is not necessary for inferring its meaning from the context of the Yijing ?? in which dao ? is clearly seen as that which exists prior to and gives rise to qian ? and kun ?. It is functionally an onto-cosmogenic term with respect to the origin of all things. It is functionally an onto-cosmographic term with respect to the image of all things. And it is functionally an onto-cosmological term with respect to its role as the principle (i.e., Aristotelian final cause) for change, which brings about all things. The contextual and functional approach of onto-hermeneutics protects the interpretive process from being taken hostage by ideological competition over the definition of isolated words. For example, the translation of tian ? as heaven becomes unproblematic when interpreted contextually in light of the Yijing ?? vis-à-vis an onto- hermeneutical approach. Context and function rule out a simplistic equating of ‘heaven’ in classical Chinese texts with the Christian Heaven. Furthermore, onto-hermeneutics reveals that the idea of chaoyue ??, not as a Western notion of “out there-ness,” but in an inherently Chinese sense, does pervade the pre-Confucian and Confucian understanding of dao ?. Simply put, transcendence (for want of a better term) in the Yijing ?? means that nature and human nature do not exist in isolation from an ontological referent. That referent is dao ?, and it is not distant, but ubiquitous, manifesting itself in the perpetual symbiosis of yin-yang ??. Neither is dao ? morally neutral or indifferent as it informs the moral principles that guide humanity into harmony with nature and itself. Dao ? is also a concept that unites all subordinate principles such as qian ? and kun ? as well as “the ten thousand things” (wanwu ?? or wanyou ??) generated by the constancy of change. MORAL FORCE AS THE IMPLICATION FOR TIANMING ?? The Mandate of tian ? (tianming ??) carries moral force precisely because it is an expression of metaphysical dao ? applied to the relationship between rulers and the ruled, government and the governed. With tianming ??, the people have a moral concept to which to appeal as the legitimization of political power. Tianming ?? thus creates a dual accountability for all rulers, one that is immanent as a duty to the people and metaphysical as a duty to tian ? and dao ?. In the Chinese worldview, the fulfillment of this duty is essential for the flourishing of unity and harmony within society as the outworking of dao ?. Its violation harms society. The onto-hermeneutical principle of ontological reference by way of unification and harmonization provides a methodology for understanding tianming ?? in its historical-philosophical context. That context connects political practice and human rights to the ontological backdrop of yin ? and yang ?. Classical Confucianism offers Tianming ?? to modern China as a conceptual basis upon which upon which a theory for governmental accountability to a standard for the exemplary treatment of persons can be established. My purpose in examining Tianming ?? and other metaphysical concepts has not been to suggest that they are efficacious in and of themselves (i.e., that Tianming ?? will hold governments accountable for their actions). Rather, I suggest that, in seeking antecedents for political theory, China can draw upon indigenous concepts deeply imbedded in its philosophical heritage. Specifically, governmental accountability to the highest standards for the ethical and humane treatment of individuals is a fundamental Chinese value that emerges from an ancient Chinese worldview. I hope it has been seen that Tianming ?? embodies an incipient form of democratic ideals that reveals a shared values structure with liberal democracy for the humane valuation of individuals by their governments, resulting in their exemplary treatment. Tianming ?? becomes particularly relevant to advocates of ideal government as it is translated from a metaphysical construct into tangible practice. For any theory relating to the treatment of individuals that China finds acceptable will need to be authentically Chinese in its genesis and approach. The staying power of Confucianism as it has evolved since classical origins is a fact of Chinese culture and the far-reaching cultures throughout Asia for that matter. Classical Confucianism offers a values structure that is authentically Chinese and, thus, will always have relevance to Chinese political ideals.
- [Religious Ideas in Craftsmanship](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/coomaraswamy-religious-craftsmanship) - Ananda K. Coomaraswamy The young craftsman is brought up and educated in the actual workshop, and is the disciple of his father. No technical education in the world can ever hope to compensate the craftsman for the loss of these conditions… it is not only technique that is learnt; in the workshop there is life
- [Three Things](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/ruysbroeck-three-things) - The man who would live in the most perfect state of Holy Church must be a good and zealous man; an inward and ghostly man; an uplifted and God-seeing man; and an outflowing man to all in common. Whenever these four things are together in a man, then his state is perfect; and through the increase of grace he shall continually grow and progress in all virtues, and in the knowledge of truth, before God and before all men. {Through Three Things a Man Becomes Good} Hear now three things which constitute a good man. The first, which a good man must have, is a clean conscience without reproach of mortal sin. And therefore whosoever wishes to become a good man must examine and prove himself with due discernment, from that time onward when he could first have committed sin. And from all these sins he must purge himself, according to the precept and the custom of Holy Church. The second thing which pertains to a good man is that he must in all things be obedient to God, and to Holy Church, and to his own proper convictions. And to each of these three he must be equally obedient so shall he live without care and doubt, and shall ever abide without inward reproach in all his deeds. The third thing which behoves every good man is that in all his deeds he should have in mind, above all else, the glory of God. And if it happens that by reason of his business or the multiplicity of his works, he has not always God before his eyes, yet at least there should be established in him the intention and desire to live according to the dearest will of God. Behold, these three things, when they are possessed in this way, make a man good. And whosoever lacks any one of these three is neither good nor in the grace of God; but whenever a man resolves in his heart to fulfil these three points, how wicked soever he may have been before, in that very instant he becomes good, and is susceptible of God, and filled with the grace of God. {Through Three Things a Man Becomes Inward} If, further, this good man would become an inward and ghostly man, he needs must have three further things. The first is a heart unencumbered with images; the second is spiritual freedom in his desires, the third is the feeling of inward union with God. Now let every one who thinks himself to be ghostly observe himself. He who would have a heart void of images may not possess anything with affection, nor may he cling to any one, or have intercourse with him with attachment of the will; for all intercourse and all affection which do not aim purely at the honour of God bring images into a man's heart, since they are born, not of God, but of the flesh. And so if a man would become spiritual, he must forsake all fleshly lusts and loves and must cleave with longing and love to God alone, and thus possess Him. And through this, all imaginations and all inordinate love towards creatures are cast out. And this loving possession of God makes a man inwardly free from ungodly images; for God is a Spirit, of Whom no one can make to himself a true image. Certainly in this exercise a man should lay hold of good images to help him; such as the Passion of our Lord and all those things that may stir him to greater devotion. But in the possession of God, that man must sink down to that imageless Nudity which is God; and this is the first condition, and the foundation, of a ghostly life. The second condition is inward freedom. Through this, the man should be able to raise himself towards God in all inward exercises, free from images and encumbrances; that is, in thanksgiving and praise, in worship, in devout prayer and fervent love, and in all those things that may be done by longing and love with the help of the grace of God and through inward zeal in all ghostly exercises. Through this inward exercise, he reaches the third state; which is that he feels a ghostly union with God. Whosoever then has, in his inward exercise, an imageless and free ascent unto his God, and means nought else but the glory of God, must taste of the goodness of God; and he must feel from within a true union with God. And in this union, the inward and spiritual life is made perfect; for in this union, the desirous power is perpetually enticed anew and stirred to new inward activity. And by each act, the spirit rises upwards to a new union. And so activity and union perpetually renew themselves and this perpetual renewal in activity and in union is a ghostly life. And so you are now able to see how a man becomes good through the moral virtues and an upright intention; and how he may become ghostly through the inward virtues and union with God. But without these said points, he can neither be good nor ghostly. {Through Three Things a Man Becomes God-Seeing} Further, you must know that if this ghostly man would now become a God-seeing man, he needs must have three other things. The first is the feeling that the foundation of his being is abysmal, and he should possess it in this manner; the second is that his inward exercise should be wayless; the third is that his indwelling should be a divine fruition. Now understand, you who would live in the spirit, for I am speaking to no one else. The union with God which a spiritual man feels, when the union is revealed to the spirit as being abysmal—that is, measureless depth, measureless height, measureless length and measureless breadth—in this manifestation the spirit perceives that through love it has plunged itself into the depth and has ascended into the height and escaped into the length; and it feels itself to be wandering in the breadth, and to dwell in a knowledge which is ignorance. And through this intimate feeling of union, it feels itself to be melting into the Unity; and, through dying to all things, into the life of God. And there it feels itself to be one life with God. And this is the foundation, and the first point, of the God-seeing life. And from this there arises the second point, which is an exercise above reason and without condition: for the Divine Unity, of which every God-seeing spirit has entered into possession in love, eternally draws and invites the Divine Persons and all loving spirits into its Self. And this inward drawing is felt by each lover, more or less, according to the measure of his love and the manner of his exercise. And whosoever yields himself to this indrawing, and keeps himself therein, cannot fall into mortal sin. But the God-seeing man who has forsaken self and all things, and does not feel himself drawn away because he no longer possesses anything as his own, but stands empty of all, he can always enter, naked and unencumbered with images, into the inmost part of his spirit. There he finds revealed an Eternal Light, and in this light, he feels the eternal demand of the Divine Unity; and he feels himself to be an eternal fire of love, which craves above all else to be one with God. The more he yields to this indrawing or demand, the more he feels it. And the more he feels it, the more he craves to be one with God; for it urges him to pay the debt which is demanded of him by God. This eternal demand of the Divine Unity kindles within the spirit an eternal fire of love; and though the spirit incessantly pays the debt, an eternal burning continues within it. For, in the transformation within the Unity, all spirits fail in their own activity, and feel nothing else but a burning up of themselves in the simple Unity of God. This simple Unity of God none can feel or possess save he who maintains himself in the immeasurable radiance, and in the love which is above reason and wayless. In this transcendent state the spirit feels in itself the eternal fire of love; and in this fire of love it finds neither beginning nor end, and it feels itself one with this fire of love. The spirit for ever continues to burn in itself, for its love is eternal; and it feels itself ever more and more to be burnt up in love, for it is drawn and transformed into the Unity of God, where the spirit burns in love. If it observes itself, it finds a distinction and an otherness between itself and God; but where it is burnt up it is undifferentiated and without distinction, and therefore it feels nothing but unity; for the flame of the Love of God consumes and devours all that it can enfold in its Self. And thus you may see that the indrawing Unity of God is nought else than the fathomless Love, which lovingly draws inward, in eternal fruition, the Father and the Son and all that lives in Them. And in this Love we shall burn and be burnt up without end, throughout eternity; for herein lies the blessedness of all spirits. And therefore we must all found our lives upon a fathomless abyss; that we may eternally plunge into Love, and sink down in the fathomless Depth. And with that same Love, we shall ascend, and transcend ourselves, in the incomprehensible Height. And in that Love which is wayless, we shall wander and stray, and it shall lead us and lose us in the immeasurable Breadth of the Love of God. And herein we shall flee forth and flee out of ourselves, into the unknown raptures of the Goodness and Riches of God. And therein we shall melt and be melted away, and shall eternally wander and sojourn within the Glory of God. Behold! by each of these images, I show forth to God-seeing men their being and their exercise, but none else can understand them. For the contemplative life cannot be taught. But where the Eternal Truth reveals Itself within the spirit all that is needful is taught and learnt.
- [Liberating the Heart: Sufi Perspectives on Qur’anic Psychology](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/liberating-the-heart-sufi-perspectives-on-quranic-psychology) - Reza Shah-Kazemi a talk given at the School of Oriental and African Studies University of London 9 March, 2015 In order to really appreciate the meaning of liberation, we have to know that from which we seek liberation, we have to know what is the nature of our imprisonment, what is the nature of the
- [Konko-Kyo: A Religion of Mediation](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/konko-kyo-mediation) - Delwin B. Schneider If you have faith, the unseen gifts of divine favor which you receive are greater than those which are seen; the unknown gifts are more than those which are known. As you ponder this, you should understand that all things have occurred in your life because of the divine favor. Click here
- [Some Puzzles and Conundrums in the Teaching of Religion](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/puzzles-and-conundrums-teaching-religion) - Harry Oldmeadow * What is religion? * Why should we be interested in it? * How should we teach it? Click here to download – 32:09 (30.9MB) Questions & answers Click here to download – 32:09 (30.9MB) Recorded at Chesterton Community College, Cambridge, December 2014.
- [Contemplation: Practice, Doctrine and Wisdom in the Teaching of Zhiyi](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/contemplation-practice-doctrine-wisdom) - It is not easy to define the type of experience initiated by practice and cultivation in Tiantai Buddhism. There are manifold methods of practice and cultivation in Tiantai Buddhism, but all of them are predominantly linked with the Chinese term for contemplation (guan). The terminological roots of the Chinese expression guan originate in Indian Buddhism, where it is called vipasyana and means examine, contemplate, consider illusion and discern illusion, contemplate and mentally enter into truth.1 It is a fundamental concept of all Buddhist schools, but Tiantai Buddhists elevate it to a distinct doctrine. It would go beyond the frame of this paper to give a comprehensive survey of contemplation throughout various Buddhist schools.2 What I intend to do here is to show how “Contemplation” works as a self-sufficient concept, wisdom and practice that allows one to live a spiritual experience without having to narrate or to represent it. This in turn might help us to identify species of spiritual traditions determined by varying relationships to the categories of narration and contemplation. The inaugurator of the scholastic system of Tiantai doctrines, Zhiyi (538- 597) explicitly dedicated several works to the doctrine of contemplation. His most important thoughts about this doctrine are expounded in the Cidi chan men (Gate of the Gradual Meditation), the Liu miao men (Gate of the Six Subtleties) and the Mohe zhiguan (=MHZG Great Calming and Contemplation). But in his other important works like the Fahua xuanyi (=FHXY The Profound Meaning of the Lotus), Fahua wenju (A Textual Commentary on the Lotus), Weimo Lueshu (An ? Contemplation (Mohe zhiguan), Zhiyi explains in detail what deconstruction in virtue of contemplation means.8 Deconstruction in virtue of contemplation consists of a refutation of all possible ontological propositions about the origin and being of mental activity. This detailed refutation is based on rationalistic arguments showing that each of the propositions contains contradictions. Its structure is subdivided according to the scheme of the four alternatives (siju) encompassing the assertion of the proposition, its negation, the synthesis of the two, and the transcendence of the two.9 Experience of introspection caused by this type of contemplation can hardly be defined as religious experience. The question of how to define the experience intended by contemplation will be one of the issues of this paper. The second question concerns the manner in which it is expounded in the above mentioned Tiantai texts. Generally, terminology in Tiantai- Buddhist texts from Zhiyi and Guanding (561-632) appears to be like an organism consisting of interrelated concepts. Tiantai concepts establish a systematic combination and continuity between doctrinal speculation, methods for practice, cultivation, concentration and its resulting experience of introspection. The crucial concept of contemplation combines the three important contents of Tiantai-teaching: theoretical reflection in terms of doctrinal articulation, practice in terms of methods of cultivation and concentration, and experience in terms of introspection. The way in which its complexity is expounded in the major Tiantai-text cannot be described as narrative. The concept of contemplation appears as a highly speculative notion within these strictly and systematically subdivided texts of Tiantai-teaching, though simultaneously articulating practical instructions for all diverse kinds of sentient beings in order to achieve the final merits in terms of salvation (jietuo). Contemplation is represented as both a speculative and instructive concept in Tiantai-texts, thus combining practical experience and theoretical reflection. The third point concerns its final purpose within Zhiyi’s teaching. Its final purpose is said to be commonly shared by all sentient beings as their universal salvation (du zhongsheng) and relief from suffering that is supposed to be an indivisible part of their existence prior to this salvation. Contemplation neither indicates sole subjectivity of spiritual experience nor mystical experience nor ecstasy.11 It does not even denote a path leading the practitioner to the experience of some transcendental sphere beyond the immediate concreteness of existence, although its object is described by words like inconceivable, ineffable (bukeshuo, bukesiyi) etc. Its ultimate purpose rather is the entire salvation of all sentient beings realized through the practitioner’s universal and simultaneously concrete wisdom (yiqie zhongzhi). Cultivation and realization of universal wisdom consist of these acts of contemplation, initiated by the single person’s practice. Practice of contemplation and cultivation for one’s own person is supposed to be capable of initiating a process of transformation extending to others. Universal salvation of all sentient beings initiated by the single person’s practice accords with the idea of entelechy that initiating practice contains the potency of fulfilling the entire process of universal transformation: transformation of sentient beings is caused through transformation of the single person that in turn is caused by this single person’s own practice. Fundamentally, Tiantai teaching deals with the idea of entelechy that transformation of others is based on one’s own transformation, the two poles of one’s own transformation and that of others are indivisible within this process of universal salvation. Viewed from the standpoint of ultimate contemplation and its highest achievement, Zhiyi says that there is no distinction between self and others.13 Human nature seems to be understood through this common process of general transformation. Based on the Avatamsaka-sutra, Zhiyi stresses the non-distinction of one’s own actual moment of awareness, the state of ignorant mind of sentient beings and the awakened mind of the Buddha.14 Fundamentally, the essence of mental activity, — no matter whether it is viewed from the standpoint of the self or that of others, from the standpoint of the unenlightened or the enlightened, — essentially remains unchangeable, its distinct courses of manifestation only express the alternating degree of achievement in transformation. Each single sentient being is involved in this common process of universal transformation, because its nature of mental activity is its property for transformation. Perception of suffering is the common mark of all sentient beings, it is the most fundamental mark of mental activity in general, it initiates the impulse to strive for relief from suffering, that in turn is the basis for transformation.15 The diversity of sentient beings is understood as a manifestation of different degrees of transformation within this universal process, determined by sentient beings’ quality of mental activity. Zhiyi’s teaching tries to outline the order, sections and functions of this universal transformation encompassing all sentient beings but initiated by one’s own conduct of cultivation. The experience of one’s own transformation does not only prove the transformation of human being in general, (that is the transformation of others too), but also qualifies the practitioner’s ability for transformation of others. FOUNDATION OF CONTEMPLATION Zhiyi’s teaching deals with contemplation leading to universal wisdom in virtue of mental-activity’s property of transformation. It simultaneously comprises both the theoretical reflection about this property of transformation and its instructive exploration of how to realize it. In fact, thus his teaching has been already becoming the very act of contemplation of mental activity itself. His teaching itself must be understood as being nothing but the immediate embodiment of the self reflecting act of contemplation of mental activity. It embodies the concrete and immediate expression of mental-activity’s innate nature, its property of transformation, experienced and embodied through the introspective act of transforming contemplation. Therefore, comprehension of and comprehension through his teaching is introspection of mental activity by itself leading to the wholesome fruits of Buddhist wisdom. For this reason, Zhiyi says that mental activity is the source of teaching (jiao), contemplation (guan) and wisdom (zhi).16 On the other hand, teaching is the gate for contemplation, which in turn is the gate for wisdom, that in turn explores and illuminates the inner nature of mental activity, its property of transformation that has been being source of teaching, contemplation and wisdom.17 Mental activity’s property of transformation is more commonly expressed as the “buddhanature” (foxing) of all sentient beings. The designation of buddhanature denotes this property of transformation within mental activity. Sentient beings are sentient beings because of obtaining mental activity, predominantly marked by perception of suffering; this in turn causes sentient beings to strive for release from suffering and to initiate a process of transformation. Zhiyi says that any sentient being is gifted with buddhanature and thus is able to obtain the wisdom of a Buddha that is the presupposition for his ideal of universal salvation. Transformation based on teaching is nothing but introspection initiated by mental activity, leading to the wholesome fruit of universal salvation. Zhiyi’s idea of teaching and transformation (jiaohua) concisely expressed as “striving for the higher, in order to save the lower” (qiushang jiuxia) is regarded as mental activity’s innate nature realized through its introspection. The gate of teaching (jiaomen) expresses the doctrinal level of theoretical reflection, represented by the entire bulk of Buddhist classical literature. The gate of contemplation (guanmen) realizes the practical path and its experience of concentration and introspection like the practice of samadhi (sanmeidi) and dhyana (chan). Within the level of wisdom (zhimen) the preceding levels of teaching and contemplation are indivisibly melted together.20 Viewed from that standpoint, Zhiyi says that contemplation and teaching are the two wings of one bird or the two wheels of one vehicle. This expresses the non- duality of theoretical reflection and practical experience in Zhiyi’s concept of wisdom. Theoretical reflection itself is one part of this diversified type of practice considered as this process of universal transformation. The universal principle of practice reflects itself through the articulation of teaching, that is, the doctrinal level of theoretical reflection. Practice of speculative thinking is the theoretically reflective part of contemplation. The foundation of contemplation is the above mentioned Chinese term xin or “mental activity”, from which accomplishment of universal wisdom realized through its acts of contemplation arises and proceeds. Mental activity is a very complex and fundamental concept comprising all diverse kinds of activity belonging to the consciousness, like perception, thought, feeling, desire and will. Mental activity is regarded as fundamental, because things that seem to exist in the way of how they appear are causally linked with that consciousness to which they appear in that way. Viewed from that standpoint, Zhiyi concludes, due to the Avatamsaka-sutra and the Treatise of Great Wisdom, that any object has to be predominantly regarded as a phenomenon of consciousness.22 The opposite term of contemplation and wisdom is fundamental ignorance (genben wuming), the fundamental cause for all sentient beings’ condition of suffering (ku). Suffering is the result of an inversion into illusion (diandao xuwang): originally non-abiding (buzhu) existence of empirical objects appears to be like an abiding or fixed object, to which the deluded mind is attached through its habitual tendencies. In virtue of these habitual tendencies (xiqi) originally non-abiding content of one’s perceptions, thoughts, desires etc. has been recognized, marked, distinguished, hypostasized and substancialized into a discrete entity, but its abidingness contradicts its authentic or original mode of non-abidingness. This hypostasis is an illusory inversion from non-abidingness into abidingness, from its original or authentic mode (zhendi) into its conventional mode (sudi), from real (shi) to unreal (xu). Distinctive marks always denote the condition of ignorance. The attached mind constantly has to experience the loss of that it tries to hold in vain, thus sentient beings’life is inevitably marked by suffering. The root of suffering is the deluded state of mind called ignorance. But mental activity is fundamental for both contemplative wisdom as well as ignorance, wisdom is transformation of ignorance, and transformation is annihilation of inversion, which means deconstruction of illusions.24 The unwholesome state of sentient being’s existence is overshadowed by ignorance, whereas ultimate wisdom is linked with universal salvation. Fundamentally, both wisdom as well as ignorance are mental activity, accordingly the unwholesome state of sentient beings’existence (samsara) is essentially not different from the wholesome conditions of universal salvation (nirvana).25 Distinction (fenbie) is a mark of ignorance only, and non-duality (buer) is a mark of wisdom. Due to the Prajnaparamita-sutras Zhiyi also says that the real mark (zhufa shixang) of all dharmas, that is the real mark of all things and all rules, is devoid of any distinctive marks (wuxiang), that is nothing but the only mark (yixiang), the nature of all dharmas (faxing).26 Epistemologically, dharmanature devoid of distinctions is the opposite of ignorance producing distinctions. Ontologically, dharmanature and ignorance are not different but identical in terms of their essence, because “there is no duality between samsara and nirvana”, as Zhiyi frequently quotes it from the Mulamadhyamika-karika.27 Their paradoxical identification, frequently found in Tiantai texts, denotes the twofold and opposite tendencies for both illusion and wisdom in mental activity. Zhiyi develops the paradoxical relationship between the ontological and epistemological viewpoint one step further, expressed by the phrase: “the one moment of mental-activity consisting of dharmanature and ignorance” (yinian wuminigfaxing xin).28 The immediate moment of non- abiding existence, simultaneously experienced as and experienced by the one moment of mental-activity (yinian xin) itself, is authentic or true (zhen) in its dynamic mode during its immediate presence only, but its distinct content is illusory by its very nature, because distinctions are considered as illusory results of fundamental ignorance. Since being recognized as a distinctive thing the object of perception, thought etc. is hypostasized into an abiding entity, contradicting its originally non-abiding existence. The immediate act of any moment of thought, perception etc. is real but its content, the distinct object of that moment of consciousness is necessarily illusory. But there is no moment of mental activity not being related to a distinct object overshadowed by ignorance. In the same way there is no appearance of objects beyond mental activity that is real in terms of its dynamic and immediate presence only. In its original and dynamic mode it is not the phenomenon of a perceived object. Its immediacy is beyond articulation and conception, it is inconceivable (bukesiyi).29 Paradoxically, this inconceivable realm of dharmanature, which is the ground of immediate presence of existing things, must include its inversion into ignorance producing all kinds of distinctions, the marks of the conceivable realm. The ground of diversity and the ground of immediate presence of existence are dialectically unified within each moment of mental activity. THE THREEFOLD CONTEMPLATION From a Buddhist viewpoint, impermanent entities of the empirical world are supposed to be devoid of an abiding substance. Buddhists understand abidingness or permanence of being as self-nature or self-being (svabhava, zixing) on which an object’s existence is based. An object’s existence conditioned by its nature is supposed to be an entity containing permanent self-being and thus contradicting to the impermanence of the empirical world. Absence of permanent self-being (wuzixing) in empirical entities is called emptiness (kong). Emptiness only denies self-being of empirical entities but not their impermanent and provisional existence (jiayou). For this reason, existence of empirical entities is said not to be based on their self-being nature, their existence arises through conditioned co-arising (yuanqi), but their conditions are in the same way empty or devoid of self-being. Fundamentally, conditioned co-arising means ultimate emptiness (bijing kong). It only denies self-being but not existence, it does not express nothingness. Empirical objects provisionally designated (jiaming) as such, are nothing but ultimate emptiness. On the other hand, provisional existence of conditioned co-arising identified with emptiness does not include non-existence. In order to emphasize its ontological status of “nor self-being neither non-existence” (feiyou feiwu), Zhiyi stresses the middle way (zhong dao) transcending self-being (you) and non-existence (wu) due to the Mulamadhyamika-karika and the Dazhidu Lun (The Treatise of Great Wisdom).30 In Tiantai-Buddhism, the middle way does not only denote the transcendence of the two opposite extremes of self-being and non-existence in conditioned co-arising. It rather stresses the synthesis of provisional existence (you) and non (self)-being (wu), the mutual identity of the provisional (jia) and emptiness (kong).31 The three aspects of the middle, provisional and emptiness are perfectly integrated, which is called “perfectly integrated threefold truth” (yuanrong sandi)32: there is no middle way, not simultaneously being provisional and emptiness; no emptiness, not simultaneously being provisional and middle way; no provisional not simultaneously being the middle way and emptiness. Since all of the three components pervade each other, Zhiyi also speaks of the threefold unity and the united threefoldness (sanyi yisan).33 This principle is valid for all discrete entities and notions holding an epistemic-propositional status in verbal articulation. The threefold truth could be considered as the central concept of Tiantai doctrines, its content combines different levels: firstly, it expresses the relativistic standpoint in respect to ontological speculation; secondly, it accounts as a paradigm of truth for all doctrines holding an epistemic- propositional status, in this function it becomes the fundamental hermeneutical principle, on which the classification of doctrines and the periodization of sutras are based due to the Tiantai view; thirdly, it is the crucial concept that combines theory and practice. Spoken in terms of practice it is called threefold contemplation (sanguan)34 encompassing the “contemplation about entering emptiness from [unwholesome] provisional” (cong jia ru kong guan), “contemplation about entering [wholesome] provisional from emptiness” (cong kong ru jia guan), “contemplation of the middle” (zhongdao guan).35 Threefold contemplation most skillfully conducted is the simultaneous application of the three modes of contemplation within one moment of mental activity. Zhiyi calls it the “threefold contemplation within one moment of mental activity“ (yixin sanguan).36 This type of contemplation is the highest level of all kinds of contemplation, expressed through the highest level of doctrinal articulation, called perfect teaching (yuanjiao). It also expresses the totality and unity of the infinite ways distinctively fitting to various conditions and thus leading to salvation. For, a person being able to realize this contemplation has accomplished the “universal and particular wisdom” (yiqie zhongzhi) ascribed to the Buddha only.37 Universal wisdom (yiqie zhi) relates to ultimate emptiness of any object; this is the first mode of contemplation. It deconstructs (po) the unwholesome provisional illusorily considered as discrete entity that in turn is based on the false view of self-nature. Particular wisdom (daozhong zhi) relates to the diversity of sentient beings that has to follow distinct paths of salvation because of their distinct faculties; this wisdom corresponds to the second mode of contemplation.38 It establishes (li) the wholesome provisional in terms of expedient means, like doctrinal articulation of various buddhadharmas fitting to different sentient beings. The third mode combines the universality of ultimate emptiness with the particularity of the wholesome provisional considered as expedient means and distinctively fitting to the concrete and changing conditions of salvation. This third mode of contemplation pervades each moment of the practitioner’s course of acting due to the path of universal salvation for himself and others. It is neither exclusively deconstructing nor exclusively establishing, it is well aware of both the wholesome and unwholesome character of the provisional. Based on the contemplation of emptiness, it avoids unwholesome provisionality; based on the contemplation of wholesome provisionality, it avoids nothingness. It simultaneously applies the two modes of contemplation, without being attached to one of them exclusively, in this way it is the contemplation of the middle way, not exclusively contemplating either emptiness or the provisional but integrating both of them simultaneously. It is most fundamental because it contemplates the origin of phenomena shaped through mental activity. Its object of contemplation is the twofold nature of mental activity, firstly that ignorance originally is dharmanature, and secondly that there is no dharmanature beyond ignorance. In virtue of this contemplation the indivisibility of dharmanature and ignorance becomes evident; the two are related to one another like emptiness and provisional existence too. Nature of all things [=dharmas] is ultimate emptiness paradoxically not being beyond the provisional that in turn is a product of ignorance, because it cannot be but perceived as a distinctive entity. Ignorance originally is dharmanature, and dharmanature is not beyond ignorance.40 The attempt to escape the world of illusion and reach a transcendental sphere of dharmanature is based on an illusion caused through ignorance too. To understand illusion as illusion and to respond to it constantly in a proper way accords with this mode contemplation. Even the distinction between the salvation of oneself and that of others is in the same way illusory. For that reason, Zhiyi says that it is contemplation neither for the exclusive benefit of oneself nor for exclusive benefit of others41, it is absolute contemplation (juedui guan) devoid of establishing fixed relations between distinct entities.42 Therefore, it is for the benefit of oneself and of others simultaneously, it contemplates the totality of universal transformation. Accordingly, it encompasses all infinite ways of properly responding to any kind of conditions. The transformation of sentient beings’ existence into their universal salvation through one’s achievements of ultimate and universal wisdom consists of a process that involves transformation of one’s own mental activity and that of others simultaneously.43 Finally, one’s own personal purpose of salvation and universally that of all sentient beings are indivisible from each other. This leads to another important link stressed in Zhiyi’s idea of universal salvation. Compassion (cibei) is as much indispensable as wisdom too. Zhiyi often emphasizes that compassion lacking wisdom is no compassion, and wisdom lacking compassion is no wisdom.45 When he explains the contemplation of the middle, he says that the Buddha’s compassion is the universal ocean into which the rivers of all dharmas flow. Viewed from Zhiyi’s standpoint, the indivisibility of the two necessarily belongs into the context of universal salvation. THE CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN CONTEMPLATION AND THE SCHEME OF CLASSIFICATION Based on the mode of contemplating the middle, Zhiyi speaks about the “threefold contemplation within one moment of mental activity (yixin sanguan).”47 It expresses an immediate and proper responding to the needs for universal salvation during constantly changing conditions. The purpose of universal salvation permanently and ultimately remains the same, but its concrete expression has to be readjusted constantly due to the constant changing of conditions immediately. Just for the same reason the Buddha had to preach the Buddhadharma (fofa) according to different levels of doctrines, in order to adjust it to the need of the diversity of sentient beings. His teaching has to be understood in terms of a classification of doctrines, but in its ultimate purpose the Buddhadharma is the only one vehicle of universal salvation (yisheng jiao), as Zhiyi quotes it from the Lotus-sutra. Zhiyi evaluates the sermon of the Lotus- sutra as the Buddha’s most authentic way of preaching the Buddhadharma and expressing its ultimate wisdom. According to his interpretation of Buddhist sutras, the Lotus-sutra preaches the unity of the ultimate purpose of all different doctrines and simultaneously pronounces the indispensability of the diversity of expedient means. Its teaching is regarded to be different from other sutras, because it “reveals the real by exploring the tentative” (kaiquan xianshi, faji xianben). Accordingly, the third contemplation of the middle reveals the real truth of things by considering them as neither self-being nor non-existence, but as being both emptiness and provisional, whereas the two preceding modes are expedient means only, because of their bias to one side exclusively. But without the one sided expedient means the contemplation of the middle and the perfectly integrated threefold contemplation would be impossible. When Zhiyi says that ultimate wisdom means neither perfect nor one sided, he wants to express that this wisdom is revealed in the exploration of the shortcomings marking the preceding one sided modes of contemplation. The same structure of mutual dependence between the real and the tentative, the provisional and ultimate, the one sided and the perfect is expressed by his classification of doctrines. According to this scheme, all Buddhist doctrines can be considered from four levels, expressing four paradigms of truth: the teaching of the small vehicle (sanzang jiao), the common teaching of the small and great vehicle (tongjiao), the distinct teaching for the great vehicle (biejiao) and the perfect teaching (yuanjiao) establishing the preceding three and simultaneously transcending their shortcomings. The small vehicle considers the arising and extinguishing within conditioned co-arising as real; the common teaching says that discrete entities of conditioned co-arising as such are empty and unreal, because they are compositions of impermanent conditions that in turn must be empty too. Even their arising and extinguishing is nothing but ultimate emptiness; the distinct teaching says that their non-existence is as unreal as their self-being, paradoxically ultimate emptiness is indivisible from provisional existence, it stresses the provisional in terms of the infinity of expedient means; the perfect teaching integrates all preceding three views but simultaneously transcends there one sidedness, it emphasizes the middle mutually being identical with conditioned co-arising, emptiness and the provisional.51 The perfect teaching expresses the unity and totality of the whole classification. This scheme is an extension of the threefold truth within the context of doctrinal classification, it follows the same principle of “revealing the one [perfect teaching] by exploring the three [preceding levels]” (kaisan xianyi). All fundamental Buddhist doctrines are viewed through this scheme of classification. From that standpoint they appear as a graduation of degrees in the achievement of practice. The doctrines of the four noble truths, the conditioned co-arising or the two truths are viewed differently from each of the four standpoints, yet expressing a graduation of degrees within one process. This scheme matches the course of practice too. The teaching of the small vehicle and the common teaching corresponds to the “contemplation about entering emptiness from [unwholesome] provisional”; the distinct teaching corresponds to the “contemplation about entering the wholesome provisional from emptiness”; the perfect teaching corresponds to the contemplation of the middle in terms of threefold contemplation. The subdivision of doctrinal classification stands in accordance with the graduation of contemplation, thus expressing Zhiyi’s idea of the unity of teaching and contemplation, theory and practice. The threefold contemplation within one moment of mental activity denotes the single and concrete act of salvation comprising the virtual totality of the infinity of all expedient means. In the same way, the perfect teaching encompasses the preceding three standpoints, thus expressing the diversity and unity of the buddhadharma. Viewed from its ultimate purpose, the single and concrete act of salvation is essentially unchanging, but its manifestations are constantly changing. Its unchanging essence cannot be different from its manifestations; it is nothing but the totality of its infinite manifestations. The single and concrete act of universal salvation conducted due to the spirit of threefold contemplation could be described as the totality virtually encompassing all paths of salvation. Its realization due to the distinct conditions has always to occur in the mode of immediacy, because it never lacks any element necessary in the course of universal salvation, during its activity of responding to any kind of condition. Zhiyi calls this perfect act of universal salvation “perfect and immediate contemplation” (yuandun guan). THE ABSOLUTE VALUE OF EXISTENCE In terms of concrete practice, merits and achievements of universal wisdom mean skillfulness and virtuosity in respect to the realization of universal salvation. A person obtaining this wisdom is skilled in appropriately responding to the diverse kinds of affairs within sentient being’s life, in that concrete perception, thought, feeling, desire and acting of them are always involved. Finally, it is the skillful mastering of all the variously single moments of life, each of them experienced by each of the countless sentient beings. Originally, perception and experience of sentient beings are contaminated by ignorance, inverting non-abidingness into abidingness, real into unreal, the authentic mode into the conventional mode. Since existing things are not separate from sentient being’s perception being contaminated by ignorance, the manner in which an existing thing appears reflects the quality and degree of one’s contaminated perception. If perceived things reflect the degree and quality of one’s contaminated perception, the way to clean up this contamination becomes possible. By this way, every entity becomes an inversed indication of how to uproot the source of one’s illusions and suffering produced by fundamental ignorance. Viewed from that standpoint, each of these moments manifests the perfect condition of universal salvation uniquely and differently in an inversed way. The single and particular moment itself is the state of universal salvation in an inversed way. Paradoxically, it thus becomes the virtual totality encompassing the infinite paths of universal salvation too. Zhiyi frequently expresses this thought by paradoxical articulation. When he comes to speak about the perfect teaching, it is always described by paradoxical identifications between samsara and nirvana, buddhanature and conditioned co-arising, wisdom and ignorance, dharmanature and ignorance etc., the middle way is the most general expression for all kinds of paradoxical identity.53 The paradox between the partial singleness of one moment and the virtual totality of the infinity of all paths for sentient beings is expressed by his famous doctrine of “one moment of thought encompasses the totality of all things” (yinian sanqian). This doctrine firstly stresses the property of transformation within mental activity shared by all sentient beings; secondly, it includes the insight that transformation of oneself is indivisibly linked with that of others; thirdly, one moment of mental activity in its dynamic reality is dharmanature, the ground of immediate existence of all things, simultaneously, it is ignorance because of its distinctive content, thus it is the ground for the diversity of existing things. As an inversion of universal salvation, each moment of existence manifests a particular way to realize universal salvation that in turn is the incarnation of the totality of all paths. This instructive component of each moment of existence makes it unique and absolutely valuable. Spoken in terms of totality this value is both indestructible and unproduced (wuzo), because it is originally linked with each moment of existence within the infinite course of conditioned co-arising. In contrast to impermanence, suffering, non-substance, impurity (buchang, ku, wuwo, bujing) marking discrete entities in the samsaric realm, it is marked with the virtues of nirvana: permanence, bliss, self and purity, although it is not beyond these discrete entities. Viewed from the perfect teaching, this absolute value of existence cannot be but paradoxically expressed.55 The teaching (jiao) aims at the unobstructed, and insofar pure comprehension of the absolute value of salvation within each concrete moment of existence, perceived by sentient beings. This perception is supposed to be combined with the immediately proper acting and wholesome transformation caused through this comprehension. Contemplation is both the methodologically explored principle of evidence and the act of evidence within this kind of universal wisdom. Ultimate wisdom is linked with universal salvation, because it firstly transforms unwholesome conditions into wholesome conditions, and secondly transformation of oneself is involved with transformation of others. Therefore salvation in terms of relief from suffering (jietuo) is also explained as the transformation of mental activity (zhuanbian) from ignorance into wisdom. The property of Mental activity of being both able to transform as well as being able to undergo transformation is the reason why Zhiyi makes it to the focus and main target of his teaching of universal wisdom resulting in universal relief of suffering. Contemplation of mental activity (guanxin) means introspection comprising all of the important aspects for the ultimate purpose of universal salvation within this teaching. Universal salvation (du zhongsheng) is based on the idea of transforming others by transformation of oneself. This idea involves the concept of entelechy. We can find similar thoughts of entelechy in earlier Chinese texts of the Confucian school according to which one’s own transformation based on cultivation is linked with transformation of others, thus constituting one common process of transformation. The most eminent example would be one of the initial phrases from the Daxue, emphasizing that social order has to be initiated by self-cultivation (xiu shen). The whole course from self- cultivation to peace in the world (tianxia ping) starts with investigation of things (gewu), followed by the succeeding links of knowing its utmost (zhizhi), trustworthiness of one’s intentions (yicheng), straightforwardness of one’s mind (xinzheng), self-cultivation (xiushen), order in one’s family (qiqia), order in the state (guozhi) and as a final result peace in the world.56 Even Confucius’ideal of humanity (ren), the ultimate of human virtue, encompasses a process initiated by one’s filial piety (xiao) and resulting in social order.57 In the Analects we find the phrase, “erecting oneself means erecting man” (liji liren)58, that explicitly express this idea. Contemplation in Zhiyi’s thoughts holds a position similar to the one of filial piety and self-cultivation in terms of Confucian traditions. Filial piety and self-cultivation is the initial virtue leading to general social order, contemplation is the initial practice leading to universal salvation of sentient beings. Like in the case of practicing filial piety, the subsequent transformation initiated by contemplation is based on a certain kind of experience, which can be called as a comprehension of fundamental values. In terms of filial piety this experience consists of the comprehension of social-ethical values; in terms of contemplation it consists of a comprehension of the absolute value of existence in general. It might be no wonder that both traditions give very little room indeed to narrative interplay in the expression of their beliefs and principles. ?
- [Christian–Buddhist Dialogue](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/christian-buddhist-dialogue) - Akizuki Ryomin To speak of religious experience is to speak of an appropriation of a dropping-off of ego and an awareness of the Original, Formless Self. In other words, it is the true person that is seeing and hearing true suchness… the opening of the world of true suchness. This is… “an experience that touches
- [Thomas Merton and Confucian Rites: The Fig Leaf for the Paradise Condition](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/wu-merton-and-confucian) - John Wu, Jr The true Confucian never goes through ritualistic movements merely to fulfil personal and social duties: rather, personal fulfillment is the perfect exchange of love and compassion, of that deep commiserate feeling of identity with the other, to wit, an exchange of humanheartedness (jen) and good will at the sacred level of being.
- [An Introduction to Lent](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/introduction-to-lent) - Contrary to what many think or feel, Lent is a time of joy. It is a time when we come back to life. It is a time when we shake off what is bad and dead in us in order to become able to live, to live with all the vastness, all the depth, and all the intensity to which we are called. Unless we understand this quality of joy in Lent, we will make of it a monstrous caricature, a time when in God's own name we make our life a misery. This notion of joy connected with effort, with ascetical endeavour, with strenuous effort may indeed seem strange, and yet it runs through the whole of our spiritual life, through the life of the Church and the life of the Gospel. The Kingdom of God is something to be conquered. It is not simply given to those who leisurely, lazily wait for it to come. To those who wait for it in that spirit, it will come indeed: it will come at midnight; it will come like the Judgement of God, like the thief who enters when he is not expected, like the bridegroom, who arrives while the foolish virgins are asleep. This is not the way in which we should await Judgement and the Kingdom. Here again we need to recapture an attitude of mind which usually we can't manage to conjure up out of our depth, something which had become strangely alien to us: the joyful expectation of the Day of the Lord—in spite of the fact that we know this Day will be a Day of judgement. It may strike us as strange to hear that in Church we proclaim the Gospel—the ‘good news'—of judgement, and yet we do. We proclaim that the Day of the Lord is not fear, but hope, and declare together with the spirit of the Church: ‘Come, Lord Jesus, and come soon' (cf. Rev. 22:20). So long as we are incapable of speaking in these terms, we lack something important in our Christian consciousness. We are still, whatever we may say, pagans dressed up in evangelical garments. We are still people for whom God is a God outside of us, for whom his coming is darkness and fear, and whose judgement is not our redemption but our condemnation, for whom to meet the Lord is a dread event and not the event we long and live for. Unless we realise this, then Lent cannot be a joy, since Lent brings with it both judgement and responsibility: we must judge ourselves in order to change, in order to become able to meet the Day of the Lord, the Resurrection, with an open heart, with faith, ready to rejoice in the fact that he has come. Every coming of the Lord is judgement. The Fathers draw a parallel between Christ and Noah. They say that the presence of Noah in his generation was at the same time condemnation and salvation. It was condemnation because the presence of one man who remained faithful, of just one man who was a saint of God, was evidence that holiness was possible and that those who were sinners, those who had rejected God and turned away from him, could have done otherwise. So the presence of a righteous man was judgement and condemnation upon his time. Yet it was also the salvation of his time, because it was only thanks to him that God looked with mercy on mankind. And the same is true of the coming of the Lord. There is also another joy in judgement. Judgement is not something that falls upon us from outside. Yes, the day will come when we will stand before God and be judged; but while our pilgrimage still continues, while we still live in the process of becoming, while there still lies ahead of us the road that leads us towards the fullness of the stature of Christ, towards our vocation, then judgement must be pronounced by ourselves. There is a constant dialogue within us throughout our lives. You remember the parable in which Christ says: ‘Make your peace with your adversary while you are on the way' (Mt. 5:25). Some of the spiritual writers have seen in the adversary not the devil (with whom we cannot make our peace, with whom we are not to come to terms), but our conscience, which throughout life walks apace with us and never leaves us in peace. Our conscience is in continuous dialogue with us, gainsaying us at every moment, and we must come to terms with it because otherwise the moment will come when we finally reach the Judge, and then our adversary will become our accuser, and we will stand condemned. So while we are on the road, judgement is something which goes on constantly within ourselves, a dialogue, a dialectical tension between our thoughts and our emotions and our feelings and our actions which stand in judgement before us and before whom we stand in judgement. But in this respect we very often walk in darkness, and this darkness is the result of our darkened mind, of our darkened heart, of the darkening of our eye, which should be clear. It is only if the Lord himself sheds his light into our soul and upon our life, that we can begin to see what is wrong and what is right in us. There is a remarkable passage in the writings of John of Kronstadt, a Russian priest of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, in which he says that God does not reveal to us the ugliness of our souls unless he can see in us sufficient faith and sufficient hope for us not to be broken by the vision of our own sins. In other words, whenever we see ourselves with our dark side, whenever this knowledge of ourselves increases, we can then understand ourselves more clearly in the light of God, that is, in the light of the divine judgement. This means two things: it means that we are saddened to discover our own ugliness, indeed, but also that we can rejoice at the same time, since God has granted us his trust. He has entrusted to us a new knowledge of ourselves as we are, as he himself always saw us and as, at times, he did not allow us to see ourselves, because we could not bear the sight of truth. Here again, judgement becomes joy, because although we discover what is wrong, yet the discovery is conditioned by the knowledge that God has seen enough faith, enough hope and enough fortitude in us to allow us to see these things, because he knows that now we are able to act. All this is important if we want to understand that joy and Lent can go together. Otherwise the constant, insistent effort of the Church—and of the word of God—to make us aware of what is wrong in us can lead us to despair and to darkness, until finally we have been brought so low that we are no longer capable of meeting the Resurrection of Christ with joy, because we realise—or imagine that we realise—that the Resurrection has nothing to do with us. We are in darkness, God is in light. We see nothing but our judgement and condemnation at the very moment when we should be emerging out of darkness into the saving act of God, which is both our judgement and our salvation. The Orthodox Church introduces Lent with a series of preparatory weeks in which the readings of the Gospel lead us step by step from outer darkness, as it were, to the point of judgement. I would like to remind you quickly of these stages. The first, dramatic stage in which we find ourselves consists in the fact that we are blind and yet are unaware of our blindness. We are in darkness and are unaware that this darkness is within and around us. Our eye is dark and darkens all that is inside us, while we remain unaware of it. The first reading from the Gospel that confronts us with this aspect of our preparation for Lent is the story of Bartimaeus, the blind man at the gate of Jericho, a man who either had lost his sight or was born blind, but was left there in the darkness, in the outer darkness. There was no light for him, there was no life for him, either, and there was no joy for him. He probably had come to terms with his distress. He continued to exist, since he could not live. He continued to exist day after day thanks to the cold, indifferent charity of passers-by. But one thing made his misery both dramatic and tragic: he lived in the time of Jesus. More than once Bartimaeus must have heard of this man of God who had come to the world, who was healing and renewing people and things, a man who had opened the eye of blind men, who had given sight to the man born blind. The presence of the possibility of salvation, of an impossible healing, must have made his darkness even darker. Possible it was, if God came his way, yet impossible, because how could he find the itinerant preacher and healer who never was still, never in the same place? How could a blind man keep pace with him? Darkness came into his awareness because there was a possibility that he might see. His despair became deeper than ever before, because there was hope. And so, when Christ came near him he could ask for healing from the very depth of his despair and from the very depth of a total, passionate longing for salvation. The coming of God had made him aware of darkness as he had never been before, aware as never before of the tragedy which he lived. This is the first step, which we must accept and which we find so difficult to accept: we must face our true situation, not consoling ourselves with the thought that we have some sort of life within us that can replace divine life. We must accept that we are in darkness as far as the light of God is concerned. And then we must do something about it. First of all we must become aware of the fact that without light we are lost, because the darkness in which we are left is death, the absence of God. But when it comes to doing something, there are two things that stand in our way. First of all, we will not act unless we are aware that we are in a desperate situation. If we are not aware that it is really a question of life and death, of the only thing that matters, then we will do nothing. We will pray God to do something. We will hope that even though we are not even praying, he will come and act. But it is only out of a sense of deadly urgency that we can begin to act, like Bartimaeus, whom no one could stop from crying out, shouting for help, since he knew that this was the decisive moment. Christ was passing by. In a minute he would be gone and the darkness would become permanent, irremediable. Another thing that prevents us from doing something is the way we are afraid of people. I remember a man in prison who told me how marvelous it was to be found out, because, as he said, ‘So long as I had not been found out, I spent all my time, an my effort, trying to look as though I was alright. The moment I was caught I felt, “Now I can choose: I can either remain what I was, a thief and a cheat, or else I can change. Now I am free to become different, and no one will be any more surprised than they were to discover that I was a thief."' As long as you have appearances to maintain it is terribly difficult to change, and this is what the parable of Zacchaeus, which follows the story the Blind Man, brings out so clearly. The problem of Zacchaeus was this: he wanted to see Christ. Would he take the risk of being ridiculous or not? To be ridiculous is a lot more difficult than to be disapproved of, because when we are sharply disapproved of we can hide behind our own pride. We feel that we stand against the whole world, even if this world is so small that it is not even worth noticing. But to be laughed at, to be ridiculed, is something which is beyond the courage of most of us. Can you imagine a bank manager in a small town climbing a tree in the midst of a big crowd, with all the boys whistling, pointing at him with their fingers, making cat-cries and the rest, just for the sake of meeting Christ? Well, that was the position of Zacchaeus, the rich man. But for him meeting Christ was so essential, such a question of death and life, that he was prepared to disregard the ridicule, the humiliation, attached to his action—and he saw Christ. There are two ways out of our dependence upon human opinions and human judgements. We must either do what Zacchaeus did, accept humiliation because it is essential to be saved, or we can let our hearts be hardened, and accept the pride that will negate the judgement of others. There is no third way. There is only the spontaneous oscillation which we all experience, knowing what is right, knowing what is wrong, and never deciding for either right or wrong because whenever we turn to the wrong we are afraid of the judgement of God, while whenever we turn to the right we are afraid of the judgement of men. Pride or humility are the only two paths by which we can leave this situation. And then there is the problem of God's judgement. The story of Zacchaeus shows how we can oscillate between the judgement of men and the judgement of God. Now comes the opportunity for another move. Isn't it time, when we are confronted with life and death, for us to judge ourselves and not be completely dependent upon others? We see this in the Publican and the Pharisee—the first, sharp, definite judgement which is both human and divine, because both coincide. If we ask ourselves how it is possible that the Pharisee could be so proud in spite of knowing so much about God and things divine, how it was that the Publican could be so truly humble in spite of being simple, I think we can find the answer in this: the terms of reference for the Pharisee were found in the law, the letter of the law. One can always be right as far as the law and the letter is concerned. One can always fulfil rules and commandments. One can always have ‘done one's duty' and feel irreproachable. The terms of reference of the Publican, however, were different. He was not a good man. What he knew of the law was this: certain aspects of the law condemned him because he knew what he was like. Certain other aspects of the law he could use in order to extort whatever he wanted out of other people. The law for him was a powerful, cruel, hard instrument in his hands or in the hands of God. And as he knew life, he knew perfectly well that the only salvation from the law was human mercy, human compassion, a human approach and attitude to one another. That was the only thing that could save a debtor from prison or save an extortioner from the judgement of the magistrate: a human touch. And so his terms of reference were in tension between a law which was inexorable, implacable, always a power that could not be fulfilled because he was too weak for it and, on the other hand, a law that could be used with such cruelty against others—and then the human relationship that could redeem all. The Publican's terms of reference were people, his neighbours, including that invisible neighbour, God. This is why he could stand at the threshold of the temple and beat his breast, though hopelessly: in spite of all the logic of things, he knew that in his world of hard, cruel, implacable men there were moments when all things become possible, for a man can be a man even when he is hardened and cruel. And so it was with God. The law was there to condemn him, but God was ‘someone'. He was not only the law-giver. He was not only the one who made sure that the law is observed. He was free within his law to act with humanity. This knowledge made the Publican humble before God, because his terms of reference contained hope, and the object of his hope was mercy, pity, charity. This made all things possible, in spite of the fact that it is so humiliating to be loved and to be saved by love. The same truth appears in another way in the next parable, that of the Prodigal Son. Here again we find two men, one who is righteous and another who is unrighteous. The Prodigal Son is in a way another aspect of the Publican, and the elder brother is the same as the Pharisee. But here we are confronted not only with the tension between a law that is objective, and therefore dead, and mercy, which is subjective because alive and personal, but we are confronted with the theme of sin itself. What does it mean to be in sin? It can be clearly defined in terms of the short conversation between the son and the father at the beginning of the parable. And if you want to put it in words more modern and cruder than the Gospel, it really amounts to this: ‘Father, I want to live, and you stand in my way. As long as you are alive the goods are yours. Die, for all intents and purposes. Let us suppose that you are already dead. I have no time to wait until you die in fact. Let us agree that as far as I am concerned I have no father left, but I have his goods because I have inherited them'. This is the sort of speech which we find, with the same or perhaps lesser hardness, on so many occasions between children and parents, between people who are related to one another in one way or another. It really involves saying: ‘As a person you do not matter. You stand in my way. The only thing that is of value to me is what I can get out of you. And so that I may get all I can from you, you must surrender even your existence. You must accept not to be'. This is sin, sin with regard to God, and sin with regard to man. With regard to God we are happy to take everything he gives and then turn him out of our lives. We are happy to go into a strange country to spend all he has given, while denying his existence with the same ruthlessness with which, in Holy Week, the soldiers covered the eyes of Christ so he could not see, so that they would be able to laugh at him more freely. The same is so often true of our relationships with people. And this is also sin. This is the very point: to rule the other out because he doesn't matter. What matters are things—and the use I can make of them. And then there is another aspect in this parable: hunger, distress, loneliness, all those things which we so hate in life, and yet which come to us as our only salvation, because as long as we are surrounded with comfort, we don't notice our true situation. We prove unable to move inward and to see that we are lonely in the midst of this crowd and that we are poor in the midst of all this richness. It is important for us to realise that all that comes our way which is bitter, which is hard, which is difficult, which we hate with all our greed and with all or fear—that is our salvation. To be deprived is essential for us. And if we are not deprived, we must learn to deprive ourselves to the point of becoming aware that we are face to face with the living God in the final, total nakedness and dereliction which is man's condition when he does not hide behind things. We misjudge our situation so badly in this respect. There is a beautiful passage in the \textit{Tales of the Hassidim} translated by Martin Buber, in which he tells about a man, a rabbi, who lived in appalling misery and yet every morning and every evening thanked God for his generous gifts. One of those who heard his prayer said to him, ‘How can you be so hypocritical? Don't you see that God has given you nothing?' And he said, ‘No, you are mistaken. God looked on me and thought, “This man, to be saved, needs hunger and thirst and cold and loneliness and illness and dereliction." And he has given me these things in abundance'. This is the true, Christian attitude, the attitude of a believer for whom the soul really matters. And this is what the return of the Prodigal Son to himself shows us. It also shows us another thing. The Prodigal Son comes back, having rehearsed his confession, and says: ‘I have sinned against heaven and against thee. I am no longer worthy to be called thy son. Let me be like the hired servants'. But the father does not allow him to say the last words. Each of us can be a prodigal son, a prodigal daughter, an unworthy son, an unworthy daughter, an unworthy friend. What no one can do is to adjust himself to a relationship, however worthy, below his rank. No one who is an unworthy son can become a worthy hireling. We cannot step down from our birthright, from the right which love gave us in the first place. And therefore we are not to look for compromise and for legal readjustments with God and say, ‘I can't give you my heart but I will behave well. I can't love you but I will serve you', and so forth. This is a lie, a relationship which God is not prepared to accept and will refuse to accept. The last step on our way towards Lent is one which is shown to us in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. It sets before us the following problem: what are we going to judge and to be judged about? And the answer is absolutely clear. In all this process of judgement we may have thought that we will be judged on whether we have a deep knowledge of God, whether we are theologians, whether we live in the transcendental realm. Well, this parable makes it absolutely clear that God's question to us, before we can enter into any kind of divine reality, is this: have you been human? If you have not been human, then don't imagine that you will be able to become like God-become-man, like the God-Man Jesus, who is the measure of all things. This is very important, because the type of judgement which we are constantly making is a falsified judgement. We notice how pious we are, how much knowledge of God we have, questions belonging to the realm of what an English writer has called ‘Churchianity' as contrasted with Christianity. But the question which Christ asks us is this: Are you human or sub-human? In other words, are you capable of love or not? I was hungry, I was thirsty, I was naked, I was in prison, I was ill. What did you do about it? Were you able to respond with your heart to my misery, were you able to respond at a cost and with all your humanity—or not? At this point we must remember what we have said before concerning the Pharisee and the Publican. Christ does not ask us to fulfil the law. He will not count the number of loaves of bread and of cups of water and the number of visits we pay to hospitals and so forth. He will measure our heart's response. And this is made clear from the words of Christ in another part of St John's Gospel, where he says, ‘And when ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, we are unprofitable servants'. The doing means nothing. We become human at the moment when, like the Publican, like the Prodigal Son, we have entered into the realm of broken-heartedness, into the realm of love which is a response both to divine love and to human suffering. This cannot be measured. We can never, on that level, say, ‘I am safe. I will come to the judgement and be one of the sheep', because it will not be a question of whether or not we have accomplished the law, but whether this law has become so much ourselves that it has grown into the mystery of love. There, at that point, we will be on the fringe, on the very threshold of entering into that spring of life, that renewal of life, that newness of all things, which is Lent. We will have gone through all these stages of judgement, and will have emerged from blindness and from the law into a vision of the mysterious relationship which may be called ‘mercy' or ‘grace'. And we will be face to face with being human. But we must remember that to be human does not mean to be ‘like us' but ‘like Christ'. With this we can enter Lent and begin to experience through the readings of the Church, through the prayers of the Church, through the process of repentance, that discovery of the acts of divine grace which alone can lead us towards growth into the full stature of the likeness of Christ. I have brought you to the gate. Now you must walk into it.
- [Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/eastern-wisdom-and-western-knowledge) - Ananda K. Coomaraswamy “Why should prejudices be so strong at this moment?” The answer it seems to me is simple… circumstances have forced parts of the world once remote from each other into actual intimacy for which peoples are not mentally or spiritually prepared…. If those prepared to act as interpreters will do their proper
- [What is Man?](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/what-is-man) - Fr Patrick Reardon As a sharer in the divine nature, the human being is made a child of God, so when he addresses God as "our Father," it is no metaphor, no figure of speech. His nature itself, always open to change, has been transformed by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Click here to
- [<em>Against the Modern World</em>, by Mark Sedgwick](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/review-against-the-modern-world) - Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2004) By Mark Sedgwick Reviewed by Michael Fitzgerald The following quotation, taken from the book?s advertising story lines, summarizes the ambitious scope of the author?s thesis: Against the Modern World is the first history of Traditionalism, an influential yet surprisingly little-known twentieth century anti-modernist movement. Involving a number of important, yet often secret, religious groups in the West and Islamic world, it affected mainstream and radical politics in Europe and religious studies in the United States... It found its voice in René Guénon, a French writer who rejected modernity as a dark age, and sought to reconstruct the Perennial Philosophy—the central religious truths behind all the major world religions—largely on the basis of his reading of Hindu religious texts. Mark Sedgwick reveals how this pervasive intellectual movement helped shape major events in twentieth century religious life, politics and scholarship—all the while remaining invisible to outsiders. A number of disenchanted intellectuals responded to Guénon?s call with attempts to put theory into practice. Some attempted without success to guide Fascism and Nazism along Traditionalist lines; others later participated in political terror in Italy. Traditionalism finally provided the ideological cement for the alliance of anti-democratic forces in post-Soviet Russia, and at the end of the twentieth century began to enter the debate in the Islamic world about the desirable relationship between Islam and modernity. Despite these advertising claims, anyone interested in understanding the basis of Traditionalism must look elsewhere,1 because the book does not explore the actual writings or thought of any Traditionalist author in detail. The book purports to be a scholarly document, but it fails on several counts to meet the criteria of such a work. This review will examine the following notable flaws: 1. The author created advertising story lines for the book that are overly sensationalized, thus distorting the facts. 2. The author has an undisclosed personal history with Traditionalism that may have created a bias in his point of view. 3. Several of the author’s generalizations and unilateral assertions about Islam demonstrate a narrow and intolerant interpretation that is characteristic of fundamentalist Islamic movements. 4. The author coins terms without adequately defining what he means by them, while ignoring established definitions. 5. The author makes connections between people, ideas and events that are superficial, misleading and contrary to existing scholarship. 6. The author inappropriately stretches the definition of a Traditionalist in unprecedented and inappropriate ways, while inaccurately narrowing the current understanding of Traditionalist philosophy. 7. The author’s research ignores existing scholarship that is contrary to his conclusions, and his methods encourage unsubstantiated allegations from informants who appear to harbor hostility toward Traditionalism. It is by Dr. Sedgwick?s own admission that some of the summary story lines for this book are “highly colored wrapping paper”: I?ll be honest: one has to dress things up slightly for the summary, to make things a bit more dramatic and clearer than they actually are, to engage the general reader who knows nothing at all of the subject. Regard that as the highly colored wrapping paper around a more sober product... The summary story lines are more highly colored than the book. 2 This was the author?s comment to me after I had observed that the advertising story lines for his book—posted on his Internet site—were overly sensationalized and thus distorted some important facts. But first, some background about my interaction with the author: I contacted Dr. Sedgwick in January 2003, after the promotional descriptions and summaries for this book3 were brought to my attention. I concluded that the manuscript for Against the Modern World likely contained significant errors, and therefore wished to provide Dr. Sedgwick with additional information so that he could at least make a more balanced presentation of certain issues. After a series of correspondence, Dr. Sedgwick granted the request for me and two other Traditionalist authors to read and comment upon three chapters of Against the Modern World. The review process provided various insights into Dr. Sedgwick?s research methods, scholarship and motivations, including his admission recorded above. Our review of the flaws in the book will demonstrate faulty scholarship, and yet faulty scholarship can explain only some of these errors. It is, for instance, helpful to know that Dr. Sedgwick is a somewhat recent convert to Islam who became a disillusioned Sufi aspirant and then turned to a prominent Traditionalist for spiritual advice. A review of correspondence with Dr. Sedgwick will allow each reader to determine if the author has a personal and undisclosed bias against Traditionalism. When Dr. Sedgwick was asked if he might have a personal prejudice against Traditionalist authors as a result of his request for personal spiritual advice from Dr. Martin Lings, an important Traditionalist, he responded: I have no memory of Dr. Lings ever giving me any advice—in fact, so far as I can remember (this was some years ago) most of the discussion was about architecture. Further, I am not and have never been attached to any tariqa.4 So your surmise that perhaps I had “a personal prejudice or hostility... as the result of [my] various experiences” is wrong... 5 However, an individual with direct knowledge of Dr. Sedgwick?s contact with Dr. Lings provided the following contrasting recollection: This was maybe January 1990. I knew Mark Sedgwick as Abd al-Azim... Abd al-Azim was attached to the Nakhshabandiyya tariqa in Cairo and intended to receive an initiation into that tariqa...when he went to visit their Shaykh [spiritual guide] in Cyprus. Apparently when he met his Shaykh—I imagine this must be Shaykh Nazim al-Qubrusi—he had felt uncomfortable, as he did not share in the loving and devotional attitude of the other fuqara [spiritual aspirants] he saw around him. Feeling he had done the wrong thing... Abd al-Azim was able to obtain a meeting with [Dr. Lings] to ask what would be the correct thing to do under such circumstances... [Sedgwick?s] question went something like this: “I have been to Cyprus to see my Shaykh and I do not feel that I love him like the other fuqara...” [Dr. Lings] interrupted him with I think the words, “But you must love your Shaykh”. This brought the entire interview, which we had anticipated might last for 30 to 40 minutes, to a close... I was amazed to read what Sedgwick had written to you regarding his first meeting with [Dr. Lings]. I think he is being deliberately misleading... This first recollection was then sent to another person who was also present at the meeting between Dr. Sedgwick and Dr. Lings, resulting in this comment: [The first recollection] has summed up the meeting... vividly and accurately... I think Sedgwick was disappointed with [Dr. Lings?] remark that one must love one?s Shaykh; not because he necessarily thought it untrue, but because he may have feared that he was temperamentally unsuited to following a spiritual path. My recollection of further discussions with him, until I lost touch with him around 1993, was that he badly wanted to find a spiritual path but felt unable to follow one. I gained the impression, but this is only an impression, that this caused him some sadness and engendered some bitterness in his approach. After both recollections were presented to Dr. Sedgwick, he responded: “I must congratulate you on your research into my first meeting with Dr. Lings, but that really alters nothing. On reading [the] accounts, I did indeed remember asking the question and receiving the answer that are [sic] reported by them... It was hardly of much significance to me.”6 Why did Dr. Sedgwick provide false information about the fact that he sought spiritual advice from a leading Traditionalist? Part of the answer may be that Dr. Sedgwick repeatedly accuses many Traditionalists of an excess of devotion to their spiritual guides, which is the exact quality he apparently lacked and that disqualified him as a Sufi aspirant. Is there an ax to grind? The denigrating tone that pervades Dr. Sedgwick?s “study” of Traditionalists is a strong indication that this may indeed be the case. Dr. Sedgwick?s action demonstrates an ironic double standard: a recurring accusation in Against the Modern World is that certain Traditionalist authors are guilty of inappropriate secrecy because of the fact that they have not disclosed every aspect of their personal spiritual lives; yet Dr. Sedgwick himself feels no need to disclose the details of his spiritual quest as it relates to Traditionalism.7 In various ways Dr. Sedgwick?s analysis demonstrates the kind of zeal seen in recent converts to Islam, who often adopt some of the narrow and intolerant interpretations that are consistent with various fundamentalist Islamic groups. For example, Dr. Sedgwick spends parts of three chapters exploring whether it is permissible for a Sufi Shaykh to grant various dispensations to disciples living in the Western world so that they are not obliged to follow all of the requirements of Islamic formality while living in a non-Islamic culture. In his discussion he fails to mention that the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence disagree on many interpretations of required formalities, and that there is a significant ongoing debate among Muslims living in the West on exactly this issue. The author repeatedly asserts that it is almost never permissible to omit any formality of the religion. To justify this opinion he then presents what he says is “the well-known story of the shaykh traveling through the desert with his exhausted followers during Ramadan [the month of fasting]. Suddenly, an oasis with a cool, clear pool and date-palms laden with ripe dates appears from nowhere. „Help yourselves!? says the voice of God...” But the Shaykh recognizes that this is in reality the voice of Satan “„because I know that God never releases anybody from observing the Sharia [Islamic law]?.”8 During this ongoing discussion he repeatedly disparages the practice of the dhikr—remembrance of God (“prayer of the heart”) as part of a spiritual method.9 These and many of Dr. Sedgwick?s other opinions, all of which are presented as based on some single absolute Islamic authority, ignore numerous Koranic injunctions, ahadith,Islamic jurisprudence and the commentary of Sufis throughout history to the contrary.10 And if Dr. Sedgwick is correct that it is never permissible to omit any formality of Islam, including during Ramadan, then a discernable percentage of the world?s Muslims, especially those Muslims working in the West, are necessarily excluded from ever attaining the degree of orthodoxy that Dr. Sedgwick seems to hold as an absolute standard. To speak categorically in the name of Islam on such matters demonstrates a presumption that may in part be explained not only by his recent conversion to Islam, but also by his failed attempts to follow a Sufi spiritual path. Against the Modern World presents a new conceptual framework for understanding Traditionalism that is a significant departure from existing understandings. To evaluate this new conceptual framework it is important to understand some of the author?s new definitions of existing terms and his newly coined terminology.11 He starts by defining the Perennial Philosophy as “...„primal truth? [which] is more commonly known as the Perennial Philosophy, and belief in the existence of the Perennial Philosophy—a belief I will call „Perennialism?—is one of the three central elements in the Traditionalist philosophy Guénon developed.” The book goes on to selectively identify two additional concepts from Guénon?s writings, namely “inversion” and “initiation”,12 which the author asserts are the missing central elements that must be added to constitute Traditionalist philosophy (at least, according to his own definition). Readers already familiar with Guénon?s writings will recognize that this new definition of Traditionalist philosophy selects two terms from Guénon?s writings out of context, while ignoring many other important elements of Guénon?s thought, thus distorting Guénon?s point of view. This new definition of Traditionalist philosophy differs from the definitions in common use in at least two ways. It overemphasizes the importance of certain ideas found in Guénon and it ignores the contributions of other acknowledged founders of the Perennialist School, which though being based on the doctrinal principles that Guénon identified, went much further in forming a fully developed school of thought.13 The book states, “The Traditionalist movement has no formal structure, and since the late 1940s has had no central command. It is made up of a number of groups and individuals, united by their common debt to the work of René Guénon.” He defines a Traditionalist as a “person forming part of the movement deriving from René Guénon, or of a movement deriving from that movement [emphasis added].”14 The author?s definition of a Traditionalist allows him to create a “List of Main Characters” at the beginning of the book that lists “The Seven Most Important Traditionalists”.15 Many readers will be very surprised to see the names of Julius Evola, Mircea Eliade and Alexander Dugin on this list, because many aspects of each of their writings deviate significantly from the other men?s writings and from the central ideas of the Perennialist School. This is undoubtedly the first time that these three names have been included in a list of the seven most important Traditionalists. The author?s definition of Traditionalism therefore includes not only the Perennialist School, but also three identifiably different points of view under the same umbrella. It therefore becomes, as any moderately discerning reader can tell, hardly possible to identify shared ideas among these so-called “Traditionalists” or to relate the ideas of many of these “Traditionalists” back to the three concepts the author uses to define Traditionalist philosophy.16 Perhaps the confusion in the minds of our readers will be clarified when we apply the author?s ambitious schema to another of his newly coined definitions: political Traditionalism. A substantial part of Against the Modern World is devoted to the newly coined concept of “political Traditionalism”, which includes the alleged political actions of men influenced to some extent by Guénon. However, the author acknowledges that Guénon?s writings led to “spiritual activity” and that none of these political actions can be traced directly to Guénon. In the first of several discussions about different “political Traditionalists”, Dr. Sedgwick acknowledges that Evola “made the most dramatic modifications to Guénonian Traditionalism, which was essentially apolitical.” Dr. Sedgwick also acknowledges that Evola is typically not associated with Guénon because of his divergence from Guénon?s point of view.17 In this section of the book Dr. Sedgwick frequently summarizes Guénon?s point of view as “anti-modernist”, but without sufficiently exploring either what characterizes “modernity” for Guénon or other Traditionalist philosophers or why and in what ways they may disagree with it.18 Nowhere does the book mention that many Perennialists actively resisted both Fascism and Nazism during World War II,19 that Guénon strongly disapproved of Fascism and Nazism and that Evola was an outspoken critic of both Fascism and Nazism.20 The chapter of the book entitled, “Neo-Eurasianism in Russia,” is devoted to Alexander Dugin and Russian politics. In this section the author acknowledges that Dugin?s point of view is based upon Evola?s writings, but with several significant departures from Evola. The book states “Dugin?s second modification of [Evola?s interpretation of] Traditionalism was to combine it with a doctrine known as Geopolitics or Eurasianism.”21 The book then elaborates: “Dugin?s Neo-Eurasianism is not specifically or overtly Traditionalist... The word „tradition? does not appear in the glossary of [his books], for example, and no Traditionalist or other philosophical authors are in the extracts from classic texts included in [Dugin?s] book.” Dr. Sedgwick goes on to note that after 2000, Dugin?s “main focus shifted to what he called „radical centrism?” and that the other key person in this movement “was not a Traditionalist”. Dr. Sedgwick may be correct when he says that “Traditionalist influences can easily be identified [in Dugin?s point of view] by the informed reader”; however, perhaps that is the most that should be said when attempting to connect Dugin to Guénon. The book?s new definition of a Traditionalist as a “follower of Guénon in one sense or another, ora follower of such a follower” allows the author to trace Dugin back to Evola, and then Evola back to Guénon. The author therefore paints Traditionalism in political terms, as the advertising story lines for the book assert in connecting Traditionalism with “Fascism, Nazism and anti-democratic forces in post-Soviet Russia”. However, as we have seen, this connection is contrary to most existing scholarship and to many of the author?s own admissions. This connection is even more strained because Dr. Sedgwick acknowledges that central elements of Evola?s writings are “recognizably a variation on the established Traditionalist philosophy” and that Dugin is even further away from Guénon?s perspective than Evola. Using similar unsubstantiated and tenuous logic, it would be possible to connect most political events of the last century to any number of philosophers.22 Dr. Sedgwick is the first author to link Traditionalism to these political movements and to coin the term “political Traditionalism”.23 Let us hope that he is also the last to do so, since this alleged link to Traditionalism is sufficiently irrelevant to, and incompatible with, the common core principles identified with this school of thought that it does not merit further discussion. The discussion of political Traditionalism highlights the confusion that results from the different ways that Dr. Sedgwick uses variations on the word “tradition”. First, the author is not consistent in the way he uses his newly coined terminology and he often fails to provide sufficient definition.24 For example, he says, “the „tradition? to which „Traditionalism? refers is, in essence, the perennial religion.” The use of these terms among established Traditionalist authors appears to be substantially different from Dr. Sedgwick?s new definitions. The book also coins the terms “Guénonian Traditionalism” and “Traditionalist Perennialism”, without definition. And, as we have seen in the examination of “political Traditionalism”, many of the so-called “Important Traditionalists” do not subscribe to elements in the book?s definition of Traditionalist philosophy. To say the least then, the line of “political Traditionalists” that leads to Dugin bears no resemblance to the Perennialist School; the author?s definition of Traditionalism is thus so expansive as to include entire movements that do not agree on central ideas. This reviewer concludes that Dr. Sedgwick has attempted to stretch the definition of a Traditionalist in unprecedented and inappropriate ways, 25 while inaccurately narrowing the correct definition of Traditionalist philosophy. Such flaws in the conceptual framework of Dr. Sedgwick?s scholarship cause it to fail by any measure. The author?s writing style is engaging, but in large part this is because it is written from an “omniscient” point of view that presents only those facts that support his conclusions. The aspirations of true scholarship towards balance, accuracy of factual data, and objectivity are sacrificed to other, more “entertaining” goals. In addition, the author presents his opinions in absolute terms, without even considering the need either for verification or a discussion of alternative interpretations.26 Readers, however, will be inclined to question the author?s impartiality when many of his generalizations and observations go beyond the selectively chosen facts and allegations in the book.27 A large portion of Against the Modern World focuses on conflict among Guénon and several inheritors of his intellectual legacy insofar as these inheritors allegedly challenge Guénon, and then each other, for supremacy within the Traditionalist movement. The book portrays a series of disagreements—apparent schisms—that result in a splintering into distinct groups, and then into distinct sub-groups, all of which apparently disagree with the others. The author summarily disregards their shared beliefs and instead accentuates only their alleged disagreements, all against the background of a list of supposed character flaws of almost every person profiled in the book. At one point Dr. Sedgwick identifies the primary source of what is described as a substantial break between Guénon and one of his followers,28 but in the absence of information about the underlying issues, the reader is left to wonder why this and other differences seem so insurmountable? Because there are almost no references to, or analysis of, the writings or opinions of prominent Traditionalist authors, the uninformed reader is also left to wonder whether key Traditionalists would agree with the book?s assertions. Readers already familiar with Traditionalism will have different questions because they will recognize that the author?s opinions are contrary to the writings of leading Perennialists. The book therefore has many attributes not of a scholarly research work but of a historical novel because of its focus on conflict in personal relationships, its shallow and often confusing presentation of underlying concepts and its failure to present any substantive analysis. Given that the author does not present information or interpretations contradicting or even contrasting with his conclusions, it is important to examine the author?s research methods and motivations. The few conversations the author did have with Perennialist authors were early on in his research and of a superficial nature, and they did not include discussion of any of the controversial allegations raised later by the author in this book. Dr. Sedgwick did not attempt to contact the great majority of Perennialist authors, even though their identity is listed on the author?s Internet site. Instead, the author actively contacted a couple of handfuls of informants, many of whom openly acknowledge their personal animosity toward one or another Perennialist writer, and he ignored the fact that most of these informants had little contact with important Perennialists. Dr. Sedgwick cloaks many of the informants who provided hostile allegations in anonymity,29 encouraging unsubstantiated accusations on their part, while preventing his readers from an examination of the motives and credibility of these sources. The author failed to consult previously published articles in journals known to promote a discussion of Traditionalism and modernity, such as Sacred Web and Sophia,even though these journals are listed on the author?s Internet site. As a result, Dr. Sedgwick presents a number of allegations from informants—who appear to be hostile toward Traditionalism in general—as indisputable facts, when ample information to refute virtually all of these allegations has already been discussed in detail in previously published materials.30 These allegations are followed by the author?s own conclusions, including carefully worded assertions that Guénon and some of his intellectual inheritors suffer from mental illness.31 Since an abundance of previously published material is available to refute most of these false accusations, I will merely observe that part of the reason Dr. Sedgwick raises the allegations of inappropriate secrecy against many Perennialist authors is due to the fact that he has not read many of the published writings on the subject;32 thus, he erroneously concludes that Traditionalism is a secret to everyone.33 In correspondence with Dr. Sedgwick during the review of the manuscript, he acknowledged that he had not read the great majority of the previously published articles and books about Traditionalism cited in this review, many of which contained information contrary to his allegations and conclusions. During February 2003 many deficiencies in the manuscript were identified and an abundance of written material and citations were brought to Dr. Sedgwick?s attention. Initially, Dr. Sedgwick adamantly refused to postpone his impending deadline for submitting the final manuscript to the publisher in order to meet the originally scheduled publication date of September 2003. A collegial process turned into a contentious process when it became evident that he did not willingly intend to take the time to acquire an informed knowledge of Traditionalism before publishing his book.34 The publication date was eventually postponed for nine months, but the changes the author made did not correct the problems that have already been noted. Nor does the author disclose a great deal of information that directly contradicts or tends to undermine his allegations and conclusions. For example, Dr. Sedgwick was provided with extensive and irrefutable documentation, including newspaper articles and court records, which demonstrate that two of his informants are not authoritative sources because they both have intense personal animosity towards members of the Perennialist School; they both have extensive court records that include being judged in “contempt of court” multiple times; one has a criminal record that resulted in psychological counseling; and the other is an adjudicated fraud and perjurer.35 Dr. Sedgwick?s response was: “for a historian, there is really no such thing as „an authoritative source?.”36 Unfortunately readers who rely on this book to draw conclusions about Traditionalism are not aware of this background information, since the author never mentions it. At this point, it is worth repeating certain observations. Dr. Sedgwick?s commentary demonstrates that he has a flawed understanding of Traditionalism and the world?s religions, including a narrow and intolerant interpretation of Islam. The author has systematically contacted every detractor of the Perennialist School and then encouraged far-fetched allegations by relying upon adjudged frauds and liars and granting anonymity to hostile informants. Further, Dr. Sedgwick systematically failed to contact known Perennialists to hear their response to these allegations and also blatantly disregarded and failed to disclose verifiable information that conflicted with his allegations and undermined his conclusions. He provided false information about his negative personal experience with key Perennialists, and when forced to acknowledge his false statements he denied that either his falsehoods or his undisclosed possible personal prejudice are relevant. How did this happen? Perhaps to some degree the author was blinded by an excess of two personal ambitions: first, he wanted to plow a new ground of scholarship by creating an elaborate schema to define a multi- dimensional philosophy in an unprecedented way; second, he wanted to justify his own rejection of a spiritual path in which many Traditionalists have found a “home”. His excessive ambition may have blinded him to the consequences of poor scholarship. The result is a thinly disguised attack on Traditionalism that can best be characterized as historical fiction or popular journalism, rather than a serious work of academic importance. Whether one agrees or disagrees with Traditionalist ideas, one cannot help being left with the view that Mr. Sedgwick?s book is a highly irresponsible, biased and inaccurate reading of what Jacob Needleman called “some of the most serious thinking of the twentieth century”.37 ________ 1 These and the other citations in this review demonstrate that Against the Modern World is not the “first history of Traditionalism”. Traditionalism: Religion in the Light of the Perennial Philosophy by Harry Oldmeadow (Sri Lanka Institute of Traditional Studies, 2000); Jean Borella’s essay entitled, “Rene Guénon and the Traditionalist School” in Modern Esoteric Spirituality (Crossroad, l992), edited by Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman; The Only Tradition by William W. Quinn Jr. (SUNY, 1997); Forgotten Truth: The Primordial Tradition by Huston Smith (Harper, 1976); Journeys East: 20th Century Western Encounters with Eastern Religious Traditions by Harry Oldmeadow (World Wisdom, 2004). World Wisdom’s “Library of Perennial Philosophy”, together with explanatory materials, can be reviewed at www.worldwisdom.com. 2 E-mail from Mark Sedgwick dated January 23, 2003. 3 The description was posted on the author?s Internet site: www.traditionalists.org. 4 Sufism is Islamic mysticism and a tariqa is one of many Sufi orders that provide guidance to spiritual seekers following a Sufi path. 5 E-mail from Mark Sedgwick dated January 23, 2003. 6 E-mail from Mark Sedgwick dated February 19, 2003. 7 Anyone reading the published material cited in this review should be able to draw their own conclusions on this issue regarding those authors and the details of their private lives. 8 Dr. Sedgwick has justified his opinion with an illustration that is contrary to the Prophet Muhammad?s practice not to fast while traveling during Ramadan. It is predominantly the more fundamentalist Muslims who ignore the recommended simplifications of rites and instead burden themselves with unnecessary hardships. The author?s illustration is therefore of almost entirely fundamentalist origin because it involves travelers during Ramadan who take on unnecessary hardship as a type of penance. 9 The practice of dhikr—prayer of the heart—is the heart of Sufism. This is only one example of many of Dr. Sedgwick?s remarks that denigrate Sufism, a position that is also consistent with almost all Islamic fundamentalist groups. 10 For instance, the author fails to mention the hadith that “He who omits one-tenth of the law now (at the time of the prophet Muhammad) will be damned, while he who accomplishes one-tenth of the law at the end of time will be saved.” The Koranic Sura 29, verse 45, illustrates the importance of the remembrance of God: “Ritual prayer preserves from indecency and grave sin, but the remembrance of God (dhikr Allah) is greater.” 11 To offer readers a point of contrast, we offer the following abbreviated definitions of selected terms that are consistent with the general understanding and usage of those terms among today?s leading Traditionalist writers. A “perennialist” subscribes to the idea that there is a transcendent Unity of religion from which emanates the timeless Truth underlying the diverse religions, this Truth often being referred to as the Sophia Perennis, Religio Perennis or Philosophia Perennis (Perennial Wisdom, Perennial Religion or Perennial Philosophy respectively). A “traditionalist” subscribes to the proposition that the spiritual tradition of each religion, including the writings of their great sages and their artistic creations, is an indispensable support for the perpetuation of the perennial Truth within each religion. The timeless wisdom of the Perennial Philosophy provides the intellectual principles capable of explaining both the formal contradictions between the religions and the transcendent Unity that is the source of the great religions. The Perennialist School arose in the beginning of the twentieth century and focused on the enunciation and explanation of the Perennial Philosophy. Deeply rooted in the sense of the sacred, the writings of its leading exponents establish an indispensable foundation for understanding the timeless Truth and spiritual practices which live in the heart of all religions. It is generally recognized that the three central writers in the Perennialist School are René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy and Frithjof Schuon, and that Guenon?s writings alone do not sufficiently represent this philosophy. When used by writers associated with the Perennialist School, the capitalized terms “Perennialist” and “Traditionalist” are interwoven and are often used interchangeably because they both indicate a person who endorses the majority of the central principles of that school of thought, although one has to take into account that there will be inevitable differences. 12 Dr. Sedgwick states, “...„inversion? is seen as an all-pervasive characteristic of modernity. While all that really matters is in fact in decline, people foolishly suppose that they see progress.” Later he says, “initiation, which is the third major element in the Traditionalist Philosophy... has two aspects, which can be described as exoteric and esoteric.” 13 The author states, “[Seyyed Hossein] Nasr had convinced me [that this philosophy] should be called not Guénonianism but Traditionalism.” However, one finally has to conclude that the author has misunderstood Dr. Nasr?s comments because Dr. Nasr has written extensively about the definition of Traditionalist philosophy and Traditionalism, and his definitions and explanations do not correspond to Dr. Sedgwick?s revised definitions. It is probable that Dr. Nasr?s comment was meant to insist that Guenon?s writings alone do not constitute an integral shared philosophy, which must include the work of the other central writers of this school. Therefore Dr. Nasr insists that the definition focus on underlying concepts and not on any one individual. For a more extensive explanation, see Dr. Nasr?s chapter, “What is Tradition?” in his Knowledge and the Sacred (SUNY, l989). 14 In an e-mail from Mark Sedgwick dated January 23, 2003, he explained that a Traditionalist is a “follower of Guénon in one sense or another, or a follower of such a follower.” 15 The seven are (by date of birth): Dr. Ananda Coomaraswamy, René Guénon, Baron Julius Evola, Dr. Mircea Eliade, Frithjof Schuon, Dr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Alexander Dugin. The writings of Guénon, Coomaraswamy, Schuon and Nasr contain many shared principles and all four are important writers in the Perennialist School. 16 For purposes of discussion we will assume that Dr. Sedgwick?s understanding of both inversion and initiation are central to Guénon?s thought, and thus, by definition, that they must be included in the Perennialist School. Mircea Eliade?s writings are not concerned either with initiation or inversion. Neither of these two concepts is an important part of Evola?s or Dugin?s writings, although both are critical of various aspects of modernity. 17 The author admits that, “I found already a scholarly literature on [Baron Julius] Evola, but nowhere were Guénon or religion mentioned... Not all readers of Guénon would discover Evola... Evolian Traditionalism pointed toward the political right, separating it definitively from Guénonian Traditionalism.” 18 The author says: “Evola?s analysis of modernity is recognizably a variation on the established Traditionalist philosophy,” but he fails to elaborate in sufficient detail. 19 For example, Frithjof Schuon was a soldier in the French Army who fought against the Nazis, was captured, escaped from a Nazi prison camp and fled into Switzerland. 20 Dr. Sedgwick does not cite the book entitled, Man Among the Ruins (Inner Traditions, 2002), a compilation of Evola?s writings that contains a well-researched essay by H.T. Hanson on Evola?s thought. In this essay Hanson analyzes the complex figure of Evola and shows that he was a fearless critic of the Fascist regime, asserting the existence of an intellectual elite based upon spiritual and intellectual principles and rejecting the biological racism of the Nazis. 21 “Neo-Eurasianism” is Dugin?s term to describe his political point of view. 22 Regardless of one?s opinion of the traditional principles underlying the Hindu caste system, a parallel application of Dr. Sedgwick?s logic could trace the biological racism of the Nazis to Hinduism, an equally improper link. 23 “Political Traditionalism” is a non sequitur because it is inconsistent with the apolitical nature of Traditionalism, which is focused on a study of the underlying spiritual truths and practices that live at the heart of each religion. The fact that Dr. Sedgwick has coined such a term indicates that he does not understand the foundational principles of Traditionalist thought and that the ambitious scope of his elaborate schema is intrinsically flawed. 24 The book rarely mentions or defines key Traditionalist terms, such as the “transcendent unity of religions”, which are common in Traditionalist writings and could help to define this point of view. 25 Given that the combination of Dr. Sedgwick?s new definition and inconsistent use of the word “Traditionalist” is confusing, and because the label “traditionalist” is also applied in many other circumstances, the term “Perennialist” will be substituted for Traditionalist in the remainder of this review. For example, Dr. Sedgwick correctly points out that “a „traditionalist? may be no more than a conservative... who hankers after the customs of his or her youth. A „traditionalist? may also be someone who prefers a specific established practice over something that has replaced it, as in the case of Marcel Lefebvre, the Catholic archbishop who rejected the conclusions of the Second Vatican council... commonly described as „Catholic traditionalists?.” 26 For example, he says, “an apocalyptic view of things became one of the most important elements of Traditionalism”, without being able to cite any important Traditionalist author or writing to verify this opinion. If Guénon and other Perennialists were such pessimists, why would they take so much trouble to emphasize the need for prayer and to try to point readers back to their respective religious traditions? This is another example of the author?s uniformly critical and exaggerated observations of Traditionalism. 27 In the Prologue the author states: “mere Fascism had always been far too tame for Evola... Evola was to Mussolini as Trotski was to Stalin—but who has heard of him?” Such generalizations seem exaggerated when Dr. Sedgwick?s later chapters disclose a selection of Evola?s many criticisms of Fascism, including the fact that Evola edited a newspaper column entitled “Spiritual Problems in Fascist Ethics”. 28 There are multiple references to a disagreement over the validity of Christian sacraments, but there is no discussion about the substance of the disagreement or the practical implications to Christians. 29 In the book he refers to his anonymous informants by numbers. 30 As just one example, Dr. Sedgwick?s allegations against Frithjof Schuon are discussed in detail in “Frithjof Schuon: Providence Without Paradox”, Sacred Web 8 (2001). Frithjof Schuon: Life and Teachings,by Jean-Baptiste Aymard and Patrick Laude (SUNY, 2004) contains several English translations of material that has previously only been available in French. 31 Dr. Sedgwick is able to make such accusations with relative impunity because our laws do not protect the dead against libelous and defamatory comments. 32 Those writings include: The Essential Ananda K. Coomaraswamy,edited by Rama Coomaraswamy (World Wisdom, 2004); Dossier H: René Guénon (L?Age d?Homme, 1984); Dossier H: Frithjof Schuon, edited by Jean-Baptiste Aymard and Patrick Laude (L?Age d?Homme, 2001); Fragments of Infinity: Essays in Religion and Philosophy: A Festschrift in Honor of Professor Huston Smith, edited by Arvind Sharma (Prism, 1991); and The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, edited by Lewis E. Hahn, Randall E. Auxier and Lucian W. Stone (Open Court, 2001), which is a volume in the Library of Living Philosophers series. 33 The appearance of secrecy is partially explained by the author?s admission in the first chapter that “Guénon?s proposed elite did not need to be... secret, since its activities, „by their very nature, remain invisible to the commonality, not because they are hidden from it, but because it is incapable of understanding them.?” 34 Readers should be aware of the contentious history between this reviewer and the author. 35 The author mentions two “allegations” of misconduct raised by Perennialists, but does not identify the many actual legal judgments against these two informants, including an assessment of punitive damages based on fraud. 36 E-mail from Mark Sedgwick dated January 19, 2003. 37 Cited from Needleman?s Introduction to The Sword of Gnosis (Penguin, 1974). This book is also an authoritative source of information about Traditionalism.
- [Requiring Religion: Be What Knows](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/requiring-religion) - Requiring Religion: Be What Knows ©2008 James S. Cutsinger University of South Carolina Religion and Science Faculty Discussion Group 4 April 2008 I have never been one for writing letters to the editor. In fact I have done so only twice in my life. Both times were within the last two years, both were to The Chronicle of Higher Education, both were concerned with the relationship (broadly speaking) between religion and science, and both—surprisingly enough—were published! The first was my response to an article entitled “On the Front Lines in the War over Evolution” (10 March 2006). Ten thousand U.S. clergy, it seems, had recently signed a joint statement, the gravamen of which was to insist that religion and evolutionary science are perfectly compatible. The author of the article was clearly, and rather smugly, delighted at this news, for it served to confirm the notion, widespread in academia, that it is only a few creationist cranks who think that the dominant scientism of our time poses any threat to faith. I wrote to ask whether any of these rather sanguine signatories had ever heard of Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett,1 to explain to The Chronicle’s readership that this clerical consensus could easily be explained by the fact that serious attention to metaphysics gave way long ago to social ethics in the curricula of the mainline seminaries, and to propose a mandatory course for all high school students, not in creation science, but in the philosophy of science. Here is how I ended that letter: No doubt the reigning evolutionary paradigm affords a way of envisioning our terrestrial environment, but to suppose it the only way, uniquely qualified to give genuine insight into the Way Things Really Are, is merely to prove that one has never given two seconds thought to the question of what constitutes a fact—never realized that what we take to be an empirical given is always the result of many prior selections and interpretations, now embedded in the fossil record of an unexamined worldview. 1 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Penguin, 2007). 2 My second letter was prompted by a piece in The Chronicle Review, “The Place of Personal Faith in the Classroom” (25 January 2008), written by one John D. Barbour, a religion professor at Saint Olaf College. Barbour has been teaching for nearly three decades, but only in recent years, he confessed, has he begun speaking about his own religious convictions in the classroom, and even now with considerable hesitation. Why the long delay, and why the diffidence? His unsurprising answer was to say that “in public and private institutions alike practitioners of religious studies have been anxious to prove that they can be as tough-minded and academically rigorous as their colleagues in other disciplines”. The problem, as I pointed out in response, is that few scholars, whether religionists or otherwise, seem to have given serious thought to the question of what exactly tough-mindedness and rigor consist in. I ended by asking: Might these admirable qualities not include pointing out that no one has ever, or could ever, come to know by means of the senses that all knowledge is based on the senses? Why assume that professorial contributions to the discussion of religion, when not of a strictly empirical or exegetical order, can be no more than a subjective sharing of values or opinions? Why act as if the positivists won the argument just because so many of them have gone on talking?2 I mention these articles and my responses in order to launch a discussion concerning what I believe to be the leading obstacle to any serious dialogue between religion and science. What I have in mind—as I have already hinted—is the widespread assumption, shared by academics on both sides of the conversation, that human knowledge is limited to the empirical order and that spiritual realities, even supposing they exist, are therefore off limits to a genuinely rational inquiry. It is because of this assumption that the vast majority of university professors of religion have felt obliged, like Barbour, to limit their scholarly writing and classroom teaching to talk about talk about God, or to talk about those who historically have talked about God, or to talk about the geographical places and political circumstances in which talk, or talk about talk, about God has occurred. Even theologians and philosophers of religion, who one might have hoped would know better, seem to be running scared of the Zeitgeist, and rather 2 Both of my letters, “Evolution and the Facts” and “Professing Knowledge”, appear in their entirety on my weblog: http://www.cutsinger.net/wordpress2/?p=14; http://www.cutsinger.net/wordpress2/?p=104. 3 than challenging its hegemony most have settled for thinking that only historians, social scientists, and critical readers of texts have a place in academia. Wherever one looks, whether in religious studies or philosophy, one sees the same lemming-like flight from the embarrassment of supra-sensory claims. Meanwhile most scientists, whether natural or social, are understandably content with this consensus, and who can blame them? Contemporary university culture has been shaped with their interests, methods, needs, and expectations at the forefront. Wherever one looks, from the study of paleontology to the study of Plato, everyone is being asked to subscribe to the notion that knowledge is a matter of production and acquisition. Knowledge, or at least the knowledge that counts—and yes, I am deliberately punning when I use that word!—is something up ahead and out there, attained incrementally one fact at a time, and in order to reach it we must all be moving forward, innovating, getting the grants and generating fresh data. As for scientists who still believe in God, most have worked out the same compromise as their colleagues in the religion department and have consigned knowledge and faith to two more or less separate compartments of their lives, one public and the other private. The result, of course, is that the media appearances and best-selling book contracts usually go to those scientists, and popularizers of science, who don’t believe, or rather who believe that all belief is irrational, and whose marketing plan depends on baiting their public with the proclamation that religion is bunk. Anyone interested in furthering a dialogue between religion and science cannot but deplore, as I do, the situation I have briefly sketched—one in which people are afraid, or at least reluctant, to raise fundamental questions, and where those on the religious side are expected not to speak in their professional voice until they have first accepted the methodological premises of their interlocutors. I am not sure I would have used quite the same approach and dramatic techniques as Ben Stein did in his recently released film “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”,3 but as far as calling the bluff on the supposed open-mindedness of the professoriate it is precisely on target. The academy, which in its ancient Athenian version was intended to serve as a refuge from the unexamined life, has in many ways become instead a breeding-ground for consensus, complacency, and status quo. It is politically fashionable these days for admissions offices and faculty search 3 Premise Media Corporation, 2008. 4 committees to stress the pedagogical and other benefits of “diversity”. But when it comes to what constitutes the university’s very reason for being, the pursuit of knowledge, standardization is almost always preferred to genuine difference—the company man to the epistemological radical. Who is this epistemological radical, and what sort of mischief might he perpetrate if allowed to run free on our campuses? I am not going to reveal all my thoughts on this subject. After all, even we tenured full professors are well advised to take things one cautious step at a time, and I would prefer not to compromise the anonymity of my moles in the sciences! I think you can deduce from what I have said thus far, however, what the first of these steps ought to be. One should begin, like Socrates, by going to the allegedly wise and asking them what precisely their wisdom consists in. Let us go to our universities’ presidents, provosts, deans, directors of development, grants officers, and fellow faculty and ask them to explain (if they can) exactly why they have chosen to assume that human knowledge is limited to the empirical order. As my letters to The Chronicle suggest, there are at least two sides to this question, or two ways of raising it. One form of the question is this: Has anyone ever, or could anyone ever, come to know by means of the senses that all possible knowledge is based on the senses? You already know the answer, for no thinking person can miss it: No sensory experience has ever proved, or ever could prove, that only sensory experience provides valid proof. Empiricism, whether understood as a full-blown philosophical position or as a methodological principle, cannot be empirically justified. And of course it follows that there may well be another way, or other ways, of knowing, and hence another object, or other objects, of knowledge. But there is also a second form of the question, which cuts a bit deeper and which could be expressed as follows: Is there really such a thing as an empirical given—a pure datum, offered up naked and raw to the appropriate sense organ? Here again the answer should be obvious, though it may take the unpracticed a little longer to grasp it: Empirical objects, including our sense organs and the bodies that apparently house them, are in fact the result of many prior selections and interpretations, some of them conscious but most of them not. Long story short: The sensor is as much in the sensing as is the sensed. 5 Now none of this is really any news, of course, and you may be forgiven for wondering why I regard raising such elementary questions as so seditious an act. No doubt there are otherwise intelligent scientists—though none in this room, I trust!—who are oblivious to these epistemological insights and who continue to subscribe to the crudest forms of positivism. But clearly no philosopher, and no philosophically educated person, will be surprised by my claim that knowing is a constructive or creative process. The epistemological radical, however, is the person who persistently takes this claim further. He is the gadfly who insists on reminding his colleagues of this cognitive constructivity or creativity at what often prove for them awkward moments. It is all well and good to philosophize in a book or at the front of the appropriate classroom. But when you are looking through a microscope or are about to dissect a piece of tissue or are translating some ancient manuscript or are in the midst of propounding a complicated theory, based on your painstakingly extensive research, as to which demographic group is most likely to exhibit behavior A in situation B, you do not want some know-it-all breathing over your shoulder, whispering, “Yes, but are there really any data there?” And yet, unless I am quite mistaken, every serious scholar needs to hear this discomfiting question, even as the Roman general, returning from his battlefield victories, needed to hear the admonition of the slave in his chariot, Memento mori. Why? Because it is extremely difficult for all of us, no matter how fully or how often we may accede in theory to constructivist principles, to keep them firmly—and operatively—at the center of our continued attention as we go about our daily lives. There lingers in virtually all our minds what the philosopher Owen Barfield called a “residue of unresolved positivism”, an undercurrent of cognitive forgetfulness, fueled by the commonsensical picture we have been taught to paint of ourselves, not as outside or above, but as within, and pressed as it were beneath the weight of, a world of objects—a physical one among the physically many, all caught in the flow of time.4 Please understand: It is not only scientists with 4 Barfield spoke of this “residue” in a number of conversations with me, as he did in an interview with Shirley Sugarman, published in her edited volume The Evolution of Consciousness (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1976). Elsewhere he wrote: “I can philosophize myself free from philosophical materialism quite easily; and so, I dare say, can you.... But after we have done the philosophizing and gone back to ordinary life, the materialism is still there in our very instruments of thought, and indeed of perception.... It is not merely a habit but an ingrained habit. It is even what we call ‘common sense’” (Owen Barfield, History, Guilt, and Habit [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961], 73). 6 whom I am charging this crime. Theologians and philosophers whose conception of the spiritual world is defined solely in relation to some material opposite, which this world is held to be “other” or “higher” than, are no less guilty of R.U.P. (Barfield’s acronym for the disease in question) than the veriest empiricist. The “solid” world of the seemingly given has retained, even for them, a final jurisdiction. It is still a comfortable home to return to when speculative flights are ended. The recommendation, propounded in the first of my letters to The Chronicle, that a course in the philosophy of science should be mandatory for all high school students, is thus only the beginning of a solution. If there is to be a fruitful dialogue between religion and science, the unexamined assumption that human knowledge is limited to the empirical order and that spiritual realities are therefore off limits to rational inquiry must be continually, and radically, called into question—as a precondition in fact to our being truly rational inquirers. But something more is needed as well, and for this reason I am recommending herewith a second course, this time at the college level, not in philosophy but in religion. Needless to say, what I have in mind is not just any course. As I have lamented already, most religious studies professors capitulated some time ago to the scientistic pressures of contemporary academic life, and most of their courses have therefore devolved into surveys about who believed what, when, where, how often, and with which social or psychological effects. This clearly does little more than perpetuate our somnambulistic contentment with intellectual business as usual. So no, what I am thinking of here is something quite different, something that would help to open the door for students from across the disciplines to a complete reappraisal of what constitutes knowledge. The key to this reappraisal is an axiom— anticipated by my subtitle—that might be expressed as follows: To know what is, one must be what knows. I have put this in what is perhaps a more cryptic and sibylline form than is strictly necessary, but the essential point is in fact a fairly straightforward one, immense though I believe its implications to be. Having learned in high school, in their study of the philosophy of science, that the seeming facts of the empirical world are the product of many prior selections and interpretations, it is essential that our students now be given in college the opportunity to begin asking themselves the question, Who or what is selecting? Who or what is interpreting? If they have studied some Latin—mirabile dictu, mirabilius visu!—and are aware that a “fact” is a deed that’s been done and that “data” are things that are given, they might also be prompted to ask, Done by whom or by what? Given to whom or to what? There are doubtless many variations on this query of queries. The form in which the question is posed, however, is considerably less important than the intellective act of posing and wrestling with it. Or perhaps I should say: The question is less important than the questioner’s self-identification with and self- recognition in the act. Precisely who or what is it that is doing the knowing when I know, or for that matter doing the doubting when I don’t?5 I realize this last phrase might lead some of you to think that a passing acquaintance with the Cartesian method would be perfectly sufficient for my purposes. Could students not be introduced to this line of inquiry in my already mandated high school philosophy course? Descartes famously saw that though he might doubt all the disclosures of his senses, and indeed the very existence of a world corresponding to those disclosures, he could not simultaneously doubt the existence of himself as the doubter. Even confused, mistaken, or inconclusive thinking entails a thinker: hence cogito ergo sum. What I have in mind now, however, is something different and considerably more demanding. I am not talking about the deductive conclusion that there must be some res cogitans or knowing I. I am talking about provoking our students—and ourselves!—to begin at least glimpsing what this knowing I is. The question is not whether one must postulate a transcendental ego as the necessary presupposition of perceptual unity. The question is whether one might contrive to look along this ego so as to see oneself being what knows. And here precisely is where a religion course, and only a religion course, can fill the bill. To get at the essential, though, we shall need to help our young charges cut through a tangled and sometimes disheartening underbrush of distracting accidents. They will need to be taught at the outset that religions are much more than collections of texts and commentaries, more than weird episodes in the lives of persons and peoples, more than institutional excuses for violence and political intrigue, more than ideological 5 Each of these is a variation on the question “What is the Self?”, which the Indian advaitic sage Sri Ramana Maharshi was famous for turning back upon his inquirers. 8 assertions to be accepted blindly and thus in a manner that dishonors the mind.6 On the contrary, they must be brought into contact with teachings, and teachers, that can help them understand that authentic religions exist fundamentally for one reason, and one reason alone: as enticements and aids for the overcoming of R.U.P.7 Students must read the writings and be introduced to the lives of the great spiritual masters and saints, and they must be encouraged to enter into these studies, not as passive recipients of yet additional data, whether commentarial or biographical, but as active researchers working within the laboratories of their own meditational practice. In making this claim as to the real point of religion, I have of course simply assumed without argument that the truest Hindus are Yogins, the truest Buddhists are Roshis, the truest Christians are Hesychasts, and the truest Muslims are Sufis. Needless to say, not everyone is going to agree with me! I can think of at least three groups of people who would dispute this proposition: secular cynics, of course, for whom nothing about religion is true; the majority of my fellow religion professors, who have fallen into the habit of thinking that religions have no essence and thus no truest form; and many of the faithful themselves, especially Christians and Muslims, who are inclined to suppose that the truest form of their religion is of a devotional rather than an intellectual order. Defending my claim against the several voices of this unlikely alliance would only distract our attention from the main point of this short talk. I therefore gladly concede that the teachings and technical methods of the various masters I mentioned might well be mere rivulets compared to the great oceans of religion from which they flow. I am even happy to grant, if you like, that my required course not be called a “religion” course at all—though I am at a loss to know where else in the university anything even close to what I have in mind could be found. Call it instead a course in maps and methods of attention. Regardless of the name or departmental classification of the offering, three related sets of ideas should be placed front and center. Since understanding the true nature of knowledge is going to require overcoming at least twelve years of epistemological 6 Unfortunately the Dawkinses and Dennetts are mostly right about much of what goes by the name of religion, though this is clearly not to excuse them for the even more that they fail to understand. 7 Of course, the religions do not put it this way; they speak of overcoming sin and ignorance. But it comes to the same, for the root problem is a misidentification of the containing “I” with the contents of “me”. 9 misinformation, I have expressed these ideas here in a negative form. Students will need to come to grips with what knowledge is not before they can begin to glimpse what it is. I. Seeing oneself being the knower is NOT the result of adding new contents to consciousness, however extraordinary these contents might be. It results instead from a transformation in the very structure of consciousness, and this is something that takes place beneath or in back of the mind and not in front of it. It is not for nothing, after all, that the masters of the traditional spiritual schools explicitly rule out “experiences” and “phenomena”—as well as what the Hindus call siddhis or “attainments”—as at best irrelevant to, and at worst a dangerous distraction from, truly knowing what is. II. The seeing at stake here is NOT something that comes and goes, like a mystical vision or audition, but a timeless recovery of What was never lost. In the classical language of Sufism, it consists in a maq?m, or “station”, not a h?l, or “state”—a mode of being altogether beyond the reach of what certain researchers are now pleased to call the “cognitive science of religion”. Seeing oneself being the knower entails, if nothing else, complete independence from the changing circumstances of the world, whether within or around us, and it would be a contradiction in terms to suppose that this independence is itself subject to alteration. III. Being what knows is NOT a miraculous, out-of-the-blue sort of thing, which “zaps” certain people for no particular reason. On the contrary, it can be deliberately approached and prepared for through specific practices or methods, undertaken in full consciousness of what one is doing. The initial step in this work, well within the capacity of every college student, is to realize that ordinary, so-called waking consciousness is actually a sort of sleep and that the minds with which most of us get through the day (or not) are almost completely out of control—the minds of scientists, philosophers, and theologians just as much as the minds of freshmen. It would no doubt be asking too much to suppose that our students could proceed from these negative preliminaries to their positive sequel within the short space of a single semester. Eager though I am to break the scientistic spell, I am obliged to admit that more advanced methods, presupposing as they do the protection of a traditional spiritual lineage, clearly go beyond anything a mere college class could be expected to provide, even assuming a Yogin, Roshi, Hesychast, or Sufi were available for the occasional guest appearance! My required course would nonetheless make a point of insisting that there are such methods—time-tested strategies leading to the mental control the students will have discovered they lack; methods operating on every level of the self, including not just the mind, but the will, the emotions, and the body; methods eventuating in the only true knowledge there is—a knowledge grounded in the ipseity of knower and known. Getting such a course off the ground would obviously not be easy. By no means the least of the obstacles would be convincing our Office of Research Compliance that the Subject of these methods is not a subject of research. And just imagine the hassle of trying to fit the anticipated “outcomes” into an assessment plan! The stakes are much too high, however, to be daunted by these merely bureaucratic details. For in the absence of such a course—or some comparable means of addressing the foundational questions I have posed—there is little point in trying to foster discussion between religionists and scientists. I am sorry to end on so critical a note. I certainly do not wish to disparage the admirable efforts and even more admirable intentions of this faculty forum. But unless we can come to some agreement about knowledge itself, based upon a careful examination of principles and informed by an experiential glimpse of the full range of what is humanly possible, a dialogue between our disciplines will never be anything more than a euphemism for parallel monologues between the academy’s current captains of complacency and its few, and increasingly fewer, radicals.
- [Computer Technology: An Academic Cargo Cult?](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/computer-technology) - Computer Technology: An Academic Cargo Cult? Harry Oldmeadow, Humanities, UCNV, Bendigo Communications Technologies and the "Information Revolution" In the 1620s Francis Bacon, in search of a new scientific method, looked forward to the day when "the mind itself be from the very outset not left to take its own course, but be guided at every step, and the business be done as if by machinery." Bacon articulated the hope of "building in the human understanding a true model of the world, such as it is in fact, not such as man's own reason would have it to be...those foolish and apish images of worlds which the fancies of men have created in philosophical systems, must be utterly scattered to the winds."i Descartes (1968) was gripped by a similar passion for a mode of thought which would be stripped of all its most personal qualities. Leibniz dreamed of a machine which, programmed with a question, would immediately flash the answer on a screen. In 1958 two of the prime movers in the push to develop so-called artificial intelligence wrote: There are now in the world machines that think, that learn and create. Moreover, their ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until - in the visible future - the range of problems they can handle will be co-extensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied.ii The dream of an infallible, universal scientific method finds an echo today in the pursuit of a theory of everything and a machine for everything. It seems to many that science has brought us to a new frontier of knowledge, and that the dream of "intelligent" machines is now a reality. I refer, of course, to the computer. We now live, we are told, in the Information Age, one in which new forms of technology will transform our lives; we are in a transition period which is bringing upheavals no less momentous than those brought by the Industrial Revolution. Leonard Sussman (1989), an American expert on international communications, is an unexceptional and representative champion of these changes. In a recent article he tells us that Nearly every man and woman on earth will [soon] be able to communicate in a few moments with someone continents away. Everyone will have immediate access, at home or at the workplace, or through a nearby communal telephone, to a vast volume of diverse information - a volume such as even the world's finest libraries or news services cannot provide today. The cultures of even the smallest, least familiar peoples will be preserved, and made accessible to everyone, everywhere. New comunications will induce the human mind to think more clearly, to test new possibilities, to gain confidence and even exhiliration from the process of idea- discovery. (p.60) New technologies bring new educational imperatives. 'The core of the problem and the key to its solution [Sussman tells us] is the need to computerise information, make it 1 accessible to the broad public, and put hundreds of millions to work in the post- industrial information era.' (p.61) Communications technology, he asserts, is altering every form of human relationship and activity. No aspect of humankind can any longer escape the influence of the new communications technologies. They will soon alter all the natural and social sciences, all levels of education, all forms of cultural activity, all geopolitics. Everywhere. (p.65) He enthuses about the fact that every eight years computer science doubles the entire volume of information available to us. He is hugely excited by the educational possibilities: The new technologies are the conduit for generating vast information-power. Almost simultaneously, world-wide, they convey, store or retrieve current speech, text, data or pictures, and information from all of human history. They also facilitate problem-solving in all human disciplines...widen the horizons of individuals through far greater cultural and educational opportunities... encourage the user to develop greater electronic literacy and the power of logical thinking...By mastering intricacies of the computer, we train our biologic brains to think. And perhaps one day we will programme the computer to develop artificial intelligence. (p.61) In much the same vein, John Naisbitt in Megatrends tells us that ...we now mass-produce information the way we used to mass-produce cars. In the information society, we have systematized the production of knowledge and amplified our brain power....we now mass-produce knowledge and this knowledge is the driving force of our economy.iii One could catalogue such commonplaces more or less indefinitely. On all sides we are being told of the wonders of these new technologies and of the almost miraculous feats of the latest "generation" of computers. As Theodore Roszak (1986) has remarked ...in the presence of so ingenious a technology, it is easy to conclude that because we have the ability to transmit more electronic bits more rapidly to more people than ever before, we are making real cultural progress - and that the essence of that progress is information technology.(p29) The widespread and rather breathless enthusiasm for these new technologies is really a kind of technological fundamentalism. Computers as Cargo Cult In the Western cultural tradition of the last few hundred years we can discern a line of thought running from Bacon and Descartes to the present apostles of the so-called "information revolution". But there is another current in the Western tradition, one which resists the ever more totalitarian claims of the sciences and which is suspicious about the claims made for machines of one kind and another. The Faust myth in its various forms, Blake's prophetic poems, Mary Shelley'sFrankenstein, various works of the English and German Romantics, Dickens's novel Hard Times, the work of the great French metaphysician Rene Guenoniv and more recently Kurt Vonnegut's anti-Utopia Piano Player, are amongst the many landmarks in this counter-tradition. To some it will no doubt seem fanciful that such writers have anything to tell us about our current situation.v Others will mutter about Luddites and self-interested cranks - to which one 2 answer is that history has proved the Luddites right in their fundamental intuition that machinery would indeed destroy many traditional arts and crafts, and and thus annihilate many honourable vocations in which countless generations found dignified work. The title of my paper suggests that, in an educational context, the enthusiasm for the computer in particular, and for other forms of technological whizz-bangery, really amounts to a kind of cargo cult. A cargo cult is a quasi-religious movement deriving from a mistaken attribution of supernatural powers to some quite mundane entity and from the belief that the paying of homage to it will bring a superabundance of material benefits. Something of the kind is going on in academia. Not only do we look to these technologies to solve problems which are quite outside their competence but our technophilia constitutes a much more serious problem than those which we hope can be so solved. I am not an expert on computers or on any other form of technology which might be turned to educational ends. I am not embarrassed by this fact. It is important that ordinary people involve themselves the debate: it will certainly not do to leave it all in the hands of the experts. As Roszak remarks in The Cult of Information (1986) ...the discussion of computers and information is awash with commercially motivated exaggeration and the opportunistic mystifications of the computer science establishment. The hucksters...have polluted our understanding of information technology with loose metaphors, facile comparisons, and a good deal of out-and-out obfuscation. There are billions of dollars in profit and a windfall of social power to account for why they should wish to do this. Already there may be a large public that believes it not only cannot make judgements about computers, but has no right to do so because computers are superior to its own intelligence - a position of absolute deference which human beings have never assumed with respect to any technology of the past. (p.61) I am not blind to the limited but important benefits these new technologies can confer. Indeed I typed this paper on a Macintosh: its advantages over the typewriter are considerable. But I do share Roszak's view that the educational claims made for computers are not only grotesquely inflated but dangerous. I hope to make clear some of the grounds of my concern to explore a few ideas which, in my view, we should resist a strenuously as possible. Thinking Machines? The first such idea is that the computer is analogous to the human mind, that it can properly be called "intelligent", that it can replicate the higher functions of the human mind. The anthropomorphizing of machines, betrayed by the attribution of such qualities as "intelligence", "memory", and "friendliness", is by no means insignificant. Not only does the jargon endow computers with qualities they do not possess but it is often used to affirm the superiority of the computer to the human mind which, John Naisbitt tells us, 'not only is limited in its storage and processing capacity, but it also has known bugs; it is easily misled, stubborn and even blind to the truth...'vi Conversely, 'The subliminal lesson that is being taught whenever the computer is used (unless a careful effort is to be made to offset that effect) is the data processing model of the mind.'(Roszak, 1986, p.246) 3 Another contemporary line of thinking leads us to Robert Jastrow's vision of a not-far- distant future where At last the human brain, ensconced in a computer, has been liberated from the weakness of the mortal flesh...It is in control of its own destiny. The machine is its body; it is the machine's mind...It seems to me that this must be the mature form of intelligent life in the Universe. Housed in indestructible lattices of silicon, and no longer constrained in the span of its years by the life and death cycle of a biological organism, such a kind of life could live forever.vii I wish I could dismiss this as a nightmarish vision from a science fiction novel. But this is no such thing: it is the project, as bizarre as anything in science fiction, of some of the world's best computer scientists. No one denies that computers can store vast amounts of data, far more than can be accommodated in the mind of any individual. Computers are also able to process this data with astonishing rapidity. Here indeed is an invention which can perform computational tasks with extraordinary speed and efficiency. No denying that the computer is hugely useful for administrative and data-sorting tasks - in university administrations and in libraries, for instance. But to move from here to the notion that computers can be developed to perform some of the higher functions of the human mind is, in my view, a very dangerous move indeed. It is then not such a big step to such absurd lucubrations as the following, written by Marvin Minsky in 1970: In from three to eight years, we will have a machine with the general intelligence of a human being. I mean a machine that will be able to read Shakespeare, grease a car, play office politics, tell a joke, have a fight. At that point, the machine will begin to educate itself with fantastic speed. In a few months, it will be at genius level, and a few months after that, its power will be incalculable.viii He went on to add that such machines might well decide to keep humans as pets. Minsky's colleagues at MIT thought this scenario was a bit reckless: the general feeling was that such a machine might take up to fifteen years to develop. The mind-computer analogy depends on another confusion: the notion there is some common measure between information and knowledge. Much discussion of the possibilities of the computer blurs the crucial distinctions between information and information-processing on one hand, and on the other those many capacities of the human mind which no computer could possibly replicate - memory, imagination, intuition, the creation of ideas, the ability to interpret - all of which all play their part in the development of what can properly be called knowledge. Unhappily, The word [information] has received ambitious, global definitions that make it all good things to all people. Words that come to mean everything may finally come to mean nothing; yet their very emptiness may allow them to be filled with a mesmerizing glamour. The loose but exuberant talk we hear on all sides these days about the 'information economy', 'the information society', is coming to have exactly that function. These oft- repeated catchphrases and cliches are the mumbo jumbo of a widespread public cult. (Roszak, 1986,p.10) The computational mode is sequential, regulated, predictable, formal, quantitative. But human experience, imagination, thought and creativity are not amenable to this model: 4 to reduce the complexities of the mind, and the processes of knowing and understanding to a computational model is to surrender to a reductionist and mechanistic scientism. Computers cannot deal with the very stuff of human thought. They can only offer us mechanical counterfeits. Contrary to much contemporary opinion, thought is generated and organized not by data or information but by ideas. What are ideas? They are images, metaphors, organizing patterns which connect and make meaningful disparate phenomena and areas of experience. They derive from our subjective experiences, from the creative interplay of imagination and memory and feeling as well as from the rational workings of the mind. Human memory is nothing like the so-called "memory" of computers which is simply the capacity to retrieve data. Human memory represses, distorts, projects, embellishes. It works through the mind, the senses, the feelings. Creative thought is supple, unpredictable, fluent, mysterious - in short, not at all computer-like. As Thomas Kuhn (1963) has shown, even scientific thought, at least in its higher reaches, is not at all computational. The great scientific discoveries have proceeded through astonishing leaps of the imagination, through intuitions, through flashes of insight rather than through either the accumulation of empirical data or the workings of an apparently objective rationality. Ideas do not grow out of empirical observation or from raw data; they are not based on information. Granted information may shape and colour our ideas but certainly cannot constitute them. Ideas are created by a consciousness in search of meaning. We cannot think without ideas. As Roszak (1986) has pointed out ideas actually generate information rather than vice versa, as is so often thought. The mind works with ideas not information. Ideas contain, define and produce information but are by no means identical with it. Every fact grows from an idea; it is the answer to a question we could not ask in the first place if an idea had not been invented which isolated some portion of the world, made it important, focused our attention, and stimulated enquiry.(p.126) Information can only be gathered and organized in response to questions which are governed by ideas and values. "In the long run, no ideas, no information." (p.128.) If we accept a recent definition of knowledge as the capacity to interpret and'to establish relevant relationships or connections between facts, data, and other information in some coherent form and to explain the reasons for those generalisations' (Bell, 1985, p.17) then the word "knowledge" cannot properly be applied to any of the computer's capacities. Computers are utterly incapable of generating either ideas or values or meaning , just as a computer is incapable of intuition or imagination or of human sympathies of any kind. Likewise computers are utterly incapable of interpretation. Interpretation, if it is to mean anything, must mean the making of judgements - aesthetic, moral, ideological, intellectual. Learning should consist, among other things, in becoming familiar with and learning to handle a diversity of interpretations - interpretations of the human condition, of the social order, of art, of philosophy and science, of the natural world, and so on. Only thus can we create our own interpretations. There can, by definition, be no objectively correct interpretation of anything. To speak and write of computers offering us "interpretations" is a nonsense: 'The prospect of machine interpretation is not only whimsical; it is absurd. Interpretation 5 belongs to a living mind in exactly the same way that birth belongs solely to a living body.' (Roszak, 1986,p.154) Let us also not forget the lesson encapsulated in Plotinus's dictum of nearly two and a half thousand years ago, no less true now that it was then: 'Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object.'ix One of the most fundamental questions, and one which is all too frequently ignored in the general enthusiasm for information, is 'What is worth knowing?'. It is also well to remember that there are many problems which cannot be addressed let alone solved by any amount of information. As one commentator recently put it, 'Our ignorance of the few things that matter is as prodigious as our knowledge of trivialities.'x Or, as Frithjof Schuon (1984) has remarked, "That which is lacking in the present world is a profound knowledge of the nature of things."(p.28) That ignorance can certainly not be remedied by information of any kind whatsoever. If you accept what I have been saying about the divide between information and ideas, between computational processes and the movements of the human mind, and if you believe, as I do, that the principal task of education is to teach young minds to deal with ideas then you begin to understand some of my misgivings about the place of computers in education. Computers in the Classroom An eminent American educationalist articulates a common hope when he writes that ...in the long run, electronic teachers may provide exchanges of information, ideas, and experiences more effectively..than the traditional classroom or the teacher. The promise of the new technology is to enrich the study of literature, science and mathematics, and the arts through words, pictures, and auditory messages.xi I am much more sympathetic to Theodore Roszak's response to this claim: My own taste runs to another image: that of teachers and students in one another's face-to- face company, perhaps pondering a book, a work of art, even a crude scrawl on the blackboard. At the very least, that image reminds us of how marvellously simple, even primitive, education is. It is the unmediated encounter of two minds, one needing to learn, the other wanting to teach. ..Too much apparatus, like too much bureaucracy, only inhibits the natural flow. Free human dialogue, wandering wherever the agility of mind allows, lies at the heart of education. (Roszak, 1986,pp.79-80; emphasis mine] I cannot claim to be familiar with much of the research done on the educational use of computers. However the evidence with which I am familiar (eg: Beattie, 1988, pp.177- 199) and my own experience suggest that when computers are used as a teaching tool several things are bound to happen: an inordinate amount of time is spent on overcoming technical difficulties and on mastering the software; students work largely in isolation from each other; contact between student and teacher is most often about procedural problems; almost inevitably the mastery of the software and of the machine come to be seen not as means towards some more significant educational end, but as ends in themselves. Consequently the ability to manipulate data through a mastery of techniques comes to be grossly over-valued. It as if the filing cabinet, the counting machine and the typewriter had become not useful but humble tools but rather the very object of study. 6 The technology also comes to determine the kind of tasks put in front of students. It has been claimed (Schostak,1988) that "the computer can be as much associated with play, fun, imagination, sharing ideas, self-expression as it can with rational information manipulation and the routine mindless repetition of predefined outputs...the difference depends upon how the computer is used and interpreted." (p.18) This strikes me as a very sanguine view indeed. It is much more likely that the computer is the last step in a process which began with the scientific revolution of the 17th century. The mystique of the computer and of computer-based paradigms derives in part from the philosophical traditions of empiricism and rationalism which we noted at the start of this paper. ["Smart" machines] have a seductive appeal to the scientific imagination, which has freely borrowed them as models of the universe at large, often reshaping our experience of the world to make it fit that model. And in this there can be the real danger that we fall prey to a technological idolatry, allowing an invention of our own hands to become an image that dominates our understanding of ourselves and all nature around us. (Roszak, 1986, 55) The triumph of Cartesianism in particular and the new ideology of science in general has meant the expulsion from scientific thought of all considerations based on value, perfection, harmony, meaning, beauty, purpose, for such considerations are now regarded as merely subjective and so as irrelevant to a scientific understanding of the real 'objective' world - the world of quantity, of reified geometry, of a nature that is impersonal and purely functional. (Sherrard,1987,p.69) Those modes of thought and understanding which go beyond the logical and the mechanical, already radically devalued by modern scientism, will be even further diminished by our infatuation with the computer. The perfect computer-driven classroom project may well be the production of the phone book or a railway timetable - a vast amount of data, highly organized into a "user-friendly" package! The surrender to scientific paradigms of knowledge does indeed lead to a kind of learning bleached of all questions of taste and value, and strips human thought of "its most intimately personal qualities - its ethical vision, its metaphysical resonance, its existential meaning' (Roszak, 1972, p.159). Where in the domain of the computer is the place for metaphor, allegory, symbol, myth, analogy? How is a computer to engender these value-laden, unpredictable and intensely personal modes of thought and experience? What becomes of questions concerning meaning, beauty, ethics, value? How are we to use a computer in the teaching of Homer? I have yet to see cogent answers to such questions. Nor do I find much to commend the argument that computers allow students to take control of their own learning. Within a very prescribed and limited arena they may well do so.But on this issue I agree with the observations of the American poet Wendell Berry (1987): The responsibility to decide what to teach the young is an adult responsibility. When adults transfer this responsibility to the young, whether they do it by indifference or as a grant of freedom, they trap themselves in a kind of childishness. In that failure to accept responsibility, the teacher's own learning and character are disemployed, and, in the contemporary industrialized education system, they are easily replaced by bureaucratic and methodological procedures, "job market" specifications, and tests graded by machines. (p.86) There is a good deal of talk about the ways in which computers might liberate teachers from some of the tasks which they presently carry out. It is much more likely that in the 7 long run, as my colleague Roger Sworder (1992) has suggested, the real consequence of this kind of process will be the destruction of the academic and teaching profession. For computer scientists, it is no doubt exciting to ask: 'Can we invent a machine that does what a teacher does?' But there is another question one might ask: 'Why should we want to invent a machine to do that in the first place?' There was never any difficulty in answering that question where the machine was intended to take over work that was dirty, dangerous or back-breaking. Teaching is hardly any of these. (Roszak,1986,p.70) Nor will it do to see in the computer an answer to the problems of incompetent teaching, student alienation, boredom and the like. If teachers do not have the energy, the imagination or the expertise to engage their students, or if students are too alienated or distracted or demoralized to respond, then this is the problem to be addressed and solved 'from inside the experience of the teachers and the students. Defaulting to the computer is not a solution; it is surrender.' (Roszak, 1986,p.79-80) I am reminded of a Cobb cartoon in which a robot standing in front of a bank of computer-like machines addresses a begowned graduate, clutching his newly acquired degree; "Haven't you heard? The Industrial Revolution is over...we won...". I do not have space here to canvas the ways in which the move towards technology- centered teaching might be connected to the view of education held by the federal government. It is no secret that the universities are increasingly being straitjacketed into a model derived from industrial production.xii It does not take much imagination to see how these trends might be related. Nor can I here examine the ways in which the computing industry has penetrated the educational systems in most industrialized countries. The agenda of developing a more or less universal computer "literacy" can perhaps more properly be seen as an attempt to make everyone computer-dependent. The marketing of hi-tech in the educational arena has been highly aggressive, sophisticated and cynical. This massive intrusion has only rarely been challenged from within the education system: more often it has been greeted with either uncritical enthusiasm or by a meek surrender. Let us also not forget that computers are expensive to manufacture, to service and to replace. Like most modern appliances they have a built-in obsolescence which demands constant up-dating - thus a cycle of endless consumption characteristic of our whole industrial system.xiii Nowhere is the lure and hypnotic glamour of the new more apparent than in the relentless proliferation of computers and their attendant gadgetry and software. I will finish with a short scene from Charles Dickens' novel Hard Times one in which his concern over a rigorously utilitarian and information-based education is most forcefully expressed. The scene is set in the classroom of a school devoted to the Gradgrind system of education. Sissy Jupe, a young girl who has spent most of her life in a travelling circus and who has an intimate experience of horses and many other animals, is unable to satisfy Mr Gradgrind's demand for a definition of a horse. The star pupil in the class is a robotic boy named Bitzer who has no direct experience of horses. He is able to supply the necessary definition. It goes this way: 'Quadruped. Gramnivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.' Thus (and much more) Bitzer. 'Now girl number twenty,' said Mr Gradgrind. 'You know what a horse is.' (p.50) This, I think, needs no comment. 8 9 The computer was once well described as "a solution in search of a problem". The computer is all too often a false solution to a real problem or indeed an apparently real solution to a false problem. Our ideas about and attitudes to such technology constitute the real problem. References Beattie, C. (1988). Bell, D. (1985). Berry, W. (1987). Berry, W. (1991) Descartes (1968) Dickens, C. (1969) Evans, N. R. (1980) Guenon, R. (1972) Huppauf, B. (1987) Kuhn, T. (1963) Roszak, T. (1972) Roszak, T. (1986) Schostak, J. (1988) Schumacher, E.F. (1977) Schuon, F. (1974) Sherrard, P. (1987) Sussman, L. (1989) Sworder, R. (1992) Footnotes Packaging Computer Knowledge; the further education classroom. In Schostak, 1988. Gutenberg and the Computer. Encounter, May. Home Economics. San Francisco: North Point Press. What are Humans For? London: Rider. Discourse on Method and The Meditations. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Tr. F.E. Sutcliffe Hard Times. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Ideologies of Anti-Technology. Quadrant, July. The Reign of Quantity. Harmondsworth: Penguin, tr. Lord Northbourne. The Universities in the Grip of the Electronic Age. Meanjin, 42. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Where the Wasteland Ends. New York: Doubleday. The Cult of Information. London: Paladin. Breaking into the Curriculum. London: Methuen. A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Jonathan Cape. No Activity without Truth.The Sword of Gnosis. Harmondsworth: Penguin; ed. J. Needleman. The Rape of Man and Nature. Colombo:The Sri Lanka Institute of Traditional Studies. The Information Revolution. Encounter, November. Are we the Last Academics? [unpublished paper] i 158; quoted in T. Roszak, 1972; pp.157 & 163. ii iii iv Newell and Simon, quoted in T. Roszak, 1986, p.22. J. Naisbitt Megatrends New York: Warner Brothers, 1982; quoted in T. Roszak, 1986, p.35. In particular see The Reign of Quantity Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972; Tr. Lord Northbourne. v Quadrant July 1980 vi vii viii ix x xi John Naisbitt Megatrends quoted in T. Roszak, 1986, p.52. 10 F Bacon Works IV. London: Longmans, 1870; ed. J. Spedding, R.L. Ellis & D.D. Heath; pp.157- (First published in french in 1945.) For a critique of "Ideologies of Anti-Technology" see an article under that title by N.R. Evans in R. Jastrow The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe New York: Simon & Schuster,1984; pp.166-7; quoted in T. Roszak, 1986, p.134. Life, Nov 20, 1970; p.586; quoted in T. Roszak, 1986; pp.144-5. Quoted in E.F. Schumacher, 1977; p.49. Gai Eaton, cited as an epigraph in Tomorrow XII.iii.1964; p.191. Dr Ernest Boyer, President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Learning, "Education's New Challenge"Personal Computing September, 1984; quoted in T. Roszak, 1986; pp.77- 78. xii See B. Huppauf, 1987. xiii See W. Berry, 1991, p.171.
- [Aikido Kotodama](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/aikido-kotodama) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection Kotodama or kototama, literally “word spirit”, is the Japanese name for the subtle power of language sounds and words. It is a central concept in Japanese mythology and Shinto, as well as in Japanese traditional martial arts. Indeed, one of the classical names of Japan is kototama
- [Asma’ Allah al-Husna](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/asmaallah) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection The recitation of the “Most Beautiful Names of God”, usually the 99 Names or Attributes of God, is based on the hadith literature and is a common devotional practice in Islam. According to a hadith narrated by Abd Allah ibn Mas‘ud some of the names of God
- [Om Mani Padme Hum](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/om-mani-padme-hum) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection The six syllables of this, Buddhism’s most famous mantra, are said to contain all the teachings of Buddha. The Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva of India can take on many forms. He can be male or female, and have four, eighteen or up to a thousand arms. No matter what
- [Zhunti Mantra (Cundi Dharani)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/zhunti-mantra-cundi-dharani) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection Zhunti (Sanskrit Cundi: “Extreme Purity”; Japanese Juntei) is a bodhisattva venerated particularly in the Esoteric or Thunderbolt (Vajrayana) Buddhist school. She is known as a bhagavati, or "mother of buddhas", and is often equated with the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, Guanyin in China, who hears the cries of sentient
- [Harmony in Popular Belief and its Relation to Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/harmony-in-popular-belief) - Prof. Cheng Chih-ming Popular belief should be seen as a set of metaphysics, realizing the aspired unity of man with the universe and by doing so establishes the purpose and meaning of human life. Click here to view the PDF Originally published in the journal Inter-Religio, by the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture. Republished
- [Music as Therapy: the analogy between music and medicine in Neoplatonism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/music-as-therapy) - Sebastian F. Moro Tornese The cosmic/metaphysical approach to music transcends the instrumental and results-driven notion of musical therapy and may help to understand musical “catharsis” in terms of the recovery of the primordial harmony of the soul in non-dualistic terms. Click here to view the PDF
- [The Cosmic Womb: Labyrinths and Rebirth in Christian Symbolism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/boss-cosmic-womb-labyrinths) - The descent to the underworld is easy: night and day the door of gloomy Dis stands open; but to recaIl your steps and pass out to the upper air - this is the task, this the toil. (Aeneid VI, 126-129) IN A MONASTERY ON MOUNT ATHOS there is a quite extraordinary icon of the Mother of God. It depicts her legs, discretely veiled, but parted in such a way that the viewer is looking into her body where there is a symbolic representation of the cosmos. The icon is called 'the universe in the womb of the Mother of God'. She who bore in her womb the One through whom all things were made bears within herself a place of incomparable mystery and grandeur. It is within her that the whole of creation is transformed. The argument of this paper is that the labyrinth is the womb, and the rituals associated with labyrinths are rituals of fertilization, conception, gestation and birth. By analogy, the labyrinth is also the place of death and burial, and its rituals those of rebirth to new life. It is the place where heaven and earth meet - a meeting which generates the fruit that is spiritual and eschatological deliverance. This is a widely held understanding of the ancient symbolic meaning of the labyrinth, and it shows the particular suitability of the labyrinth's presence in churches dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, Chartres Cathedral being perhaps the most striking example of such a church. Theseus at Knossos In Western civilization, although the most ancient labyrinth is reputed to be that of Egypt, the archetypal labyrinth is that of Knossos on the island of Crete, known primarily through the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur.1 So many of the details of the Theseus legend are replicated at Chartres that it is worth giving a careful rendering of the legend here. Theseus was the son of Aegeus, king of Athens. His mother was Aethra, daughter of Pittheus, king of Troezen. Theseus was brought up at Troezen, by his mother and in seclusion. 2 When he grew up he went to Athens, where he slew the Marathonian bull which had been terrorizing the Athenian people. Aegeus then acknowledged Theseus as his heir. In Athens, however, all was still not well, due to a dispute that had arisen between Athens and Knossos, the city of Crete. Knossos was the most powerful maritime state in the Mediterranean, and was ruled over by King Minos, son of Zeus and Europa. Homer says that Minos' wisdom and justice were very great, so that after his death he was appointed one of the judges in Hades. Minos' wife was Pasiphae, daughter of Helios and Perse. Now Minos and Pasipha6 had a son, Androgeos, who beat all his opponents in the Panathenaic games at Athens - an annual festival held during August in honour of the goddess Athena. Aegeus was jealous of Androgeos' success and had him assassinated. At least, this was the story that was brought back to Minos in Crete. So Minos imposed a penalty on the Athenians, At Minos' court there was an engineer and inventor, Daedalus, who had designed a structure called the labyrinth. The labyrinth was so designed that if anyone were placed inside it, it would be more or less impossible for them to find their way out without a guide. 3 Daedalus had also invented a wooden cow, in which Pasiphafi had been concealed and in this guise had had sexual intercourse with a bull. In consequence of this she conceived and gave birth to a creature that was part man and part bull - the Minotaur (Greek: Minos + tauros [bull]). The Minotaur inhabited the labyrinth and was so fierce that it would kill any human that fell in its path. Now the tribute that Minos exacted from the Athenians was this: every nine years, seven youths and seven maidens were to be shipped to Knossos. When they arrived, the fourteen, one by one, would be cast into the labyrinth. Since they could not find their way out, they would eventually be caught and slain by the Minotaur. When Theseus arrived in Athens, two tributes had already been paid, and the time for the third was approaching. So Theseus offered himself to be one of the seven youths, saying that he would find a way to slay the Minotaur. Aegeus tried to dissuade his son from this dangerous course of action, but Theseus was resolute, and Aegeus eventually consented. The ship taking the maidens and youths to Knossos usually sailed under a black sail, so Aegeus told Theseus that if he were successful in his endeavour, then he should return to Athens under a white sail instead. So Theseus sailed to Knossos, where he met Ariadne, the fair-haired daughter of Minos and Pasipha6. Daedalus had made a dance-floor for her, and on the floor was the design of the Egyptian labyrinth, a magnificent sacred site which included burial places. 4 Ariadne fell in love with Theseus, and the two conspired together in such a way that Ariadne gave Theseus a sword with which to slay the Minotaur, and a thread - a clew - of which one end should be fastened to the entrance to the labyrinth, and the rest held in Theseus' hand, so that as he proceeded through the labyrinth, the thread would unwind and he would be able to follow it back out in order to escape. So when Theseus was sent into the labyrinth, he engaged in a great combat with the Minotaur and killed him, and then followed the clew back out again. He freed the other Athenian youths and maidens, and gained possession of the ship. All of them, together with Ariadne, then set sail for Athens. On the journey home, the party stopped at numerous islands, where they celebrated their victory with song and dance. One of these islands was Delos. Now Delos was a sacred island, because it was the birthplace of the god Apollo and the goddess Artemis, who were twins. The island had once been drifting, but Zeus had anchored it so that Apollo's and Artemis' mother Leto could give birth there. Artemis was born first and acted as midwife the next day at the birth of her brother Apollo. Artemis slew she-goats and Apollo made an altar with their horns, and the altar was said to be one of the seven wonders of the world because it was made without mortar. The sanctity of the island was such that no mortals were allowed to be born or to die there, although it was said that seven virgins had been buried there. When Theseus and his company arrived on Delos, they performed a dance there - the geranos, or 'crane dance' (so called, perhaps, because it may have imitated the mating dance of cranes). It was said that this dance mimicked the threading of the labyrinth. It was also said that prior to this, men and women had always danced separately, and that this was the first occasion on which they danced together. The company also sailed to Naxos, where Theseus left Ariadne behind. Theseus and the other youths and maidens returned to Athens, but Theseus failed to change the sail on their ship. So when Aegeus saw the black sail in the distance, he assumed his son to be dead and drowned himself in the sea, which is why it is called the Aegean Sea. Theseus thus returned to be king of Athens. This legend has been used again and again by Christians, especially in association with the construction of labyrinths in churches. Usually, these images make the obvious symbolic association between Theseus' destruction of the Minotaur and Christ's triumph over Satan, but they often involve more detailed and evocative symbolism of rebirth after death. Christian labyrinths Christians have placed labyrinths in churches from antiquity. The oldest is probably the pavement labyrinth at the church of Reparata in Orleansville, Algiers, which may date from as far back as the fourth century. The labyrinth is a square construction, with a single pathway arranged into four quarters. At its centre is a square containing a sort of word-game using the words sancta ecclesia -'holy church' .5 Most of the church labyrinths, however, were constructed during the Middle Ages, and several of these make explicit reference to Theseus and the Minotaur. On the wall of Lucca Cathedral, for example, is a small disc-shaped labyrinth, consisting of eleven circuits and with the following inscription facing the 'entrance way': Hic quem Creticus edit Daedalus est laberinthus, de quo nullus vadere quivit qui fuit intus, ni Theseus gratis Ariadne stamine jutus. 6 Roughly translated, this means: 'This which the Cretan Daedalus built is the labyrinth, from which none who entered would ever leave, were it not for Theseus who was aided thanks to Ariadne's thread.' In the church of San Michele Maggiore in Pavia there is likewise a small, circular, wall labyrinth, possibly from the tenth century. At its centre is a picture of Theseus slaying the Minotaur (who is shown as half- man and half-bull), with the inscription: Teseus intravit monstrumque biforme necavit, i.e., 'Theseus entered and killed the double-formed monster.' Next to the labyrinth there is a representation of the contest between David and Goliath. 7 Since David's slaying of Goliath must be intended as a type of Christ's overcoming Satan and the powers of evil, it is reasonable to assume that the image of Theseus and the Minotaur is to be understood as a pagan type of the same Christian drama. At the centre of two of these labyrinths, then, is a symbol of salvation: the Church, and the overcoming of evil. The centrepiece of the Lucca labyrinth no longer survives, but the inscription suggests that the labyrinth stands for a place of imprisonment and death - either Hell or this world - and that Theseus should again be understood as a type of Christ who has liberated the world from that imprisonment. In some mediaeval authors, the number eleven - the number of circuits of the labyrinth -is symbolic of this world in its unredeemed state, since it exceeds the number of the Mosaic commandments and is just short of the number twelve, which is one of the perfect numbers. 8 That Theseus is assisted by Ariadne may be a figure for the co-operation of Our Lady in the work of redemption, since she gave the Saviour his humanity and thus provided the thread by which Heaven united itself to Earth and thus secured its redemption. In the great Gothic cathedral of Amiens, the original labyrinth -which was laid in the floor of the nave during the thirteenth century but largely destroyed at the French Revolution -bore the inscription Maison dedalus, or 'Daedalus house'. 9 This designation seems intended to point to the genius of the cathedral architects, since together with this naming of the master engineer of antiquity, at the centre of the labyrinth there were (and are again, since it has been restored) representations of the bishop who commissioned the cathedral's construction and of the three architects who oversaw its execution. So the figures at the centre of the labyrinth are now human, rather than other-worldly. This shift corresponds to the new confidence and interest in human powers that were a strong feature of cultural developments during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and which are admirably attested to in the remarkable construction of Gothic cathedrals such as Amiens. 1¡ Yet these buildings were intended in some way to represent Heaven on Earth, and most details of their construction are intended to turn the mind to that which is eternal and unchanging. This labyrinth, for example, is octagonal. The octagon had been used for Christian sepulchres - the sites from which the elect will rise to glory - and for churches commemorating the site at which a unique exchange between Heaven and Earth had taken place. The fifth-century Tomb of the Virgin in Jerusalem, for example, was octagonal; likewise the fourth-century shrine of the Ascension at the Mount of Olives and the ancient sanctuary of the Church of the Holy Nativity at Bethlehem. 11 The Tomb of the virgin may be a significant reference point for the labyrinth at Amiens, because the cathedral is dedicated to the Assumption; and the four human figures in the stone at the centre originally rested between the arms of an inlaid copper cross of whose east-west axis it was said that if it were extended sufficiently it would coincide with the point at which the sun rises (or rose) on 15 August, the feast of the Assumption. The cross - the instrument and symbol of redemption "thus pointed to the ascent into Heaven of her who had passed through this earthly life (signified by the labyrinth) and the tomb (signified by its octagonal shape), and is now united with Christ, of whom the sun is a primary emblem. Chartres Cathedral The most well known labyrinth in a Christian church is almost certainly that at Chartres Cathedral in northern France, which, as at Amiens, is an enormous pavement (about 40 feet in diameter) set in the floor of the nave. Again as at Amiens, the church is dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin; and indeed, it is impossible to understand much at all about the construction and decoration of Chartres without reference to Catholic teaching about Our Lady. The almost circular shape of the labyrinth may itself be a reference to the Virgin's tomb, since during the Middle Ages there was a gradual shift from octagonal to circular buildings to represent ancient sepulchres. Round buildings are especially associated with Marian dedications. 12 Birth and eternity The doctrine of the Assumption holds that the Blessed Virgin was taken body and soul to Heaven, so that she did not endure any bodily corruption in the grave. In honour of this, burials have always been forbidden within Chartres Cathedral: just as Our Lady's body knew no decay, so no other bodies should decay in her palace. This may call to Labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral drawn by J. Gailhaband (1858) Reproduced from Matthews: Mazes and Labyrinths, fig. 47 mind the prohibition on birth and death on the island of Delos (except, of course, for the seven virgins!) - the island on which the dance of 'threading the labyrinth' was first performed. And the story of this first labyrinth dance on Delos seems to contain a paradox: for a dance which is noted for its bringing together the two sexes might well be understood to be concerned with fertility and procreation; yet the sanctity of the island of Delos - on which was born the virgin Artemis - was such that childbearing was not permitted on it. A not dissimilar paradox exists in Christian tradition, which holds on the one hand that the Blessed Virgin was the human mother of Christ, and in many places has regarded her as the special protectress of women in childbirth, yet on the other hand maintains that she was perpetually a virgin and that she is the special protectress of those whose lives are vowed to virginity. So let us unravel this paradox a little. Virginity is frequently associated with fertility. The rationale behind this seems to be the idea that fertility is something of which one is, as it were, endowed with a certain quantity, and that a portion of this original fertility is used up each time one generates a new life. In the case of soil, it is evident that the growth of certain plants does indeed deplete its store of nutrition, so that its fertility is reduced. Thus, virgin land is the most fertile. A similar principle has often been applied in thinking about humanity, so that the virgin woman is perceived to have a full measure of fecundity, a3 The association between virginity and fertility in the mythology of labyrinths, however, is more complex than this. The labyrinth seems since ancient times to be associated with fertility. A wine pitcher, made in Etruria about 620 BC, was found in an Etruscan tomb at Tragliatella. 14 Its decoration (to which we shall return below) includes a drawing of a labyrinth, of the type found on ancient Cretan coins, and next to it two depictions of a man and woman copulating. Scandinavian labyrinths, made of stones set on the ground, are usually also of the Cretan type. They are often called 'Troy towns', but in some cases were also known as 'maiden's dances', apparently because of a ritual dance in which a young woman would stand at the centre of the structure whilst young men would process through it. 15 On the basis of comparisons with other customs, modern authors have speculated that this practice had its origin in ancient springtime rituals. Perhaps this invites the question as to what was the dance that Ariadne performed on her labyrinthine dance-floor. In parts of India, labyrinth designs of the 'Cretan' type have traditionally been used in procedures for easing the pains of women in labour -a practice that seems to be connected to the idea that the Coin from Knossos, c.300 BC From Aidan Meehan: Maze Patterns, fig.35 labyrinth represents the womb. 16 As with the European examples, this shows a connection between the labyrinth and procreation; but it also suggests a connection between fecundity and heaven, since rebirth from the womb is a motif that is sometimes used to describe the passage of a deceased person from death to new life. In Christianity, the resurrection of the elect has on occasions been articulated precisely as the rebirth of the Christian from the womb of the Mother of God. Thus, a Visigothic prayer book addresses her in the following words: Chakra-vygth Illustration from a modem book of Indian rituals. It accompanies a text for the easing of labour pains. From Kern: Through the Labyrinth, fig.631 Receive your people's requests ... so that, welcoming into your maternal womb all those who, exiles on the journey of life, take refuge in you with certain hope, you may present them, saved, to the Lord Jesus Christ, your son. 17 The same idea seems implied in the famous painting of the pregnant Virgin by Piero della Francesca. This standing figure of the Godbearer, who holds herself majestically between curtains parted by angels, was painted for the cemetery where the artist's mother was buffed. So Piero painted the Mother of God as a gift for his own mother, and suggested in a visual image that those who have put on Christ in baptism - or, as we say in English, have been 'christened' -are waiting in the belly of the earth for rebirth in Christ at the Resurrection. Now, one of the characteristic features of the heavenly state is that it is without time. In heaven there is the quality of eternity: things do not change. In contrast to this, conception and birth are part of the world of flux and transition; so virginity, as the opposite of this, signifies the transcending of time in eternity. It is sometimes claimed of virgin saints that their bodies have been miraculously preserved from decay, as was that of the Virgin Mary. In the passage from this world to heaven, therefore, there is both rebirth - the blossoming of seed that was sown in the world of change -and the realization of the perfect peace of eternity. In the Virgin Mary, these qualities of earthly fruitfulness and heavenliness are simultaneously present in her motherhood and her virginity. In her palace of Chartres Cathedral, the labyrinth is the pathway of this world in which the Christian soul is nourished and grows within the womb of the Church, whilst the dedication to the Assumption and the absence of death represents the heavenly state into which body and soul will eventually emerge, like a butterfly that breaks out of its chrysalis and into the light of day. Indeed, the building is itself intended to be an icon of heaven on earth. For example, the sacred numbers seven and nine are incorporated over and over again in the building's construction. 18 These numbers, of course, occur in the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur; but that reference is overpowered by the significance which the numbers bear in Christianity. Seven is the perfect number of the days of creation, whilst nine is the number of the Blessed Trinity multiplied by itself. 19 At Chartres, there are seven bays across the transepts and seven chapels in the apse. There are nine doorways, and it is likely that in the original plan for the cathedral it was intended to build nine towers. Calculations of the geometry of the floor plan suggest that the aisles and nave are composed of sixty-three rectangles. And so on. So the labyrinth is a place of change and growth within the assurance of fulfilment and final perfection. Making the transition In the light of what has gone above, it will not be surprising to learn that labyrinths have a particular association with death, funerals and the safe deliverance of the soul to the afterlife. This 'safe deliverance' may be understood as analogous either to the delivery of a child from the womb to the outside world, or else to the deliverance of a labouring mother from a time of great danger. More probably, both references should be taken together. 2¡ In Book V of the Aeneid, Virgil records that Aeneas escaped from Troy carrying his father and leading his son Iulus, or Jules. Jules and his friends then take part in an activity called 'the game of Troy'. This was performed in Italy, and Romans said that it had been introduced there by Aeneas. It was a processional dance, or parade, with some participants on horseback. Virgil compares the movement of the dance to the movement of the labyrinth: it is intricate, and easy for the dancer to make a mistake. The wine pitcher from the tomb near Tragliatella depicts not only the copulating couples and the labyrinth, but also a military-looking procession, including riders on horseback, and the inscription 'Truia'. Other Roman authors report that the 'game of Troy' was performed at funerals, around graves. The precise significance of the labyrinth in this regard is strongly suggested by another passage from the Aeneid, this time from Book VI. Here, we learn of Aeneas' arrival at Cumae, facing Crete. It is said that Daedalus made himself wings and flew here from Crete. When he arrived, he built a temple to Apollo, on the doors of which was depicted the death of Androgeos and the Athenian tribute. The passage recalls the Minotaur and the thread - itself contrived by Daedalus. At a cavern by the temple there is a sibyl, a prophetess inspired by Apollo. Aeneas consults her, because he wants to visit his now dead father. He appeals to her for help, and in reply she says: The descent to the underworld is easy: night and day the door of gloomy Dis stands open; but to recall your steps and pass out to the upper air - this is the task, this the toil! [Lines 126-129] The sibyl says that this re-emergence from 'gloomy Dis' is only for a few - for those whom Jupiter has taken to heaven. And this indeed is the central point about the labyrinth: it is a place of entrapment and potential escape. The escape comes by supernatural help, or with the assistance of the right execution of the steps of an elaborate dance. It is possible that the original construction of the labyrinth was precisely in the form of a dance floor, like Ariadne's. The pathway of the labyrinth may at root be the mapping out of the path of a processional dance. 21 At the cathedrals of Anxerre and Sens in the late Middle Ages, a dance around the labyrinth would be performed on Easter day. 22 The date of the dance suggests that its significance was related to that suggested in the passage from Virgil, namely, the escape from the underworld and re-emergence to the light of day. In this case, of course, that escape and re-emergence are the Harrowing of Hell and Resurrection of Christ, which constitute the final defeat of the powers of the Minotaur and the potential liberation of the whole world from the labyrinth of death. The movement through the labyrinth, and from one world to another, is most likely at the foundation of all labyrinth traditions. The observant reader may have noticed that a number of place names mentioned in connection with labyrinths begin with the letters 'Tr': Troezen, Troy and Tragliatella. 'Tr' seems to be an Indo-European root in words to do with movement across. 23 All the words containing the Latin trans are in this class, together with 'tradition' ('handing on') and such English words as 'tread', 'trample' and 'trip'. The game of Troy is concerned with movement from a place of danger to one of safety - that is to say, with deliverance or salvation. The Virgin and Child According to Christianity, salvation is possible because the Word of God crossed over the boundary between Creator and creature and became a human being. By that act, the way between heaven and earth was opened up, so that creatures can receive the grace to be divinized - transformed into a state of heavenly glory. This union of God and creation occurred in the conception of Christ in the womb of his mother Mary, and so her womb is the prototypical and uniquely privileged place of exchange between heaven and earth. In the crypt of Chartres Cathedral there has been a shrine of the Virgin Mary since time immemorial. It is the site of a holy well, and romantic tradition holds that even before the advent of Christianity the place was prophetically held sacred to the Virgo paritura, the 'Virgin who will give birth' .24 The present church building, constructed at the turn of the thirteenth century, is built in such a way that the whole construction is founded and focused upon the more ancient crypt. 25 Before it was destroyed at the French Revolution, a Romanesque statue of the Virgin in Majesty held pride of place in the crypt chapel, and there is now a modern copy in the same place. The statue shows the Christchild enthroned on his mother's lap, and the Virgin enthroned as queen of heaven and earth. The image of Christ is intended to depict him as God incarnate. In his left hand he holds a globe representing the cosmos, and with his right hand he raises his fingers in blessing - both gestures indicating his divine status. But at the same time, he is only a child on his mother's lap, and he has bare feet - both attributes which signify his humanity. 26 His mother, on the other hand, was only a human woman, and yet she was depicted enthroned and crowned as Queen of Heaven; because by giving the Son of God his humanity, she co-operated in a uniquely important manner in the work of salvation and is honoured with the paradoxical title of 'Mother of God'. Thus the incarnation of God and the corresponding glorification of humanity are depicted in a single image representing the single mystery in which the crossing between heaven and earth, in both directions, is accomplished. In Christ, God unites himself to the whole created order and thus sanctifies it and makes possible its deliverance from death and destruction. For Christians, then, the labyrinth-womb is the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, by whom the whole universe is redeemed from death in order to come to rebirth in Christ. Sarah Jane Boss is Director of the Centre for Marian Studies at the Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology, Cambridge, and Executive Editor of The Way. NOTES 1 The story of Theseus and the Minotaur occurs in a number of versions and has been re-told many times. The principle Classical source for the story is Plutarch's Lives, written during the first century. For English accounts, see W. H. Matthews, Mazes and labyrinths: their histo?'y and development (New York: Dover Publications, 1970 [London, 1922]), pp 17-22; Hermann Kern, Through the labyrinth: designs and meanings over 5,000 years (Munich, London and New York: Prestel, 2000)4 pp 41--42. 2 That Theseus was brought up by his mother away from civilization is an interesting detail, because it occurs in other stories of heroesl It is told, for example, of Parsifal (Wolfram yon Eschenbach, Parzival, translated by A. T. Hatto [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980]), and likewise of Parsifal's British counterpart Peredur (G. Jones and T. Jones [trans], The Mabinogion [London: Dent (Everyman Library), 1949], pp 183=227). It seems worth considering whether the strong Mediaeval and Renaissance interest Christ's relationship with his mother Mary may not have been connected to this wider cultural background. 3 Most visual representations of labyrinths - from ancient Crete until the Middle Ages - show them to have a single pathway snaking inwards and outwards from the outside to the centre. Technically, therefore, it should be possible to find one's way out. Kern argues that this is the 'original form' of the labyrinth, and that other forms, such as pathways that have blind alleys, or key patterns, are not strictly 'labyrinths'. He and some other authors designate pathways with blind alleys (such as that at Hampton Court) 'mazes', and make a clear distinction between the two forms of the labyrinth and the maze. This distinction may have a certain functional advantage for the student of mazes and labyrinths, but from a historical point of view it seems artificial. There is no good reason for assuming that there was ever some single 'original form' signified by the word 'labyrinth', and in English usage, the word 'maze' (cognate with 'amaze' - i.e., a place where you are astonished and puzzled) has generally been used interchangeably with 'labyrinth' (a word known from Greek authors, but whose origin is disputed). Notwithstanding the simplicity of the single-pathway labyrinth, walking along such a path is very disorientating. 4 Matthews, Mazes and labyrinths, pp 1-16. 5 Matthews, Mazes and labyrinths, pp 54-55; Kern, Through the labyrinth, p 88 and other refs. 6 Matthews, Mazes and labyrinths, pp 55-57; Kern, Through the labyrinth, p 156. 7 Matthews, Mazes and labyrinths, p 56; Kern, Through the labyrinth, pp 157-158. 8 Kern, Through the labyrinth, p 144. Kern cites Hincmar of Rheims (ninth century) in support of this claim. 9 Kern, Through the labyrinth, pp 149-150. 10 See, for example, Jean Gimpel, The cathedral builders, translated by T. Waugh (Salisbury, Wilts: Michael Russell, 1983). A more spiritual interpretation of the splendours of Gothic architecture is given in Otto von Simson, The Gothic cathedral: the origins of Gothic architecture and the medieval concept of order (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956). 11 Christian Sapin, 'L'origine des rotondes mariales des IXe-XIe siecles et le cas de Saint- Germain-d'Auxerre', in D. Iogna-Prat, et aL, Marie: Le culte de la vierge dans la societe medievale (Paris: Beauchesne, 1996), pp 295-312. 12 Mary Clayton, The cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp 137-138. 13 For an explanation of how this is applied to the Virgin Mary in the writing of Nicholas of Cusa, see Sarah Jane Boss, Empress and handmaid: on nature and gender in the cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Cassell, 2000), pp 188-189. 14 A description, photograph and line drawing are given in Kern, Through the labyrinth, pp 78-82. 15 Kern, Through the labyrinth, p 268. 16 Kern, Through the labyrinth, p 294. 17 Costante Berselli and Giorgio Gharib (eds), In praise of Mary: hymns from the first millennium of the Eastern and Western churches, translated by Phil Jenkins (Slough: St Paul Publications, 1981), p 64. 18 John James, Chartres: the masons who built a legend (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), pp 101-102. 19 James believes that these numbers had particular Marian significance, Chartres, p 84 and elsewhere. 20 Cf. Sarah Jane Boss, 'Guardians of the way', in Martin Warner (ed), Say yes to God: Mary and the revealing of the Word made flesh (London: Tufton Books, 1999), pp 95-122. 21 Kern, Through the labyrinth, p 25. 22 Kern, Through the labyrinth, pp 146-147. 23 AidanMeehan, Maze patterns (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993),pp 95-96. 24 Y. Delaporte, Les trois Notre-Dame de la Cathddrale de Chartres (Chartres: E. Houvet, 1955), pp 9-11. 25 James, Chartres, p 154. 26 A brief discussion of this type of iconography is given in Boss, Empress and handmaid, pp 26-36. A full discussion of the Romanesque Virgin in Majesty is given in Ilene Forsyth, The throne of wisdom: wood sculptures of the Madonna in Romanesque France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972).
- [Faith, Doubt and Questioning (Video)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/faith-doubt-and-questioning-video) - Metropolitan Anthony Bloom “We must be honest with God and with ourselves. God does not want to be surrounded by credulous people but by people who know Him enough to trust Him at times beyond the limits of their knowledge.” Recorded 4 October 2001. Transcript (click here) and subsequent talks are available from the Metropolitan
- [Rediscovering God (audio)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/rediscovering-god-audio) - Rupert Sheldrake The mind of God would be a mind that transcends nature, which is within nature and also transcends nature, like our own minds are within our bodies but they also transcend them… our minds transcend our physical bodies through time. Rediscovering God Click here to download – 58:40 (56.3MB) Questions and Answers Click here
- [Ubi Caritas](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/ubi-caritas) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection “Ubi caritas” is a hymn of the Western Church, long used as one of the antiphons for the washing of feet on Maundy Thursday. The Gregorian melody was composed sometime between the fourth and tenth centuries, though some scholars believe the text dates from early Christian gatherings
- [The Yoga of Hesychasm](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/yoga-of-hesychasm) - I must begin with a few words of caution. This article is meant to cast light on a short mystical poem, “The Ladder of Divine Graces” by Theophanis the Monk. We know very little about Theophanis, not even when he lived. All we are sure of is that he was a monastic of the Christian East, one among the monks of Mounts Athos and Sinai, whose quest towards hesychia or stillness has given rise to their designation as the Hesychast Fathers. Here is where a first warning comes in. Nothing I shall be saying is going to make the slightest sense unless my reader understands at the outset that for Theophanis Christianity is a mystagogical path, a way toward what is. It is not a creed, it is not a rite, and it is not an ethic. Or rather, while it includes all these things on the surface, in its essence it is the means of our becoming Divine. A second caveat has to do with the expectations one brings to these brief remarks. We need to be modest. Into these seventy-one lines of verse are distilled over a thousand years of spiritual teaching and ascetic discipline. The poem contains what amounts to an alchemical tincture, very concentrated and very potent, and my hope is simply to offer a taste of the resulting elixir. There is no question of providing an exhaustive interpretation of this tradition. I wish only to highlight a few salient ideas, while underscoring the poet’s own repeated stress on experience. Experience teaches one, he says, not words. Whatever else, the author means to prick the conscience of anyone who supposes that doctrine can stand alone without method, theory without practice. We need the effectual means of liberation supplied by a genuine yoga. I have mentioned how little is known of this writer. This fact is a great blessing, of course. By providing the ready excuse of necessity, it permits us cheerfully to dispense with that whole apparatus of biographical and other horizontal detail that so often intrudes between a text and its interpreters. My only concession to the usual academic procedure is to admit that “The Ladder” can be found in the third volume of The Philokalia, a classic compilation of Christian mystical writings ranging from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries. Beyond that, I would ask that one think of “Theophanis” strictly as a symbol for the spiritual search, and of his poem as but a provocation for entering the Supreme Reality. The Ladder of Divine Graces which experience has made known to those inspired by God The first step is that of purest prayer. From this there comes a warmth of heart, And then a strange, a holy energy, Then tears wrung from the heart, God-given. The Matheson Trust Then peace from thoughts of every kind. From this arises purging of the intellect, And next the vision of heavenly mysteries. Unheard-of light is born from this ineffably, And thence, beyond all telling, the heart's illumination. Last comes—a step that has no limit Though compassed in a single line— Perfection that is endless. The ladder's lowest step Prescribes pure prayer alone. But prayer has many forms: My discourse would be long Were I now to speak of them: And, friend, know that always Experience teaches one, not words. A ladder rising wondrously to heaven's vault: Ten steps that strangely vivify the soul. Ten steps that herald the soul's life. A saint inspired by God has said: Do not deceive yourself with idle hopes That in the world to come you will find life If you have not tried to find it in this present world. Ten steps: a wisdom born of God. Ten steps: fruit of all the books. Ten steps that point towards perfection. Ten steps that lead one up to heaven. Ten steps through which a man knows God. The ladder may seem short indeed, But if your heart can inwardly experience it You will find a wealth the world cannot contain, A god-like fountain flowing with unheard-of life. This ten-graced ladder is the best of masters, Clearly teaching each to know its stages. If when you behold it You think you stand securely on it, Ask yourself on which step you stand, So that we, the indolent, may also profit. My friend, if you want to learn about all this, Detach yourself from everything, From what is senseless, from what seems intelligent. Without detachment nothing can be learnt. Experience alone can teach these things, not talk. Even if these words once said By one of God's elect strike harshly, I repeat them to remind you: He who has no foothold on this ladder, Who does not ponder always on these things, When he comes to die will know Terrible fear, terrible dread, Will be full of boundless panic. My lines end on a note of terror. Yet it is good that this is so: Those who are hard of heart—myself the first— Are led to repentance, led to a holy life, Less by the lure of blessings promised Than by fearful warnings that inspire dread. “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” You who have written this, hear, then, and take note: Void of all these graces, How have you dared to write such things? How do you not shudder to expound them? Have you not heard what Uzzah suffered When he tried to stop God's ark from falling? Do not think that I speak as one who teaches: I speak as one whose words condemn himself, Knowing the rewards awaiting those who strive, Knowing my utter fruitlessness. As my readers will have noticed, the text falls naturally into several distinct parts. First, there is a labeling of the ten steps of the ladder; second, an emphasis on the special importance of the initial step, purity in prayer; third, a listing of the ladder’s benefits; fourth, a request for assistance from persons further advanced than the author; fifth, stern counsel for those who are just beginning, together with a justification for this severity; and sixth, the author’s concluding self-reproach and effacement. An entire article could be written on any one of these headings. What I shall do here is to concentrate on the meaning of the ten steps themselves, adding then a few broader strokes concerning the rest of the poem. First, though, just a word or two concerning the title. In a sense, the title of this poem says it all: The Ladder of Divine Graces. The man who seeks union with God must understand before he even begins his search that synergy or cooperation is the key to his movement, a cooperation between human effort and Divine mercy. A ladder must be climbed, and the climbing is accomplished one step at a time. The spiritual life demands real work, real movement, real discipline, which proceeds methodically and incrementally. It is dangerous, says Plato, to go too quickly from the many to the One, and the Hesychast tradition takes account of this fact in distrusting ecstasies and consolations not grounded in method. On the other hand, one must not forget that man’s climbing is not only toward God; it is in and by God. Each of the rungs of the ladder is a gift or a grace, a real and efficacious presence of the Goal in the very midst of the way. True spirituality is not Pelagian, not a self-help technique. “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for God is at work within you” (Phil. 2:12- 13). The subtitle confirms this synergy. The authority of the poem’s teaching is at once human and Divine. On one level it is a matter of embodied truth. What we are about to be told is no rarified speculation, concocted by some spiritual dreamer whose claims are untestable. It comes instead rooted in the concrete, the practical, the immediate, and it leads beyond mere credulity or acceptance to certainty. Notice that experience has made the ladder known. But at the same time, the knowledge is thanks to God, who has mercifully condescended to those inspired by Him. We should be grateful. Authentic wisdom is never man’s alone, an accomplishment or achievement for which he can take credit. The wisdom born of God is to know that God knows Himself in us. Turning now to the poem itself, one observes that each of the ten steps of the ladder can be distinguished by a single noun. The journey passes through the several stages of prayer, heart, energy, tears, peace, purging, vision, light, illumination, and perfection. But the nouns in each case are to be specified by adjectives. It is not just any prayer, but purest prayer that counts; not just any heart, but a warm one. So also we note that the energy is holy, the tears are God-given, the peace is mental, the purging is intellective, the vision is mystical, the light is ineffable, the illumination is cardiac, and the perfection is endless. “Theophanis” is careful to stress that the prayer of step one is of a most particular kind. Prayer may include but is more than a collection of petitions and praises, whether private or public, spoken or silent, personal or canonical. In its purest form, it is an imageless attention to the Divine presence, ontologically rather than discursively linked to its object, and often supported by the repetition of a short invocatory formula like the Jesus Prayer. Please note that the attention of this opening step is itself a highly advanced spiritual state, presupposing a background not even hinted at in the poem. Our exposition of the text obliges us to begin at a point far beyond what most of us may be ready for. Quintessential prayer is the bottom rung of a ladder that must first be set on a living sacramental foundation, and its scaling assumes a deliberate and extensive propaedeutic under the guidance of a spiritual father. The Christian mystical tradition knows very well that individual initiatives and exploits are always ruinous in the contemplative life. Hence the author’s deference, in the lines below, to his own elders and betters: to a saint inspired by God and to one of God’s elect. Were a man granted the grace of this first step—were those of us writing and reading this article truly prepared to go further—it would soon be discovered that true prayer is a transformative power, which begins to work its magic within the tissues of the human body itself. This is noticed initially, the Hesychasts teach, in that central part of the body, the heart,where pure consciousness dwells, and the most common signal of change is a sensation of warmth. Warmth, like the heart, is no metaphor. Something really begins to happen in the breast. One could say that it happens in and to the four-chambered beating muscle if the concern is to stress, as one must, the material actuality of the process. But at the same time, the warmth comes as proof that our true heart was always more than its concealment in matter, more than just a physical pump. In either case, the ladder brings the whole man into play. The body is not left behind in our approach to full union, but is lifted up and drawn into its Divine prototype. Heaven is more, not less, solid than earth. And then a strange, a holy energy. What was true at first for the central organ alone gradually makes itself felt throughout the entire human organism. A centrifugal radiation of power begins now to course outward through the various envelopes of the self. Energy is a technical term in this context. Western philosophy is accustomed to a distinction between form and matter. Energy is the third that connects these two, the living and interior pulse through which essence communicates itself as substance. If we picture what a thing is as a center and how it appears as a sphere, then the radii are an image of its energy. God too has His own kind of energy, the effective and salvific presence of the Transcendent in the domain of the immanent. “Theophanis” is certainly no pantheist: the Divine Essence remains like an asymptote forever beyond our aspiration as creatures. Nevertheless we may participate fully in the Divine Substance and come to share in God’s powers through an assimilation of His holy energies. The nexus of this exchange is man’s heart, an exchange which begins when our own center moves toward coincidence with the center of God. Tears, the fourth step, are a mark of this concentrical shift. Not just any tears, however: only those that are God-given. It is very important that we not confuse the “gift of tears”, as it is sometimes called, with ordinary sorrow or grief. Climbing the ladder means mastering the passions, including the self-pity, resentment, and anger which sometimes express themselves in crying. We are to become objective toward our ego, no longer controlled by its sentimental involvement in the shifting play of the world. Detach yourself from everything, says “Theophanis”. For without detachment nothing can be learnt. The tears of the ladder are not tears of selfish regret or refusal. On the contrary, they are the natural result of the ego’s liquefaction. As the radiant energy of God carries the heart’s warmth forward through the rest of our organism, the many layers of ice begin melting. We become the warm, soft water of our tears. The warmth is our fervor and longing for God; the softness is our yielding to the Divine influx; the water is the power of our new-found passivity. The next pair of steps may be usefully treated as one, for they are two sides of a single coin: peace from thoughts and purging of the intellect. Notice that the peace is from thoughts of every kind. This is no power of positive thinking, which would simply replace bad or debilitating conceptions with good ones. The Hesychast follows a path leading beyond conception as such. By thoughts he means any product of discursive mentation, any recording of the impressions of sense and any abstraction therefrom or combination thereof. He knows that our waking life is dominated by the mental chatter that comes from the jostling and sorting of these impressions, images, ideas, and feelings, and that our so-called waking is therefore truly a dreaming. We are never simply now in the present, so fully occupied is our mind by the memory of what was and the idle hopes of what will be. Against all of this must be placed an altogether different quality of attention, superintended by what the Christian East calls the nous or intellect. Unlike discursive thinking, which proceeds sequentially with the information it has gleaned from the surface of things, the intellective or noetic faculty goes straight to their core, contemplating the inner logoi or essences of creatures by direct apprehension. Present in all of us but dormant in most, the intellect is first awakened and set into motion by the efforts of prayer and ascetic discipline. Once purged of the encrusting dross which surrounds it, the noetic faculty becomes in turn a purging or purifying force of its own. Cutting through the veils of forgetfulness and piercing to the world’s very marrow, it there discovers by recollection its own inward content. “For, behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21). “Theophanis” has incorporated within his own ten-fold sequence a more common and better known distinction among three basic stages in the spiritual life: purification, illumination, and union. The first of these has been the subject of the poem to this point, beginning with purest prayer in step one and culminating with the purging of the intellect in step six. His aim has been to describe the indispensable initial work of repentance, a negative movement away from illusion and death. Now we begin glimpsing the positive results of that work, for the next three steps are all concerned in some way with vision and light, and thus with the second fundamental stage of illumination. There is a vision of heavenly mysteries, next the perception of unheard-of light, and then the illumination of the heart itself. Now please understand, the mysteries which “Theophanis” has in view are not secret facts or formulas, nor is the fruit of his path a knowledge of celestial statistics. If one were foolish enough to be interested in dating the end of the world or in the names and properties of discarnate masters or in how many lives one might have lived before now—or in any of the other bits and pieces of occult information so often dangled before the curious and restless seekers of our day—one would have to go elsewhere. “Theophanis” has counseled detachment not only from what is senseless but from what seems intelligent, and this latter category doubtless includes much of what passes for spirituality in this so-called new age. He knows that a true mystery by definition exceeds the form of data, no matter how peculiar or enticing those data might be. The inner is always inner even in the midst of our seeing it. Etymology is important here: the term mystery comes from the Greek verb muo, which refers to a closing or shutting of the eyes and mouth. The vision of mysteries remains therefore a vision of mysteries, of realities which continue to elude even the innermost modalities of sensation and which cannot be adequately conveyed by any language. I might add that the Eastern Christian tradition regularly uses the term mysteries to refer to its sacraments, especially the Eucharist. We are thus reminded that the spiritual ladder must be firmly positioned on a living faith before we even consider ascending it. Whatever it is that one noetically envisions, the Hesychasts are unanimous about its being bathed in an extraordinary light. Indeed, the doctrine of the uncreated light is characteristic of their teaching. Once again we are using more than a metaphor. It is said that the light in question is objectively real, its model being the light of Christ’s transfiguration on Mount Tabor, when “His face shone as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light” (Matt. 17:2). Being born from one’s vision ineffably, this dazzling darkness eclipses all description. And yet it is truly present, suffusing creation with the radiance of God, a sort of visible band in the spectrum of His holy energy. Intimately tied to our transformed perception of this light all about us, says our poet, there will come next a corresponding and complementary illumination within. Beyond all telling, this ninth step of the ladder admits man to a degree of Divine participation where he himself begins to shine with Christ’s glory. True to the maxim that like can be known only by like, the Hesychast strives by grace toward the moment when the body, now thoroughly steeped in God, bears witness in its own substance to the realities it has seen. The iconographical tradition of the halo or nimbus is no pious extravagance. Had we the eyes to see, we would realize that the true saint shines like the heaven he is. And yet heaven is not enough. Heaven is a prison for the Sufi, say the mystics of Islam, for who wants the garden when there is also the Gardener? “Theophanis” agrees. There is more than illumination in the spiritual journey. We are not to rest satisfied with a contemplation of the splendor of God, nor with an appreciative spectator’s place in the Divine proximity, however joyful and permanent. A tenth step remains: a coinherence or union with the Supreme Reality itself. For as the Hesychast sees it, the only truly endless perfection is the perfection of what is intrinsically endless or infinite, namely, God. It is therefore into this Infinite that human nature will eventually be drawn at the very top of the ladder. Like God Himself, the top rung has no limit, even though its description may be compassed in a single line. The end of the way is in fact the beginning of an immeasurable advance into the Love that loves Love and in Love all things. Those of my readers who are familiar with Eastern Christian theology will recognize this as the Orthodox doctrine of theosis or deification, classically summed up in the Patristic formula “God became man that man might become God”. Salvation is not just the restoration of an Edenic status quo. It is an unprecedented and unheard-of life, no longer restricted by the qualities and conditions of created existence in this present world. A reversion has taken place along the path of creation, a voluntary return of what we are into God. Two distinct circles remain, the human and the Divine, but their center is now the same. I turn now as promised to a few, even briefer, comments on the remaining parts of the poem. The most important question the reader should be asking himself at this juncture is why there is a remainder at all. After scaling the summit of deification, the succeeding lines may seem tedious and anticlimactic. What is the author’s point? Why not stop, as he easily might have, with the highly charged first half of his efforts? Why all the imploration, admonition, and self-reproach of his conclusion? To answer these questions, we need to consider a common feature of all Hesychast writing, common in fact to the Christian East as a whole, and that is its preference for the mystical way of negation. It is sometimes said that there are two distinct spiritual paths: the cataphatic way or way of affirmation and the apophatic way or way of negation. In the former, which is somewhat more typical of western theology, one approaches God by affirming His goodness in good things, His beauty in things that are beautiful, and His truth in all truths. God is the highest or greatest of beings, to whom creatures point through their positive qualities. In the negative way, by contrast, one approaches God by prescinding from all qualities or attributes, by denying that the Supreme Reality has anything whatsoever in common with this world. God is not created or finite, of course. Every theologian knows that. But neither is He even good with the goodness we know, nor wise in terms of earthly wisdom, nor indeed does He even exist by our measures. He is not the highest or greatest of beings, but superessentially beyond even being itself. We have seen evidence of this apophaticism in the first part of “The Ladder”. The vision is a vision of mysteries, the Divine light is unheard-of, and the heart’s illumination is beyond all telling. In short, experience alone can teach these things, not talk. All language is reduced to stammering and silence when confronted by the experience of God. But the same thing is true of all our experiences. Which words are really sufficient for a rose or a friendship? Perception on every level of being is always more than the concepts describing it. “Theophanis” is therefore obliged to go further, extending the range of negation and deepening its intensity. Do not deceive yourself, he continues. The full force of his imperative will not be felt unless we have first admitted that our entire waking life is a web of delusion and vanity. Recall what I said earlier on the subject of thoughts. Try to attend to one thing alone, and we soon discover that our days are but daydreams. Whatever contact we may hope to have with absolute Truth will come only at the expense of all those idle hopes aroused by our present, passion-laden experience. This does not mean that we should despair of making any progress toward God, believing ourselves condemned to a sort of total depravity. The apophatic path is still a path, and the poet is quick in counseling us to make every effort to find the Truth in this present world. It should be understood, however, that this last phrase is adverbial, not adjectival; it modifies man’s endeavors toward finding, not the Truth found. For the Supreme Reality is beyond even more than our personal experience. It transcends the entire cosmic order. What we shall find when we find it is a wealth the world cannot contain. The author means what he says: if you wish to enter God, you must detach yourself from everything. Understanding this stress on negation should help considerably when it comes to making sense of the concluding parts of “The Ladder”. The poet’s vivid expressions of unworthiness may at first seem excessive. We are told that “Theophanis” is indolent, hard of heart, and void of all these graces; that he is presumptuous in having dared to write on so sublime a subject and is therefore deserving of the fate of the Biblical Uzzah, who was killed for touching the ark of God (2 Sam. 6:6-7); and finally that he is worthy only of words that condemn himself, an example of utter fruitlessness. Surely, one feels, this very eloquent monk cannot have been quite such a villain! And then, making matters perhaps even more indigestible, there are the threats of boundless panic. A note of terror is sounded by the author’s fearful warnings, which he deliberately intends to strike us harshly and to inspire our dread. What is going on here? Is this pious sentimentality? Is the author following some ancient stylistic precedent? Is he just trying to scare us? Our answer in each case must be no. One must admit that the poem could be read this way and that it is easy to be put off by its seeming platitudes and fire-and-brimstone exhortations. Such a reading, however, would be quite mistaken. A man who understands so precisely the pure science of prayer, who is subtle enough to distinguish between illumination and light, and who from his own wrestling with thoughts can speak so powerfully about the limits of language is surely aware of what we ourselves can see so clearly. We all know from our own not-so-subtle experience that terror and panic are emotions belonging to the hardened, not the liquefied, heart. They are measures of the ego’s continuing eccentricity in relation to God, the result of its congenital complicity in a world that will finally disappoint every one of us. In Hesychast terms, such passions are simply more thoughts, more psychic chatter. “Theophanis” cannot possibly be construed as encouraging them. Nor can he have failed to see that insofar as someone recognizes his fruitlessness, he cannot be utterly fruitless. The poet is well aware that the ego has a way of feeding even on abjection and self-condemnation, of being proud of its sin. When he refers to himself as the first among those who are hard of heart, it would therefore be absurd to imagine that he expects us to think we are his rightful superiors. Only the negative way can make sense of these puzzling expressions; both the self- reproaches and the warnings require transposing into an apophatic key. It is helpful to recall the anonymity of the poet. The compilers of The Philokalia have recorded a name, or at least a pen name, but that is all. In reading the “Ladder”, we are not listening to a particular individual whose biography might be used in checking the accuracy of his judgments. We are listening to a voice which the accidents of history have now rendered impersonal, according perhaps to its own design: the voice, as I proposed earlier, of the spiritual search itself, the inward cry of every man’s longing for God. I suggested that the author’s name should be seen as a symbol, and I can now be more precise about that symbol’s significance. “Theophanis the Monk” is not such and such an ego. He is the ego as such—the principle of limitation, individuation, and self-forgetfulness in each of us. With this in mind, his estimate of himself becomes perfectly intelligible. He is indeed void of all graces, not just in fact but in principle. For measured against the Supreme Reality at the top of the ladder, the ego is even less than unworthy; it is a virtual void, a centrifugal tendency toward the “outer darkness” (Matt. 8:12) of destruction and the root of blind and fruitless craving, and its mortification is essential to our seeing that God is the only true center. Competition with the Divine is never more than illusion. The promises of terror and the fearful warnings can be interpreted along similar lines. I have singled out the words terror and panic as signs of a purely emotional and ego-centric attachment. But suppose we read them instead in conjunction with two of the poem’s other terms: fear and dread. Fear is often just a passion itself, of course, a feeling of malaise, consternation, or anxiety, and as such it too must be excluded from the soul of the man who is seeking peace from thoughts. But in an older and deeper sense, fear signifies awe. Rather than a subjective and blood-freezing fright, it points us toward an objective and liberating wonder. No mere reactive emotion, this kind of fear is a real organ for perception and participation in God. Let us not expunge the common sense meaning of the poet’s words. Doubtless there will come a day of sheer panic for those who in this life did not ponder always on these things and did not by a serious spiritual effort grow accustomed to the daily death of desire. But for those who did, the holy fear of awe will be among the blessings promised. Far from something they might wish to escape, the exquisite joy of dread will be offered as one of the rewards of their way, a delicious fruit of all the books. The true seeker knows from repeated experience that the negation of a negation is something wondrously positive. “Theophanis” is not trying to frighten us or force our submission to a sectarian ideology. On the contrary, with a precise and carefully selected dialectical language, he is simply describing what makes it possible to climb the ladder: the negations are nothing but the spaces between the rungs. And he is showing us, from the point of view of the ego he “is”, what must inevitably happen as one moves through these spaces: how the many layers of ambition and cowardice and resentment and greed and smugness and torpor are each in turn stripped away and the naked soul is ushered, beyond all possibility, into the heart of the living God. © Sacred Web
- [Suhrawardi on Sacred Symbolism and Self-Knowledge](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/suhrawardi-on-sacred-symbolism) - Suhrawardi on Sacred Symbolism and Self-Knowledge* by Mohammed Rustom This essay was first published in the journal, Sacred Web (www.sacredweb.com), and is reproduced here with the kind permission of Sacred Web Publishing. Amongst the writings of the founder of the school of Illumination and key figure in post- Avicennan Islamic philosophy, Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi (d. 587/1191)1, are a series of mystical/philosophical narratives or „recitals? written in Persian. In the context of each of these narratives Suhrawardi employs numerous symbols which take his readers through the multiple levels of initiation into the very depths of their being. As is the case with all of his symbolic recitals, the narrator of these tales is Suhrawardi and is not Suhrawardi. It is he because he relates the tale in the first person. But it is not he insofar as those reading the tale follow the footsteps of the narrator and become initiated into the esoteric significance of its symbols. Through unveiling the text by „becoming? the narrator, its readers unveil and therefore „become? their true selves. At the beginning of perhaps his most famous symbolic treatise, Awaz-i parr-i Jibra’il (The Reverberation of Gabriel’s Wing)2, Suhrawardi speaks of his being freed from the womens? quarters and from some of the shackles and limitations experienced by children.3 In a state of discomfort as the result of what he calls “the onslaughts of a dream” (hujum-i khwab),4 he takes a lamp and goes towards the mens? quarters of his home. This entire scene takes place against the background of the setting of darkness, which is referred to as “the hand of the brother of non-existence” upon the regions of the lower world.5 Suhrawardi encircles these quarters until the break of dawn, at which time he wishes to enter his father?s khanaqah or Sufi lodge. One of its doors leads to the city and the other door leads to an open field (sahra) and a garden (bustan).6 After closing the door that leads to the city he proceeds towards the field and the garden. Once outside, he encounters ten beautiful Sages (piran) seated upon a bench. With great hesitation he approaches them and greets them.7 The Angel and the Interior Temple The meeting that takes place with these Sages is indeed mysterious. Ten, which is the number assigned to them, would seem arbitrary if it were not known that in the classical Islamic philosophical conception of the cosmos there were ten Intellects, one proceeding from the other in a series of emanative descents from the First Intellect (the first descent from the Godhead) all the way to the tenth or Active Intellect. These Intellects were identified with the Angels by Avicenna, and the tenth or Active Intellect was identified with the Angel Gabriel. In The Reverberation of Gabriel’s Wing, Gabriel is the Sage seated at the furthest end of the bench. He is the Angel who brings revelations to the Prophets and acts as the guide of humanity since he is the „link? between Heaven and Earth. When Suhrawardi approaches these Sages he addresses the Angel Gabriel, asking him where the Sages have come from. Gabriel replies in the following manner: „We are a group of disengaged Folk who have come from the direction of No-Place- Estan (na kuja abad).? I did not understand the reference, so I inquired, „To which clime does that city belong?? He replied, „That clime which cannot be pointed out by the index finger.? Thus I came to know that the Sage was extensive in knowledge.8 The Angel reminds Suhrawardi of the eighth clime,9 that place “which cannot be pointed out by the index finger.” The place which is no place is, in fact, where this very encounter takes place. By meeting the Angel he becomes initiated into what he always has been in divinis. The Angel, as celestial guide, orients him to his own situation by „pointing? out to him that place from whence they came, which is the place that cannot be „pointed out.? The meeting with the Angel implies initiation at the very moment of the encounter, but it also requires one to re-turn to one?s true self in its entirety. The Angel is a guide for Suhrawardi because he will cause him to re-trace those steps leading him back to himself. The Angel will allow him to perform the necessary ta’wil or spiritual exegesis of his own soul so that he may re-turn to his primordial nature. His perfect nature or true self is, from this perspective, distinct from him, which is why it can function as his guide. In reality they are not different. However, because his soul is still trapped in the world he must re-learn what he always has known, so that he may know once again who he truly is. As Henry Corbin notes in his Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, a fundamental change must take place within the individual which allows it to re-cognize itself as a prisoner in the cosmic crypt, thus acting as an impetus for its awakening for the encounter with the Angel.10 That there needed to be a fundamental shift in Suhrawardi?s being is confirmed by the Angel when Suhrawardi asks him why it is that these Sages who are characterized by immobility have in fact descended into the lower world, “How is it that you have descended (nuzul) upon this khanaqah after you just said that motion and change does not proceed from you?”11 The Angel provides Suhrawardi with an analogy of a blind man who does not see the light of the sun. The sun never changes. It is always in its „place.? If the blind man does not perceive it, it is not because of the sun. Rather, it is because he does not possess that faculty which will allow him to see it: We, too, have always been seated upon this bench, yet your [prior] inability to see is not a proof of our non-existence, nor does it indicate [that we] have changed or moved. [Rather,] a change has come about in your spiritual state (hal).12 This „meeting? could only have taken place in a semi-dream state, when Suhrawardi was imaginally positioned between waking and sleeping. In the beginning of the narration of The Reverberation of Gabriel’s Wing Suhrawardi provides precisely this background for what will pave the way for the meeting with his celestial archetype. When man „awakens? to the situation of imagination there arises within him a desire to transcend the ephemeral realm and join his celestial archetype,13 which is what he always has been and never ceased being but of which he had been heedless on account of his material existence. The desire to move inward is occasioned precisely by this awareness, without which one can never turn inward because of being deluded by the outward, the zahir. Yet in order to enter the inward, the batin, one must proceed from the zahir but not be of it. The cosmic situation is therefore perfectly set up for us at the beginning of this tale. The semi-dream state in which Suhrawardi finds himself is that realm in which he has never ceased to be, but of which he is only now aware by virtue of his realization of his being trapped within the cosmic crypt. It will be recalled that Suhrawardi encircled the mens? quarters- here symbolizing his state of contemplation- until the break of dawn, which symbolizes illumination. He then states, “the intense desire to enter my father?s khanaqah came about.”14 Corbin notes that the term khanaqah is to be understood here as “the interior temple as the „place? for the encounter with the Angel.”15 It is precisely in this interior temple that Suhrawardi has this encounter. The „father? referred to by Suhrawardi is the Angel of his own being, his personal celestial guide. By entering the temple of his „father? he turns towards himself: he turns inward. This initial step Suhrawardi takes towards himself is instantiated from outside of himself, hence the symbolism of illumination. It is an inner illumination, but one which proceeds from without; that is to say an illumination from his archetype forever fixed in the divine „mind? impels him from without to turn within. This „from without? is not to be understood in terms of physical space. I use it here to denote the complete dependency the spiritual aspirant has upon the divine volition (in this sense „outside? of him) for him to turn to himself, which is nothing but an image of the divine Self. The Angel whom Suhrawardi encounters is none but his own true self in divinis. Suhrawardi enters the temple in order to contemplate, that is, in the etymological sense of the term, to enter that place where one may witness God?s divine signs. By entering the temple of his father, who is responsible for bringing him up and for guiding him, Suhrawardi is able to concentrate upon the one whose image he seeks and who seeks him. By concentrating, he returns to his centre, which is his own image in divinis, being none other than his father, his Angel and guide. The Art of Tailoring and the Tablet of One’s Being The Angel continues to initiate Suhrawardi after his initial initiation into the different orders of cosmic reality to which his soul, in its pure luminous substance unbounded by matter, truly belongs. The different levels of initiation which the Angel takes him through allow him to understand the text of the cosmos with greater clarity. As he increases in knowledge, he re- cognizes more of himself and his situation in divinis. The Angel goes on to teach Suhrawardi the art of tailoring (‘ilm-i khiyatat), telling him that knowledge of this science will allow him to repair his own patched frock (muraqqa‘ah ) whenever it needs to be stitched.16 This patched frock worn by the Sufis symbolizes their orientation in the world. The science of tailoring therefore can be taken to be a type of spiritual method in which the Angel instructs Suhrawardi so that he may never go about without his Sufi frock, that is, so that he may never be without his fundamental orientation in the world. This spiritual method which the Angel teaches him is nothing other than the invocation (dhikr). So long as the soul is tied to the material world, the „frock? of one?s being will be torn. It is only through the dhikr that the dhakir (invoker) may mend the substance of his soul, thus transcending himself into the presence of the madhkur (Invoked). Suhrawardi then asks the Sage to teach him the Word of God (kalam-i khuday).17 When Suhrawardi met the Sage at the beginning of the tale the latter told him that both he and the other nine Sages were “preservers of the Word of God.”18 The Sage responds to Suhrawardi?s request by telling him that so long as he is “in this city” he could only learn so much of God?s Word.19 “This city” is to be understood as the material world. This explains why Suhrawardi, when describing the inner temple, speaks of it as having two doors, one which leads to the city and the other which leads to an open field and a garden. By closing the door which leads to the city he closes himself off to the materiality of this world, to the „city? full of distractions, and enters through the door leading to the open field, which symbolizes that infinite interstitial space known as the world of imagination (‘alam al-khayal). When one enters the open field of imagination the city is seen for what it truly is: a place engrossed in materiality and within which its adherents- whom Suhrawardi shall at the end of the tale refer to as merchants20, that is, the merchants of the material world- are imprisoned by virtue of their distance from the open field, and hence their true selves. At the end of the tale we encounter this city once again, where Suhrawardi cites a verse from Q 4:75 in which the people dwelling in the city (qaryah) are oppressors.21 Yet so long as man is embodied in the city, so long as he is characterized by some type of material framework, the city is „inhabited.? It is to the degree of man?s detachment from the city that he will learn the Word of God. Recounting how the Angel taught him God?s Word, Suhrawardi says: Quickly, he took hold of my tablet (lawh-i mara), and then taught me a rather mysterious alphabet (hija’) with which I could know whatever sura [i.e. a chapter of the Qur'an] I wanted [to learn]. He said, „Whoever does not know this alphabet, those secrets (asrar) of God?s Word which one should know will not be grasped by him. And whoever understands the spiritual significance of this alphabet will attain nobility and constancy thereby.22 Suhrawardi goes on to say that numerous unexplainable wonders (‘aja’ib) were revealed to him and that whenever he was unable to understand a „passage? from the sura of the cosmic text, the Angel would teach him the answer.23 The reference in this passage to the tablet of one?s own being immediately calls to mind the lawh al-mahfuz or the Preserved Tablet mentioned in Q 85:22. The Preserved Tablet is the primordial, celestial archetype for all the Words of God. The Qur'an, which is the Word of God, is in the Preserved Tablet, as are the other Words of God. Yet here we are also told that Suhrawardi has his own tablet upon which the mysterious alphabet taught by the Angel was transcribed and with which he was able to read the suwar of the Word of God. The tablet of one?s being is nothing other than a reflection of this primordial Tablet: there is a direct correspondence between the archetype and its symbol. The Words inscribed upon the Preserved Tablet are also to be found in the cosmos and upon the tablet of one?s being. That Suhrawardi had in mind this correspondence between the metacosom, the macrocosm and the microcosm is made perfectly clear in the lines which follow, where he asks the Angel about the correspondence (munasabat) between the blowing of the Spirit (nafath-i ruh) and the Holy Spirit (ruh al-qudus).24 As will become clear from the Angel?s answer, the correspondence between the blowing of the Spirit and the Holy Spirit is the same as the correspondence between the spirits of humans and the Holy Spirit. The Words of the Cosmos The Angel answers Suhrawardi?s question concerning the correspondence between the blowing of the Spirit and the Holy Spirit by stating that everything in the four corners of the world proceeds from Gabriel?s wing.25 Suhrawardi asks him how he is supposed to understand what this means. The Angel replies in the following manner: Know that the Real great and glorious has several Great Words which are luminous Words [proceeding] from the august glories of His noble Countenance, some of which are above others. The First Light is the Highest Word, beyond which there is no greater Word. Its relation in light and manifestation to the other Words is like the relation of the sun to the other stars.26 The Angel then says that the „rays? of the Highest Word (kalimah-yi ‘ulya) form another Word, whose rays then form another Word and so until their number becomes complete.27 The Angel states that these Words are collectively to be referred to as the Engulfing Words (kalimat-i tammat).28 We also learn that the last of these Great Words(kalimat-i kubra) is none other than the Angel Gabriel and that the spirits of human beings proceed from this Great Word. The Great Words above Gabriel are therefore the nine Angelic Intellects of Neoplatonic Islamic cosmology and Gabriel is the tenth or Active Intellect. The Angel offers an exegesis of several key Qur'anic passages to prove that the Word and the Spirit have the same reality. He cites, for example, Q 19:17, And We sent to her Our Spirit. Then he cites Q 4:171, in which Jesus is referred to as the Spirit of God (ruh Allah) and His Word which He conferred upon Mary. After equating the Spirit with the Word the Angel demonstrates how the spirits which proceed from the last Great Word are the „Small Words? (kalimat-i sughra).29 The question of the correspondence between the blowing of the Spirit and the Holy Spirit is thus answered by the Angel through his long exposition of the descent of the great Words of God down to the last Great Word and ultimately to the Small Words which are the spirits of human beings. What is elucidated here by the Angel is the essential divine nature of the things in the world. If the spirits of human beings are Words and the Angel is a Spirit and the last of the Great Words, then there is an intimate relationship between this Angel and the spirits which proceed from it. The blowing of the Spirit is, therefore, the coming about of human spirits from the last Great Word. They are not only related to the Angel. Through the emanative descent beginning with the Greatest Word or the First Intellect in the language of Islamic philosophy, the Small Words or breaths of the Spirit are also related to the other Words. Ultimately, all the Words are rays issuing from the divine Light. But insofar as the last of the Great Words is a ray proceeding from the divine Light, the Small Words which come from the last of these Great Words are rays of its light. It is with this image in mind that we shall now turn to Suhrawardi?s exposition of Gabriel?s wing. Gabriel’s Wing Suhrawardi had to be initiated into all the others symbols before he could be informed of the function of Gabriel?s wing. The myth which the Angel presents to him is not simply a recasting of the Neoplatonic structure of the cosmos. There is something deeper at work here. It was mentioned above that the Great Words, taken as a whole, form the „Engulfing Words.? It is the function of the Angel?s wing which will enable us to understand these „Engulfing Words.? The Angel addresses Suhrawardi: Know that Gabriel has two wings, one of which is right and is pure light (nur-i mahd), the entirety of whose being is completely devoted to [the side facing] the Real. And [he has] a left wing, upon which are some traces of darkness, like the spots on the surface of the moon [or] the feet of a peacock. This is a sign that its being has one side towards non-being. [Yet] when you consider the relation of its existence with respect to the Being of the Real, it is characterized by His Being.30 The Angel?s right wing, characterized by pure luminosity, faces the world of pure Light, that is, the „side? of the Great Words. The left wing is not „dark? as such. Its traces of darkness result from a depravation of the light coming from the side of the Great Words. In other words, the window into the prison of the world only allows for a certain amount of light from the garden of pure luminosity to seep through. From the shadow cast by the Angel?s left wing emerges “the world of falsehood and delusion.”31 Hence, the spirits which appear in this world proceed from the light of the right wing of the Angel which is pointed towards the world of Light, “Every ray of light which falls upon the world of delusion is from its light.”32 As Suhrawardi has already shown, the Spirit and the Word share the same reality. Therefore, the „reverberations? of the wing of Gabriel are the same as the patches of darkness upon its left wing. Just as the imperfection of light is cast as a shadow, the imperfection of the Small Word is cast as a reverberation. A shadow at once bespeaks its source and a deficiency on its own part. Likewise, a reverberation denotes from whence it proceeds yet by its function it also denotes its imperfection since it is removed from its source. The spirits of human beings are therefore reverberations of the Angel?s left wing because they are imperfect as a result of their descent into the cosmic crypt. By being characterized by the dual nature of light and darkness the Spirit or Small Word is therefore „confused.? Like the spirits of the righteous, the spirits of the evildoers and those who do not believe in God are also reverberations of the Angel?s left wing, but are “entangled reverberations (sada amiz).”33 In other words, their reverberations are more muddled and confused than the reverberations of the righteous. Since the righteous are closer to their source their reverberations are less confused and they therefore manifest in a clearer sense their true natures. In the language of light and darkness, the rays of the unbelievers are darker than the rays of the believers since the latter are closer to the Sun. It is not until the penultimate paragraph of this tale that the function of the Angel?s wing becomes entirely clear. In response to Suhrawardi?s question concerning the form of the wing of Gabriel, the Angel replies, “Oh heedless one! Do you not know that these are all symbols (rumuz), which, if taken literally, would not allow these „Engulfing Words? (tammat) to be understood?”34 It was mentioned earlier that the Great Words are referred to as the tammat. This term appears in the singular in Q 79:34 with reference to the „great calamity? of the day of judgement.35 It conveys the idea of „calamity? and „disaster?, its triliteral Arabic root denoting „overflowing?, „flooding? and „being engulfed?. In Q 79:34 the final day will be a great calamity since it will „overtake? people and its terrors will „engulf? them. The reason the Great Words are „engulfing? is because they proceed from the Greatest Sound (which is the first existentiation from the Godhead), and through the downward flow of their descents „engulf? and „overflow? and thus „fill? the cosmos. Yet those in the material world cannot grasp their reality. The Great Words are so far removed from the creatures on earth that the creatures have no access to them. It is only through the Angel- who is the last of the Great Words- that they may comprehend them. There would not be a purpose for those in the material world to understand the function of the Great Words on their own. It is, therefore, necessary to comprehend them through the symbols in the tale insofar as they convey to those in the material world their own cosmic situation. The symbols employed in this tale are there simply to relate the nature and purpose of human existence. The function of the Angel?s wing is to act as an intermediary, demonstrating our celestial origin and how it is that, from our descent into the cosmic crypt, we have become trapped by materiality but may return to our true Home once again. The wing also plays an important role in the very symbolism of the flight of the human spirit to its Origin: we descended into the world by virtue of that very thing which will allow us to ascend. At the beginning of The Reverberation of Gabriel’s Wing Suhrawardi cites an early Sufi figure, Abu „Ali Farmadi (d. 403/1011), as saying, “of all of the reverberations of Gabriel?s Wing, one of them is you.”36 It is only after having been shown the function of the wing by the Angel that Suhrawardi comes to understand why he was not able to learn much of God?s Word while trapped in the „city.? At the same time, the initiation he received into whatever of the Word he could read from the tablet of his being becomes all the more clear to him, as he now understands the correspondence between the tablet of his being and the Words of God. It is nothing but a reverberation of the wing of the Angel which Suhrawardi realizes that he himself is. He is a Word of God and he reads the Words of God in the very cosmic reverberations which find their manifestations in forms on the outward plane, and upon the tablet of his soul on the inward plane. * This is a revised version of an article which originally appeared in Transcendent Philosophy 7 (2006): 189-202 under the title, “The Symbology of the Wing in Suhrawardi?s The Reverberation of Gabriel’s Wing.” I would like to thank Maria Subtelny for her insightful remarks on an earlier version of this essay. My thanks also go to Andrew Hicks and Donald Smith for their comments on aspects of Awaz-i parr-i Jibra’il. 1 For his life and teachings, see Mehdi Amin Razavi, Suhrawardi and the School of Illumination (Surrey: Curzon, 1997) and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Three Muslim Sages (Delmar, NY: Caravan, 1997, rep. ed.), 52-82. 2 Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi, Awaz-i parr-i Jibra’il, in Suhrawardi, Oeuvres philosophiques et mystiques, ed. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, vol. 3 (Tehran: Académie Impériale Iranienne de Philosophie, 1977, rep. ed.), 208-223. For French translations of most of Suhrawardi?s symbolic treatises, see part two of Suhrawardi, L’Archange empourpré: quinze traités et récits mystiques, trans. Henry Corbin (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1976). In 1982 Wheeler Thackston published his English translations of Suhrawardi?s symbolic treatises. Readers familiar with the 1982 edition of translations would do well to read Hermann Landolt?s review article of this work, “Suhrawardi?s “Tales of Initiation,”” Journal of the American Oriental Society 107:3 (1987): 475-486. Thackston?s translations have been slightly revised and reissued in a bilingual volume, the Persian text of which is primarily based on Nasr?s edition. See Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi, The Philosophical Allegories and Mystical Treatises, trans. Wheeler Thackston (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 1999). For Suhrawardi?s Persian writings in general, see Mehdi Amin Razavi, “The Significance of Suhrawardi?s Persian Sufi Writings in the Philosophy of Illumination”, in The Heritage of Sufism, ed. Leonard Lewisohn, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oneworld, 1999), 259-283, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “The Significance of Suhrawardi?s Persian Writings,” in Nasr, The Islamic Intellectual Tradition in Persia, ed. Mehdi Amin Razavi (Surrey: Curzon, 1996), 154-159. 3 Ibid., 209. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 210. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 211. 9 Suhrawardi, L’Archange empourpré: quinze traités et récits mystiques, trans. Henry Corbin (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1976), 258, n. 12. 10 Henry Corbin, Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, trans. Willard R. Trask (Irving: Spring Publications, 1980), 19. 11 Suhrawardi, Awaz-i parr-i Jibra’il, 215. 12 Ibid. 13 Corbin, Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, 26. 14 Suhrawardi, Awaz-i parr-i Jibra’il, 210. 15 Suhrawardi, L’Archange empourpré: quinze traités et récits mystiques, 258, n. 6. 16 Suhrawardi, Awaz-i parr-i Jibra’il, 216. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 211. 19 Ibid., 216. 20 Suhrawardi, Awaz-i parr-i Jibra’il, 223. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 216. 23 Ibid., 217. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. The phrase, “from the august glories of His noble countenance” is taken from the famous Prophetic tradition which speaks of the seventy thousand veils of light and darkness that veil God from His creatures. In his Mishkat al-anwar (The Niche of Lights), al-Ghazali (d. 505/1111) comments upon both this tradition and the famous Light verse (Q 24:35). See Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, The Niche of Lights, trans. David Buchman (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1998). 27 Suhrawardi, Awaz-i parr-i Jibra’il, 218. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 219. 30 Ibid., 220. 31 Ibid., 221. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 222. 35 Q 79:34 and the verse following read, “And when the Calamity comes- the day people shall recall that for which they strove.” 36 Suhrawardi, Awaz-i parr-i Jibra’il, 209.
- [C. G. Jung & Mircea Eliade: “Priests without Surplices”? Reflections on the Place of Myth, Religion and Science in Their Work](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/jung-eliade) - C.G. Jung & Mircea Eliade: ‘Priests without Surplices’? Reflections on the Place of Myth, Religion and Science in Their Work Harry Oldmeadow Source: Bendigo Department of Humanities, LTUB. (No 1. in the Studies in Western Tradition, Occasional Papers Series), 44pp. Also, a talk for the Bendigo Jung Society, 1995. The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Carl Jung 1 ...the history of religions reaches down and makes contact with that which is essentially human: the relation of man to the sacred. The history of religions can play an extremely important role in the crisis we are living through. The crises of modern man are to a large extent religious ones, insofar as they are an awakening of his awareness to an absence of meaning. Mircea Eliade 2 ...the scientific pursuit of religion puts the saddle on the wrong horse, since it is the domain of religion to evaluate science, and not vice verse. Whitall Perry 3 1. The Life and Work of Mircea Eliade The academic study of religion over the last half-century has been massively influenced by the work of Mircea Eliade. His scholarly oeuvre is formidable indeed, ranging from highly specialized monographs to his encyclopedic and magisterial A History of Religious Ideas, written in three volumes over the last decade of his life.4 He was recognized throughout the world, elected to many different Academies, showered with honours. Eliade?s erudition was imposing: his own library ran to something over 100,000 volumes and he was certainly not one to buy books for decorative purposes. (I'm told that it is possible in America to buy books by the yard and by colour!) Looking back we get * First delivered as a talk to the Bendigo Jung Society, 1992. 1 2 C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (London 1983), 356-7 [Hereafter MDR]. M. Eliade, Ordeal by Labyrinth, Conversations with Claude-Henri Rocquet (Chicago Press 1982), 148. [Hereafter Labyrinth]. 3 Religion 7:2 (1973), 127. W. Perry, Review of N. Smart?s The Phenomenon of Religion in Studies in Comparative 4 this paper. See list of References at the end of this paper for full details of Eliade?s works cited in 2 a sense, as we do with Carl Jung, of a life of intellectual heroism, of indefatigable labours and prodigious output. Both Jung and Eliade were pioneers who changed, respectively, the theoretical landscapes of psychology and comparative religion. Eliade?s attitude to autobiography was much less ambivalent than Jung?s and we have to hand four volumes of personal journals and a two-volumed autobiography. With the journals particularly, one sometimes shares the sentiments of the schoolboy who opened his review of a book on elephants with the words, „This book told me more than I wanted to know about elephants.? Eliade was born in Romania in 1907 and died in Chicago in 1986. His Romanian nationality was a decisive factor in his life and work; from an early age he felt he had one foot in the Occident, the other in the Orient, reflected in the title of the first volume of his autobiography Journey East, Journey West. He developed an early interest in folklore, mythology and religion, and learnt English in order to read Max Muller and J.G. Frazer. At university he mastered Hebrew, Persian and Italian and embarked on a postgraduate study of the influence of Hermeticism and the Kabbalah on Italian Renaissance philosophy. Whilst visiting Italy he read Dasgupta?s famous work The History of Indian Philosophy. So deeply affected was he by this work that he soon left for Calcutta to study Indian philosophy and spirituality under Dasgupta. In Calcutta he immersed himself in Sanskrit and classical Indian philosophy, and developed an interest in the psycho-spiritual disciplines of yoga and tantra. He spent six months at the holy city of Rishikesh, at the foot of the Himalayas, under the guidance of Swami Shivananda. After more than three years in the sub-continent he returned to Romania where he took up teaching and writing. Apart from a shadowy interlude during the war when he carried out diplomatic work in Lisbon, Eliade devoted the rest of his life to writing and teaching about religious phenomena. After the Soviet seizure of Romania he settled in Paris and over the next decade moved from one temporary post to another, living a rather hand-to-mouth existence. The Communist takeover of Romania left him in an exile that was to be permanent. His work was denounced in Romania itself as being „obscurantist?, „mystic„ and „fascist?.5 (Decoded these words might signify an interest in the past and in religion, and a hostility to Communist totalitarianism.) In the late 40s and early 50s he produced several works which quickly established his international reputation: Patterns in Comparative Religion, The Myth of the Eternal Return, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy and Yoga: Immortality and Freedom. In 1956 Eliade was invited to the University of Chicago as a visiting professor. He was to remain there for the rest of his life. When he took up a chair in the History of Religions at Chicago it was one of very few such chairs; within 15 years there were at least 25 chairs in the major American universities, nearly all of them occupied by his former students.6 Like Jung, Eliade seems to have understood his own role in somewhat prophetic terms. From his Journal: „I feel as though I am a precursor; I am aware of being somewhere in the avant-garde of the humanity of tomorrow or after.?7 2. Eliade, Jung and ERANOS Eliade was first invited to the annual ERANOS Conferences in 1950 and attended annually until 1962, the year of Olga Froebe?s death, delivering lectures at most conferences. Over the years met figures like Gershon Scholem, Louis Massignon, Raffael Pettazoni, Joachim Wach, D.T. Suzuki, 5 M. Eliade, Autobiography II 1937-1960, Exile’s Odyssey (Chicago 1988), xiv-xv. In the 1970s he resisted inducements from the Romanian government to return, refusing to make any compromise with the communist dictatorship. 6 7 See Autobiography II, 208-9. from M. Eliade, No Souvenirs (New York 1977), quoted in a review by R. P. Coomaraswamy in Studies in Comparative Religion 12:1-2 (1978), 123. 3 Guiseppe Tucci and many others in the ERANOS constellation. In his journal Eliade recounts his first meeting with Jung at a dinner in an Ascona restaurant: ...he is a captivating old gentleman, utterly without conceit, who is as happy to talk as he is to listen. What could I write down here first of this long conversation? Perhaps his bitter reproaches of „official science?? In university circles he is not taken seriously. „Scholars have no curiosity,? he says with Anatole France. „Professors are satisfied with recapitulating what they learned in their youth and what does not cause any trouble...?8 In an interview late in his life he again recalled his first meeting with Jung: After half an hour?s conversation I felt I was listening to a Chinese sage or an east European peasant, still rooted in the Earth Mother yet close to Heaven at the same time. I was enthralled by the wonderful simplicity of his presence...9 In 1952 Eliade conducted a lengthy interview with Jung for the Parisian magazine Combat, at a time when Jung?s recently published Answer to Job was provoking a stormy controversy.10 (We remember Gershon Scholem?s only half-jesting remark that Jung had tried to psychoanalyze Yahweh.11) In the same year, Jung read Eliade?s massive work on shamanism and the two had a long and intense conversation about it. They met several times over the next few years, the last occasion being at Kusnacht in 1959 where they had a lengthy conversation in the garden, primarily about the nature of mystical experience. Eliade?s rather fragmentary remarks about this last encounter are not without interest. He tells us that Jung no longer had any interest in therapies and case studies, nor in contemporary theology, but that he retained his appetite for patristic theology. He also notes again Jung?s disenchantment with the scientific establishment: ... now and then it seemed to me that I detected a trace of bitterness. Speaking about the structures of mystical experiences, he declared the medical doctors and psychologists are „too stupid or too uncultivated? to understand such phenomena.12 Eliade?s connections with the Jungian establishment were institutional as well as personal. In the early 50s he was awarded a special grant by the Bollingen Foundation which enabled him and his wife to escape „the nightmare of poverty?.13 Several of Eliade?s major works appeared in the Bollingen Series. In 1953 Eliade gave five two-hour lectures at the Jung Institute in Zurich. There are a great many subjects which commanded the attention of both Jung and Eliade: mythological symbolisms; esoteric spiritual disciplines such as alchemy; the mystical literature of the East; dreams and the structures of the unconscious; the pathologies of modern civilisation, to name a few. One is constantly struck by parallels. For instance, Jung?s work on alchemy and Eliade?s on shamanism both provided a unified view of reality in which physical and psychic energy are two 8 274. [Wehr?s biography hereafter JB]. In his autobiography Eliade again refers to Jung?s Journal 1, August 23, 1950, quoted in G. Wehr, Jung, A Biography (Boston 1988), 273- „bitter comments? about „official science?. See Autobiography II, 147. 9 Labyrinth, 162-3 10 An edited version of this interview can be found in C. G. Jung Speaking, Interviews and Encounters (London, 1978), 225-234. Unfortunately Eliade?s introductory comments and his interpolations have been severely abridged in this edition. [This collection hereafter CGJ Speaking]. 11 12 13 Autobiography II, 162. ibid., 205. See also No Souvenirs June 6, 1959, 41-2. Autobiography II, 149. 4 aspects, or dimensions, of a single reality (hence the possibility of para-normal powers and the like).14 In their approach to these subjects both showed a sympathetic receptivity to the spiritual messages of the documents they were studying. There are also obvious parallels in their biographies: academic resistance to their discoveries; the hostility of particular disciplinary coteries (the Freudians in Jung?s case, the anthropologists in Eliade?s); the importance of ERANOS as a forum where ideas could be ventilated and hypotheses tested amongst kindred spirits; the trips to India, Africa and America; the intrepid exploration of what Eliade calls „foreign spiritual universes?. Consider this passage from Eliade?s journal, written in 1959: These thirty years, and more, that I?ve spent among exotic, barbaric, indomitable gods and goddesses, nourished on myths, obsessed by symbols, nursed and bewitched by so many images which have come down to me from those submerged worlds, today seem to me to be the stages of a long initiation. Each one of these divine figures, each of these myths or symbols, is connected to a danger that was confronted and overcome. How many times I was almost lost, gone astray in this labyrinth where I risked being killed...These were not only bits of knowledge acquired slowly and leisurely in books, but so many encounters, confrontations, and temptations. I realize perfectly well now all the dangers I skirted during this long quest, and, in the first place, the risk of forgetting that I had a goal...that I wanted to reach a „center?.15 With a few words changed how easily this could have come from Jung! Let me now turn briefly to one of Eliade?s main tasks, what he called the „deprovincialization? of Western culture by a „creative hermeneutics? which would bring „foreign spiritual universes? within our purview. 3. ‘Deprovincializing’ European Culture in a ‘Crepuscular Era’ In his autobiography Eliade says this: ...the re-entry of Asia into history and the discovery of the spirituality of archaic societies cannot be without consequence...The camouflage or even occultation of the sacred and of spiritual meanings in general characterizes all crepuscular eras. It is a matter of the larval survival of the original meaning, which in this way becomes unrecognizable. Hence the importance I ascribe to images, symbols and narratives, or more precisely to the hermeneutical analysis which describes their meanings and identifies their original functions.16 In his ERANOS Lectures in 1953, which were on earth symbolism in various cultures, Eliade tells us that he ...tried to show the necessity, or rather the obligation, to study and understand the spiritual creations of „primitives? with the same zeal and hermeneutical rigor used by Western elites with respect to their own cultural traditions. I was convinced that the documents and method of the history of religions lead, more surely than any other historical discipline, to the deprovincialisation of Western cultures.17 There are many parallels here with Jung?s work. For the moment, however, I would like to point out an interesting divergence in their work. For all his sympathetic inquiries into primal mythologies and Eastern spirituality, and despite the importance of his excursions into other cultures, Jung remained resolutely European in his orientation: his intellectual anchorage, so to speak, was always in Europe. This is nicely illustrated by two episodes from his visit to India: the first is his extraordinary reluctance to visit the great saint and sage of Arunacala, Ramana Maharshi, as if he were either 14 See JB, 254-5. 15 No Souvenirs November 10, 1959, 74-5. 16 Autobiography II, 153. 17 ibid., 166. 5 skeptical about the status of Ramana, or more likely, that he felt somewhat threatened by the spiritual force to which such a visit would expose him.18 Recall also this passage from Jung: I had felt the impact of the dreamlike world of India...My own world of European consciousness had become peculiarly thin, like a network of telegraph wires high above the ground, stretching in straight lines all over the surface of an earth looking treacherously like a geographic globe. He was profoundly disturbed by the thought that the world of Indian spirituality might be the real world and that the European lived in a „madhouse of abstractions?.19 One cannot help but feel that Jung did not fully confront or assimilate this experience, that he turned his back on India in a self- defensive reflex, so to speak.20 One senses no such inhibition in Eliade?s immersion in Indian spirituality: his work ratifies his claim that his three years in India were „the essential ones in my life. India was my education?.21 Let me say a few words about what Eliade defined as his „essential problems: sacred space and time, the structure and function of myth, and the morphology of divine figures?.22 In Jung?s writings, the most common meaning ascribed to „myth? refers to a personal, inner life, a kind of allegorical narrative embedded deep in the psyche. Nevertheless, Jung is sometimes prepared to go beyond purely psychic understandings of myth. One remembers the vivid account in his autobiography of his encounter with the Taos Pueblo Indians in 1925, and in particular, the meeting with an Indian elder named Ochwiay Biano. The elder was bewildered by the attempts of the American authorities to curtail Indian ritual life. The Indians, he claimed, performed an indispensable service for all Americans, and indeed all peoples: After all, we are a people who live on the roof of the world; we are the sons of Father Sun, and with our religion we daily help our father to go across the sky. We do this not only for ourselves, but for the whole world. If we were to cease practicing our religion, in ten years the sun would no longer rise. Then it would be night forever.23 Jung?s commentary on this: If for a moment we put away all European rationalism and transport ourselves into the clear mountain air of that solitary plateau...if we also set aside our intimate knowledge of the world and exchange it for a horizon which seems immeasurable ...we will begin to achieve an inner comprehension of the Pueblo Indian?s point of view...That man feels capable of formulating valid replies to the overpowering influence of God, and that he can render back something which is essential even to God, induces pride, for it raises the human individual to the dignity of a metaphysical factor.24 Jung also remarks on the way in which our scientific knowledge impoverishes rather than enriches us by cutting us from the mythic world. This anticipates in striking fashion one of the most persistent motifs in Eliade?s work on archaic cultures: the theme of archaic ontology and cosmic responsibility. Jung?s insight into the „cosmic meaning of consciousness? was reinforced during his visit to the Athi 18 See MDR, 305. Ramana Maharshi is not mentioned by name but is clearly one of the „holy men? in question. See also T. Burckhardt?s comment on this episode in „Cosmology and Modern Science?, in J. Needleman (ed), The Sword of Gnosis (Baltimore 1974), 178. 19 quoted in JB, 283 20 Jung has similarly been criticized for his limited understanding of Chinese spirituality. One is reminded of the somewhat unkind joke, „What is Chinese philosophy? Well, there is yin, and yang, and then there is Jung.? 21 Labyrinth, 54. See Eliade?s remarks about his Indian experience in Labyrinth, 54-64. 22 Autobiography II, 174. 23 MDR, 280. 24 ibid., 281. 6 Plains near Nairobi, where he more clearly understood man?s responsibility as a „second creator?, again a theme which Eliade has pursued indefatigably.25 Jung?s insights into archaic mythologies and cosmologies was undoubtedly of decisive importance in Eliade?s intellectual development. Clearly Eliade, like Joseph Campbell, was influenced by Jung?s work which disclosed what he called a „universal parallelism? of analogous symbolisms and motifs in mythologies from all over the world.26 Eliade repeatedly acknowledges the debt. At points Jung concedes the metaphysical status of myths: No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science. For it is not that „God? is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth, rather it speaks to us as a Word of God.27 But one finds in Jung the more or less constant attempt to bring archaic cosmology and metaphysics back into the psychic domain while Eliade is prepared to go beyond it. This can be seen in the different senses in which Jung and Eliade use the term „archetypes?: for Jung the archetypes are „structures of the collective unconscious? while Eliade uses the term in its neoplatonic sense of exemplary and „transhistorical? paradigms.28 Jung also tended to homologize dreams and myths. In this context, Eliade?s differentiation of the two is suggestive: The resemblances between dreams and myths are obvious, but the difference between them is an essential one: there is the same gulf between the two as between an act of adultery and Madame Bovary; that is, between a simple experience and a creation of the human spirit.29 Likewise Jung?s interest in the qualitative determinations of time, most notably in his ideas about synchronicity and psychosynthesis,30 remains within the psychic arena while for Eliade sacred time is itself an irreducible category and one altogether indispensable to an understanding of the archaic and mythological modes.31 Jung evinced much less interest in the question of sacred space which has been pivotal in Eliade?s work. The bringing of other spiritual universes within the ambit of the West was an important but subsidiary task in Jung?s lifework. It has been the motive force in Eliade?s work. The following passage from Myths, Dreams and Mysteries might well stand as a epigraph for Eliade?s work over half a century: ...the „exotic? and „primitive? peoples have now come within the orbit of history, so that Western man is obliged to enquire into their systems of values if he is to be able to establish and maintain communication with them...We have to approach the symbols, myths and rites of the Oceanians or the Africans...with the same respect and the same desire to learn that we have devoted to Western cultural creations, even when those rites and myths reveal „strange?, terrible or aberrant aspects.32 25 ibid., 284. 26 See A. Jaffé, The Myth of Meaning (Baltimore 1975), 15. 27 ibid., 373. 28 Autobiography II, 162. 29 Labyrinth, 162. (Clearly this formulation, a characteristic one, is open to the charge that it reduces myths to no more than cultural creations.) 30 See MDR, 160 & JB, 111. 31 Eliade?s most acessible treatment of this theme is to be found in The Sacred and the Profane (New York 1957). 32 M. Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Memories (New York 1960), 9,10,12. 7 Clearly, for Eliade this was not simply a grandiose academic project but one driven by certain existential imperatives, as was the case with Jung?s studies. Consider this, for instance, from Eliade?s Journal: ...it is not some kind of infatuation with the past that makes me want to go back to the world of the Australian aborigines or the Eskimos. I want to recognize myself—in the philosophical sense—in my fellow men.33 Eliade discerns a great divide in the human past, cutting off archaic and historical man from modern man. Archaic man lives in a world whose meaning and value is articulated symbolically, through a mythology which is enacted and re-actualized in ritual and ceremonial life. Historical man is more conscious of himself in time but his world view remains profoundly religious and spiritual. Modern man, by contrast, lives not in an ordered and meaningful cosmos but a chaotic, opaque and mute universe in which he has lost the capacity for religious experience: „the desacralized cosmos is a recent discovery of the human spirit.?34 Such is the legacy of a materialistic scientism. These differences are thrown into sharp relief in Eliade?s work by his treatment of archaic and modern ways of understanding time and space. For the traditional mentality space is not homogeneous, as it is for modern science, but is qualitatively determined. Sacred space, both natural and man-made, is ordered, meaningful and centered, while profane space is chaotic, meaningless and threatening. Sacred space is „organized? round a centre, a point at which hierophanies occur, at which the barriers between the physical, psychic and spiritual dimensions of reality become permeable and transparent. Time too is qualitatively determined, and is cyclical and repeatable, or „recoverable?. Space and time are sanctified by their relationship to that which is sacred, which is to say that which is immutable, beyond the world of flux, beyond time and space. Modern conceptions of time and space, on the other hand, are mechanistic, materialistic and one-dimensional. Furthermore, says Eliade, our encounters with other spiritual universes are urgently necessary for our own spiritual health. We must no longer regard them „as immature episodes or as aberrations from some exemplary history of man—a history conceived, of course, only as that of Western man.?35 4. Science, Religion and Personal Faith I move now to the most problematic part of this paper, a consideration of the place of science, religion and personal faith in the work of Jung and Eliade. Shortly before their falling-out, Freud made the following plea to Jung: My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make of it an unshakeable bulwark. To Jung?s somewhat astonished query as to what this bulwark must stand against, Freud replied, „Against the black tide of the mud...of occultism.? In Memories, Dreams, Reflections Jung makes this comment: 33 34 35 Freud, who had always made much of his irreligiosity, had constructed a dogma; or rather, in the place of a jealous God whom he had lost, he had substituted another compelling image, that of sexuality...the „sexual libido? took over the role of a deus absconditus, a hidden or concealed god...The advantage of this transformation for Freud was, apparently, that he was able to regard the new numinous principle as scientifically irreproachable and free from all religious taint. At bottom, however, the numinosity, that Labyrinth, 137. The Sacred and the Profane, 13. M. Eliade, Australian Religions (Ithaca, 1971), xix. 8 is, the psychological qualities of the two rationally incommensurable opposites—Yahweh and sexuality—remained the same...the lost god now had to be sought below, not above.36 Soon after the breakdown of their relationship Freud spoke disparagingly of Jung?s „disregard for scientific logic?37 to which Jung might well have replied with the maxim we find in Memories: „Overvalued reason has this in common with political absolutism: under its dominion the individual is pauperised.?38 The episode raises several interesting questions about the way Freud, Jung and Eliade positioned themselves in relation to the ideology of modern science and to religion. For Freud psychoanalysis was a rigorously scientific discipline which must remain uncontaminated by all those modes of understanding which he herded together under the pejorative label of „occultism?. Freud?s views on religion are well known and need not be rehearsed here; as Jung noted in Memories Freud saw any expression of spirituality as a function of repressed sexuality.39 Suffice it to say that Freud surrendered to a severely reductionist view altogether characteristic of the late nineteenth intellectual alienated from religious tradition.40 For Jung the problem was much more complex. He rejected the narrow dogmatism and stifling moralism which characterized his father?s faith but affirmed the richness, potency and psychologically liberating elements within Christianity and in esoteric Western traditions such as gnosticism, hermeticism and alchemy. ...all religions [wrote Jung], down to the forms of magical religion of primitives, are psychotherapies, which treat and heal the sufferings of the soul, and those of the body that come from the soul.41 On the other side, Jung rejected the rampant materialism of a profane science whilst retaining his faith in an empirical mode of inquiry. The appeal of psychiatry, he tells us, was precisely that it was a meeting ground for the biological and the spiritual: Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found. Here at last was the place where the collision of nature and spirit became a reality.42 This, of course, anticipates the great Jungian theme of the reconciliation of opposites. In Eliade?s work, the opposites present themselves not as the „biological? and the „spiritual? but rather in terms of a set of dichotomies which structure the whole of his agenda: the sacred and the 36 MDR, 174-5. To which passage Jung adds this astounding remark, „But what difference does it make, ultimately, to the stronger agency if it is called now by one name, and now by another?? (Jung seems impervious to the very great difference made by these respective angles of approach, so to speak.) 37 SeeJB,22. 38 MDR, 333. 39 MDR, 172. 40 For a brief but useful account of Freud?s views on religion see D.W.D. Shaw, The Dissuaders (London, 1978). In his Journal Eliade dismisses Freud?s extraordinary lucubrations on this subject thus: his „explanations of religious experiences and other spiritual activities are purely and simply inept?. Journal 1 April 23, 1953, quoted in G. Steiner, „Ecstasies, not arguments?, review article on Eliade?s Journals, in Times Literary Supplement September 28-October 4, 1990, 1015. For an interesting account of the effects of Freud?s alienation from his Judaic heritage, see W. Perry, „The Revolt Against Moses, A New Look at Psychoanalysis?, Tomorrow 14:2 (1966), 103-119. 41 A 1935 paper on psychotherapy, quoted in JB, 293. 42 MDR, 130. 9 profane; the archaic and the modern; the mythological and the historical; the poetic and the scientific. Eliade?s work as a whole can be seen as a project to recuperate the former mode from each of these pairings. For Eliade the problem of scientific materialism exerted itself largely through the reductionist models of the anthropologists. Eliade?s task was to „revalorize? manifestations of the sacred, to restore to them their experiential and ontological meanings and to resist the „audacious and irrelevant interpretations? of reductionists of every ilk—Marxist, Freudian, Durkheimian, or whatever.43 Such a demystifying attitude [he wrote] ought to be arraigned in its turn, on charges of ethnocentrism, of Western „provincialism?, and so, ultimately, be demystified itself.44 Eliade also challenged his own colleagues: ...the majority of the historians of religion defend themselves against the messages with which their documents are filled. This caution is understandable. One does not live with impunity in intimacy with „foreign? religious forms...But many historians of religion end by no longer taking seriously the spiritual worlds they study; they fall back on their personal religious faith, or they take refuge in a materialism or behaviourism impervious to every spiritual shock.45 One of Eliade?s most important contributions to the discipline of religious studies was his insistence on explanatory categories which are sui generis, peculiar to religious phenomena, which are autonomous, so to speak. Here Eliade is much closer to the great German theologian, Rudolf Otto: ...a religious phenomenon will only be recognized as such if it is grasped at its own level, that is to say, if it is studied as something religious. To try to grasp the essence of such a phenomenon by means of physiology, psychology, sociology, economics, linguistics, art or any other study is false; it misses the one unique and irreducible element in it—the element of the sacred. Obviously there are no purely religious phenomena...But it would be hopeless to try and explain religion in terms of any one of these basic functions...It would be as futile as thinking you could explain Madame Bovary by a list of social, economic and political facts; however true, they do not effect it as a work of literature.46 * One cannot help noticing in the autobiographical writings of both Jung and Eliade a certain reticence about their own religious beliefs and affiliations. Eliade remarked, in an interview late in his life, „I made the decision long ago to maintain a kind of discreet silence as to what I personally believe or don't believe.?47 One obvious possibility is that both felt that too open an affirmation of such beliefs might compromise their academic standing in a milieu which privileged the ideal of a scientific objectivity and detachment, to such an extent, indeed, that one can speak here of a kind of pseudo-cult. Professional pressures and expectations sometimes „diluted [Jung?s] most potent observations in deference to a more conventional audience.?48 As Jung himself observed in a 43 M. Eliade The Quest, History and Meaning in Religion (Chicago 1969), 5. [Hereafter Quest] 44 Labyrinth, 137. 45 Quest, 62. 46 M. Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York 1958), xiii. 47 Labyrinth, 132. 48 P Novak, „C.G. Jung in the Light of Asian Psychology?, Religious Traditions 14 (1991), 66-7. 10 frequently cited passage, „Today the voice of one crying in the wilderness must necessarily strike a scientific tone if the ear of the multitude is to be reached.?49 Another possibility is that both struggled with the problems of religious faith without ever resolving the many difficult questions which were latent in Nietzsche?s famous pronouncement of „the death of God?. We remember the inscription over the doorway at Kusnacht, the maxim which Jung found in the writings of Erasmus: „Invoked or not, the god will be present.? Jung himself said of this inscription: It is a Delphic oracle though. It says: yes, the god will be on the spot, but in what form and to what purpose? I have put the inscription there to remind my patients and myself: timor dei initium sapientiae („The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.? Psalm 11.10) 50 Remember also remember Jung?s famous remark, in an interview in 1955, that All that I have learned has led me step by step to an unshakable conviction of the existence of God. I only believe in what I know. And that eliminates believing. Therefore I do not take His existence on belief—I know that He exists.51 There seems no doubt that Jung underwent an experience of a transcendent reality: in later life, he tells us, he became almost exclusively concerned with those events and happenings where the „imperishable world irrupted into the transitory one?.52 The problem remained: how to describe, define, conceptualize this experience and what place to give it in his professional work? The problem for us is how, precisely, we are to understand Jung?s somewhat contradictory writings about the exact nature and status of the realities he understood to be signalled by terms like „archetype?, „collective unconscious? and, perhaps most vexingly, „God?. Gerhard Wehr, one of Jung?s several biographers, claims that In Jung, as in no other psychologist of his time, the superindividual was paramount. A decisive role was played by the transpersonal, not only as a biologically and instinctually grounded driving force, but as an „archetype?, a physical, mental and spiritual motive power that points beyond man precisely by engaging him in a lifelong process of maturation.53 This kind of formulation, it seems to me, wants to have it every which way: the „superindividual? is subsumed in the term „archetype? which then becomes, simultaneously, „a physical, mental and spiritual motive force?. This amounts to hedging one's bets. 5. The Traditionalist Critique of Jung and Eliade Jung?s work was attacked from the scientific side as being „symbolistic?, „mystical?, „occultist? and the like, just as Eliade?s work in turn has been attacked as „Jungian? and „Catholic?, lacking in „objectivity?, and motivated by „unscientific zeal?.54 These kinds of criticisms are of no interest in the 49 quoted in W. Smith, Cosmos and Transcendence (La Salle 1984), 127. 50 Letter, quoted in JB, 93. 51 „Men, Women and God?, interviews with Frederick Sands, in CGJ Speaking, 251. Cf: „I find that all my thoughts circle around God like the planets round the sun, and are as irresistibly attracted by Him. I would feel it to be the grossest sin if I were to oppose any resistance to this force.? Letter to a young clergyman, quoted in Aniela Jaffé?s Introduction to MDR, 13. 52 JB, 23. 53 JB, 4. 54 See, for example, Edmund Leach?s smug review article, „Sermons from a Man on a Ladder?, New York Review of Books October 20, 1966, 28-31. 11 present context. Much more disturbing, from my point of view, are the charges that have been pressed by exponents of the traditional religious outlook. The most incisive of these critics are traditionalists such as René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Frithjof Schuon and Titus Burckhardt. I do not have time here to rehearse the premises from which such thinkers start—we may turn to this in the discussion later. Let us look briefly at a few of the criticisms that have been made. There are, it seems to me, four kinds of criticisms which deserve our attention. I shall flag these criticisms by identifying their targets: pan-psychism; the denial of metaphysics; the tyranny of the ego; the repudiation of traditional religion. From a traditionalist perspective the first problem is that Jung?s writings often seem to confound the psychic and the spiritual. In Jung?s case it is a matter at times of reducing the spiritual to the level of the psychic (a form of psychologism), and at others of elevating the psychic to the level of the spiritual, or, to put the same point differently, of deifying the unconscious.55 In Memories Jung states that All comprehension and all that is comprehended is in itself psychic, and to that extent we are hopelessly cooped up in an exclusively psychic world.56 It is difficult to find in Jung?s writings a completely unequivocal affirmation of the objective and supra-psychic reality of the numen, to borrow a term from Otto, a figure who significantly influenced both Jung and Eliade.57 In the interview conducted by Eliade for Combat, Jung does say this: Religious experience is numinous, as Rudolf Otto calls it, and for me, as a psychologist, this experience differs from all others in the way it transcends the ordinary categories of time, space and causality.58 However, many of his formulations on this subject are ambivalent. It is also undoubtedly true that a great many people, including Christian theologians, have used Jung?s sometimes confusing ruminations as a theoretical platform for a wholesale psychologizing of religion—Don Cuppitt, to name but one popular exponent of the view that religion needs no metaphysical underpinnings.59 This is to be guilty of what Frithjof Schuon has called the „psychological imposture?, which he castigates in these terms: ... the tendency to reduce everything to psychological factors and to call into question not only what is intellectual and spiritual...but also the human spirit as such, and therewith its capacity of adequation 55 See René Guénon, „The Confusion of the Psychic and the Spiritual? and „The Misdeeds of Psychoanalysis? in The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times (Baltimore 1972). 56 MDR, 385. 57 The same kind of ambivalence is evident in most Jungian formulations concerning both the collective unconscious and archetypes. This, for instance, from Marie-Louise von Franz: „Really, it is a modern, scientific expression for an inner experience that has been known to mankind from time immemorial, the experience in which strange and unknown things from our own inner world happen to us, in which influences from within can suddenly alter us, in which we have dreams and ideas which we feel as if we are not doing ourselves, but which appear in us strangely and overwhelmingly. In earlier times these influences were attributed to a divine fluid (mana), or to a god, demon, or “spirit”, a fitting expression of the feeling that this influence has an objective, quite foreign and autonomous existence, as well as the sense of its being something overpowering, which has the conscious ego at its mercy.? per JB, 170. 58 CGJ Speaking, 230. (Italics mine.) 59 See the glib commentary by Cuppitt on Jung?s view of „religion?, quoted in S. Segaller & M. Berger Jung, The Wisdom of the Dream (Chatswood 1989), 179. 12 and still more evidently, its inward illimitation and transcendence...Psychoanalysis is at once an endpoint and a cause, as is always the case with profane ideologies, like materialism and evolutionism, of which it is really a logical and fateful ramification and a natural ally.60 Schuon?s reference to materialism and evolutionism alert us to these two 19thC bugbears (still very much with us, alas!) which occasionally raise their ugly heads in Jung?s writings. Even in the autobiography written near the end of his life, Jung is capable of a kind of scientistic gobbledygook which betrays a failure to break free from the stultifying effects of these prejudices. Two examples: „Consciousness is phylogenetically and ontogenetically a secondary phenomenon?.61 (This is a variant on the preposterous evolutionist inversion whereby the „flesh? becomes „word?.) Likewise in his Introduction to The Secret of the Golden Flower, Jung descends into Darwinian hocus-pocus when he suggests that the analogical relationships of symbolic vocabularies and mythological motifs across many different cultures derives from „the identity of cerebral structures beyond all racial differences?.62 Here the psychic domain seems to have itself been reduced to nothing more than an epiphenomenon of a material substrate. This is Jung at his worst, surrendering to a materialistic scientism which he elsewhere excoriates. In Psychology and Religion Jung staked out his most characteristic position on metaphysics: Psychology treats... all metaphysical... assertions as mental phenomena, and regards them as statements about the mind and its structure that derive ultimately from certain unconscious dispositions. It does not consider them to be absolutely valid or even capable of establishing metaphysical truth...Psychology therefore holds that the mind cannot establish or assert anything beyond itself.63 In similar vein, this: I am and remain a psychologist. I am not interested in anything that transcends the psychological content of human experience. I do not even ask myself whether such transcendence is possible...64 Jung, to his credit, was not always able to hold fast to this position. In 1946, for example, he was prepared to write that „archetypes...have a nature that cannot with certainty be designated as psychic?, and that the archetype is a „metaphysical? entity not susceptible to any unequivocal (ie. „scientific?) definition.65 The „status? of archetypes is a critical issue, particularly if we take the following kind of claim seriously: „The basis of analytical psychology?s significance for the psychology of 60 F. Schuon, Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism (Bloomington 1986), 195. 61 MDR, 381. 62 From Jung?s Introduction to The Secret of the Golden Flower, quoted by Burckhardt in „Cosmology and Modern Science?, in The Sword of Gnosis, 168. (Burckhardt?s essay can also be found in his Mirror of the Intellect Cambridge, 1987.) The traditionalist critique of Jung?s thought cannot be canvassed in any detail here, though some of the comments made in this discussion clearly draw on traditionalist understandings. See also P. Sherrard, „An Introduction to the Religious Thought of C.J. Jung?, Studies in Comparative Religion 3:1 (1969); W. Smith, Cosmos and Transcendence Ch 6; and W. Perry, The Widening Breach: Evolutionism in the Mirror of Cosmology (Cambridge, 1995), 89. Sherrard argues that Jung?s thought can best be understood as an agenda for the displacement of Christianity while Smith highlights some of the contradictions and the „dogmatic relativism? which betrays Jung?s confusion of the spiritual with the psychic. Perry notes how Jung inverts the traditional doctrine of Archetypes. 63 C. G. Jung, „Psychology and Religion?, quoted in P. Novak, 68. 64 Interview with Eliade for Combat, in CGJ Speaking, 229. 65 C.G. Jung, „On the Nature of the Psyche?, quoted in A. Jaffé, The Myth of Meaning, 23. 13 religion...lies in C.G. Jung?s discovery of how archetypal images, events and experiences, individually and in groups, are the essential determinants of the religious life in history and in the present.?66 From a traditionalist point of view there are two problems: the first is the suggestion, not hard to find in Jung?s writings, that the psychic domain contains and exhausts all of supra-material reality, a view we have already designated pan-psychism. But even when Jung retreats from this position (as in the passage just cited), he still insists that the psychic is the only supra-material reality that we can explore and know. From the viewpoint of traditional metaphysics this amounts to nothing less than a denial of the Intellect, that faculty by which Absolute Reality can be apprehended, and to which all traditional wisdoms testify.67 What of „God?? Jung?s position, at least as Aniela Jaffé recalls it, is subtle but clear: „God? and „the unconscious? are inseparable from the point of view of the subject but not identical. One of Jung?s most careful formulations on the subject goes like this: This is certainly not to say that what we call the unconscious is identical with God or set up in his place. It is simply the medium from which religious experience seems to flow. So far so good. The problem arises in what follows: „As to what the further cause of such experience may be, the answer to this lies beyond the range of human knowledge.?68 Elsewhere he affirmed that, „the transcendental reality...[beyond] the world inside and outside ourselves...is as certain as our own existence.?69 Nevertheless, it necessarily remains an unfathomable mystery. In denying the possibility of intellection and of absolute certitude concerning metaphysical realities Jung again falls foul of the traditionalists. Compare Jung?s notion that we „are hopelessly cooped up in an exclusively psychic world? and that the cause of religious experience „lies beyond human knowledge? with this kind of claim from Frithjof Schuon: The distinctive mark of man is total intelligence, that is to say an intelligence which is objective and capable of conceiving the absolute...This objectivity...would lack any sufficient reason did it not have the capacity to conceive the absolute or infinite...70 Or, even more succinctly, The prerogative of the human state is objectivity, the essential content of which is the Absolute. There is no knowledge without objectivity of the intelligence...71 Furthermore, This capacity for objectivity and absoluteness is an anticipated and existential refutation of all the ideologies of doubt: if man is able to doubt, this is because certitude exists; likewise the very notion of illusion proves that man has access to reality.72 66 JB, 291. [Italics mine.]. 67 See P. Novak, 77. At other points Jung?s philosophical position is also reminiscent of a kind of „existentialist? relativism. Thus, „...the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.? MDR, 358. 68 from „The Undiscovered Self?, in Civilisation in Transition , quoted in A. Jaffé, 40. 69 from Mysterium Coniunctionis quoted in A. Jaffé, 42. 70 F. Schuon, „To be Man is to Know?, Studies in Comparative Religion 13:1-2 (1979), 117- 118. 71 F. Schuon, Esoterism as Principle and as Way (Bloomington 1981)15ff. 72 F. Schuon, Logic and Transcendence (New York 1975), 13. 14 Another stumbling block for traditionalists concerns the relationship of the empirical ego and consciousness. Ananda Coomaraswamy signals the problem when he writes, The health envisaged by empirical psychotherapy is a freedom from particular pathogenic conditions; that envisaged by sacred or traditional psychology is freedom from all conditions and predicaments.73 In other words, Jung sought to rehabilitate the empirical ego rather than to dismantle it. From a traditionalist point of view Jung hoists himself on his own petard when he writes „To us consciousness is inconceivable without an ego...I cannot imagine a conscious mental state that does not relate to the ego...?74 Daniel Goleman elaborates the cardinal point: The models of contemporary psychology... foreclose the acknowledgement or investigation of a mode of being which is the central premise and summum bonum of virtually every Eastern psycho-spiritual system. Called variously Enlightenment, Buddhahood...and so on, there is simply no fully equivalent category in contemporary psychology.75 Fourthly, several traditionalists, most notably Phillip Sherrard, have argued that Jung?s covert and perhaps not fully conscious agenda was nothing less than the dethronement of Christianity in all of its traditional and institutional forms, and its replacement by a kind of quasi-religious psychology for which Jung himself was a „prophetic? voice. A variant of this particular kind of argument has been elaborated by Philip Rieff and is adumbrated in the following passage: After the failure of the Reformation, and the further fragmentation of Christianity, the search was on for those more purely symbolical authorities to which an educated Christian could transfer his loyalty from the Church. Biblicism gave way to erudition, erudition to historical liberalism, and the latter to a variety of psychological conservatisms, of which Jung?s is potentially the most attractive for those not entirely unchurched.76 This kind of argument would seem to have some cogency when we recall some of Jung?s many explanations of his own relationship to religion. Take this, for example, from a letter written in 1946: I practice science, not apologetics and not philosophy...My interest is a scientific one...I proceed from a positive Christianity that is as much Catholic as Protestant, and my concern is to point out in a scientifically responsible way those empirically tangible facts which would at least make plausible the legitimacy of Christian and especially Catholic dogma.77 The traditionalist response to this kind of claim is quite implacable. Thus Schuon: Modern science...can neither add nor subtract anything in respect of the total truth or of mythological or other symbolism or in respect of the principles and experiences of the spiritual life...We cannot be too wary of all these attempts to reduce the values vehicled by tradition to the level of phenomena 73 A.K. Coomaraswamy, „On the Indian and Traditional Psychology, or rather, Pneumatology?, in Coomaraswamy, Vol 2, Selected Papers: Metaphysics (Princeton 1977), 335. (Italics mine.) See also T. Burckhardt, „Cosmology and Modern Science?, 174-175. 74 from „Psychology and Religion?, quoted by P. Novak, 82. 75 quoted in P. Novak, 73. As Goleman goes on to say, „The paradigms of traditional Asian psychologies, however, are capable of encompassing the major categories of contemporary psychology as well as this other mode of consciousness.? One again sees the problem in Jung?s homologizing of the psychosis of the mental patient with the „mythopoeic imagination which has vanished from our rational age.? MDR, 213. 76 P. Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (Harmondsworth 1973), 110. 77 quoted in JB, 302. 15 supposed to be scientifically controllable. The spirit escapes the hold of profane science in an absolute fashion.78 In the light of these kinds of criticisms it is not hard to see why one traditionalist has suggested that „In the final analysis, what Jung has to offer is a religion for atheists...?,79 or why Rieff claims that Jung?s thought amounts to „a religion for heretics?.80 In a wonderfully ambiguous phrase, a Dominican admirer of Jung called him „a priest without a surplice?.81 It was meant as a compliment but if we take the lack of a surplice as signifying Jung?s detachment from any religious tradition then the epithet carries a different freight. (To make the same point differently, „a priest without a surplice? is no priest at all.) On theological questions Mircea Eliade often retreats into a post-Nietzschean kind of credo. In 1965, for example, he wrote this; In a „world? composed of billions of galaxies...all the classical arguments for or against the existence of God seem to me naive and even childish. I do not think that, for the moment, we have the right to argue philosophically. The problem itself should be left in suspension as it is. We must content ourselves with personal certitudes, with wagers based on dreams, with divinations, ecstasies, aesthetic emotion. That also is a mode of knowing, but without arguments...82 Eliade autobiographical writings, almost, one feels, when he is caught off guard. Like Jung he was often prepared to state things more directly face to face than he was in more professional contexts. In an interview with Claude-Henri Rocquet, Eliade put the matter quite unequivocally: If God doesn?t exist, then everything is dust and ashes. If there is no absolute to give meaning and value to our existence, then that means that existence has no meaning. I know there are philosophers who do think precisely that; but for me, that would be not just pure despair but also a kind of betrayal. Because it isn?t true, and I know that it isn?t true.83 However, Eliade?s apparent lack of any personal commitment to a religious tradition and his failure to understand the full implications of the many scriptures and sacred writings in which he immersed himself have been trenchantly criticized by traditionalists. David Lake thus: „One has the impression of an uprooted and genial academic busily drifting from article to article, without inward centre or the intellectual discrimination to master his prodigious mental fertility.?84 Rama Coomaraswamy is even harsher: „The man is a dilettante, a mere scholar, and in outlook, a totally profane person. When I say he is a dilettante, I refer to the spiritual realm.?85 Both reviewers accuse Eliade of a kind of psychologism but take no account of Eliade?s own exposure of psychological relativism. In No Souvenirs, for instance (the book under review by both Coomaraswamy and Lake) Eliade has this to say: 78 F Schuon, „No Activity Without Truth?, 36-37. 79 W. Smith, Cosmos and Transcendence, 130. 80 P Rieff, 115. 81 W. Smith, 130. 82 Journal II, quoted in G. Steiner, „Ecstasies, not arguments?, 1015. 83 Labyrinth, 67. 84 D. Lake, Review of No Souvenirs in Studies in Comparative Religion 13:3-4 (1978), 244 85 R.P. Coomaraswamy, Review of No Souvenirs in Studies in Comparative Religion 13:1-2 (1978), 123. only reveals something of his personal religious beliefs in informal mode in his 16 Psychoanalysis justifies its importance by asserting that it forces you to look to and accept reality. But what sort of reality? A reality conditioned by the materialistic and scientific ideology of psychoanalysis, that is, a historical product...86 6. Jung and Eliade in Perspective Where does all this leave us? Considered from the traditionalist perspective both Jung and Eliade can be accused of a kind of „humanism? with quasi-religious trappings; from this point of view they are implicated in the destruction of religion begun by the materialistic and humanistic sciences of the Renaissance and more or less completed by Darwinian evolutionism and Freudian psychoanalysis. As Ananda Coomaraswamy so neatly put it, „While nineteenth century materialism closed the mind of man to what is above him, twentieth century psychology opened it to what is below him.?87 Certainly I cannot accept either Jung or Eliade as sages or prophets: they both, it seems to me, exemplify some of the confusions of the age in their life and work. I am not much impressed by the „prophetic? tone which each sometimes strikes in writing of their own work. Our age has not been much blessed by either sages or prophets, and it is perhaps not surprising that both Jung and Eliade have sometimes been mistaken for such. The fact that they cannot live up to the claims of their more extravagant admirers is no reason to dismiss or ignore their work which has a richness and depth not often found amongst the self-styled savants of our times. Both Jung and Eliade were profoundly concerned with man?s position in a world in which science had stripped the cosmos of meaning, apparently eroded the pillars of religious faith, and robbed man of his spiritual dignity. Whatever our views on some of the questions I have been canvassing, we should be grateful to both Jung and Eliade for rescuing their respective disciplines from the clutches of the materialists and their accomplices, and for their attempts to bridge the apparent chasm between traditional religion and modern science. They each have a great deal to say to us. Nevertheless, if we are to draw what is valuable from their work we need to maintain a sense of proportion and to apply a discernment which, I believe, can only be drawn from the treasuries of metaphysical and spiritual teachings found within each of the integral religious traditions. As for Jung, I cannot improve on Philip Novak?s carefully considered judgement: Of Jung?s enduring value, however, there can be no doubt. For modern psychotherapy and the religious quest alike, he dug a seed-bed from which much life-giving and soul-invigorating insight has sprung...But Jung yearned for absoluteness and for Truth—he so wanted to bring a saving message to man—and the clash of this yearning with his avowed vocation, that of empirical scientist and physician, created a lifelong battle of forces within his breast. These tensions spilled over to the printed page, not least when Jung had there to confront the Asian systems which adumbrated the spiritual completion of psychological man that he sought, but with doctrines and methods he could not accept.88 The more crucial general point towards which Novak?s assessment points is one which the twentieth century is determined to ignore. It has been precisely stated by Frithjof Schuon: Outside tradition there can assuredly be found some relative truths or views of partial realities, but outside tradition there does not exist a doctrine that catalyzes absolute truth and transmits liberating notions concerning total reality.89 86 No Souvenirs October 7th, 1965, 269. 87 A. K. Coomaraswamy, quoted in W. Perry, „Drug-Induced Mysticism?, Tomorrow 12:2 (1964), 196. (Coomaraswamy was paraphrasing René Guénon.) 88 P. Novak, 84. 89 F. Schuon, „No Activity Without Truth?, in The Sword of Gnosis, 36. To this might be added another passage of the most far-reaching significance (from the same essay), „Nothing is more misleading than to pretend, as is so glibly done in our day, that the religions have 17 compromised themselves hopelessly in the course of the centuries or that they are now played out. If one knows what a religion really consists of, one also knows that the religions cannot compromise themselves and that they are independent of human doings...tradition, let it be repeated, cannot “become bankrupt”, rather it of the bankruptcy of man that one should speak, for it is he who that has lost all intuition of the supernatural. It is man who has let himself be deceived by the discoveries and inventions of a falsely totalitarian science.? 29.
- [Looking Forward to Tradition: Ancient Truths and Modern Delusions](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/looking-forward-to-tradition-ancient-truths-and-modern-delusions) - Harry Oldmeadow I want to repudiate the conventional notion that we look back on Tradition, belonging to the past, and we look forward to Progress, taking us into the future… I want to argue that “tradition”, in its full amplitude, is a religious and metaphysical conception… Click here to view the PDF or click here
- [Al-Fatiha (The Opener)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/al-fatiha) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection The Fatiha (Arabic for "Opener" or "Opening" sc. chapter) is the first chapter of the Qur'an. As an essential component of the canonical daily prayer (salat), it is recited at least seventeen times a day. Called “the Mother of the Book” and the “Oft Repeated Seven” (sc.
- [Spirituality in Interreligious Dialogue: Challenge and Promise](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/spirituality-in-dialogue) - A common Arab proverb says: “Humans resemble their time more than their fathers”. The meaning is that people, living in the same time context, share a mentality which makes them more akin than they are with people of previous generations. This proverb points to an important factor that shapes our lives: time. Time is not only the framework in which we are born and die, but it deeply shapes our interior life. Interpreting “the signs of times” has become a common topic in Catholic theology since Vatican Council II. It is also one of the main themes of Scripture. God, we believe, reveals himself not in abstract thoughts, but through the events and happenings of human history. Consequently, Christian faith must be in continuous interaction with time and time events, taking them into account as decisive and essential factors for its growth. The present essay intends to explore some aspects of Christian spirituality in our present historical context which is inescapably one of religious pluralism. This is, surely, a new challenge for Christian spirituality, but it may also turn into an opening to new dimensions and horizons. In the end, it may become an opportunity (in the sense of biblical kairos) of becoming more Christian. 1. Pluralism: The challenge of our time 1.1. The Present Context Understanding our time and the deep changes our world is going through has become a compelling concern among scholars in our day. 1 The new era we are entering upon is often qualified as being one of a ‘global context’ or ‘globalization’. The accelerating breaking down of economic, social and political barriers is creating a common global market. But along with such an economic expansion, deep cultural and spiritual changes are also going on. Peoples from all corners of the planet are now coming closer. No one, Christians included, can possibly afford to live in seclusion, in cultural and spiritual isolation. Jacques Dupuis remarks, at the beginning of his book, that: “... the encounter of cultures and religions, which is increasingly becoming a fact of life in the First World countries themselves, has turned the theological debate on other religions into a primary concern in the Churches of the Western world as well”. 2 In short, pluralism at all levels is becoming all the more a permanent feature of the present and future human predicament. Now we no longer discuss world religions as far away entities, belonging to foreign peoples and countries, but we find them on our doorstep. As a consequence, all religions, Christianity included, are now challenged to define their own identity in a plural context, in close interrelationship; this is vital for their future. Finding the meaning of this new situation of religious pluralism both at the theological and the spiritual level has become a basic concern of theologians. Religious pluralism cannot be seen just as a historical accident, or interpreted only in a negative, pessimistic way. Theology is always called to be open to God’s purpose and providence in the important events of human history. Now the question has already shifted from the old topic of ‘theology of religions’, as separated, distant entities, to ‘the theology of religious pluralism’, as the title of Dupuis’s book clearly declares. Christianity, in the past, used to live in a world vision in which it placed itself naturally at the centre. In such a vision, the ‘other’, the non? Christian, was basically seen as either a potential Christian to convert or an infidel whose destiny was not guaranteed. All this was well epitomized in the famous traditional theologoumenon: Extra ecclesiam nulla salus (Outside the Church there is no salvation). Nowadays we are entering, not without hesitations and refluxes, into a new spiritual situation. For the Catholic Church the turning point has surely been the Second Vatican Council. Since then, a lot of theological research has been dedicated to the topics of religious pluralism and intrerreligious dialogue. A. Race, for instance, says that: “... the future of the Christian theological enterprise is indeed at stake in the attitude the Christian adopts to the newly experienced religious pluralism”. 3 And D. Tracy adds that: “We are approaching the day when it will not be possible to attempt a Christian systematic theology, except in serious conversation with the other great ways”.4 M. Barnes focuses on the fact that we are becoming more aware of the ‘other’, from all points of view, religious included. We are beginning to take difference seriously. The existence of the other can no longer continue to be peripheral to our faith: we have to exist and coexist in a pluralistic religious context.5 Consequently, our spirituality too cannot continue to be isolated, content to live in the secure fold of the Church. In a way, it must come out and meet the other, people of different creeds and faiths, on the streets, next door. 1.2. Spirituality in Our Time The issue of religious pluralism is not confined to the academic level of theological discussions. It concerns the whole of Christian faith and life, and its spirituality too. Spirituality is not an easy topic to define. Many different definitions or descriptions of it have been given by scholars. 6 M. Downey sees spirituality as: “... a way of consciously striving to integrate one’s life through self-transcending knowledge, freedom and love in light of the highest values perceived and pursued”. 7 For E. Cousin spirituality is connected with the ‘spiritual’ in humans: “The spiritual core is the deepest centre of the person. It is here that the person is open to the transcendent dimension; it is here that the person experiences ultimate reality”. 8 In short, it seems to me that spirituality is a complex attitude involving a number of different elements: the person concerned, the world context in which he/she finds him/herself, and the transcendent reference of both, the ultimate Reality. All these three dimensions must be part of an integrated spirituality. For the purpose of the present research it is important to underline that the religious factor, in all its variety and plurality, is part of the spiritual context and must become an integral element of its constitution. In fact, the interreligious context has a special significance for it, being an important mediating factor in inter? human relationships and, ultimately, in relation to the transcendent Reality. It is therefore important to investigate the way the new, present context of religious pluralism is going to shape our spirituality, highlighting the challenges that a true contemporary Christian spirituality has to face. Looking to the past, one can say that the traditional spiritual world of Christian saints developed in what one might call a mono? religious context. This does not mean that Christianity existed without inter? action with its context; history witnesses to just the opposite. It is a fact, however, that Christian saints naturally sought their perfection inside the Christian fold. Non? Christians could at most benefit from their sainthood, but surely not teach them anything in it. A good case in point is the great popular modern saint, St Thérèse de Lisieux. She was very sympathetic with sinners and non? believers, to the point of offering for them her life, as victim to the Divine Love. Yet, all this was done by her in the sole perspective of the salvation of their souls so that they too might enter the Christian fold in the end. Such an isolated spirituality is now challenged by the present context, which is inevitably a pluralistic one. This new religious situation obliges us all to rethink our spiritual way of life, coming to terms with God’s presence in our present world and finding a meaning for our faith. One could dare to say that Christian spirituality will have a real future only by becoming a meaningful presence in an expanding pluralistic context, in close encounter and dialogue with other religions. To this purpose, some basic interior attitudes must be developed, going beyond past spiritual and theological positions. 2. In interreligious encounter 2.1. The Other: Identity and Difference A term which is becoming all the more central in our pluralistic culture is the ‘other’. There is nowadays a growing sensibility and perception of the specificity of the ‘other’ at all levels, religious, cultural, racial, etc. This attitude is quite different from what was prevalent until the quite recent past in many world ideologies, such as nationalism, communism and others. A basic trait, common to these ideologies, was the rejection, to the point of elimination, of the ‘other’, the different, the foreign. Accepting difference, taking it seriously, may not be easy. A basic feeling of fear of the ‘other’ needs to be overcome. We are, in fact, always inclined to reduce the unknown to the known, the unfamiliar to the familiar, distorting in this way, consciously or not, the image of the other. Rooted in all human beings there is a basic ‘inclusive instinct’. 9 Barnes, in his article, relates his estranged feeling in hearing his Christian experience kindly reduced by his interlocutor to Hindu terms. The same happens very often to one living in an Islamic context, as I do. However, I find this experience helpful, because it makes us aware that we, in our turn, may make the same mistake of reducing the other to our own terms. This attitude is not infrequent in the theological readings of other faiths: one is always easily tempted to interpret the other in one’s own terms.10 Beyond all good intentions, such attitudes are likely to be perceived by the other as a kind of an imperialistic attempt at assimilation. In approaching the other, one has to come to terms first of all with the ‘other in its otherness’, taking differences seriously.11 A common prejudice to be overcome in this process is that of picturing other religions in abstract terms, as closed systems of beliefs either to be accepted or rejected in their entirety. J. Lipner argues against such an attitude highlighting that religions are always polycentred phenomena. Particularly in day to day life there is always a human space in which people interrelate, bridge over to one another beyond fixed dogmatic patterns. For this reason, he calls for a basic attitude of ‘constructive empathy’, oriented to creating ‘an open? ended mode of being’.12 Such an attitude helps people to be open to the presence of God in the other. To counter the ‘inclusivist instinct’ one has to become aware that God acts in all religions: “One must at least allow for the possibility of God’s action outside the known boundaries”.13 Accepted with such an open mind, the other ceases to be a menace to one’s own self, becoming, on the contrary, an essential factor of one’s own identity. Self? identity is not obliterated but enhanced through the openness to the other. There is a mutual fulfillment in a true interfaith encounter. D. Lochhead, for example, relates how he was personally enriched in overcoming a mentality of hostility towards his Catholic environment, crossing over to an attitude of understanding and partnership. He concludes saying that now his life cannot do without a ‘Catholic’ component, and this has been for him an unexpected enrichment. 14 This is what is hoped for from a sincere interreligious dialogue. Change must not be required as a prerequisite of it, but it must surely be one of its outcomes. In this way, the other ceases to be seen as an opponent, but turns into a catalyst that helps in deepening one’s own religious experience, becoming part of one’s own identity. Having lived for a long time in an Islamic context, it has now become impossible for me to think of my Christian faith and practice without having in mind the Islamic view and sensitivity to it. For example, picking up a book of Christian prayers or songs, I spontaneously ask myself: what would my Muslim friend get from such expressions? Would they help him/her in understanding something of Christian faith or make it more obscure to him/her? In some way, the ‘other’, the ‘Islamic predicament’, has become an integral part of my daily life and reflection, say, of my own identity. This way of acceptance of the other, in his/her otherness and difference, is often designated as ‘intra-religious dialogue’ and proposed as the premise for a true ‘inter? religious dialogue’. The other is no more a foreigner, but a guest in our journey of faith: we let the other’s belief and life question and test our own belief and life. This openness will add depth and breadth to our own understanding of Christian faith.15 Dialogue, in fact, is not, in the first place, dealing with abstract systems of thought, but with concrete persons in their quest for truth, a quest in which each partner must become a ‘thou’ for the other. Eventually, we all are called to journey together from hostility to ‘partnership’ (Lochhead), or ‘relation in mutuality’ (Cousins), or ‘mutual conversation’ (Barnes). In any case: “Dialogue probes both partners in all aspects of their humanity and religious commitment”.16 In conclusion, a common ground of mutual esteem and understanding, an intra? religious dialogue, should be fostered before meeting in an exterior dialogue. Experience proves that there is no meaningful and fruitful interreligious dialogue if it has not been prepared by an intra? religious one. However, this attitude cannot be just taken as a pragmatic way of getting along with people of other faiths, but must grow from a new theological vision of God’s presence in the world. 2.2. On Paradigms and Beyond Finding the meaning of the contemporary pluralistic religious context has become one of the major issues in modern theological reflection. 17 In 1973, John Hick with his book God and the Universe of Faiths, launched his ‘Copernican revolution’, calling for a ‘God? centred’ theology of religions as a radical departure from the traditional ‘Christ? Church? centred’. Since then, the debate has been focused on the so-called religious paradigms of exclusivism, inclusivism, pluralism. This division, however, is becoming obsolete, as we are moving beyond paradigms.l8 Proposing a ‘common idea of God’ to be shared by all religions, as the supporters of the pluralistic view pretend, is seen as an over-simplification of differences, leading to a dangerous religious reductionism and relativism. In fact, all religious reflection is situated in a specific ‘faith context’, and only in it can be properly understood. There is no Christianity without Christ, no Buddhism without Buddha, no Islam without Mohammed. On the other hand, exclusivist and inclusivist paradigms do not seem in tune with the new perception, emerging from the present situation of religious pluralism. The salvation of non? Christians is no more the central issue in the interreligious debate. Contemporary theology feels to be called to focus on: “ ... the meaning in God’s design for humankind of the plurality of living faiths and religious traditions with which we are surrounded”. 19 Many theologians, such as Barnes and Dupuis, think that instead of starting from a preset theological paradigm it is better to build a theology of dialogue on the basis of an actual interreligious encounter. They propose theologies in conversation (Barnes), or in dialogue (Dupuis), or in interpenetration (R. Panikkar). No religion, meeting the others, can start by setting itself or its views on the top of them all, fixing an a priori theological pattern, even if a pluralistic one. There is an increasing awareness that in interreligious dialogue each partner should start rethinking his/her own faith in an unprejudiced openness to the others. Each religious tradition, in fact, should develop from within itself an open and dialogical attitude in relation to the others. The two aspects, commitment to one’s own tradition and openness to the other’s faith, should not be contrasted, but strictly and faithfully conjugated together by all partners. This is surely a positive spiritual attitude to be developed and a workable premise acceptable by all sides. It is to be remarked that the official documents of the Catholic Church do not discuss at length the theological status of non? Christian religions, but give just some practical guide? lines on how to enter into dialogue with them indicating the four basic levels of, life, works, thought and spirituality. In fact, an open, dialogical attitude can be developed only through an actual experience of dialogue. Dialogue, in fact, does not involve only theoretical thinking, necessary as it may be. It must be, in the first place, a meeting at the level of spiritual life and religious experience which are the heart of all religions. It seems that in the present interreligious context a spiritual person, or saint, should not be such only in the limits of his/her own religious tradition, as it has been in the past. He/she should gain a sort of recognition beyond strict confessional boundaries if his/her sainthood is to be contextualized in our present historical situation. Recently, we have witnessed some holy persons, such as Mother Teresa (d. 1998) and Bede Griffiths (d. 1993), gaining appreciation and recognition beyond their confessional boundaries, by people of other religious traditions. Their way of life, opened to the pluralistic religious context surrounding them, had a tremendous impact, opening paths of mutual understanding and esteem among people of different religious traditions. This seems to be now the type of sainthood fitting for our present pluralistic context, and this is what the people of our time expect: an interreligious way of sainthood, one could say. 3. Entering into dialogue 3.1. A new spiritual vision Entering into a dialogical attitude is not an easy task. A radical interior change is required. Accepting the ‘other’, not as an opponent, but as a partner in one’s own journey of faith, implies a growth towards a new understanding of one’s own faith. This attitude may be summarized as a basic openness to two mysteries: the mystery of God’s love working in all creation and human history, and the mystery of the human person in quest of ultimate truth and love. One must grow first in the conviction that God speaks through the other and must be ‘allowed’ to do so. One has to recognize that the other, too, has a truth from God which may complete one’s own truth. No religion can claim to possess the full truth about God, or the full comprehension of God’s mystery. Dialogue, in fact, is: “... a matter first and foremost of coming to terms with the mystery of what God is doing in the world”. 20 On the other hand, one must be open to the mystery present in every human being. The human being is defined as essentially self? transcendent, in a perpetual quest of truth and love beyond any particular situation or predicament. In this sense, no paradigm can fully express such a dynamism of self? transcendence which starts from within a given tradition but reaches out beyond it to the unknown. Religions are not just fixed patterns of beliefs. In each religion there is an inner life, a dialectic between prophetic dynamic aspects and institutional static ones. These are openings for mutual encounter and exchange. 21 Moreover, religions exist in communities of people, living in particular historical and social contexts. Every believer feels to be called to the double task of fidelity to one’s own faith and openness to the others. In a true interreligious encounter or dialogue, the two moments are not contrasted, but always interrelated: in a sense, they grow together. For this reason, Barnes prefers the term conversation to that of dialogue among religions. Dialogue seems to suggest rather a dialectic of words, while conversation indicates a direct meeting of people. In fact, he insists, entering into dialogue one must turn from an ‘idea? dominated’ relationship into a ‘person? centred’ one. The common ground of dialogue is not, in the first place, a given general idea about God, but the common human quest for God. A true encounter, based on this premise, is bound to bring a new and enlarged understanding of one’s own faith. Cousins describes dialogue as a spiritual journey, a crossing over to the other and a coming back, enriched by the other’s richness. As has been seen, to this purpose a deep, mutual empathy between the partners is required. Interreligious dialogue is becoming, in his view, the distinctive spiritual journey of our time: “Through interreligious dialogue, we may be entering a new age of faith”.22 One may say that spirituality in our present pluralistic context is becoming all the more a spirituality of openness to the others, or a spirituality of and in interreligious dialogue. 3.2. For a theology of dialogue Interreligious dialogue, however, should not be seen just as a new fashion or cultural mood. It must be grounded in a deep understanding of one’s own faith. Christian theology is struggling to come to terms with two basic tenets of its faith: the uniqueness of Christ as the universal Saviour and God’s love and presence in all religions. Are these two truths in contradiction so that accepting one of them the other is forfeited? This has been the central issue of the theological paradigms. Now a more comprehesive solution can be looked for in a new understanding of the Trinitarian mystery seen as the source of the theology of dialogue. Our human interreligious dialogue is viewed as an image, a participation of the dialogue going on at the very core of the ultimate mystery of Being, God himself. This mystery is, in Christian terms, not just an undifferentiated or amorphous Oneness, but a deep dialogical interrelation in which unity is expressed in and through the distinction and otherness of persons: the mystery of the Trinity. This same mystery is seen to be the source and the model of all interreligious dialogue and spirituality. Also here unity and diversity among the religious partners must be accepted and conjugated together. Dupuis expands a Trinitarian theology of dialogue centred on the presence of the Word before and outside the limits of the Incarnation. 23 Barnes develops a Trinitarian theology of dialogue based on the role of the Holy Spirit as the revealer of God’s mystery in human history.24 It is the same Spirit of God who makes the mystery of Christ present throughout human history. In this way, Barnes intends to go beyond both a self? centred inclusivism and a reductionist pluralism. In dialogue, he says, one does not just look for the ‘hidden’ Christ in other religions but for: “... the way the Spirit of Christ is active, in all religions, in revealing the mystery of Christ — the mystery of what God is doing in the world”.25 God’s presence in creation and human history, religious history included, in all its various manifestations, becomes now the main concern of the theology of religious pluralism and dialogue. In a Christian understanding this can be conjugated with the centrality of Christ’s revelation. In the end, however, one must always be aware that God, even in his self? revelation, remains for ever the known? unknown, the present-transcendent, the never exhausted Mystery: “God remains a mystery, but a mystery which seeks to reveal itself”. 26 And in meeting God’s mystery, one must know that: “Paradox and dialectic are at the heart of all human religiosity; we only come to know God by being prepared to struggle with ambiguity and insecurity”.27 Faith is never a conquest, but a gift to be received in wonder. Besides, Dupuis reminds us that interreligious dialogue should take into consideration the actual conditions of humankind. The great world religions extend through areas of the impoverished and oppressed masses of the South of the world. A true interreligious dialogue cannot overlook such a situation of injustice and exploitation, but must always be conjugated with both a theology and praxis of liberation. 28 Conclusion The present research is intended to point to the fact that a new spiritual attitude is required by our present context of religious pluralism. From within all religions, an attitude of openness to the ‘other in his/her otherness’ must be developed. This can be achieved only on the basis of a new perception of God’s presence in all religions and cultures. The other, the different should no longer be perceived as a threat, an opponent, but welcomed as a partner on a common journey of faith. Such a deep spiritual change can only be brought about through a new understanding of one’s own faith. In a Christian vision, dialogue should not become just a new fashion of our times, but the expression of a deeper insight of the Trinitarian mystery. This mystery is considered the source and model of a spirituality of and in interreligious dialogue. Such spirituality must, finally, become involved in the suffering of humankind, in the struggle for justice and liberation on behalf of the oppressed. These are, in my view, some basic traits of a spirituality suitable for our time, a time of religious pluralism and interreligious encounter.
- [Gathering of Voices 2012](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/gathering-of-voices-recordings) - The selection we are having is, quite obviously, far from representing the full spectrum of the world religious traditions, but not so obviously, it is also far from representing even the wide spectrum to be found within each tradition. Not only are many different prayers given preference over one another in different schools, denominations and branches of every tradition, but there are also many different languages in use for devotional purposes within those traditions. Some religions, most notably Buddhism and Christianity as we will hear, have always given preference to translations into local languages, while others, even in spite of having a central canonical language, have produced over the centuries a very rich and inspired literature in local languages; notable cases include the use of Marathi in Hinduism, Yiddish in Judaism and of Urdu in Islam. • A similar reservation applies to the translations you will find in the programme, which have been selected among many possibilities, and are in no way intended here to promote any particular school of thought. They are given as useful, though precarious, pointers, on the understanding that the original texts are truly inexhaustible. • We would have liked, of course, to have other representations in the programme; there are some major omissions, most of us will agree, and we can only ask for your indulgence in this respect. We did want to bring in at least a few other groups, and invitations were made, but Tuesday afternoon is not such a friendly time, then the snow came, and we also needed to try to keep the length of the event within reasonable bounds… In the end, the final product, as usually, seems to have taken a life of its own and here we are. * Interfaith initiatives, especially in academic contexts, tend to focus on doctrinal, usually theological, elucidations and dialogue. Sometimes joint sessions of scriptural reading, or conferences on a given doctrinal or social issue take place. In all these exchanges the pitfalls of expression are always lurking, and those engaged feel as if treading on thin ice lest they are misinterpreted and then misquoted and misjudged and the whole endeavour collapses. How could it be otherwise, we may wonder, if what is involved is always trying to express what is beyond words and even beyond language? In the face of such a challenge, music easily presents itself, foremost among other non-verbal means, as a sufficient vehicle, or in any case as a subtler vehicle, capable perhaps of reaching inwards, or upwards, or at least, through its rhythm, closer in language to our beating hearts, and even closer when use is made of the human voice as an instrument. True and timeless bridges between the corporeal and the subtle realms, we don’t seem to be able to determine exactly where is it that our intonations and invocations spring from, and how far they reach in their subtle repercussions. Much could be said along these lines, but we have not gathered here for any lecturing. We think, however, that it will not be out of place to suggest a level of reflection that can help us enter a right mood, with a musical pun intended, for listening to the recitations to come. We can do it briefly by paraphrasing an old and fundamental question of philosophy: why is there any sound at all instead of utter and boundless silence?
- [Death, Resurrection and Human Destiny: Christian and Muslim Perspectives](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/death-resurrection-and-human-destiny) - The 11th Building Bridges Seminar Convened by Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury Day of Public Lectures – 23rd April 2012 King’s College, London Death, Resurrection & Human Destiny in the Bible The Rt Revd Prof Tom Wright, University of St Andrews Death, Resurrection & Human Destiny in the Qur’an Prof Mona Siddiqui, Edinburgh University
- [Poblet Monastery Cloister Garden](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/poblet-monastery-cloister-garden) - Josep M. Mallarach It is appropriate to finish by recalling (…) the essential coincidence in symbolism and functionality between Christian cloister gardens and the Moorish Chah-Bagh. Here we have another example of the links in the essential dimensions based on the artistic and natural beauty of these indoor gardens that unite the World’s two main
- [Road Maps for the Soul](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/road-maps-for-the-soul) - Jacob Schmidt-Madsen A critical reading of five Indian gyan caupar (“snakes and ladders”) boards. Where once there were many in a house, there now remains only one, and where there is one, there are many later, and not even one in the end; and thus, shaking night and day like two dice, Time, the expert,
- [Inter or Intra-Religious Dialogue?](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/inter-or-intra-religious-dialogue) - Gerard V. Hall SM Do we come to the table of dialogue with a religious spirit—which represents gratitude to God and openness to one’s neighbour—or do we come with not-so-hidden agendas based on threats and stereotypes? If so, there can be no true dialogue. The participants will not meet the ‘other’ but some ‘false image’
- [Enduring Utterance: Collected Lectures (1993-2001)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/enduring-utterance) - by Martin Lings, 2014, edited by Trevor Banyard. ISBN 978-1-908092-09-0 Click here to read an excerpt To buy this publication through Amazon click here This is a Matheson Trust Publication, click here to view other Matheson Trust Publications.
- [To Take Upon Us the Mystery of Things: The Shakespeare Lectures](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/to-take-upon-us) - by Martin Lings, 2014, edited by Ira Zinman. ISBN 978-1-908092-10-6 Click here to read an excerpt To buy this publication through Amazon click here This is a Matheson Trust Publication, click here to view other Matheson Trust Publications.
- [Notes Toward a Chinese View of Time](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/dy-chinese-view-of-time) - Manuel B. Dy Jr. To be great is, above all, to be “sincere”, because “only those who are absolutely sincere can fully develop their own nature.” One is “sincere,” that is, integrated, complete, whole, when no divisions exist, either within oneself, or between oneself and an “earth which supports and contains all things, and a
- [Dogen on Being Time](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/dogen-on-being-time) - Eihei Dogen One has to accept that in this world there are millions of objects and that each one is, respectively, the entire world—this is where the study of buddhism commences. Dogen's insights as to time and being and the views of certain contemporary physicists on time and space parallel each other to a remarkable
- [Looking Forward to Tradition:</br> The Contemporary World in the Light</br> of the Perennial Philosophy](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/looking-forward-to-tradition-events) - A week of events in London and Cambridge with Prof. Harry Oldmeadow * Public Lecture · Lincoln Centre, Mon. 1st December, 2014 Organised jointly with the Temenos Academy. This lecture will examine problematic notions of “tradition”, “modernity” and “postmodernism”, and argue that our most fundamental problems are rooted in a misunderstanding of the world and
- [Letters of Shaykh al-‘Arabi al-Darqawi](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/letters-of-shaykh-al-arabi-al-darqawi) - Translated by Titus Burckhardt A selection from the Rasa’il al-darqawiyya, an important document among the Sufi brotherhoods of North Africa. “You will perhaps find a benefit in distress which you have not been able to find in fasting nor in prayer; therefore when it descends upon you, defend yourself no longer and do not be
- [The Method](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-method) - Of the voluntary rites of Islam as performed by the Sufis, the invocation of the Name Allah has already been mentioned as by far the most important. There might seem to be a certain contradiction between the opening of the Holy Tradition quoted at the outset of this chapter which sets the obligatory above the voluntary and the Quranic affirmation that dhikr Allah, which is voluntary, is greater even than the ritual prayer, which is obligatory. But it must be remembered that although what is obligatory serves to confer a spiritual rhythm on the flow of the hours, the time that it actually takes is relatively short. The voluntary has therefore a potential precedence over it by being capable of embracing and penetrating the whole of life, and this is what those who practise methodically the 7LV: 26–7. 8For a fuller treatment of the significance of these movements, see A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century, pp. 187–90. invocation aim at making it do. The meaning of the Holy Tradition is clearly that what is a legal obligation cannot be replaced, at the whim of an individual, by something which is not. Thus the Sufis are in agreement that the invocation of the Name, in itself the most powerful of all rites, is only acceptable to God on the basis of the invoker’s having performed what is obligatory. It could not be a legal obligation itself for power necessarily means danger; and by no means every novice is allowed to proceed at once to the invocation of the Supreme Name. The recitation of the Qur'an is no doubt the voluntary rite which is most widely spread throughout the Islamic community as a whole. The Sufis may be said to differ from the majority in that when they recite it—or when they listen to it which is ritually equivalent—they do so as a prolongation of dhikr Allah, with no abatement of their aspiration to return to God. The doctrine of the Uncreatedness of the Revealed Book holds out a means of union which is not to be refused. Moreover the soul has need of the Qur'an as a complement to the Name, being as it is by its very nature what might be called a multiple unity, and its God-given multiplicity demands a certain direct recognition which it is not the Name’s function to accord. The following passage will find an echo in every reader of the Qur'an. But it concerns the Sufis above all, for they alone are fully conscious of the problem it touches on: ‘The Quran is, like the world, at the same time one and multiple. The world is a multiplicity which disperses and divides; the Quran is a multiplicity which draws together and leads to Unity. The multiplicity of the holy Book—the diversity of its words, sentences, pictures and stories—fills the soul and then absorbs it and imperceptibly transposes it into the climate of serenity and immutability by a sort of divine “cunning”. The soul, which is accustomed to the flux of phenomena, yields to this flux without resistance; it lives in phenomena and is by them divided and dispersed—even more than that, it actually becomes what it thinks and does. The revealed Discourse has the virtue that it accepts this tendency while at the same time reversing the movement thanks to the celestial nature of the content and the language, so that the fishes of the soul swim without distrust and with their habitual rhythm into the divine net.’9 The Name and the Book are two poles between which lie a wealth of possibilities of invocation and litany, some being nearer to one pole and some to the other. The recitation of the two Shahadahs, for example and the invocation of the two Names of Mercy are nearer to the Supreme Name, whereas certain long and complex litanies are more comparable to the Qur'an and as often as not they largely consist of extracts from it. But the Name may be said to have another complement which is very different from the Revealed Book though parallel to it in the sense that it directly recognises the diffuse nature of the soul, and this is the individual prayer when the suppliant speaks directly to the Divinity as to another person, telling him of his difficulties and his needs, for himself and for those near to him, both living and dead, and asking for favours of various kinds—or not, as the case may be, for it is essential that this prayer should be a spontaneous laying bare of the individual, and no two individuals are alike. In this connection it must be remembered that night is the symbol of the soul, and that even the unclouded shining of the full moon does not change night into day. Whatever faith the soul may be said to possess can only be very relative as compared with the certainty of the Heart, but it can be more or less a prolongation of that certainty. There is a significant passage in the Qur'an where Abraham asks God to show him how He brings the dead to life. Hast thou not 9Frithjof Schuon, Understanding Islam (World Wisdom Books, 1998), p. 48. faith? is the divine rejoinder. Yes, but (show me) so that my heart may be at rest10 is his answer. These last words could be glossed: So that the certainty in the depth of my being may be left in peace, untroubled by the surface waves of reason and imagination. The answer is accepted and followed by a miracle of vivification, which proves that the soul has a right to certain concessions. It could in fact be said that the purpose of a miracle is to enable the whole soul to partake supernaturally of an ‘absolute’ certainty which is normally the prerogative of the Heart; but a small part of this effect can be produced through that most natural and human means, the individual prayer—not by any superimposition of faith but by the elimination of obstacles and distractions. This prayer, like the recitation of the Qur'an, is shared by the whole community and is generally considered as an adjunct to the ritual prayer, which it normally follows, preceded by the words of the Qur'an: Your Lord hath said: Call upon Me and I will answer you.11 But the majority are not concerned with method, whereas the Sufi Shaykhs insist on this prayer above all for its methodic value, not only as a means of regular communion for the soul but also as a means for it to unburden itself, that is, to unload some of its inevitable cares and anxieties so that it may be, at any rate in its higher reaches, a prolongation of the peace of the Heart rather than a discontinuity. Nor should the gestural value of this prayer be underrated, for the suppliant, head slightly bowed and hands held out with hollowed empty palms upturned, becomes a soul-penetrating incarnation of spiritual poverty. It may be concluded from what is taught about human perfection—and this has already been touched on in relation to the Messenger—that the primordial soul is a unified multiple harmony suspended as it were between the next world and this world, that is, between the Inward and the Outward, in such a way that there is a perfect balance between the pull of the inward signs—the Heart and beyond it the Spirit—and the signs on the horizons. This balance has moreover a dynamic aspect in that the Heart sends out through the soul a ray of recognition of the outer signs, the great phenomena of nature; and these by the impact they make on the senses, give rise to a vibration which traverses the soul in an inward direction, so that with man, the last created being, the outward movement of creation is reversed and everything flows back as it were through his Heart to its Eternal and Infinite Source. But in the fallen soul, where the attraction of the Heart is more or less imperceptible, the balance is broken and the scales are heavily weighted in favour of the outer world. To ask how the true balance can be restored is one way of asking ‘What is Sufism?’ And the first part of the answer is that the Divine Name must take the place of the veiled Heart, and a movement towards it must be set up in the soul to counteract the pull of the outer world so that the lost harmony can be regained.
- [The Universality of the Qur’an](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-universality-of-the-quran) - Martin Lings Recorded in London, October 2003. Universality of the Qur’an Click here to download – 37:45 (36.3MB) Questions & Answers Click here to download – 37:45 (36.3MB) Format: MP3. Republished by kind permission of The Temenos Academy.
- [Human Origins and Destinies According to the Great Religions of the World](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/human-origins-and-destinies) - Dr Martin Lings Recorded by The Jupiter Trust, Oxford, 21 March 2003. Click here to download – 48:23 minutes (46.5MB) Format: MP3.
- [Martin Lings—Schuon’s Books](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/lings-video-schuons-books) - Martin Lings Martin Lings explains why Schuon's books are not easy to read, who is drawn to Schuon’s writings and what readers can gain from them. Running Time: 2:46
- [Martin Lings—Writings of Guénon and Schuon II](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/lings-video-writings-guenon-schuon-2) - Martin Lings Martin Lings concludes his remarks comparing the writings of Guénon & Schuon and defines their places as the preeminent exponents of Perennial Philosophy. Running Time: 2:06
- [Martin Lings—Writings of Guénon and Schuon I](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/lings-video-writings-guenon-schuon-1) - Martin Lings Martin Lings discusses the similarities and differences between the writings of René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon. Running Time: 6:23
- [Martin Lings—1st Correspondence with Guénon](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/lings-video-correspondence-with-guenon) - Martin Lings Martin Lings discusses the French journal, Etudes traditionnelles, and his first correspondence with René Guénon. Running Time: 1:07 This clip is shown here by courtesy of World Wisdom Books.
- [The Heart (from <em>What is Sufism?</em>)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-heart-from-what-is-sufism) - “To-day1 Sufism (ta?awwuf) is a name without a reality. It was once a reality without a name.” Commenting on this in the following century, Hujw?r? adds: “In the time of the Companions of the Prophet and their immediate successors this name did not exist, but its reality was in everyone. Now the name exists without the reality.”2 Similarly, but without being so absolute either in praise or in blame, Ibn Khald?n remarks that in the first three generations of Islam mysticism was too general to have a special name. But “when worldliness spread and men tended to become more and more bound up with the ties of this life, those who dedicated themselves to the worship of God were distinguished from the rest by the title of Sufis”.3 The word ??f? means literally “woollen” and by extension “wearer of wool”, and there can be little doubt that woollen dress was already associated with spirituality in pre-Islamic times. Otherwise the Prophet would hardly have thought it worth mentioning that Moses was clothed entirely in wool when God spoke to him. Nonetheless, the wearing of wool does not appear to have ever been a general practice among the mystics of Islam. The most likely explanation of the name is that it was first aptly applied to a small group who did wear wool and that it was then indiscriminately extended to all the mystics of the community in order to fill a void; for they had as yet no name, and since they were becoming a more and more distinct class, it was becoming more and more necessary to be able to refer to them. The extremely rapid spread of the name Sufi and its subsequent permanence are no doubt to be explained partly in view of this need and also in virtue of the suitability, in more than one respect, of the term itself. The difficulty which people have always had in explaining it is not the least of its advantages since for the majority Sufism itself, by its very nature, is something of an enigma, and as such it calls for a name that is partially enigmatic. At the same time, its name should have venerable associations and profound implications; and the Arabic root, consisting of the three letters ?ad–w?w–f?’, which has the basic meaning of “wool”, has according to the science of letters a secret identity4 with the root ?ad–f?’–w?w which has the basic meaning of “purity” in the sense of what has been sifted, as grain is sifted from chaff. Moreover this root yields a verbal form which, when written without vowels as is normal in Arabic, is identical to the eye with ??f? and which means “he was chosen as an intimate friend”, the implication being that the chooser was God, as in the case of al-Mu??af?, the Elect, the Chosen, one of the names of the Prophet, which is also from this root. The name given to the mystics of Islam is near enough to these other words to be apt, but remote enough for the mystics to accept it without seeming vainglorious. As often as not, however, they speak of themselves as “the poor”, al-fuqar?’, plural of faq?r, in Persian darv?sh, whence the English “fakir” and “dervish”. The poverty in question is the same as in the Beatitude: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven”. But the origin of the Sufi term is the verse of the Qur’?n: God is the Rich and ye are the poor.5 Unlike the Beatitude, it refers to mankind in general, expressing a fact from which none can escape. The Sufis apply the verse to themselves because it is they alone who draw from it, as we shall see, the ultimate conclusions. Indeed, Sufism could almost be defined as an exploitation of the fact in question—the double fact, in what concerns God as well as man. Moreover the name faq?r has an operative value in that it serves as a precious reminder; and in ending a letter for example, a Sufi will often precede his name with the words: “from the poor unto his Lord…” If the Qur’?n does not address the Sufis specifically in the words Ye are the poor, it does, as we have seen, refer to the Saints, that is, to the fully realised Sufis, as the slaves of God in certain contexts where not only the fact of slavehood (which concerns everyone) but also the full consciousness of it is indicated; and the two concepts of slavehood and poverty are inextricably connected. We have also seen that the Sufis, or rather the best of them, are the foremost and the near. But of all those Qur’?nic terms which may be said to refer to them and to no one else except a priori the Prophets, the most significant as well as the most recurrent is probably the somewhat enigmatic phrase those who have hearts; and mention of this has been reserved until now because it is important enough to be the central theme of a chapter. For what indeed is Sufism, subjectively speaking, if not “heart-wakefulness”? In speaking of the majority, the Qur’?n says: It is not the eyes that are blind but the hearts.6 This shows—and it would be strange if it were otherwise—that the Quranic perspective agrees with that of the whole ancient world, both of East and of West, in attributing vision to the heart and in using this word to indicate not only the bodily organ of that name but also what this corporeal centre gives access to, namely the centre of the soul, which itself is the gateway to a higher “heart”, namely the Spirit. Thus “heart” is often to be found as a synonym of “intellect”, not in the sense in which this word is misused today but in the full sense of the Latin intellectus, that is, the faculty which perceives the transcendent. In virtue of being the centre of the body, the heart may be said to transcend the rest of the body, although substantially it consists of the same flesh and blood. In other words, while the body as a whole is “horizontal” in the sense that it is limited to its own plane of existence, the heart has, in addition, a certain “verticality” for being the lower end of the “vertical” axis which passes from the Divinity Itself through the centres of all the degrees of the Universe. If we use the imagery suggested by Jacob’s Ladder, which is none other than this axis, the bodily heart will be the lowest rung and the ladder itself will represent the whole hierarchy of centres or “Hearts” one above the other. This image is all the more adequate for representing each centre as separate and distinct from the others and yet at the same time connected with them. It is in virtue of this interconnection, through which the centres are as it were merged into one, that the bodily heart receives Life from the Divinity (according to Sufi doctrine all Life is Divine) and floods the body with Life. In the opposite direction the bodily heart may serve as a focal point for the concentration of all the powers of the soul in its aspiration towards the Infinite, and examples of this methodic practice are to be found in most forms of mysticism and perhaps in all. It is also in virtue of the same interconnection that “Heart” may be used to indicate the topmost rung of the ladder, that is, the Infinite Self, as in the following Holy Tradition:8 “My earth hath not room for Me, neither hath My Heaven, but the Heart of My believing slave hath room for Me.” Another example is to be found in the poem of the Sufi ?all?j which begins: “I saw my Lord with the Eye of the Heart. I said: ‘Who art thou?’ He answered: ‘Thou’.” From this last point of view, “Heart” can be considered as synonymous with “Spirit”, which has a Divine as well as a created aspect; and one of the great symbols of the Spirit is the sun which is the “heart” of our universe. This brings us back to the significance of the name Sufi. We have seen that the word means “wearer of wool” and that wool is associated with spirituality. But what is the reason for this association? The answer to this question is clearly to be sought for in the science of symbols and in the knowledge that it gives us of mysterious equivalences; and it emerges, as if by chance, from a remark made by René Guénon9 about the profound connection between two symbols of the Spirit, namely the tree and the sun (represented here by its metal, gold): “The fruits of the Tree of Life are the golden apples of the Garden of the Hesperides; the golden fleece of the Argonauts, which was also placed on a tree and guarded by a serpent or a dragon, is another symbol of the immortality which man has to reconquer.”10 Although he does not mention it, Guénon was certainly aware that this second symbol is solar not only on account of the gold but also on account of the fleece. Like the lion, the sheep has always been especially sacred to the sun;11 and so to wear a woollen garment is to put on the raiment of that “Heart-wakefulness” which is symbolised by the sunlight and which is a central aspect of all that the Sufi sets out to reconquer. The Quranic term those who have hearts has thus a relationship even with the name of Sufism as well as being directly expressive of its essence. So far we have considered the Heart mainly as a centre which includes all its “vertical” prolongations. But when the term “Heart” is used in Sufism (as in other mysticisms) of one particular centre as distinct from others, it normally denotes neither the highest nor the lowest but the next to the lowest, that is, the centre of the soul. In the macrocosm, the Garden of Eden is both centre and summit12 of the earthly state. Analogously the Heart, which in the microcosm corresponds to the Garden, is both centre and summit of the human individuality. More precisely, the Heart corresponds to the centre of the Garden, the point where grows the Tree of Life and where flows the Fountain of Life. The Heart is in fact nothing other than this Fountain, and their identity is implicit in the Arabic word ?ayn which has the meaning of both “eye” and “spring”. The extreme significance of this penultimate degree in the hierarchy of centres is that it marks the threshold of the Beyond, the point at which the natural ends and the supernatural or transcendent begins. The Heart is the isthmus (barzakh) which is so often mentioned in the Qur’?n13 as separating the two seas which represent Heaven and earth, the sweet fresh-water sea being the domain of the Spirit whereas the brackish salt sea is the domain of soul and body; and when Moses says: I will not cease until I reach the meeting-place of the two seas,14 he is formulating the initial vow that every mystic must make, implicitly if not explicitly, to reach the lost Centre which alone gives access to transcendent knowledge. One of the Quranic keys to inner meanings is the verse: We will show them Our signs on the horizons and in themselves.15 This draws our attention to the correspondence between outer phenomena and inner faculties, and in considering what is meant by the Heart it is particularly instructive to consider which of “the signs on the horizons” is its symbol. We have already seen that as the Centre of our whole being, the Heart is the inward Sun. But it is so only in virtue of its “conjunction” with the Spirit; in its own right, as centre of the soul and threshold of Heaven, it corresponds to the moon. In a fourteenth-century Sufi commentary16 on the Qur’?n the sun is interpreted as signifying the Spirit; light is gnosis; day is the Beyond, the transcendent world of direct spiritual perception; and night is this world, the world of ignorance or, at its best, the world of indirect reflected knowledge symbolized by moonlight. The moon transmits indirectly the light of the sun to the darkness of night; and analogously the Heart transmits the light of the Spirit to the darkness of the soul. But it is the moonlight that is indirect; the moon itself, when it shines in the night sky, is looking directly at the sun and is itself not in night but in daylight. This symbolism reveals the transcendence of the Heart and explains what is meant when it is said that the Heart is the faculty of direct spiritual (or intellectual) vision. But in fallen man this faculty is veiled; for to say that when man was compelled to leave the Earthly Paradise he lost contact with the Fountain of Life amounts to saying that he no longer had direct access to the Heart. The soul of fallen man is thus comparable to a clouded night; and this brings us to a question of fundamental importance for Sufism: if it be asked what qualification is necessary for entry into a Sufi order, or what is it that impels anyone to seek initiation, the answer will be that the clouds in the night of the soul must be thin enough to allow at least some glimmer of Heart-light to penetrate the gloom. A Shaykh of this century, when asked how it was that would-be novices came to him although his disciples made no attempt to proselytise, replied that they came because they were “haunted by the thought of God”.17 In other words, they came because the clouds were not thick enough to keep out the awareness of spiritual reality. We may also reflect, in this context, on the phrase “to have a presentiment of one’s higher states”. This presentiment was mentioned by Guénon as a valid motive for seeking to embark on a spiritual path and as a criterion of qualification for the path. The higher states are the spiritual degrees which are centred in hierarchy, one above the other, along the Axis of the World which is none other than the Tree of Life, the Ray of Light which connects the inward Sun with the inward Moon, the Spirit with the Heart; and the crown of this presentiment is the sense, however remote it may be, of what the same author translated as the “Supreme Identity”18—in other words, a foretaste of the truth expressed in the lines which have just been quoted from ?all?j. The word “foretaste” enters in here with a view to the Arabic dhawq (taste), a term much used by the Sufis following the Prophet to denote the directness of Heart-knowledge as opposed to mind-knowledge. Ghaz?l? in fact defines Sufism as dhawq; and in order to understand how this knowledge which belongs to the summit of the soul and the threshold of Heaven can have need of a term borrowed from the knowledge which is experienced at the soul’s lower boundary, the threshold of the body, it is necessary first to understand the universal law of which this “need” is a particular application. When it is said that God is Love, the highest meaning this can have is that the Archetypes of all the positive relationships—conjugal, parental, filial and fraternal—are Indivisibly One in the Infinite Self-Sufficing Perfection of the Divine Essence.19 A less absolute meaning is that the central relationship, namely the conjugal one on which the others depend and in the background of which they are already present, has its Archetype in the polarisation of the Divine Qualities into Qualities of Majesty and Qualities of Beauty. It results from this Archetype that mutual concord depends on likeness and unlikeness, affinity and complementarity. Both the Majesty and the Beauty are Infinite and Eternal, whence their affinity. But one is Active Perfection and the other is Passive Perfection,20 whence their complementarity. On earth the human pair have affinity through their vice-regency for God, and they are complementary through being man and woman. The harmony of the universe depends on analogous samenesses and differences not only between individuals but also between worlds. The relationship may be “horizontal” where both poles are on the same plane as in the examples already given, or it may be “vertical” as between a higher world and a lower world which is its manifestation or symbol. In this latter case the parental-filial relationship is stressed, but by no means exclusively; the conjugal relationship is always there inasmuch as the Divine Immanence can never be excluded. Thus it is possible to speak of “the Marriage of Heaven and Earth”; and it is also in virtue of the Divine Immanence,which puts the Lover virtually on a level with the Beloved, that the Sufi poems addressed to the Divinity under the name of Layla21 are love poems in the most central sense. The all-embracing example of the vertical relationship is to be found in the already quoted Holy Tradition “I was a Hidden Treasure and I loved to be known and so I created the world”. There is nothing in the world which has not its Divine Archetype. But harmony demands also that the world shall be a complement, and complementarity implies invertedness. Thus man, whose Archetype is the Divine Being Itself from which everything derives, is the last of all created things, the finality towards which all creation tends. It is this precedent that causes, on the lowest plane of all, the reflection of an object to be a faithful yet inverted image of the object itself. The mountain whose top appears to be at the bottom of the lake which reflects it is a natural prototype of the Seal of Solomon, the world-wide symbol of the Union of the Active and Passive Perfections and by extension the symbol of all the pairs which are the images of this Union throughout the worlds of the universe.22 The perfect balance of the primordial soul depends on the harmonious union of the domains of inner and outer man. If we take the apex of the upper triangle of the Seal of Solomon to represent the Heart’s direct experience of Spiritual Truths which are the fruits of the Tree of Life, the down-turned apex of the lower23 triangle will represent taste in the literal sense, whereas the two interpenetrating bases will represent the indirect mind-knowledge which derives from the two direct experiences. The Seal’s message here is that if we want to know what Heart-knowledge is like we must consult the senses rather than the mind, at any rate as regards directness. But our symbol also figures the gulf which separates the senses from the Heart: sense-knowledge, being the lowest mode of perception, is the most deeply submerged in space and time and other earthly conditions and is therefore narrower and more fleeting than mind-knowledge, whereas the inner “taste” escapes from these conditions in virtue of its exaltation and is thus of all experiences the vastest and most enduring. The Seal of Solomon is a key to the interpretation of many texts which have eluded the comprehension of those who are ignorant of the laws of symbolism, and amongst such texts are the Quranic descriptions of Paradise. It is true that spiritual bliss is often indicated simply by an affirmation that there is no common measure between earthly and heavenly joys, or by such words as Verily thy Lord shall give and give unto thee and thou shalt be satisfied.24 But in descriptive passages, the Qur’?n speaks in terms of the pleasures of the senses, because these direct pleasures are in fact the earthly projections or shadows of the Paradisal archetypes which it is seeking to convey. Having their roots in these archetypes, the sensations have power to recall them, for the “tether” which attaches the symbol to its reality not only traces the path by which the symbol came into existence but can become, in the opposite direction, a vibrating chord of spiritual remembrance. These Quranic descriptions, while serving to remind the soul that Paradise is intensely desirable,25 serve also to re-endow life on earth with a lost dimension; and here lies a significant aspect of Sufism, already hinted at in connection with Islam’s claim to be a restoration of the primordial religion. It goes without saying that this claim is above all justified—we might even say only justified—in virtue of Islamic mysticism. Every form of mysticism begins with a quest for the “primordial state”, since this state means human perfection which is the only basis for the spiritual ascent. But the perfection envisaged, although essentially always the same, is not always “primordial” in its details. What distinguishes Islamic mysticism from many others is that it looks for its ideal to man as he was created, that is, to a perfection which would accord with the Earthly Paradise. As an image of the primordial soul, the Seal of Solomon with its two triangles pointing in opposite directions figures an intense extroversion balanced—and dominated—by an intense introversion, the pull of the outer world being balanced by the pull of the Heart. We have already seen how the Prophet of Islam personifies this harmonious resolution of opposites. The “pull of the Hour” which was mentioned in this connection may be said to coincide with the magnetism of the Heart inasmuch as consciousness of both lies in the Heart. Moreover it is the Hour which actually reintegrates symbols into their archetypes, and one of the functions of Heart-knowledge is to anticipate this reintegration by continually referring outward objects back to the inner realities they symbolise. Typically representative of the primordial religion is one of the best known utterances of the Prophet: “Perfume and women have been made dear to me, and coolness hath been brought to mine eyes in the prayer”.26 An analogous inward outwardness is characteristic of the Message which as Messenger he received and transmitted. Coming at the end of the cycle of time, it holds out to mankind once more the Book of Nature, the Primordial Revelation whose hieroglyphs are man and the animals, the forests and the fields, the mountains, seas and deserts, sun, moon and stars. One of the Qur’?n’s most central teachings is: “Do not look on the things of this world as independent realities, for they are all in fact entirely dependent for their existence on the Hidden Treasure whose Glory they were created to reveal.” In its own words: The seven heavens and the earth and all that is therein extol Him, nor is there anything which doth not glorify Him with praise; yet ye understand not their glorification.27 And one of the “refrains” of the Qur’?n is to address the visionaries or potential visionaries among men and bid them meditate on these or those wonders of creation as “signs”. This outwardness for the sake of inwardness which characterises Sufism28 can be figured by a line joining the two apexes of the Seal of Solomon. The faculty of direct outward perception must be connected with the faculty of direct inward perception, and this connection is the already mentioned “chord of spiritual remembrance” which must be made to vibrate in order that the inward faculty may be awakened and that the “glorification” may be “understood”; and beyond that faculty, represented by the upper apex, the “chord” may be prolonged indefinitely, for the vibration does not stop short at the threshold of Heaven but is aimed at the Infinite. We are here once again at the very centre of our theme, for Sufism is the doctrine and method of this aim, nor is the vibration anything other than a variant of the ebbing wave which was our initial image. We may take up once more at this point the question “What is it that ebbs?”, for the answer already given, that it is the centre of consciousness that ebbs, will now be clearer in the light of what has been said about the Heart, which always denotes the centre but which, because subjectively this centre is not stationary, may refer to the inward Moon or to the inward Sun or beyond this even to the Essence Itself. Since everyone has always a centre of consciousness, everyone may be said to have a “heart”. But the Sufis use the term on principle in a transcendent sense to denote a centre of consciousness which corresponds at least to the inward Moon. This principle has its roots in the Prophet’s definition of i?s?n (excellence) which is directly related to Heart-knowledge: “Excellence is that thou shouldst worship God as if thou sawest Him; for if thou seest Him not, yet He seeth thee.” “As if thou sawest Him.” As if man were still in full possession of his primordial faculties. The whole of one aspect of Sufi method lies in the word ka’ annaka “as if thou…”; and this rule of idealism has many applications, some of which we shall see later. But it needs to be combined with the rule of actualism, the rule of “but in fact”. No one is more acutely conscious of the fall of man than the mystic—so much so that a thing counts for him as positive according to the measure in which it is capable of setting up a vibration towards the Heart and clearing an access to it. In principle, since there is nothing which doth not glorify Him with praise, everything has this capability. Yet ye understand not their glorification. It has to be admitted that the symbols which could penetrate the Heart of primordial man are prevented from being fully operative for fallen man by his obstructedness. In other words he cannot react to them powerfully enough to effect the necessary vibration; and if left to his own resources he would be impotent to achieve access to the Heart. The sight of a beautiful landscape, for example, arouses not only wonder and delight but also longing inasmuch as the subject cannot merge with the object; and this longing is no less than a degree of the already mentioned presentiment of one’s higher possibilities, a degree of “remembrance” that in the archetypal world of the Spirit a merging of subject with object actually does take place. But such a presentiment would be, in almost every case, no more than a qualification for the spiritual path. In itself it would be hopelessly outmeasured. It is not for nothing that in most traditions the obstacle to be overcome is represented as a gigantic monster with supernatural powers. Nothing will serve short of a sword that has been forged and tempered in Heaven; but as an auxiliary to such a sword, the presentiment will be a precious strength in the soul; in other words, it needs to be consecrated by some Heaven-sent incantation, above all by the Divine Name itself. It is important to remember here that Dhikr All?h (Remembrance of God or Invocation of God) is a name of the Prophet, and that according to the Qur’?n this invocation is “greater” even than the ritual prayer. The word in question could also be translated “greatest”, without the comparison, for both interpretations are linguistically possible; and in the present context it can be affirmed that calling on the Name of God, whether it be accompanied by some other experience or not, is the most positive thing in all the world because it sets up the most powerful vibration towards the Heart. The Prophet said: “There is a polish for everything that taketh away rust; and the polish of the Heart is the invocation of All?h.” We are here anticipating the theme of the chapter on method; but like the unity which it aims at establishing, Sufism is so closely knit that it is impossible to isolate, in altogether separate chapters, the doctrine, the method, and the spiritual and psychic substance to which doctrine and method apply. To continue anticipating for a moment, it may be mentioned that although the invocation of the Supreme Name All?h takes precedence over all the other practices of Sufism, the term Dhikr All?h is also extended to other rites and in particular to the recitation or audition of the Qur’?n which is, as we have seen, of one substance with God; and in the context of causing vibration and of the passage from the outward to the inward, it is relevant to quote what the Revealed Book says of itself in virtue of the power of its own verses in this respect: It causeth the skins of those that fear their Lord to thrill. Then their skins and their hearts grow pliant (or supple) unto the remembrance of God.29 The Sufis have here all the authority they need for using outward movement, such as the swaying of the body in the sacred dance, as a means to inward concentration. The words their hearts grow pliant or, as it could be rendered, their hearts soften, can be glossed “their Hearts grow less hard”. The barrier in question may be spoken of as hardness of heart or rust on the heart or clouds over the Moon or as a dragon that guards the access to the Fountain of Life. If it were not for this barrier, which is the direct result of the fall of man, there would be no need of religion in the ordinary sense, for Revelation could come directly to each man in his Heart which would then refract the Message to the mind and to the rest of the psychic substance. There would thus be a perpetual flow and ebb between the Self and the self. But as things are, a special Messenger has to be sent that he may transmit to others what his Heart receives. This does not mean however that all other souls are entirely cut off from the inward reception of spiritual light. It means that for so tremendous a descent as the Revelation, the Heart must be fully operative as is the case only with the Prophets and the Saints; but between these and the majority is the minority of mystics—“travellers” for whom by definition the barrier is or has become relatively transparent. They seek, as we have seen, to identify themselves with the Prophet and to ebb as he ebbs in response to the Revelation. In other words, it must be for the traveller as if the Revelation has come directly to him, in his Heart; and this ka’ anna, like all the other “as ifs” of Sufism, is only possible on the basis of certainty. What then is certainty? Or what is the difference between certainty and conviction? Conviction is indirect and belongs to the mind, being the result of purely mental processes such as argument. But certainty, being always direct, belongs to “the apex of the triangle”. As such it can be the result of sensory perception; hearing or touch or sight can give certainty. But in its spiritual sense, when it has for object the Transcendent, certainty is the result of Heart-knowledge. Moreover, failing this knowledge in its fullest sense, those elements which are nearest the Heart at the summit of the soul must also be considered as faculties of direct perception, albeit in a fragmentary way; and through the light which these faculties of intuition receive in virtue of the transparency of the barrier, a soul may claim to be possessed of a faith which is no less than certainty. Before closing this chapter, and as a preface to the doctrine which like all mystical doctrines presupposes at least a virtual certainty in the soul—otherwise the seed would “fall on stony ground”—let us consider the three degrees of certainty as Sufism defines them.30 The Divine Truth is symbolised by the element fire. The three degrees, in ascending order, are the Lore of Certainty (?ilm al-yaq?n), the Eye of Certainty (?ayn al-yaq?n) and the Truth of Certainty (?aqq al-yaq?n). The Lore is the certainty that comes from hearing the fire described; the Eye is the certainty that comes from seeing its flames; the Truth is the certainty which comes from being consumed in it. This last degree is the extinction (fan?’) of all otherness which alone gives realisation of the Supreme Identity. The second degree is that of Heart-knowledge, for the Eye which sees is the Heart. As to the Lore, it is a mental understanding which has been raised to the level of certainty by the faculties of intuition which surround the Heart; and it is one of the functions of the doctrine to awaken these faculties and make them operative.
- [The Wine-Song (<em>Al-Khamriyya</em>)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-wine-song-al-khamriyya) - Umar Ibn al-Farid (1181-1235) Translation by Martin Lings Rememb’ring the belovèd, wine we drink Which drunk had made us ere the vine’s creation… They tell me: “Thou hast drunk iniquity”. Not so, I have but drunk what not to drink Would be for me iniquitous indeed. Listen to the poem translation, read by Guy Ogilvy
- [Ghazali’s Deathbed Poem (<em>Qul li-ikhwani</em>)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/ghazali-deathbed-poem) - Abu Hamid al-Ghazali Translated by Martin Lings I am a bird, and this was once my cage; But I have flown, leaving it as a token. … Ere now I was a dead man in your midst, But I have come to life, and doffed my shroud. Listen to the poem translation, read by Guy
- [“Laila” and other poems](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/shaykh-alawi-poems) - Shaykh Ahmad al-Alawi From Martin Lings’ now classic study, A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century, we present here translations of three poems by the revered Sufi master from Mostaghanem. Click here to read the PDF, and use the buttons below to listen or download. Laila Click here to download – 1:41 (1.6MB) The Path
- [The Symbolism of the Letters of the Alphabet](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/alawi-lings-symbolism-of-letters) - Martin Lings Chapter VII from A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century introduces, translates and comments a brief treatise by Shaykh Ahmad al-Alawi, Al-Unmudhaj al-Farid (The Book of the Unique Archetype), “which signalleth the way unto the full realization of Oneness in considering what is meant by the envelopment of the Heavenly Scriptures in the
- [The Truth of Certainty](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/truth-of-certainty) - The Truth of Certainty Moses said to his household: Verily beyond all ?doubt I have seen a fire. I will bring you tidings of it? or I will bring you a flaming brand that ye may? warm yourselves. Then when he reached it he was? called: Blessed is He who is in the fire and He who? is about it, and Glory be to God? the Lord of the worlds. (Q. XXVII: 7–8) In every esoteric doctrine there are references to three degrees of faith, and in Islamic Mysticism, that is, in Sufism, these three degrees are known as the Lore of Certainty (ilmu ’l-yaqin), the Eye of Certainty (aynu ’l-yaqin) and the Truth of Certainty (haqqu ’l-yaqin). The difference between them is illustrated by taking the element fire to represent the Divine Truth. The lowest degree, that of the Lore of Certainty belongs to one whose knowledge of fire comes merely from hearing it described, like those who received from Moses no more than “tidings” of the Burning Bush. The second degree, that of the Eye of Certainty, belongs to one whose knowledge of fire comes from seeing the light of its flames, like Moses before he reached the Bush. The highest degree, that of the Truth of Certainty, belongs to one whose knowledge of fire comes from being consumed by it and thus becoming one with it, for this degree belongs only to the One. The realization of this Oneness is here implied for Moses in that he is summoned into the Divine Presence with which the Bush is surrounded. Entry into that presence is the equivalent of entering into the fire. Blessed is He who is in the fire and He who is about it. In another chapter of the Qur’an, also with reference to the Burning Bush, this supreme experience is confirmed by an additional symbolism: And when he reached it, he was called: O Moses! Verily I am thy Lord. So take off thy sandals. Verily thou art in the holy valley of Tuwa. (Q. XX: 11–12) When Moses reached the Burning Bush his extinction in the Truth of Certainty is represented by his taking off his sandals, that is, by removing the very basis of his apparent existence apart from the Creator in the two created worlds, Heaven and earth. Nor could he do otherwise, for the name of the valley means, according to the commentary, “rolling up”, as in the verse which describes the Last Day as: The day when we shall roll up the heavens as at the rolling up of a written scroll . (Q. XXI: 10) To have been divested of all “otherness” is to have attained the degree of Universal Man (al-insanu ’l-kamil), who is also called the Sufi. But strictly speaking, It cannot be considered as a degree at all, for It is no less than the Eternal and Infinite Oneness of God, the Certainty of Whose Truth effaces all except Itself. Therefore it is sometimes said that “the Sufi is not created”, since the Truth Itself is not created, and It has effaced in the Sufi all that was created, leaving only Itself. This Identity of Universal Man with the Divine Truth is affirmed in a holy utterance (hadith qudsi) of the Truth Itself speaking through the mouth of the Prophet: “My slave ceaseth not to draw nigh unto Me through devotions of free-will until I love him; and when I love him, I am the Hearing Wherewith he heareth and the Sight Wherewith he seeth and the Hand Wherewith he fighteth and the Foot Whereon he walketh.” The same is also expressed in another utterance attributed by Sufis to the Prophet: “I am Ahmad without the letter mim. I am an Arab without the letter ayn. Who hath seen Me, the same hath seen the Truth.” The letter mim is the letter of death, that is, of ending, and the letter ayn is the letter of the source of creation, that is, of beginning, and in the Truth of Certainty all that has to do with beginning and ending has been reabsorbed, leaving only That Which has neither beginning nor end, namely ahad, One, and rabbi, my Lord. These words refer especially to that aspect of the Truth which is named Eternity after extinction (al-baqa bad al-fana’), for all that is subject to change has been extinguished, and That which remains, the Eternal (al-baqi), is beyond all change whatsoever. This Remainder is the Real Self, and the self which has a beginning and an end, and which corresponds to Ahmad the Arab, is only an appearance. That the Real Self is none other than God is also affirmed in yet another utterance of the Prophet: “Who knoweth himself, the same knoweth his Lord” The Self is All that is left to Universal Man in whom the veils of the self which hid It have been utterly consumed by the Truth. Thus it is said in the Chapter of the Cow: We make no distinction between any of His Apostles. ? (Q. II: 285) for in the Truth of Certainty each of them is nothing but the Self, and the Self is always One and the Same; and it was because of the Self above all that the Angels were told to prostrate themselves before Universal Man in the form of Adam. The Self, Which is the Truth of Certainty, is One; but It is not one with the oneness of a single thing among many, but with Oneness Which Eternally annihilates all duality, and nothing can be added to It so as to make more than One, for It is already Infinite. This Infinite Unity (al-ahadiyyah) is sometimes called He (huwa) or the Essence (al-dhat). The Garden of the Essence is therefore the Highest of all the Paradises, or rather, in the Truth of Certainty, It is the One Paradise, the Paradise of Him, and nothing may enter It since Everything is already there. Thus if it be said that one has entered the Garden of the Essence, the meaning is that his self has been reduced to nothing and that he has thus been changed from one into nought, since only nought may enter It. This knowledge of the nothingness of oneself is what is called poverty (al-faqr) and it is implied in the utterance of Jesus: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” In respect of poverty one may see a further meaning in the words: “We make no distinction between any of His Apostles,” considering this time not so much the Self as the selves of the Apostles; for though it is said in the Chapter of the Night Journey: And We have favoured some of the Prophets above others, and unto David we gave the Psalms . (Q. XVII: 55) these distinctions of favor only refer to what is below the Paradise of the Essence, whereas in the Essence Itself they are all equal in realizing the truth: God is the Rich and ye are the poor . (Q. XLVI:38) It is in this equality that the Prophets are rated at their highest worth; for they are incomparably greater and richer by reason of their poverty than by reason of all their earthly and heavenly plenitudes, since this nothingness and poverty is the key by which alone one may have access to the Infinite Riches of the Truth; and yet since the being is utterly extinguished in the Truth he cannot be said to have gained possession of Its Riches, for in Reality He has never ceased to possess Them. Before extinction, the being is veiled by the Qualities from the Essence, that is, by multiplicity from Unity, and at extinction he is veiled by the Essence from the Qualities, whereas in Eternity after extinction He is veiled neither by the Qualities from the Essence, nor by the Essence from the Qualities, yet the Qualities are not other than the Essence. This Greatest of all Mysteries, the Mystery of the Infinitely Rich Who is One, is expressed in the Supreme Name Allah (God, the Divinity), which signifies the Essence together with all the Qualities in Indivisible Unity. In view of this Mystery it is said: Say: He, God, is One, God, the Eternally Sufficient unto Himself . (Q. CXII: 1–2) lest in the weakness of human conception the Infinite Riches contained in God should as it were overflow into duality, the Supreme Name is safeguarded between two affirmations of His Unity, “He” signifying the Pure Essence in Itself without any differentiation as regards the Qualities. Then, to wipe away the stain of any idea of limitation or insufficiency that the human intelligence might conceive, the Name of Divinity is uttered again, and with it the Name of Absolute Plenitude, the Eternally Sufficient unto Himself (al-?amad). The Truth is One, yet Its Unity implies, for the believer, no fear of any loss, since the Truth is also the Infinitely Good (al-rahman) and the All-Bountiful (al-karim). That which is taken away by extinction is restored in Eternity according to the Infinite measure of Its Real Self. The different beings are extinguished in the Truth as different colours that are reabsorbed into the principial whiteness of light. Yet as it were on the other side of the Whiteness are the True Colors, Each incomparably more distinct in the Eternal Splendor of Its Reality, as revealed in the Light of the Whiteness, than ever it was in its illusory self; and yet at the same time there is no duality, no otherness. That Which is named the Garden of the Essence inasmuch as It is the Paradise of Him, is named Firdaws inasmuch as It is the Paradise of God. The Prophet said: “If ye ask a boon of God, ask of Him Firdaws for it is the midmost Paradise and the highest Paradise, and from it flow forth the rivers of Paradise.” Here the Beloved have attained to eternity after the extinction, which is the Divine Station (al-maqamu ’l-ilahi), the Station of Immutability; but lest their plurality should seem to imply a plurality in God, they are, when spoken of, as it were separated from the divinity being named “those who are brought nigh” (al-muqarrabun). It is they who drink at Kawthar (Abundance), the Supreme River whence flow all others and of which the Prophet said: “There are on its banks as many cups of silver as there are stars in the firmament. Whoso drinketh thereof shall never thirst.” In Firdaws the nigh drink also from a Fountain which, like Kawthar, is perfumed with musk and which is named Tasnim (Exaltation). Yet the name Tasnim, in its expression of highraisedness, is an understatement pregnant with significance, as is the name of the River in its expression of abundance, for Kawthar is no less than the flow of the Infinite Beatitude of the All-Holy (al-quddus). Nor is it otherwise with the name of those who drink thereat in its expression of nearness, which must be measured in the light of the definition of the Nearness of God: We are nearer to him (man) than his jugular vein. (Q. L: 16) To speak of the Gardens and Fountains of Paradise, as also of Its Rivers, Fruits and Consorts, is to speak the truth, whereas to speak of such blessings in this world is only a manner of speaking, for the Realities are in Firdaws, and what we see in this world are only the remote shadows of Reality. The Divinity, Immutable and Indivisible, is the Truth besides Which all other truths cease to exist. One such relative truth is that of the religious Law, and it is said that this truth may be expressed in the words “I and Thou”, whereas the Truth of the Path, that is, the direct way of return towards God, may be expressed: “I am Thou and Thou art I”. But the Truth Itself is: “There is neither I nor Thou but only He”. Universal man realizes eternally in the Truth that he is nothing and yet that He is Everything. But such realization is beyond his human soul, and this is what is meant by the saying: “The slave remains the slave”. The slave cannot become God, since he is either the slave, as in appearance, or nothing at all, as in Reality. Universal man cannot make his human soul divine; like the souls of all other men, but with an outstanding difference of quality, it implies the illusion of an existence apart from God. It differs from them not in kind, but in what might almost be called an organic consciousness that this separate existence is in Truth no more than an illusion. There is a saying that “Muhammad is a man, yet not as other men, but like a jewel among stones.” Albeit the soul remains the soul, just as night remains night, or else it vanishes and there is day. But though the soul of Universal Man cannot itself attain to the direct knowledge of the Truth of Certainty, yet unlike other souls it is touched in its centre by a ray of light proceeding from the sun of the Spirit of the Truth; for this perfect soul, represented in Islam by the soul of the Prophet, is none other than the Night of Power (laylatu ’l-qadr), into which descend the Angels and the Spirit; and the Heart, that is, the point of this spiritual ray’s contact, is as a full moon in the unclouded night of the perfect soul making it better than a thousand months of other nights, that is, peerless among all other souls. This Moon, from which the soul looks towards the Sun of the Spirit, is the Eye of Certainty; and its presence makes the soul at peace until the break of dawn, until the night vanishes, until the soul together with its peace is extinguished in the Light of Reality, leaving only the Absolute Peace of Unity. Although the existence of any perfection or indeed of anything at all apart from God is an illusion, the illusory perfections of the created Universe may none the less serve as guides and incentives to one who has not yet attained to the Truth, inasmuch as they are images of His Perfection. Of these images the highest and fullest which can be readily conceived by one who has not passed beyond the limits of this world is the human perfection itself. Moreover this perfection, unlike other earthly perfections, is a state through which the traveller (al-salik) must himself pass on his way to the Truth. Therefore the religions have greatly extolled the state of human perfection, setting it up as a lamp to mark the end of the first stage of the journey, just as one might tell a man who had long lived in darkness to look at the full moon, knowing that the light of the sun would serve at first rather to blind than to guide him; and so Universal Man, whose state is the End of the journey, is represented as having two perfect natures, the perfect human nature (al-nasut) being merely a reflection or image of the Divine Nature (al-lahut), besides Which in Reality it is nothing, though to the traveller it seems nearer and more accessible. In accordance with what has already been said, the two natures might be called the perfect self and the Perfect Self, the former corresponding to Ahmad the Arab, and the Latter being the One Lord. The perfect human nature stands as it were between the traveller and the Divine Nature, in the sense that he must acquire the one before he may rise from it to the Other; and here lies one of the interpretations of the saying that no one may meet God if he has not first met the Prophet. ? Universal man with his two natures is figured in the Seal of Solomon, of which the upper and lower triangles represent respectively the Divine and the human nature. In virtue of this duality he is the mediator between Heaven and earth, and it is owing to this function that he is sometimes referred to as “the isthmus” (al-barzakh) as in the Chapter of the Distinct Revelation: And He it is Who hath let loose the two seas, one sweet and fresh, the other salt and bitter, and hath set between them an isthmus, an impassable barrier. (Q. XXV: 53) In His Heart alone does the sweet sea of the next world meet the salt sea of this; and by reason of this meeting his human nature itself is the noblest and best of all earthly things as is affirmed in the Chapter of the Fig: Verily We created man in the fairest similitude. (Q. XCV: 4) The nearness of Heaven, by reason of his presence, even causes sometimes the laws of earth to cease perceptibly, just as the moon grows pale at the approach of day; and it is at such moments that a miracle may take place, such as the changing of water into wine, or the step which leaves a print upon the rock and none upon the sand. As in the Seal of Solomon, his central function as mediator is also figured in the Cross, which is another symbol of Universal Man in that the horizontal line represents the fullness of his earthly nature, whereas the vertical line represents his heavenly exaltation; and yet another of his symbols is the Crescent, for like a cup it indicates his function of receiving the Divine Grace, and at the same time, like the horns of the bull, it indicates his majesty, his function of administering this Grace throughout the whole Universe. Blessed be He Who hath made the distinct revelation unto His servant, that he might be for all the worlds a warner. (Q. XXV: 1)
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- [From Religious Form to Spiritual Essence](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/shah-kazemi-from-religious-form) - My aim in this talk is to show the ways in which two great sages, Ibn al-?Arab? in Islam and Meister Eckhart in Christianity, help us to travel from the religious form to the spiritual essence, from the outer teachings of religion to the inner mysteries from which these teachings derive all their transformative power. In Islam this journey from the outer to the inner is referred to in terms of a movement from the ??hir, the outwardly apparent, to the b??in, the inwardly hidden. The first point to make here is that both aspects are divine, for the Qur’an declares that God is the First and the Last, the Outwardly Apparent and the Inwardly Hidden (verse 3 of chapter 57). From the point of view of Ibn al-?Arab?, this verse is one of the keys for transforming the basic theological teaching of Islam, taw??d, into a metaphysical doctrine concerning the nature of reality. To say that God is the beginning and end of all things, and that He is the inward and the outward of all things means that there is nothing in Being except God (laysa fi’l-wuj?d siwa’Ll?h). This is the essence of the famous doctrine associated with him: wa?dat al-wuj?d, the oneness of Being. The principle of Taw??d, oneness, or unification, which is expressed by the formula no god but God (l? il?ha illa’Llah), acquires a dimension of unfathomable depth in this perspective: instead of being narrowly theological—a dogma pertaining to God—it becomes ontological, embracing the whole of existence. The negation of false gods—l? il?ha—is transformed into a negation of all otherness; the affirmation of the one true God—illa’Ll?h—is transformed into a metaphysical doctrine of the affirmation of a single Reality. The principle that must be understood here is that metaphysical doctrines are not superimposed by the mystic upon the theological teaching revealed by Scripture. Rather, the mystic or metaphysician simply grasps all of the subtle implications of Scripture. As Ibn al-?Arab? says: When the Scriptures speak of the Real (al-?aqq), they speak in a way that yields to the generality of men the immediately apparent meaning. The spiritual elite, on the other hand, understand all the meanings inherent in that utterance, in whatever terms it is expressed. (Bezels, 73). This principle is clearly at work in the teachings of Meister Eckhart. The foundational principle in Christianity, the Incarnation, for example, the dogma which tells us that Jesus Christ was the Incarnation of the Son of God, undergoes an astonishing metaphysical transformation in Eckhart’s perspective. Theologically, it is understood that Jesus’ birth in time is but the expression of an eternal event: the Son is perpetually being born from the Father within God conceived as the Trinity of Three Persons. But Eckhart goes beyond this theological principle and rhetorically exclaims: What does it avail me that this birth is always happening, if it does not happen in me? That it should happen in me is what matters (I:1). Why did God become man? That I might be born God Himself (I:138). The Birth of the Divine Word in the human soul: this is what Eckhart urges us to realize. It is in this Birth that the ultimate beatitude of the soul lies, all else is radically marginalised to the periphery of existence; indeed, all else is unreal. Everything pertaining to the creature as such is, according to Eckhart, a pure ‘nothing’; everything that makes me such and such a human being as opposed to human as such is excluded from this ultimate beatitude: God took on human nature and united it with His own Person. Then human nature became God, for He put on bare human nature and not any man. Therefore, if you want to be the same Christ and God, go out of all that which the eternal Word did not assume... then you will be the same to the eternal Word as human nature is to Him. For between your human nature and His there is no difference: it is one, for it is in Christ what it is in you (II:313–314) The implications of this metaphysical reduction to the pure humanity which God assumed in the Incarnation is expressed by Eckhart in such daring formulations as the following: All that God the Father gave His only-begotten Son in human nature He has given me: I exclude nothing, neither union nor holiness (I:xlviii). [God] has been ever begetting me, his only-begotten son, in the very image of His eternal Fatherhood, that I may be a father and beget Him of whom I am begotten (II:64). [Jesus] was a messenger from God to us and has brought our blessedness to us. The blessedness he brought us was our own (I:116). Upon hearing this last statement—that Jesus was a messenger from God, bringing to us a blessedness we already possess, by virtue of the primordial essence of our humanity—Muslims will be struck by how Islamic this sounds. The resonance continues at a deeper metaphysical register when we hear Eckhart’s description of what happens when the Divine Word is born in the soul. He says that the Word has three aspects: immeasurable power, infinite wisdom, and infinite sweetness (I:60-61). Ibn al-?Arab? refers to the essence of Being, wuj?d, in almost identical terms, doing so in a formulation which plays on the three letters of which the word wuj?d is composed: al-wuj?d wijd?n al-?aqq fi’l-wajd: Being is consciousness of the Real in bliss (Path, 212; II:244.7 in Persian PDF ed). Ibn al-?Arab? comes to this understanding of the nature of Being through a process of mystical ascent which disrobes him of all otherness; finally, God removes from him his very contingency, that which makes for his specific possibility, his imk?n. Once his contingency is lifted from him, he comes to see all the divine Names of God returning to one object, the Named, musamm?, and one Essence: ‘that object Named’, he writes, ‘was what I witnessed, and that Essence was my Being. For my voyage was only in myself and pointed to myself, and through this I came to know that I was a pure servant without a trace of lordship in me at all (Illuminations (Morris), 380).’ Just as Eckhart says that he becomes a father and begets Him of whom he is begotten, so Ibn al-?Arab? makes a similarly startling assertion: He made His Throne to be a couch for me, the kingdom a servant for me, and the King to be a prince to me (Ascension, 75). The point to be understood here is that in both cases there is no longer any question of specific individuality: Eckhart and Ibn al-?Arab? are describing states of consciousness in which the ego has been annihilated; in Sufi terms, the ego undergoes fan??, and that which subsists, in a condition of baq??, can only be God: When that is extinguished which never was—and which is perishing— and there remains that which has never ceased to be—and which is permanent—then there rises the Sun of the decisive proof for the vision through the Self. Thus comes about the absolute sublimation (Extinction, 27–28). After undergoing this annihilation that results from vision, and this vision that results from annihilation, both mystics return to themselves; but the return is to a self illumined, transformed and sustained by a taste of that which infinitely transcends the self. They now see that the return to the Essence of God is in fact never not taking place; being with God in God as God is the ever-realized reality (what Shankara calls: nitya-siddha), and anything else is an illusion: When I enter the ground, the bottom, the river and fount of the Godhead, none will ask me whence I came or where I have been. No one missed me (II:82). Similarly, Ibn al-?Arab? says: Naught save the Reality remains.... There is no arriving and no being afar (Bezels, 108). Eckhart refers to the Godhead or Ground or Essence as that which goes beyond God; there is a subtle correspondence between the realization of the nothingness of the ego and the realization of the relativity of God. For God, conceived as the Personal Lord, the Creator, the Revealer, the Judge, and so on, presupposes the existence of creatures; affirming the nothingness of the creature as such is then tantamount to affirming that there must be something infinitely more real than the Creator: God, inasmuch as He is ‘God,’ is not the supreme goal of creatures.... [I]f a fly had intellect and could intellectually plumb the eternal abysm of God’s being out of which it [the fly] came, we would have to say that God, with all that makes Him ‘God’ would be unable to fulfill and satisfy that fly! (II: 271) Ibn al-?Arab? makes a similar point: here the key distinction on this metaphysical plane is between God as Essence (dh?t), and God as divinity (il?h). As il?h, God’s being presupposes creatures, that is, beings over which God exercises His divinity. The creature is thus referred to by Ibn al-?Arab? as ma?l?h, literally: ‘godded over’. The Essence, by contrast, has no relationship whatsoever with creatures or with anything other than Itself. He makes this key point in many places in his writings. One startling expression of this principle is given in his exegesis of the following words of verse 110 of chapter 18 (Surat al-kahf ): Let him not associate (any) one with his Lord’s worship (18:110). The literal meaning of this verse relates to the prohibition of shirk or associating false gods with the true Divinity: in your worship, do not associate any false god with the true Lord. But Ibn al-?Arab? makes the ‘one’, a?ad, refer to the Essence, and thus says: He is not worshipped in respect of His Unity, since Unity contradicts the existence of the worshipper. It is as if He is saying, ‘What is worshipped is only the Lord in respect of His Lordship, since the Lord brought you into existence. So connect yourself to Him and make yourself lowly before Him, and do not associate Unity with Lordship in worship.... For Unity does not know you and will not accept you’ (Path, 244). All that can be worshipped is God as Lord, Rabb, or il?h, and even then, all that one is worshipping is a god created in the form of your belief (al-il?h al-makhl?q fi’l-i?tiq?d). However, since this created form of God in one’s belief is the subjective reflection of an objectively real self-disclosure of the One, and since this created form is moreover essentially defined by the Revelation of God, and only accidentally defined by the contours of one’s individual belief, worship of God is really worship of God and nothing else, for the Lord is the form assumed by the Essence for the sake of being conceived and worshipped, loved and known. Another way in which Ibn al-?Arab? distinguishes between the Essence and the Lord brings us close to Eckhart’s conception of the Trinity. For Ibn al-?Arab?, the plurality of the Names and Qualities of God are registered as a differentiated plurality only at the degree of Being proper to the Lord; at this degree of Being, we speak of ‘the unity of the many’. At the level of the divine Self, or Essence, we speak of ‘the unity of the One’: In respect of His Self (i.e. His Essence), God possesses the Unity of the One, but in respect of His Names, He possesses the Unity of the many (Path, 337). Here, we should take note of a statement which makes one think of the dizzying heights to which the Hindu idea of Maya extends; it also helps Muslims to appreciate the meaning of the Buddhist notion of anatta, no self, no Atman, whether on the individual or universal level: All existence is an imagination within an imagination, the only Reality being God, as Self and Essence, not in respect of His Names (Bezels, 124–125). In other words, even the Names of God—and therefore the degree of Being to which these Names pertain as distinct Names—are ‘imagination’, not ultimate Reality. The sole Reality is God as Self and Essence, because it is only the Oneness of the One that is ultimately Real; by contrast, to quote Ibn al-?Arab? again, ‘The Names in their multiplicity are but relations which are of a non-existent nature’ (Sufism, 161). And again: The Names have two connotations; the first connotation is God Himself Who is what is named, the second that by which one Name is distinguished from another.... As being essentially the other, the Name is the Reality, while as being not the other, it is the imagined Reality (Bezels, 125). At this point, however, we have to pay careful attention to the way in which the imagined Reality of the Names in their plurality is reintegrated by Ibn al-?Arab? into the pure Reality of the One: in essence, the oneness of the many is simply the other side of the same coin of the oneness of the One. The oneness of the many is but the face of the One turned towards the many. Ibn al-?Arab? makes this point beautifully in his own comment on a line of poetry in his Tarjum?n al-Ashw?q, Interpreter of Desires, and it is here that one remarks upon the extraordinary similarity with Eckhart’s conception of the Trinity: My Beloved is three although He is One, even as the Persons are made one Person in essence. [The interpretation given by Ibn al-?Arab?]: ‘Number does not beget multiplicity in the Divine Substance, as the Christians declare that the Three Persons of the Trinity are One God, and as the Qur’?n declares: ‘Call upon God or call on the Merciful; however ye invoke Him, it is well, for to Him belong the most beautiful Names’ (17:110).’ (Tarjuman, p. 70) Ibn al-?Arab? identifies the three Persons of the Trinity as three aspects or ‘names’ of the one Essence, thus resolving multiplicity within unity in a manner which is analogous to that by means of which the ninety-nine ‘names’ of All?h refer to a single Essence in Islam. For, to repeat his crucial statement, ‘number does not beget multiplicity in the divine Substance’. This statement is almost identical to what Eckhart says about the Trinity. And here we should note the remarkable fact that Eckhart, in speaking about the Trinity, refers to the number 100: an oblique reference, perhaps, to All?h and His 99 Names?: For anyone who could grasp distinctions without number and quantity, a hundred would be as one. Even if there were a hundred Persons in the Godhead, a man who could distinguish without number and quantity would perceive them only as one God.... [He] knows that three Persons are one God (I:217) Both Eckhart and Ibn al-?Arab? situate differentiated plurality on a plane, within the divine nature, which is below that of the Essence; a plane which pertains to the relationship between the Creator and the created. This plurality pertaining to relativity, however, can only emerge as a result of the infinitude of the Essence. This infinitude implies that an innumerable plurality is comprised, in absolutely undifferentiated mode, within the Essence. In other words, what is infinite within the Essence is transcribed as so many modes of differentiable plurality—three Persons or ninety-nine Names—on the plane of the divinity. The oneness of the One is not therefore numerical, it is metaphysical; it is a oneness of all-inclusive totality, a unitive infinitude which transcends the altogether created category of number; it is an infinitude which transcends the plane upon which oneness can be contrasted with multiplicity. It is on the plane of the divinity that oneness can be contrasted with many-ness. The oneness of the many pertains to the relationships that the One assumes in relation to the many. To speak of ‘relationship’ is ineluctably to speak of relativity, and it is on this plane of relativity—still within the divine nature itself, but relativity nonetheless—that one can ascribe numerical plurality to God. This plurality, though, does not ‘beget’ or imply any kind of numerical multiplicity within the divine Substance or Essence, because this Essence is simple, non-compound: that is, absolutely indivisible. It comprises all possible aspects, but also transcends them. As Schuon has said, the Absolute is Absolute not because It comprises aspects but because It transcends the aspects it comprises. The Essence is ‘one’ not in any numerical sense of unity which can be distinguished, on the same plane of number, from plurality; for then we would still be on the plane of relativity, asserting one ‘unit’ or thing as opposed to other similarly located units or things. Rather, the Essence is one, as we said just now, in a properly metaphysical sense, a sense which goes beyond physis or nature, understanding by nature all that which pertains to the created order, and number evidently pertains to this order. Number, then, as applied to God must be applied in a consciously metaphysical manner: if one is to speak of God in terms of the contingent category of number, then one should assert that God is indeed ‘one’, for, on the plane of number, ‘one’ is the most adequate symbol by which the Absolute can be described, as Frithjof Schuon has cogently argued in his remarkable critique (which is also a defence) of the doctrine of the Trinity (see ‘Evidence and Mystery’ in Logic and Transcendence). Returning to Eckhart, let us note the ways in which he manifests what Muslims would unhesitatingly call taw??d. His doctrine of oneness is ultimately derived from his experience of absolute unity within himself. In the following passage, he describes this unity as a ‘citadel’: So truly one and simple is this citadel, so mode and power transcending is this solitary One, that neither power nor mode can gaze into it, nor even God Himself !... God never looks in there for one instant, in so far as He exists in modes and in the properties of His Persons... this One alone lacks all mode and property... for God to see inside it would cost Him all His divine names and personal properties: all these He must leave outside... But only in so far as He is one and indivisible (can He do this): in this sense He is neither Father, Son nor Holy Ghost and yet is a something which is neither this nor that. (I:76) Before proceeding any further along this metaphysical trajectory, it is important to note that both mystics lay down strict conditions for receiving their teachings. Eckhart says in one sermon that his words are meant only for the ‘good and perfected people’ in whom dwell ... the worthy life and lofty teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ. They must know that the very best and noblest attainment in this life is to be silent and let God work and speak within (I:6, emphasis added). For what I say here is to be understood of the good and perfected man who has walked and is still walking in the ways of God; not of the natural, undisciplined man, for he is entirely remote from and totally ignorant of this birth (I:1). Good character, together with the assimilation of the basic teachings of Scripture, constitute the qualification for starting the journey along the path towards union, even if the next stage of this path calls for an unknowing and a radical forgetting. This forgetting is necessary for Eckhart, not in order to transcend Scripture, but to leave behind one’s own inescapably limited understanding of Scripture; for the transcendent aim is to be one with the essential content and source of revelation itself, the Word of God. Union with the source of revelation thus presupposes an emptiness of all conceptions, even those derived from the data of revelation itself. In Ibn al-?Arab? we find an almost identical stress on the pre-requisite of virtue and of the correct observance of the outward forms of Islam. For example, in one treatise on the central method of spiritual realisation, the spiritual retreat, khalwa, he says that before entering the retreat, the following three conditions must be observed: Firstly, proper intention: God alone—and not self-glorification, or phenomenal powers and states—must be the object of the aspirant’s quest. Secondly, the aspirant must strictly observe the external rules of the religion. Thirdly, his imagination must be mastered and this in turn presupposes the appropriate ‘spiritual training’ (riy??a) which means among other things, the perfection of character (Journey, 30); and for Ibn al-?Arab?, as for all the mystics of Islam, there can be no perfection of character apart from the emulation of what the Qur’an calls the uswa ?asana, or khuluq ?a??m: the beautiful model, the tremendous nature, constituted by the Prophet Mu?ammad. This emphasis on submission to the religious tradition stemming from Revelation help us to understand the cardinal importance—indeed the centrality—of humility in the perspectives of Eckhart and Ibn al-?Arab?. This humility is expressed in Sufism by the term faqr, poverty or neediness. The Qur’an addresses us all as the poor, al-fuqar??: O mankind, ye are the poor in relation to God, and God, He is the Rich, the Praised. (35:15) One of Eckhart’s most famous sermons is on poverty. This sermon can be read as a commentary on this Qur’anic verse, as well as on the Biblical verse— one of the beatitudes given by Jesus—with which Eckhart begins the sermon: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven’. Eckhart defines a poor man as ‘one who wants nothing, knows nothing and has nothing.’ (II:269–270) He criticizes those people, attached to ‘penances and outward practices’, who claim that the poor man who wills nothing is one who ‘never does his own will in anything, but should strive to do the dearest will of God’. Eckhart then evaluates this position thus: It is well with these people because their intention is right, and we commend them for it. May God in His Mercy grant them the Kingdom of Heaven! But by God’s wisdom I declare that these folk are not poor men or similar to poor men... I say they are asses with no understanding of God’s truth. Perhaps they will gain heaven for their good intentions, but of the poverty we shall now speak of they have no idea. (II:270) As long as a man is so disposed that it is his will with which he would do the most beloved will of God, that man has not the poverty we are speaking about: for that man has a will to serve God’s will—and that is not true poverty! (II:272) For when that man stood in the eternal being of God, nothing else lived in him: what lived there was himself. Therefore we declare that a man should be as free from his own knowledge as he was when he was not. That man should let God work as he will, and himself stand idle. (II:272) Eckhart’s notion of poverty, then, is rooted in an awareness of our essential nothingness. This is almost identical to what we find in Ibn al-?Arab?’s perspective on poverty, which is linked to the idea of a servitude which is likewise rooted in nonexistence. One of the ways in which he conveys this notion of the poverty of the true servant is his turning upside down the conventional Sufi interpretation of the fol- lowing divine saying, in which God describes two types of servant: My servant draws not near to Me with anything more loved by Me than the religious duties I have enjoined upon him; and my servant continues to draw near to Me with supererogatory works until that I love him. When I love him I am his hearing with which he hears, his seeing with which he sees, his hand with which he strikes and his foot upon which he walks. (Forty Hadith Qudsi, no. 25, modified) It is normal in Sufism to read this saying as an allusion to the grace of sanctity (wal?ya) that is granted to the servant whose total dedication to God is expressed through those devotions which are supererogatory, that is, over and above the obligatory prayers. But Ibn al-?Arab? says the exact opposite: Supererogatory works and clinging fast to them give the servant the properties of the attributes of the Real, while obligatory works [note: no clinging] give him the fact of being nothing but light. Then he [the servant] looks through His [God’s] Essence, not through His [God’s] attributes, for His Essence is identical to His hearing and His seeing. That is the Real’s Being, not the servant’s existence. (Path, 330–331 (modified)) What is intended here is made clearer by Ibn al-?Arab?’s distinction between servitude (?ub?dah) and servanthood (?ub?diyyah), the first referring to the quality as such, shorn of all personal appropriation, the second connoting a personal substance to which the quality is appended. Servitude is the ascription of the servant to Allah, not to himself; if he is ascribed to himself, this is servanthood (?ub?diyyah) not servitude. So servitude is more complete. (Illuminations (Chittick) 555, n. 16) In other words, insofar as servanthood requires the affirmation of the individual, it relates to the affirmation of relative existence before it is subordinated to Being; whilst servitude, as a quality which subsumes the individual, is itself sublimated within Being; the individual ceases to be a barrier between the quality of servitude and the reality of Being. The saint who is thus assimilated to the attribute of servitude gazes upon the way in the which ‘God turns him this way and that.’ (Illuminations (Chittick) 555, n. 16). This reminds us of Eckhart’s statement: ‘That man should let God work as he will, and himself stand idle.’ Ironically, it is this apparent idleness that qualifies one who has inwardly attained complete freedom: this is a freedom from oneself, and freedom from God, for it is uncreated freedom in and as the Essence of God: While I yet stood in my first cause, I had no God. . . I was free of God and all things. But when I left my free will behind and received my created being, then I had a God. For before there were creatures, God was not ‘God’: He was That which He was. But when creatures came into existence and received their created being, then God was not ‘God’ in Himself—He was ‘God’ in creatures (II:271). Eckhart was ‘free of God’ only when he had no God, that is, before the duality between God and creatures was established. Now this ‘before’ must be understood not chronologically but ontologically, that is, not as a moment in time but as a degree within Being. Eckhart realizes this degree of being, as he attests in the following statement, part of which we cited earlier: When I return to God, if I do not remain there, my breakthrough will be far nobler than my outflowing.... When I enter the ground, the bottom, the river and fount of the Godhead, none will ask me whence I came or where I have been. No one missed me, for there God unbecomes (II:82). Where God unbecomes, and the Godhead alone subsists, there Eckhart is ‘free of God’; but we cannot any longer speak of Eckhart as a specific individual. He has, by definition, undergone fan??, annihilation; this annihilation being the sole means of access to ultimate freedom. Being completely ‘free’ is being ‘free of God’, and this state is strictly predicated upon being liberated from one’s own ego. This is precisely what Ibn al-?Arab? asserts in the following passage, after stating that only the divine Essence possesses the station or maq?m of Freedom. Here, it is important to stress the distinction between a state, ??l, which is always temporary; and a station, maq?m, which is permanent: When the servant desires the realization of this station... [he knows] that this can only come about through the disappearance of the poverty that accompanies him because of his possibility, and he also sees that the Divine Jealousy demands that none be qualified by existence except God... he knows through these considerations that the ascription of existence to the possible thing is impossible.... Hence he looks at his own entity and sees that it is nonexistent... and that nonexistence is its intrinsic attribute. So no thought of existence occurs to him, poverty disappears, and he remains free in the state of possessing nonexistence, like the freedom of the Essence in Its Being (Illuminations (Chittick), 257–258). Just as the Essence is free of the limitations binding the Creator to creation, so the servant is free of the limitations binding him to the Creator only in- sofar as he, the servant, realizes completely his own nonexistence: to exist is to be imprisoned within the poverty, faqr, which is forever in need of the riches— the Being—of the Lord. The servant remains always the servant. When the servant becomes ontologically and not just notionally aware of his nonexistence, only then can there arise the momentary state of complete freedom, a taste of, or participation in, the eternal freedom of the Essence. What this all implies and induces is the purest or most radical sense of humility: Since the wuj?d of the servant is not his own entity, and since the wuj?d of the Lord is identical with Himself, the servant should stand in a station from which no whiffs of lordship are smelt from him (Path, 324). For my voyage was only in myself and pointed to myself, and through this I came to know that I was a pure servant without a trace of lordship in me at all (Illuminations (Morris), 380). The final end and ultimate return of the gnostics... is that the Real is identical with them, while they do not exist. (Path, 375). We call this humility ‘radical’ because it goes to the very root of our existence, or rather, it uncovers the fundamental ambiguity of our existence: that we are at once pure nothingness and pure Being. The gnostics, the true knowers, are aware that their true identity is the Real, in the very measure that they are aware that they—as individuals—do not exist. They recognize themselves in the Light which they discover in the depths of their hearts, the Light of which their specific existence is a shadow. Ibn al-?Arab? writes: The object of vision, which is the Real, is light, while that through which the perceiver perceives Him is light. Hence light becomes included within light. It is as if it returns to the root from which it became manifest. So nothing sees Him but He. You, in respect of your entity are identical with shadow, not light (Path, 215). It is as if Eckhart were commenting on the idea of light returning to its root when he says: In the inmost part, where none is at home, there that light finds satisfaction, and there it is more one than it is itself.’ (II:105) The light within Eckhart’s intellect—which is ‘uncreated and uncreatable’—is more truly one that it is itself. To the extent that he identifies with this light, he is truer to himself in that which transcends him than he is in and as himself. In other words, one finds one’s self more in the One than in oneself. Let us not forget that Eckhart is not speculating in the void: he is speaking as one who has leapt into that void (cite Schuon: Logic and Transcendence), and tells us that he knows himself only in the negation of his own particularity, in the disappearance of his own egoic nucleus. One of the most powerfully evocative images Eckhart gives us to convey a hint of what this self-abnegation means is this: When the soul has got so far it loses its name [cf nama-rupa transcended] and is drawn into God, so that in itself it becomes nothing, just as the sun draws the dawn into itself and annihilates it. (III: 126) This is a perfect image of the mystery expressed by the Sufi formula: al-baq?’ ba’d al-fan?’, subsistence after annihilation. The annihilation of the lesser light of the soul—the extinction of its fragmentary consciousness—is infinitely compensated by the rising of the sun—the awakening to supreme consciousness. The negation of limitation—whether this limitation take the form of the Trinity/Divine Names in the face of the Godhead or of the soul before God—this negation of limitation transforms death into life: self-negation, motivated by supreme aspiration and consummated by divine grace, grants one a taste of the beatitude of infinite being. We return to what Eckhart describes as the content of the Word that is born in the soul: immeasurable power, infinite wisdom, and infinite sweetness; and to what Ibn al-?Arab? describes as the essence of Being: al-wuj?d wijd?n al-?aqq fi’l-wajd: Being is consciousness of the Real in bliss.
- [Everlasting Joy](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/everlasting-joy) - Fr Pavel Florensky By all sorts of paths God leads man to such an understanding, to a knowledge of his holiness. Sometimes this takes place through a great trial… And at other times—a great undeserved happiness, a sharp joy which pierces through the whole being and overwhelms the soul, ripping off the despised cover which
- [The Ten Oxherding Pictures (<em>Jugyuzu</em>)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/ten-oxherding-pictures-jugyuzu) - Commentary by Shodo Harada Roshi on one of the oldest documents of Zen Buddhism history. The Ten Bull Pictures or Ten Oxherding Pictures (Japanese: jugyu, Chinese: shíniú) is a series of short poems and accompanying pictures to illustrate the stages of the path towards enlightenment and the perfection of wisdom. Rinzai said that in this
- [The Universality of the University](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/universality-of-university) - Jean-Luc Marion To educate basically signifies to teach what can be learned, but above all to teach the learner his power and his finitude—to open up his mind to his intellectus itself. No authentic university can dispense with theology. If there is no knowledge, and therefore no teaching or education without love of the truth,
- [Medieval Jewish Poetry (Audio)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/medieval-jewish-poetry-audio) - Ibn Gabirol / Abraham Abulafia From two of the greatest mystics of the Jewish tradition, we bring a selection of their poetry, read in the original Hebrew and in English translation. Ibn Gabirol: “I am the Man” (Ani ha-ish) Click here to download, English and Hebrew – 6:22 (6.1MB) Ibn Gabirol: Selections from “Kingdom's Crown”
- [The Cherubinic Wanderer](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/cherubinic-wanderer) - Angelus Silesius (1624–1677) Selections of Silesius’ masterpiece of mystical poetry, read in English and German original. The rose which here thou seest with thine outward eye Hath blossomed in God from all eternity. Die Rose, welche hier dein äußres Auge sieht, Die hat von Ewigkeit in Gott also geblüht. • Click here for a PDF
- [Introductory Lectures on Zen Training](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/yasutani-lectures) - Since modern man, as Yasutani-roshi points out, lacks the faith and burning zeal of his predecessors in Zen, he needs a map which his mind can trust, charting his entire spiritual journey, before he can move ahead with confidence. For these reasons Harada-roshi, Yasutani-roshi’s own master, devised a series of introductory lectures on Zen practice some forty years ago, and it is this material which forms the basis of these lectures by Yasutani-roshi. These lectures are more than a compendium of instructions on the formal aspects of zazen, i.e., sitting, breathing, and concentration. They are an authoritative exposition of the five levels of Zen, of the aims and essentials of zazen, and of the all-important relation of zazen to enlightenment (satori). With them as map and compass the earnest seeker need not grope along hazardous bypaths of the occult, the psychic, or the superstitious, which waste time and often prove harmful, but can proceed directly along a carefully charted course, secure in the knowledge of his ultimate goal. Yasutani-roshi’s emphasis on the religious aspect of Zen, that is, on faith as a prerequisite to enlightenment, may come as a surprise to Western readers accustomed to “intellectual images” of Zen by scholars devoid of Zen insight. *Translated and edited by Roshi Philip Kapleau, disciple of the author. Originally published as chapter 1 of The Three Pillars of Zen, Beacon Press, Boston, 1965. The present text includes some modifications of later editions, with thanks to the Rochester Zen Center. This derives for the most part from the teachings of Dogen-zenji, one of the truly imposing religious personalities of Japanese history, who brought the doctrines of the Soto sect of Zen Buddhism from China to Japan. ... Although sitting is the foundation of zazen, it is not just any kind of sitting.Not only must the back be straight, the breathing properly regulated, and the mind concentrated beyond thought, but, according to Dogen, one must sit with a sense of dignity and grandeur, like a mountain or a giant pine, and with a feeling of gratitude toward the Buddha and the Patriarchs, who made manifest the Dharma. And we must be grateful for our human body, through which we have the opportunity to experience the reality of the Dharma in all its profundity. This sense of dignity and gratitude, moreover, is not confined to sitting but must inform every activity, for insofar as each act issues from the Bodhi-mind it has the inherent purity and dignity of Buddhahood. This innate dignity of man is physiologically manifested in his erect back, since he alone of all creatures has this capacity to hold his spinal column vertical. An erect back is related to proper sitting in other important ways, which will be discussed at a later point... ... To help awaken us to this world of Buddha-nature, Zen masters employ yet another mode of zazen, namely, the chanting of dharani1 and sutras. Now, a dharani has been described as “a more or less meaningless chain of words or names that is supposed to have a magical power in helping the one who is repeating it at some time of extremity.” As phonetic transliterations of Sanskrit words, dharani have doubtlessly lost much of their profound meaning through the inevitable alteration of the original sounds. But as anyone who has recited them for any length of time knows, in their effect on the spirit they are anything but meaningless. When chanted with sincerity and zest they impress upon the heart and mind the names and virtues of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas enumerated in them, removing inner hindrances to zazen and fixing the heart in an attitude of reverence and devotion. But dharani are also a symbolic expression in sound and rhythm of the essential Truth of the universe lying beyond the realm of the discriminating intellect. To the degree that the discursive mind is held at bay during the voicing of dharani, they are valuable as another exercise in training the mind to cease clinging to dualistic modes of thought. The intoning of sutras, while also a mode of zazen, fulfills yet a further purpose. Since they are the recorded words and sermons of the Buddha, sutras do in some degree make a direct appeal to the intellect. Thus for those whose faith in the Buddha’s Way is shallow the repeated chanting of sutras eventually leads to a measure of understanding, and this serves to strengthen faith in the truth of the Buddha’s teachings. As faith grows, however, there is less need for chanting them. In another sense sutra-chanting can be compared to an Oriental ink painting of, say, a pine tree in which most of the picture consists of white space. This 1A dharani (Jap. darani ???) is a type of ritual speech similar to a mantra. The word dh?ra?? derives from a Sanskrit root which means “to hold or maintain”. ? empty space corresponds to the deeper levels of meaning of the sutras which the words adumbrate. Just as in the picture our minds are brought to a heightened awareness of the white space because of the tree, so through the reciting of the sutras we can be led to sense the reality lying beyond them, the Emptiness to which they point. ... The uniqueness of zazen lies in this: that the mind is freed from bondage to all thought-forms, visions, objects, and imaginings, how ever sacred or elevating, and brought to a state of absolute emptiness, from which alone it may one day perceive its own true nature, or the nature of the universe. 1 Theory and Practice of Zazen What I am about to tell you is based upon the teaching of my revered teacher, Daiun2 Harada-roshi. Although he himself was of the Soto sect, he was unable to find a truly accomplished master in that sect and so went to train first at Shogen- ji and then Nanzen-ji, two Rinzai monasteries. At Nanzen-ji he eventually grasped the inmost secret of Zen under the guidance of Dokutan-roshi, an outstanding master. While it is undeniably true that one must undergo Zen training himself in order to comprehend the truth of Zen, Harada-roshi felt that the modern mind is so much more aware that for beginners lectures of this type could be meaningful as a preliminary to practice. He combined the best of each sect and established a unique method of teaching Zen. Nowhere in Japan will you find Zen teaching set forth so thoroughly and succinctly, so well suited to the temper of the modern mind, as at his monastery. Having been his disciple for some twenty years, I was enabled, thanks to his favor, to open my Mind’s eye in some measure. Before commencing his lectures Harada-roshi would preface them with advice on listening. His first point was that everyone should listen with their eyes open and upon him—in other words, with their whole being—because an impression received only through the hearing is rather shallow, akin to listening to the radio. His second point was that each person should listen to these lectures as though they were being given to oneself alone, as ideally they should be. Human nature is such that if two people listen, each feels only half responsible for understanding, and if ten people are listening each feels one’s own responsibility to be but one tenth. However, since there are so many of you and what I have to say is exactly the same for everybody, I have asked you to come as a group. You must nonetheless listen as though you were entirely alone and hold yourselves accountable for everything that is said. ? 2A Zen name meaning “Great Cloud.” This discourse is divided into twelve parts, which will be covered in some eight lecture sessions. The first involves the rationale of zazen and direct methods of practice; the next, special precautions; and the following lectures, the particular problems arising from zazen, together with their solution. In point of fact, a knowledge of the theory or principles of zazen is not a prerequisite to practice. Students who train under an accomplished teacher will inevitably grasp this theory by degrees as their practice ripens. Modern students, however, being intellectually more sophisticated than their predecessors in Zen, will not follow instructions unreservedly; they must first know the reasons behind them. Therefore I feel obligated to deal with theoretical matters. The difficulty with theory, however, is that it is endless. Buddhist scriptures, Buddhist doctrine, and Buddhist philosophy are no more than intellectual formulations of zazen, and zazen itself is their practical demonstration. From this vast field I will now abstract what is most essential for your practice. We start with Buddha Shakyamuni.3 As I think you all know, he began with the path of asceticism, undergoing tortures and austerities which others before him had never attempted, including prolonged fasting. But he failed to attain enlightenment by these means and, half-dead from hunger and exhaustion, came to realize the futility of pursuing a course which could only terminate in death. So he drank the milk-rice that was offered him by a concerned country girl, gradually regained his health, and resolved to steer a middle course between self-torture and self-indulgence. Thereafter he devoted himself exclusively to zazen for six years4 and eventually, on the morning of the eight of December, at the very instant when he glanced at the planet Venus gleaming in the eastern sky, he attained perfect enlightenment. All this we believe as historical truth. The words the Buddha uttered involuntarily at this time are recorded variously in the Buddhist scriptures. According to the Kegon (Avatamsaka) sutra, at the moment of enlightenment he spontaneously cried out: “Wonder of wonders! Intrinsically all living beings are Buddhas, endowed with wisdom and virtue, but because people’s minds have become inverted through delusive thinking they fail to perceive this.” The first pronouncement of the Buddha seems to have been one of awe and astonishment. Yes, how truly marvelous that all human beings, whether clever or stupid, male or female, ugly or beautiful, are whole and complete just as they are. That is to say, the nature of every being is inherently without a flaw, perfect, no different from that of Amida or any other Buddha. This first declaration of Shakyamuni Buddha is also the ultimate conclusion of Buddhism. Yet human beings, restless and anxious, live half-crazed existences because their minds, heavily encrusted with delusion, are turned topsy-turvy. We need therefore to return to our original perfection, to see through the false 3The traditional Japanese term is O-Shaka-sama. It is both respectful and intimate. The O and sama are honorifics, and rather than attempt an arbitrary translation of them, I have followed the usual English rendering of this title. 4Other accounts say six years elapsed from the time he left his home until his supreme enlightenment. image of ourselves as incomplete and sinful, and to wake up to our inherent purity and wholeness. The most effective means by which to accomplish this is through zazen. Not only Shakyamuni Buddha himself but many of his disciples attained full awakening through Zazen. Moreover, during the 2,500 years since the Buddha’s death innumerable devotees in India, China, and Japan have, by grasping this selfsame key, resolved for themselves the most fundamental question of all: What are life and death? Even in this day there are many who, having cast off worry and anxiety, have emancipated themselves through zazen. Between a Nyorai (i.e. a supremely perfected Buddha) and us, who are ordinary, there is no difference as to substance. This “substance” can be likened to water. One of the salient characteristics of water is its conformability: when put into a round vessel it becomes round, when put into a square vessel it becomes square. We have this same adaptability, but as we live bound and fettered through ignorance of our true nature, we have forfeited this freedom. To pursue the metaphor, we can say that the mind of a Buddha is like water that is calm, deep and crystal clear, and upon which the “moon of truth” reflects fully and perfectly. The mind of the ordinary person, on the other hand, is like murky water, constantly being churned by the gales of delusive thought and no longer able to reflect the moon of truth. The moon nonetheless shines steadily upon the waves, but as the waters are roiled we are unable to see its reflection. Thus we lead lives that are frustrating and meaningless. How can we fully illumine our life and personality with the moon of truth? We need first to purify this water, to calm the surging waves by halting the winds of discursive thought. In other words, we must empty our minds of what the Kegon (Avatamsaka) sutra calls the “conceptual thought of the human being.” Most people place a high value on abstract thought, but Buddhism has clearly demonstrated that discriminative thinking lies at the root of delusion. I once heard someone say: “Thought is the sickness of the human mind.” From the Buddhist point of view this is quite true. To be sure, abstract thinking is useful when wisely employed—which is to say, when its nature and limitations are properly understood—but as long as human beings remain slaves to their intellect, fettered and controlled by it, they can well be called sick. All thoughts, whether ennobling or debasing, are mutable and impermanent; they have a beginning and an end even as they are fleetingly with us, and this is as true of the thought of an era as of an individual. In Buddhism, thought is referred to as “the stream of life-and-death.” It is important in this connection to distinguish the role of transitory thoughts from that of fixed concepts. Random ideas are relatively innocuous, but ideologies, beliefs, opinions, and points of view, not to mention the factual knowledge accumulated since birth (to which we attach ourselves), are the shadows which obscure the light of truth. So long as the winds of thought continue to disturb the water of our Self- nature, we cannot distinguish truth from untruth. It is imperative, therefore, that these winds be stilled. Once they abate, the waves subside, the muddiness clears, and we perceive directly that the moon of truth has never ceased shining. The moment of such realization is kensho, i.e., enlightenment, the apprehension of the true substance of our Self-nature. Unlike moral and philosophical concepts, which are variable, true insight is imperishable. Now for the first time we can live with inner peace and dignity, free from perplexity and disquiet, and in harmony with our environment. I have spoken to you briefly about these matters, but I hope I have succeed in conveying to you the importance of zazen. Let us now talk about practice. ? The first step is to select a quiet room in which to sit. Lay out a fairly soft mat or pad some three feet square, and on top of this place a small circular cushion measuring about one foot in diameter to sit on, or use a square cushion folded in two or even a folded or rolled-up blanket. Preferably one should not wear trousers or socks, since these interfere with the crossing of the legs and the placing of the feet. For a number of reasons it is best to sit in the full-lotus posture. To sit full-lotus you place the foot of the right leg over the thigh of the left and the foot of the left over the thigh of the right. The main point of this particular method of sitting is that by establishing a wide, solid base with the crossed legs and both knees touching the mat, you achieve repose and absolute stability. When the body is immobile, thoughts are not stirred into activity by physical movements and the mind is more easily quieted. If you have difficulty sitting in the full-lotus posture because of the pain, sit half-lotus, which is done by putting the foot of the left leg over the thigh of the right and the right leg under the left thigh. For those of you who are not accustomed to sitting cross-legged, even this position may not be easy to maintain. You will probably find it difficult to keep the two knees resting on the mat and will have to push one or both of them down again and again until they remain there. In both the half- and the full-lotus postures the uppermost foot can be reversed when the legs become tired. For those who find both of these traditional zazen positions acutely uncom- fortable, an alternative position is the traditional Japanese one of sitting on the heels and calves. This can be maintained for a longer time if a cushion is placed between the heels and the buttocks. One advantage of this posture is that the back can be kept erect easily. However, should all of these positions prove too painful, you may use a chair.5 The next step is to rest the right hand in the lap, palm upward, and place the left hand, palm upward, on top of the right palm. Lightly touch the tips of the thumbs to each other so that a flattened circle is formed by the palms and thumbs. The right side of the body is the active side, the left the passive. Accordingly, during practice we quiet the active side by placing the left foot and left hand over the right members, as an aid in achieving the highest degree of tranquility. If you look at a figure of the Buddha, however, you will notice that the position of these 5See section IX of The Three Pillars of Zen for sketches of all these postures, including one widely used in the Southeast Asian Buddhist countries. ? members is just the reverse. The significance of this is that a Buddha, unlike the rest of us, is actively engaged in the task of liberation. After you have crossed your legs, bend forward so as to thrust the buttocks out, then slowly bring the trunk to an erect posture. The head should be straight; if looked at from the side, your ears should be in line with your shoulders and the tip of your nose in line with your navel. The body from the waist up should be weightless, free from pressure or strain.6 Keep the eyes open and the mouth closed. The tip of the tongue should lightly touch the back of the upper teeth. If you close your eyes you will fall into a dull and dreamy state. The gaze should be lowered without focusing on anything in particular, but be careful not to incline the head forward. Experience has shown that the mind is quietest, with the least fatigue or strain, when the eyes are in this lowered position. The spinal column must be erect at all times. This admonition is important. When the body slumps, not only is undue pressure placed on the internal organs, interfering with their free functioning, but the vertebrae by impinging upon nerves may cause strains of one kind or another. Since body and mind are one, any impairment of the physiological functions inevitably involves the mind and thus diminishes its clarity and one-pointedness, which are essential for effective concentration. From a purely psychological point of view, a ramrod erectness is as undesirable as a slouching position, for the one springs from unconscious pride and the other from abjectness, and since both are grounded in ego they are equally a hindrance to enlightenment. Be careful to hold the head erect; if it inclines forward or backward or sideward, remaining there for an appreciable length of time a crick in the neck may result. When you have established a correct posture, take a deep breath, hold it momentarily, then exhale slowly and quietly. Repeat this two or three times, always breathing through the nose. After that breathe naturally. When you have accustomed yourself to this routine, one deep breath at the beginning will suffice. After that, breathe naturally without trying to manipulate your breath. Now bend the body first to the right as far as it will go, then to the left, about seven or eight times, in large arcs to begin with, then smaller ones until the trunk naturally comes to rest at center. You are now ready to concentrate your mind. There are many good methods of concentration bequeathed to us by our predecessors in Zen. The easiest for beginners is counting incoming and outgoing breaths. The value of this particular exercise lies in the fact that all reasoning is excluded and the discriminative mind put at rest. Thus the waves of thought are stilled and a gradual one-pointedness of mind achieved. To start with, count both inhalations and exhalations. When you inhale concentrate on “one”; when you exhale, on “two” and so on, up to ten. Then you return to “one” and once more count up to ten, continuing as before. If you lose the count, return to “one.” It is as simple as that. 6The center of gravity of the body-mind should be about two inches below the navel. ? As I have previously pointed out, fleeting thoughts which naturally fluctuate in the mind are not in themselves an impediment. This unfortunately is not commonly recognized. Even among Japanese who have been practicing Zen for five years or more there are many who misunderstand Zen practice to be a stopping of consciousness. There is indeed a kind of zazen that aims at doing just this,7 but it is not the traditional zazen of Zen Buddhism. You must realize that no matter how intently you count your breaths you will still perceive what is in your line of vision, since your eyes are open, and you will hear the normal sounds about you, as your ears are not plugged. And since your brain likewise is not asleep, various thought forms will dart about in your mind. Now, they will not hamper or diminish the effectiveness of zazen unless, evaluating them as “good,” you cling to them or, deciding they are “bad,” you try to check or eliminate them. You must not regard any perceptions or sensations as an obstruction to zazen, nor should you pursue any of them. I emphasize this. “Pursuit” simply means that in the act of seeing, your gaze lingers on objects; in the course of hearing, your attention dwells on sounds; and in the process of thinking, your mind adheres to ideas. If you allow yourself to be distracted in such ways, your concentration on the counting of your breaths will be impeded. To recapitulate: let random thoughts arise and vanish as they will, do not dally with them and do not try to expel them, but merely concentrate all your energy on counting the inhalations and exhalations of your breath. In terminating a period of sitting do not arise abruptly, but begin by rocking from side to side, first in small swings, then in large ones, for about half a dozen times. You will observe that your movements in this exercise are the reverse of those you engage in when you begin zazen. Rise slowly and quietly walk around with the others in what is called kinhin ??, a walking form of zazen. Kinhin is performed by placing the right fist, with thumb inside on the chest and covering it with the left palm while holding both elbows at right angles. Keep the arms in a straight line and the body erect, with the eyes resting upon a point about two yards in front of the feet. At the same time continue to count inhalations and exhalations as you walk slowly around the room. Begin walking with the left foot and walk in such a way that the foot sinks into the floor, first the heel and then the toes. Walk calmly and steadily, with poise and dignity. The walking must not be done absentmindedly, and the mind must be taut as you concentrate on the counting. It is advisable to practice walking this way for at least five minutes after each sitting period of twenty to thirty minutes. Your are to think of this walking as zazen in motion. Rinzai and Soto differ considerably in their way of doing kinhin. In Rinzai the walking is brisk and energetic, while in traditional Soto it is slow and leisurely; in fact, upon each breath you step forward only six inches or so. My own teacher, Harada-roshi, advocated a gait somewhere between these two and that is the method we have been practicing here. Further, the Rinzai sect cups the left hand on top of the right whereas in the orthodox Soto the right hand is placed on top. Harada 7Shojo Zen, see below, p. 16 ? roshi felt that the Rinzai method of putting the left hand uppermost was more desirable and so he adopted it into his own teaching. Now even though this walking relieves the stiffness in your legs, such relief is to be regarded as a mere by-product and not the main object of kinhin. Accordingly, those of you who are counting your breaths should continue during kinhin, and those of you who are working on a koan should carry on with it. This ends the first lecture. Continue to count your breaths as have instructed until you come before me again. 2 Precautions to Observe in Zazen In this second lecture I am going to change your breathing exercise slightly. This morning I told you to count “one” as you inhale and “two” as you exhaled. Hereafter I want you to count “one” only on the exhalation, so that one full breath (inhalation and exhalation) will be “one.” Don’t bother counting the inhalations; just count “one,” “two,” “three,” and so forth, on the exhalation. It is advisable to do zazen facing a wall, a curtain, or the like. Don’t sit too far from the wall nor with your nose up against it; the ideal distance is from two to three feet. Likewise, don’t sit where you have a sweeping view, for it is distracting, or where you look out on a pleasant landscape, which will tempt you to leave off zazen in order to admire it. In this connection, remember that although your eyes are open you are not actually trying to see. For all these reasons it is wisest to sit facing a wall. However, if you happen to be doing zazen formally in a Rinzai temple, you will have no choice but to sit facing others, as this is the established custom in that sect. In the beginning, if possible, select a room that is quiet as well as clean and tidy, one which you can regard as special. It may be asked whether it is satisfactory to do zazen on a bed so long as the room is clean and free from noise. For the ordinary healthy person the answer is no; there are any number of reasons why it is difficult to keep the mind in proper tension on a bed. A bedridden person, of course, has no choice. You will probably find that natural sounds, like those of insects or birds or running water, will not disturb you, neither will the rhythmic ticking of a clock nor the purring of a motor. Sudden noises, however, like the roar of a jet, are jarring. But rhythmic sounds you can make use of. One student of mine actually attained enlightenment by utilizing the sound of the steady threshing of rice while he was doing zazen. The most objectionable sounds are those of human voices, either heard directly or over the radio or television. When you start zazen, therefore, find a room which is distant from such sounds. When your sitting has ripened, however, no noises will disturb you. Besides keeping your room clean and orderly you should decorate it with flowers and burn incense since these, by conveying a sense of the pure and the holy, make it easier for you to relate yourself to zazen and thus to calm and unify your mind more quickly. Wear simple, comfortable clothing that will give you a feeling of dignity and purity. In the evening it is better not to wear night clothes, but if it is hot and a question of either doing zazen in pajamas or not doing it at all, by all means wear the pajamas. But make yourself clean and tidy. The room ought not to be too light or too dark. You can put up a dark curtain if it is too light, or you can use a small electric bulb if it is night. The effect of a dark room is the same as closing your eyes: it dulls everything. The best condition is a sort of twilight. Remember Buddhist zazen does not aim at rendering the mind inactive but at quieting and unifying it in the midst of activity. A room with plenty of fresh air, that is neither too hot in summer nor too cold in winter, is ideal. Punishing the body is not the purpose of zazen, so it is unnecessary to struggle with extremes of heat or cold. Experience has shown, however, that one can do better zazen where on feels slightly cool; too hot a room tends to make one sleepy. As your ardor for zazen deepens, you will naturally become unconcerned about cold or heat. Nevertheless, it is wise to take care of your health. Next let us discuss the best time for zazen. For the eager and determined any time of day and all seasons of the year are equally good. But for those who have jobs or professions the best time is either morning or evening, or better still, both. Try to sit every morning preferably before breakfast, and just before going to bed at night. But if you can sit only once—and you should sit at least once a day—you will have to consider the relative merits of morning and evening. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. If you find that either morning or evening is equally good and you ask which I recommend (because you can sit only once a day), I would say the morning, for the following reasons: no visitors come early in the morning, whereas in the evening you are likely to be interrupted. Also, morning—at any rate in the city—is much quieter than evening since fewer cars are on the streets. Furthermore, because in the morning you are rested and somewhat hungry, you are in good condition for zazen, whereas in the evening, when you are tired and have had your meal, you are likely to be duller. Since it is difficult to do zazen on a full stomach, it is better not to sit immediately after a meal when you are a beginner. Before a meal, however, zazen can be practiced to good advantage. As your zeal grows it won’t matter when you sit, before, after, or during a meal. How long should you do zazen at one sitting? There is no general rule, for it varies according to the degree of one’s eagerness as well as the maturity of one’s practice. For novices a shorter time is better. If you sit devotedly five minutes a day for a month or two, you will want to increase your sitting to ten or more minutes as your ardor grows. When you are able to sit with your mind taut for, say, thirty minutes without pain or discomfort, you will come to appreciate the feeling of tranquility and well-being induced by zazen and will want to practice regularly. For these reasons I recommend that beginners sit for shorter periods of time. On the other hand, should you force yourself from the beginning to sit for longer periods, the pain in your legs may well become unbearable before you acquire a calm mind. Thus you will quickly tire of zazen, feeling it to be a waste of time, or you will always be watching the clock. In the end you will come to dislike zazen and stop sitting altogether. This is what frequently happens. Now even though you sit for only ten minutes or so each day, you can compensate for this briefness by concentrating intensely on the counting of each breath, thus increasing its effectiveness. You must not count absentmindedly or mechanically, as though it were a duty. In spite of your being able to sit for an hour or more with a feeling of exquisite serenity, it is wise to limit your sitting to periods of about thirty or forty minutes each. Ordinarily it is not advisable to do zazen longer than this at one sitting, since the mind cannot sustain its vigor and tautness and the value of the sitting decreases. Whether one realizes it or not, a gradual diminution of the mind’s concentrative intensity takes place. For this reason it is better to alternate a thirty- or forty- minute period of sitting with a round of walking zazen. Following this pattern, one can do zazen for a full day or even a week with good results. The longer zazen continues, however, the more time should be spent in walking zazen. In fact, one might advantageously add periods of manual labor to this routine, as has been done in the zen temple since olden times. Needless to say, you must keep your mind in a state of clear awareness during such manual labor and not allow it to become lax or dull. A word about food. It is better to eat no more than eighty percent of our capacity. A Japanese proverb has it that eight parts of a full stomach sustain the man; the other two sustain the doctor. The Zazen Yojinki (Precautions to Observe in Zazen), compiled about 650 years ago, says you should eat two-thirds of your capacity. It further says that you should choose nourishing vegetables— of course meat eating is not in the tradition of Buddhism and it was taboo when the Yojinki was written—such as mountain potatoes, sesame, sour plums, black beans, mushrooms, and the root of the lotus; and it also recommends various kinds of seaweed, which are highly nutritious and leave an alkaline residue in the body. Now, I am no authority on vitamins and minerals and calories, but it is a fact that most people today eat a diet which creates too much acid in the blood, and a great offender in this respect is meat. Eat more vegetables of the kind mentioned, which are alkalinic in their effect. In ancient days there was a yang-yin diet. The yang was the alkaline and the yin the acid, and the old books cautioned that a diet ought not be either too yang or too yin. This is substantially what I have just told you. There comes a point in your sitting when insights about yourself will flash into your mind. For example, relationships that previously were incomprehensible will suddenly be clarified and difficult personal problems abruptly solved. If you don’t jot down things that you want to remember, this could bother you and so interfere with your concentration. For this reason when you are sitting by yourself you may want to keep a pencil and notebook next to you. 3 Illusory Visions and Sensations This is the third lecture. Before I begin I will assign you a new way of concentration. Instead of counting your exhalations, as heretofore, count “one” on the first inhalation, “two” on the next inhalation, and so on, up to ten. This is more difficult than counting on the exhalation, because all mental and physical activity is performed on the exhaled breath. For instance, just before pouncing, animals take a breath. This principle is well known in kendo fencing and judo fighting, where one is taught that by carefully observing his opponent’s breathing his attack can be anticipated. While this exercise is difficult, you must try to practice it as another means of concentrating your mind. Until you come before me again you are to concentrate on counting the inhalations of your breath, not audibly but in the mind only. Makyo ?? are the phenomena—visions, hallucinations, fantasies, revela- tions, illusory sensations—which one practicing zazen is apt to experience at a particular stage in his sitting. Ma means “devil” and kyo “the objective world.” Hence makyo are the disturbing or “diabolical” phenomena which appear to one during zazen. These phenomena are not inherently bad. They become a serious obstacle to practice only if one is ignorant of their true nature and is ensnared by them. The word makyo is used in both a general and a specific sense. Broadly speaking, the entire life of the ordinary person is nothing but a makyo. Even such Bodhisattvas as Monju and Kannon, highly developed though they are, still have about them traces of makyo; otherwise they would be supreme Buddhas, completely free of makyo. One who becomes attached to what he or she realizes through satori is also still lingering in the world of makyo. So you see, there are makyo even after enlightenment, but we shall not enter into that aspect of the subject in these lectures. In the specific sense, the number of makyo which can appear are in fact unlimited, varying according to the personality and temperament of the sitter. In the Ryogon (Surangama) sutra the Buddha warns of fifty different kinds, but of course he is referring only to the commonest. If you attend a sesshin of from five to seven days’ duration and apply yourself assiduously, on the third day you are likely to experience makyo of varying degrees of intensity. Besides those which involve the vision there are numerous makyo which relate to the sense of touch, smell, or hearing, or which sometimes cause the body suddenly to move from side to side or forward and backward or to lean to one side or to seem to sink or rise. Not infrequently words burst forth uncontrollably or, more rarely, one imagines he is smelling a particularly fragrant perfume. There are even cases where without conscious awareness one writes down things which turn out to be prophetically true. Very common are visual hallucinations. You are doing zazen with your eyes open when suddenly the ridges of the straw matting in front of you seem to be heaving up and down like waves. Or without warning everything may go white before your eyes, or black. A knot in the wood of a door may suddenly appear as a beast or demon or angel. One disciple of mine often used to see visions of masks—demons masks or jesters’ masks. I asked him whether he had ever had any particular experience of masks, and it turned out that he had seen them at festival in Kyushu when he was a child. Another man I knew was extremely troubled in his practice by visions of Buddha and his disciples walking around him reciting sutras, and was only able to dispel the hallucination by jumping into a tank of ice-cold water for two or three minutes. Many makyo involve the hearing. One may hear the sound of piano or loud noises, such as an explosion (which is heard by no one else), and actually jump. One disciple of mine always used to hear the sound of a bamboo flute while doing zazen. He had learned to play the bamboo flute many years before, but had long since given it up, yet always the sound came to him when he was sitting. In the Zazen Yojinki we find the following about makyo: “The body may feel hot or cold or glasslike or hard or heavy or light. This happens because the breath is not well harmonized with the mind, and needs to be carefully regulated.” It then goes on to say: “One may experience the sensation of sinking or floating, or may alternately feel hazy and sharply alert. The disciple may develop the faculty of seeing through solid objects as though they were transparent, or he may experience his own body as a translucent substance. He may see Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Penetrating insights may suddenly come to him, or passages of sutras which were particularly difficult to understand may suddenly become luminously clear to him. All these abnormal visions and sensations are merely the symptoms of an impairment arising from a maladjustment of the mind with the breath.” Other religions and sects place great store by experiences which involve visions of God or deities or hearing heavenly voices, performing miracles, receiving divine messages, or becoming purified through various rites and drugs. In the Nichiren sect, for example, devotees loudly and repeatedly invoke the name of the Lotus sutra, to the accompaniment of vigorous body movements, and feel they have thereby purged themselves of their defilements. In varying degree these practices induce a feeling of well-being, yet from the Zen point of view all are abnormal states devoid of true religious significance and therefore only makyo. What is the essential nature of these disturbing phenomena we call makyo? They are temporary mental states which arise during zazen when your ability to concentrate has developed to a certain point and your practice is beginning to ripen. When the thought-waves that wax and wane on the surface of the mind are partially calmed, residual elements of past experiences “lodged” in the deeper levels of consciousness bob up sporadically to the surface of the mind, conveying the feeling of a greater or expanded reality. Makyo, accordingly, are a mixture of the real and the unreal, not unlike ordinary dreams. Just as dreams are usually not remembered by a person in deep sleep but only when one is half asleep and half awake, so makyo do not come to those in deep concentration or samadhi. Never be tempted into thinking that these phenomena are real or that the visions themselves have any meaning. To have a beautiful vision of a Buddha does not mean that you are any nearer becoming one yourself, any more than a dream of being a millionaire means that you are any richer when you awake. Therefore there is no reason to feel elated about such makyo. And similarly, whatever horrible monsters may appear to you, there is no cause whatever for alarm. Above all, do not allow yourself to be enticed by visions of the Buddha or of gods blessing you or communicating a divine message, or by makyo involving prophecies which turn out to be true. This is to squander your energies in the foolish pursuit of the inconsequential. But such visions are certainly a sign that you are at a crucial point in your sitting and that if you exert yourself to the utmost, you can surely experience kensho. Tradition states that even Shakyamuni Buddha just before his own awakening experienced innumerable makyo, which he termed “obstructing devils.” Whenever makyo appear, simply ignore them and continue sitting with all your might. 4 The Five Varieties of Zen I shall now enumerate the different kinds of Zen. Unless you learn to distinguish between them, you are likely to err on decisive points such as whether or not satori is indispensable in Zen, whether Zen involves the complete absence of discursive thought, and the like. The truth is that among the many types of Zen there are some which are profound and some shallow, some that lead to enlightenment and some that do not. It is said that during the time of the Buddha there were ninety or ninety-five schools of philosophy or religion in existence. Each school had its particular mode of Zen, and each was slightly different from the others. All great religions embrace some measure of Zen, since religion needs prayer and prayer needs concentration of mind. The teaching of Confucius and Mencius, of Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu, all these have their own elements of Zen. Indeed, Zen is spread over many different activities of life, such as the tea ceremony, Noh, kendo, judo. In Japan, starting with the Meiji Restoration, less than a hundred years ago and continuing up to the present, there have sprung up a number of teachings and disciplines with elements of Zen in them. Among others I recall Okada’s System of Tranquil Sitting and Emma’s Method of Mind and Body Cultivation. Recently one Tempu Nakamura has been zealously advocating a form of Indian Yoga Zen. All these different methods of concentration, almost limitless in number, come under the broad heading of Zen. Rather than try to specify them all, I am going to discuss the five main divisions of Zen as classified by Keiho-zenji, one of the early Zen masters in China, whose categories, I feel, are still valid and useful. Outwardly these five kinds of Zen scarcely differ. There may be slight variations in the way the legs are crossed, the hands folded, or the breathing regulated, but common to all are three basic elements: an erect sitting posture, correct control of breathing, and concentration (unification) of mind. Beginners need to bear in mind, however, that in the substance and purpose of these various types there are distinct differences. These differences are crucial to you when you come before me individually to state your aspiration, for they will enable you to define your goal clearly the better that I may assign you the practice appropriate to it. 1 The first of these types we call bompu ??, or “ordinary,” Zen as opposed to the other four, each of which can be thought of as a special kind of Zen suitable for the particular aims of different individuals. Bompu Zen, being free from any philosophic or religious content, is for anybody and everybody. It is a Zen practiced purely in the belief that it can improve both physical and mental health. Since it can almost certainly have no ill effects, anyone can undertake it, whatever religious beliefs they happen to hold or if they hold none at all. Bompu Zen is bound to eliminate sickness of a psychosomatic nature and to improve the health generally. Through the practice of bompu Zen you learn to concentrate and control your mind. It never occurs to most people to try to control their minds, and unfortunately this basic training is left out of contemporary education, not being part of what is called the acquisition of knowledge. Yet without it what we learn is difficult to retain because we learn it improperly, wasting much energy in the process. Indeed, we are virtually crippled unless we know how to restrain our thoughts and concentrate our minds. Furthermore, by practicing this very excellent mode of mind training you will find yourself increasingly able to resist temptations to which you had previously succumbed, and to sever attachments which had long held you in bondage. An enrichment of personality and a strengthening of character inevitably follow since the three basic elements of mind—that is, intellect, feeling, and will—develop harmoniously. The quietist sitting practiced in Confucianism seems to have stressed mainly these effects of mind concentration. However, the fact remains that bompu Zen, although far more beneficial for the cultivation of the mind that the reading of countless on ethics and philosophy, is unable to resolve the fundamental problem of human existence and one’s relation to the universe. Why? Because it cannot pierce the ordinary man’s basic delusion of himself as distinctly other than the universe. 2 The second of the five kinds of Zen is called gedo ??. Gedo means literally “an outside way” and so implies, from the Buddhist point of view, teachings other than Buddhist. Here we have a Zen related to religion and philosophy but yet not a Buddhist Zen. Hindu yoga, the quietist sitting of Confucianism, contemplation practices in Christianity, all these belong to the category of gedo Zen. Another feature of gedo Zen is that it is often practiced in order to cultivate various supranormal powers or skills, or to master certain arts beyond the reach of the ordinary person. A good example of this is Tempu Nakamura, the man whom I mentioned earlier. It is reported that he can make people act without himself moving a muscle or saying a word. The aim of the Emma Method is to accomplish such feats as walking barefooted on sharp sword blades or staring at sparrows so that they become paralyzed. All these miraculous exploits are brought about through the cultivation of joriki, the particular strength of power which comes with the strenuous practice of mind concentration, and of which I shall speak later in greater detail. Here I will simply remind you that a Zen which aims solely at the cultivation of joriki for such ends is not a Buddhist Zen. Another object for which gedo Zen is practiced is rebirth in various heavens. Certain sects, we know, practice Zen in order to be reborn in heaven. This is not the object of Zen Buddhism. While Zen Buddhists do not quarrel with the idea of various strata of heaven and the belief that one may be reborn into these realms through the performance of ten kinds of meritorious deeds, they themselves do not crave rebirth in heaven. Conditions there are altogether too pleasant and comfortable and one can all too easily be lured from zazen. Besides, when one’s merit in heaven expires one can very well land in hell. Zen Buddhists therefore believe it preferable to be born into the human world and to practice zazen with the aim of ultimately becoming a Buddha. I will stop here and at the next lecture conclude the five types of Zen. I have now discussed with you the first two kinds of Zen, namely, bompu and gedo. Before going on to the next three types I am going to give you another method of concentration: experiencing the breath. For the time being stop counting your breaths and instead concentrate intently on following your inhalations and exhalations, trying to experience them clearly. You are to carry on this exercise until you come before me again. 3 The third type of zen is shojo ??, literally meaning “small vehicle.” This is the vehicle or teaching that is to take you from one state of mind (delusion) to another (enlightenment). This small vehicle is so named because it is designed to accommodate only one’s self. You can perhaps compare it to a bicycle. The large vehicle (Mahayana), on the other hand, is more like a car or bus: it takes on others as well. Hence shojo is a Zen which looks only to one’s own peace of mind. Here we have a Zen which is Buddhist but a Zen not in accord with the Buddha’s highest teaching. It is rather an expedient Zen for those unable to grasp the innermost meaning of the Buddha’s enlightenment; i.e., that existence is an inseparable whole, each one of us embracing the cosmos in its totality. This being true, it follows that we cannot attain genuine peace of mind merely by seeking our own salvation while remaining indifferent to the welfare of others. There are those, however—and some of you listening to me now may be among them—who simply cannot bring themselves to believe in the reality of such a world. No matter how often they are taught that the relative world of distinctions and opposites to which they cling is illusory, the product of their mistaken views, they cannot but believe otherwise. To such people the world can only seem inherently evil, full of sin and strife and suffering, of killing and being killed, and in their despair they long to escape from it. Indeed, death seems even preferable to life. The most unbearable sin of all is the taking of life in any form and under any circumstances, since this condemns them to interminable suffering incarnated as beasts or demons in countless future existences owing to the inexorable law of karma. So mere death is not the end. Hence what they are seeking is a way of avoiding rebirth, a method of dying without being reborn. Shojo Zen provides the answer to this need. It has as its aim the stopping of all thoughts so that the mind becomes a complete blank and enters into a state called mushinjo ???, a condition in which all the sense functions have been eliminated and the faculty of consciousness suspended. With practice this power can be cultivated by anyone. In case there is no wish to die one can enter this trance-like state for a limited period—say an hour or two or one or two days— or one can remain in it indefinitely, in which event death follows naturally and painlessly, without—and this is most important—rebirth. This entire process of death without rebirth is set forth in great detail in a Buddhist philosophical work called the Kusharon. 4 The fourth classification is called daijo ??, great vehicle (Mahayana) Zen, and this is a truly Buddhist Zen, for it has as its central purpose kensho-godo, that is, seeing into your essential nature and realizing the Way in your daily life. For those able to comprehend the import of the Buddha’s own enlightenment experience and with a desire to break through their own illusory view of the universe and experience absolute, undifferentiated Reality, the Buddha taught this mode of Zen. Buddhism is essentially a religion of enlightenment. The Buddha after his own supreme awakening spent some fifty years teaching people how they might themselves realize their Self-nature. His methods have been transmitted from master to disciple right down to the present day. So it can be said that a Zen which ignores or denies or belittles enlightenment is not true daijo Buddhist Zen. In the practice of daijo Zen your aim in the beginning is to awaken to your True-nature, but upon enlightenment you realize that zazen is more than a means to enlightenment—it is the actualization of your True-nature. In this type of Zen, which has as its object satori-awakening, it is easy to mistakenly regard zazen as but a means. A wise teacher, however, will point out from the onset that zazen is in fact the actualization of the innate Buddha-nature and not merely a technique for achieving enlightenment. If zazen were no more than such a technique, it would follow that after satori zazen would be unnecessary. But as Dogen-zenji himself pointed out, precisely the reverse is true; the more deeply you experience satori, the more you perceive the need for practice. 5 Saijojo ?? Zen, the last of the five types, is the highest vehicle, the culmination and crown of Buddhist Zen. This Zen was practiced by the Buddhas of the past—namely, Shakyamuni and Amida—and the expression of Absolute Life, life in its purest form. It is the zazen which Dogen-zenji chiefly advocated and it involves no struggle for satori or any other object. We call it shikan-taza, and of this I shall speak in greater detail in a subsequent lecture. In this highest practice, means and end coalesce. Daijo Zen and saijojo Zen are, in point of fact, complementary. The Rinzai sect placed daijo uppermost and saijojo beneath, whereas the Soto sect does the reverse. In saijojo, when rightly practiced, you sit in the firm conviction that zazen is the actualization of your undefiled True-nature, and at the same time you sit in complete faith that the day will come when, exclaiming, “Oh, this is it!” you will unmistakably realize this True-nature. Therefore you need not self-consciously strive for enlightenment. Today many in the Soto sect hold that since we are all innately Buddhas, satori is unnecessary. Such an egregious error reduces shikan-taza, which properly is the highest form of sitting, to nothing more than bompu Zen, the first of the five types. This completes my account of the five varieties of Zen, but unless I now tell you about the three objectives of zazen my presentation of these five types, especially the last two, will be incomplete. 5 The Three Aims of Zazen The aims of zazen are three: (1) development of the power of concentration (joriki ??), (2) satori-awakening (kensho-godo ????), and (3) actualization of the Supreme Way in our daily lives (mujodo no taigen ??????). These three form an inseparable unity, but for purposes of discussion I am obliged to deal with them individually. Joriki, the first of these, is the power or strength which arises when the mind has been unified and brought to one-pointedness in zazen concentration. This is more than the ability to concentrate in the usual sense of the word. It is a dynamic power which, once mobilized, enables us even in the most sudden and unexpected situations to act instantly, without pausing to collect our wits, and in a manner wholly appropriate to the circumstances. Those who have developed joriki are no longer slaves to their passions. More fully in command of both themselves and the circumstances of their lives, such people are able to move with real freedom and equanimity. The cultivation of certain supranormal powers is also made possible by joriki, as is the state in which the mind becomes like clear, still water. The first two of the five kinds of Zen I have spoken about depend entirely on joriki. Now, although the power of joriki can be endlessly enlarged through regular practice, it will recede and eventually vanish if we neglect zazen. And while it is true that many extraordinary powers flow from joriki, nevertheless through it alone we cannot cut the roots of our illusory view of the world. Mere strength of concentration is not enough for the highest types of Zen; concomitantly there must be satori-awakening. In a little-known document handed down by Master Sekito Kisen, the founder of one of the early Zen sects, the following appears: “In our sect, realization of the Buddha-nature, and not mere devotion or strength of concentration, is paramount.” The second of these aims is kensho-godo, seeing into your True nature and at the same time seeing into the ultimate nature of the universe and “all the ten thousand things” in it. It is the sudden realization that “I have been complete and perfect from the very beginning. How wonderful, how miraculous!” If it is true kensho, its substance will always be the same for whoever experiences it, whether that one be the Buddha Shakyamuni, the Buddha Amida, or any one of you gathered in this temple. But this does not mean that we can all experience kensho to the same degree, for in the clarity, the depth and the completeness of the experience there are great differences. As an illustration, imagine a person blind from birth who gradually begins to recover his sight. At first he can see very vaguely and darkly and only objects close to him. Then as his sight improves he is able to distinguish things a yard or so away, then objects at ten yards, then at a hundred yards, until finally he can recognize anything up to a thousand yards. At each of these stages the phenomenal world he is seeing is the same, but the differences in the clarity and accuracy of his view of that world are as great as those between snow and charcoal. So it is with the differences in clarity and depth of our experiences of kensho. The last of the three objectives is mujodo no taigen, the actualization of the Supreme Way throughout our entire being and our daily activities. At this point we do not distinguish the end from the means. Saijojo, which I have spoken of as the fifth and highest of the five types of Zen, corresponds to this stage. When you sit earnestly and egolessly in accordance with the instructions of a competent teacher—with your mind fully conscious yet as free of thought as a pure white sheet of paper is unmarred by a blemish—there is an unfoldment of your intrinsically pure Buddha-nature whether you have had satori or not. But what must be emphasized here is that only with true awakening do you directly apprehend the truth of your Buddha-nature and perceive that saijojo, the purest type of Zen, is no different from that practiced by all Buddhas. The practice of Buddhist Zen should embrace all three of these objectives, for they are interrelated. There is, for instance, an essential connection between joriki and kensho. Kensho is “the wisdom naturally associated with joriki,” which is the power arising from concentration. Joriki is connected with kensho in yet another way. Many people may never be able to reach kensho unless they have first cultivated a certain amount of joriki, for otherwise they may find themselves too restless, too nervous and uneasy to persevere with their zazen. Moreover, unless fortified by joriki, a single experience of kensho will have no appreciable effect on your life and will fade into a mere memory. For although through the experience of kensho you have apprehended the underlying unity of the cosmos with your Mind’s eye, without joriki you are unable to act with the total force of your being on what your inner vision has revealed to you. Likewise there is an interconnection between kensho and the third of these aims, mujodo no taigen. Kensho when manifested in all your actions is mujodo no taigen. With perfect enlightenment (anuttara samyak-sambodhi) we apprehend that our conception of the world as dual and antithetical is false, and upon this realization the world of Oneness, of true harmony and peace, is revealed. The Rinzai sect tends to make satori-awakening the final aim of sitting and skims over joriki and mujodo no taigen. Thus the need for continued practice after enlightenment is minimized, and koan study since it is unsupported by zazen and scarcely related to daily life becomes essentially an intellectual game instead of a means by which to amplify and strengthen enlightenment. On the other hand, while the practice advocated in the official quarters of the Soto sect today stresses mujodo no taigen, in effect amounts to little more than the accumulation of joriki, which, as I pointed out earlier, “leaks” or recedes and ultimately disappear unless zazen is carried on regularly. The contention of the Soto sect nowadays that kensho is unnecessary and that one need do no more than carry on daily activities with the Mind of the Buddha is specious for without kensho you can never really know what this Buddha mind is. These imbalances in both sects8 in recent times have, unfortunately, impaired the quality of Zen teaching. This concludes the discussion of the three aims of zazen. 6 Individual Instruction Continue to practice the exercise I gave you last time, namely, concentrating on your incoming and outgoing breaths and endeavoring to experience each breath clearly. This lecture will deal with dokusan ?? (individual instruction which is the time allotted for bringing all problems pertaining the practice before the roshi in private. This tradition of individual teaching started with the honored Shakyamuni himself and has continued unbroken until today. We know this because one of the great masters of Tendai, Chisha-daishi, in his systematizatioin of all the sutras under Eight Teachings and Five Periods, lists the Secret Teaching, which corresponds to dokusan. Without this individual guidance we cannot say that our practice of zazen is authentic. Unfortunately, since the Meiji period, nearly a hundred years ago, dokusan has virtually died out in the Soto sect, continuing only in the Rinzai tradition. If we compare zazen to a journey on which some start rapidly and then slow down, others begin slowly and later accelerate their pace, some find one phase of the journey more hazardous than another, and all carry different burdens of luggage (that is, preconceived ideas), we can begin to understand why individual guidance in dokusan cannot be dispensed with. It may be asked why it is necessary to keep dokusan secret. Since nothing immoral is involved, why can it not be open and in public? First of all, since we are ordinary people, with ego, in the presence of others we are inclined to make ourselves out to be better than we are. We cannot bare our souls and stand naked, as it were. Likewise we hesitate to speak the whole truth for fear of being laughed at. Or if the roshi scolds us, using harsh language, we become more concerned with the effect of this on others than in listening to him open-mindedly. There is yet another reason for privacy in dokusan. After your first experience of kensho you move from koan to koan as your understanding deepens, and were others to be present when you demonstrated these koans, listening to the master’s replies, they might think, “Oh, so that’s the answer!” without fully understanding the import of the koan. Obviously this would hurt their practice, for instead of coming to their own realization and presenting it to the master, they would remember that this was an acceptable answer but that was not, and 8For a poetic description of the differences between Rinzai and Soto, the following from an unpublished manuscript of the late Nyogen Senzaki may be of interest: “Among Zen students it is said that ‘Rinzai’s teaching is like the frost of the late autumn, making one shiver, while the teaching of Soto is like the spring breeze which caresses the flower helping it to bloom.’ There is another saying: ‘Rinzai’s teaching is like a brave general who moves a regiment without delay, while the Soto teaching is like a farmer taking care of a rice field, one stalk after another, patiently.’” thus, to their own detriment, their koan practice would degenerate to mere intellection. For these reasons you should remain silent when asked about a koan which the questioner has not yet passed. Irresponsible talk may lead to other harmful consequences. Rumors may spread that one is savagely beaten in dokusan, for example, giving Zen an undeservedly bad name. Therefore do not discuss your koans with anybody, not even your best friends or members of your family. It is precisely this violation of the secrecy which formerly surrounded the koan system that has brought about a steady deterioration in Rinzai teaching. What I am about to say does not apply to lay people, who are generally serious in their practice. But in the monasteries, where there are monks who resent the entire training, being there in the first place only to serve the period required to inherit the resident priesthood of a temple, this problem becomes serious. In monasteries where the discipline is faulty an older monk will often say to a younger one: “What koan are you working on?” When told the older one will say: “Do you understand it?” “No.” “All right, I will tell you the answer,” the older monk says, “and you buy me some cake in return.” An accomplished teacher can tell whether the answer is authentic or not, but if for some reason he himself becomes lukewarm, he may accept an answer which is not the monk’s own. This practice may not be particularly harmful if such a monk spends only two or three years at a monastery before becoming the resident priest of a temple, as his duties there will not require his evaluating another’s kensho. But it can happen that there is no opening when he completes this minimal training, so that he may remain at the monastery for perhaps eight or ten years, going through the entire koan system with answers which are not his own. Finally, as is the custom in the Rinzai sect when one completes all the koans, one receives the title of teacher. In this way one with no real understanding becomes “qualified” to guide others. T
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- [René Guénon](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/oldmeadow-rene-guenon) - René Guénon Harry Oldmeadow Published in the 1995 edition of René Guénon’s Reign of Quantity as a 30pp introductory essay, Sophia Perennis et Universalis, New York. ...there are those whose vocation it is to provide the keys with which the treasury of wisdom of other traditions can be unlocked, revealing to those who are destined to receive this wisdom the essential unity and universality and at the same the formal diversity of tradition and revelation. Seyyed Hossein Nasr1 Ananda Coomaraswamy: ...the least important thing about Guénon is his personality or biography... The fact is he has the invisibility that is proper to the complete philosopher: our teleology can only be fulfilled when we really become no one.2 The American traditionalist, Whitall Perry, who knew Guénon personally, speaks of his "outer anonymity" and of this "austere yet benevolent figure... ungraspable and remote".3 There is indeed something elusive and enigmatic about René Guénon the man. He left a formidable legacy of writings which testify to his achievements as a metaphysician but his personal life remains shrouded in obscurity. In France he has always commanded a small but dedicated following and academic interest in Guénon shows some sign of burgeoning there. Elsewhere he remains a shadowy figure whose name occasionally crops up in reference to French occultism or his pioneering study (in the West) of Advaita Vedanta. The growing interest in Guénon has generated no small amount of controversy amongst French scholars about some aspects of his life, especially in the years from 1906 to 1912.4 Here we shall confine ourselves to a biographical sketch which leaves aside some of these unresolved questions and includes only such material for which there appears to be persuasive evidence and reputable authority.5 * York. It is also comprises a chapter in Traditionalism: religion in the light of the perennial philosophy, Sri Lanka This essay appeared in the 1995 edition of Guénon's The Reign of Quantity, Sophia Perrenis et Universalis, New Institute of Traditional Studies, Colombo, 2000. Abbreviations used in footnotes: 6 7 8 France's phrase is cited in M. Eliade: "The Occult and the Modern World" in Occultism, Witchcraft and Cultural Fashions Uni of Chicago, 1976; p51. M. Eliade: op.cit.; p53. W. Perry: "The Revival of Interest in Tradition" in RF UT pp8-9. 2 Furthermore, we shall only be interested in those aspects of his life which might shed light on his work. René Guénon was born in Blois in 1886. He grew up in a strict Catholic environment and was schooled by Jesuits. As a young man he moved to Paris to take up studies in mathematics at the Collège Rollin. Maths remained a lifelong interest and a few years before his death he published a short mathematical treatise, Les principes du calcul infinitésimal. However, his energies were soon diverted from academic studies and in 1905 he abandoned his preparation for Grandes Écoles. For the next seven years, seized by what Anatole France called "the vertigo of the invisible", Guénon submerged himself in fin-de-siècle French occultism.6 He became a leading member in several secret societies - theosophical, spiritualistic, masonic and "gnostic". Guénon's involvement in the occultist underground seems to have been somewhat indiscriminate. From the vantage-point of his later work it was a murky and bizarre period in his life, one of which he apparently did not care to be reminded. Nevertheless, Guénon learned a good deal in this period and indeed, he was eventually to become one of the most unsparing critics of these occultists movements. In the context of the present study it is not necessary to unravel all the details of Guénon's participation in various secret societies. However, it is worth pausing to reflect on the significance of this period in his life. In its sociological dimension occultism provided, as doubtless it still does, a framework for the repudiation of the bourgeois ideologies and institutions of the day. Most of the occult groups turned to the archaic past in search of authentic spiritual values against which modern civilisation was measured and found wanting. As Mircea Eliade has observed, ...involvement with the occult represented for the French literary and artistic avant-garde one of the most efficient criticisms and rejections of the religious and cultural values of the West - efficient because it was considered to be based on historical facts.7 Although Guénon was to disown the philosophical and historical assumptions on which such movements were built and to contrast their "counterfeit spirituality" with what he came to see as genuine expressions of esotericism, as a traditionalist he remained steadfastly opposed to contemporary European civilisation. Some of the occult movements stimulated a study of ancient esoteric traditions in Egypt, Persia, India and China, and directed attention towards the sacred writings of the East. Precisely how Guénon came to a serious study of Taoism, Hinduism and Islam remains unclear but it seems likely that it was through his involvement in one of the occultist groups. Whitall Perry has suggested that the "catalyzing element" was Guénon's contact in Paris with some Indians of the Advaita school.8 The facts of the matter are far from clear and there is insufficient evidence to make speculation fruitful. Guénon always kept a cloak of secrecy tightly wrapped around his own spiritual life. In June 1909, Guénon founded the occultist journal La Gnose, subtitled 'organe de l'Eglise gnostique universelle'. It lasted a little over two years and carried most of his writings from this period which, although they exhibit some rationalistic and anti-religious bias, demonstrate a familiarity with Vedanta. It can be said that Guénon's life certainly entered a new phase in 1912, one marked by his marriage to a devout Catholic. He emerged from the rather subterranean world of the occultists and now moved freely in an intensely Catholic milieu, leading a busy social and 9 Guénon's view of Christianity has been discussed in P.L. Reynolds René Guénon: His Life and Work (unpublished) pp9ff. See also B. Kelly: "Notes on the Light of the Eastern Religions" in RH pp160-161. 10 Quoted in J.P. Laurant: "Le problème..." p57. (Trans: "These old letters I have from him breathe a perfect Catholic spirit.") 11 ibid.; pp57-59. See RG CMW pp95-96. 12 J.P. Laurant: "Le problème..." p60. 13 W. Perry: "Coomaraswamy" p160. 3 intellectual life. He was influenced by several prominent Catholic intellectuals of the day, among then Jacques Maritain, Fathers Peilleaube and Sertillanges, and one M. Milhaud who conducted classes at the Sorbonne on the philosophy of science. The years 1912 to 1930 were the most public of Guénon's life. He attended lectures at the Sorbonne, wrote and published widely, gave public lectures himself and maintained many social and intellectual contacts. He published his first books in the 1920s and soon became well known for his work on philosophical and metaphysical subjects. Whatever Guénon's personal commitments may have been during this period his thought had clearly undergone a major shift away from occultism towards an interest in sapiential traditions within the framework of the great religions. One of the foci of interest for Guénon was the possibility of a Christian esotericism within the Catholic tradition. (He always remained somewhat ignorant of the esoteric dimensions of Eastern Orthodoxy.9) Olivier de Fremond, a friend of those years, wrote of Guénon's letters from this period, "Les vieilles lettres que j'ai de lui respirent un parfait esprit catholique."10 Guénon envisaged, in some of his work in this period, a regenerated Catholicism, enriched and invigorated by a recovery of her esoteric traditions and "repaired" through a prise de conscience11. He contributed regularly to the Catholic journal Regnabit, the Sacré-Coeur review founded and edited by P. Anizan. These articles reveal the re-orientation of Guénon's thinking in which "tradition" now becomes the controlling theme. Some of these periodical writings found their way into his later books. The years 1927 to 1930 mark another transition in Guénon's life, culminating in his move to Cairo in 1930 and his open commitment to Islam. A conflict between Anizan (whom Guénon supported) and the Archbishop of Rheims, and adverse Catholic criticism of his book Le roi du monde (1927) compounded a growing disillusionment with the Church and hardened Guénon's suspicion that it had surrendered to the "temporal and material". In January 1928 Guénon's wife died rather abruptly. Following a series of fortuitous circumstances Guénon left on a three month visit to Cairo.12 He was to remain there until his death in 1951. In Cairo Guénon was initiated into the Sufic order of Shadilites and invested with the name Abdel Wahed Yahya. He married again and lived a modest and retiring existence. ...such was his anonymity that an admirer of his writings was dumbfounded to discover that the venerable next door neighbour whom she had known for years as Sheikh Abdel Wahed Yahya was in reality René Guénon.13 A good deal of Guénon's energies were directed in the 1930s to a massive correspondence he carried on with his readers in Europe, often people in search of some kind of initiation, others simply pressing inquiries about subjects dealt with in Guénon's books and articles. Most of Guénon's published work after his move to Cairo appeared in Études Traditionnelles (until 1937 Le Voile d'Isis), a formerly theosophical journal which under Guénon's influence was transformed into the principal European forum for traditionalist thought. It was only the war which provided Guénon with enough respite from his correspondence to devote himself to the writing of some of his major works including The Reign of Quantity (1945). In his later years Guénon was much preoccupied with questions concerning initiation into authentic esoteric traditions. He published at least twenty-five articles in Études Traditionnelles dealing with this subject from many different angles. Although he had found 4 his own resting-place within the fold of Islam, Guénon remained interested in the possibility of genuine initiatic channels surviving within Christianity. He also never entirely relinquished his interest in Freemasonry and returned to this subject in some of his last writings. It was only shortly before his death that he concluded there was no effective hope of an esoteric regeneration within either masonry or Catholicism. The relationship between Guénon's life and his work has engaged the attention of several scholars. Jean-Pierre Laurant has suggested that his intellectual, spiritual and ritual life only achieved a harmonious resolution after his move to Cairo and within the protective embrace of Islam.14 P.L. Reynolds has charted the influence of his French and Catholic background on his work.15 Others, especially those committed to traditionalism themselves, have argued that Guénon's whole adult life represents a witness to an unchanging vision of the truth and that his participation in occultism was part of this function. Such commentators suggest that his thought does not "evolve" but only shifts ground as Guénon responds to changing circumstances. Thus Michel Valsan, a collaborator on Études Traditionnelles, writes: Il convient de préciser en l'occurrence que le privilège spécial qu'a cette oeuvre de jouer le rôle de critère de vérité, de régularité et de plénitude traditionnelle devant la civilisation occidentale dérive du caractère sacré et non-inviduel qu'a revêtu la fonction de René Guénon. L'homme qui devait accomplir cette fonction fut certainement préparé de loin et non pas improvisé. Les matrices de la Sagesse avaient prédisposé et formé son entité selon une économie précise, et sa carrière s'accomplit dans le temps par une corrélation constante entre ses possibilités et les conditions cycliques extérieures.16 Each of these kinds of claims carries some legitimacy. The shaping influence of his own background and period is obvious enough in his work. Nor is there any point in denying that, looked at as a whole, Guénon's thought does undergo a radical change between about 1910 and 1914. While much of his early work remains interesting and often illuminating it cannot be said to represent a strictly traditionalist view such as we find in his later works. Given Guénon's education and background he could not have come to a traditionalist understanding without passing through a period in which he would learn to shed some modernistic (which is to say, anti-traditional) views and assumptions. To borrow one of his own favourite images, his early work is not without fissures which left it vulnerable to some of the more fanciful theories of the occultists. However, if we leave aside a few jejune writings from these early years, Guénon's work does exhibit an arresting consistency, an apparently intuitive grasp of metaphysical and cosmological principles and an authoritative explication of the sophia perennis. One commentator has observed that after the occultist period Guénon only revised his position on two substantial issues: the authenticity of Buddhism as an integral tradition and the initiatic possibilities of freemasonry.17 If we add to this his changing attitude to the revival of Christian esotericism we have indeed catalogued all the radical revisions in Guénon's work in almost forty years. We shall return to this aspect of Guénon's achievement in discussing his own perception of the role he had to play. 14 J.P. Laurant: op.cit.; pp66-69. 15 P.L. Reynolds: op.cit.; passim. These influences, Reynolds argues, account for various imbalances and inadvertencies in Guénon's work. 16 M. Valsan in the Special Issue of Études Traditionnelles: Le Sort de l'Occident, Nov 1951. (Trans: It is useful to clarify in the present case that the special privilege of truth which belongs to this work of playing the role of truth, regularity and traditional plenitude in the face of Western civilisation derives from the sacred and non-individual character that clothed the function of René Guénon. The man who had to accomplish this function would certainly have been prepared from long ago rather than improvising [his role]. The matrices of Wisdom had predisposed and formed his being according to a precise economy, and his career fulfilled itself in time by a constant correlation between his possibilities and the exterior cyclic conditions [of the age].) 17 M. Bastriocchi: "The Last Pillars of Wisdom" in SS ACRR p359, fn8. Seyyed Hossein Nasr writes of the lack of "development" in Guénon's work that it was "as if he had written them all [his books] at one sitting and then published them over the next few decades." SHN K&S p101. 5 Guénon was a prolific writer. He published seventeen books during his lifetime, and at least eight posthumous collections and compilations have since appeared. Here we shall take only an overview of his work. The oeuvre exhibits certain recurrent motifs and preoccupations and is, in a sense, all of a piece. Guénon's understanding of tradition is the key to his work. As early as 1909 we find Guénon writing of "...the Primordial Tradition which, in reality, is the same everywhere, regardless of the different shapes it takes in order to be fit for every race and every historical period."18 As the English traditionalist, Gai Eaton, has observed, Guénon believes that there exists a Universal Tradition, revealed to humanity at the beginning of the present cycle of time, but partially lost... his primary concern is less with the detailed forms of this Tradition and the history of its decline than with its kernel, the pure and changeless knowledge which is still accessible to man through the channels provided by traditional doctrine...19 The existence of a Primordial Tradition embodying a set of immutable metaphysical and cosmological principles from which derive a succession of traditions each expressing these principles in forms determined by a given Revelation and by the exigencies of the particular situation, is axiomatic in Guénon's work.20 It is a first principle which admits of no argument; nor does it require any kind of "proof" or "demonstration", historical or otherwise. Guénon's work, from his earliest writings in 1909 onwards, can be seen as an attempt to give a new expression and application to the timeless principles which inform all traditional doctrines. In his writings he ranges over a vast terrain - Vedanta, the Chinese tradition, Christianity, Sufism, folklore and mythology from all over the world, the secret traditions of gnosticism, alchemy, the Kabbalah, and so on, always intent on excavating their underlying principles and showing them to be formal manifestations of the one Primordial Tradition. Certain key themes run through all of his writings and one meets again and again with such notions as these: the concept of metaphysics transcending all other doctrinal orders; the identification of metaphysics and the "formalisation", so to speak, of gnosis (or jñana if one prefers); the distinction between the exoteric and esoteric domains; the hierarchic superiority and infallibility of intellective knowledge; the contrast of the modern Occident with the traditional Orient; the spiritual bankruptcy of modern European civilisation; a cyclical view of Time, based largely on the Hindu doctrine of cosmic cycles; a contra-evolutionary view of history. Many of these key ideas will be explored in greater detail later in this study, especially as they have found expression in the work of Frithjof Schuon. Here we shall confine ourselves to a few general remarks and to a brief look at the Guénonian corpus. Guénon gathered together doctrines and principles from diverse times and places but emphasized that the enterprise was a synthetic one which envisaged formally divergent elements in their principial unity rather than a syncretic one which press-ganged incongruous forms into an artificial unity. This distinction is a crucial one not only in Guénon's work but in traditionalism as a whole.21 Guénon repeatedly turned to oriental wisdoms, believing that it was only in the East that various sapiential traditions remained more or less intact. It is important not to confuse this Eastward-looking stance with the kind of sentimental exoticism nowadays so much in vogue. As Coomaraswamy noted, 18 R. Guénon: "La Demiurge" La Gnose 1909; per M. Bastriocchi: op.cit.; p351. 19 G. Eaton The Richest Vein Faber & Faber, London, 1949; pp188-189. 20 The relationship between the Primordial Tradition and the various traditions needs clarification in that while each tradition in fact derives its overall form and principal characteristics from a particular Revelation, it nevertheless carries over (in many of its aspects) certain essential features of the tradition which precedes it. 21 See R. Guénon The Symbolism of the Cross Luzac, London, 1958; pp. x-xi and RG CMW p9 & pp108ff. 6 If Guénon wants the West to turn to Eastern metaphysics, it is not because they are Eastern but because this is metaphysics. If "Eastern" metaphysics differed from a "Western" metaphysics - one or the other would not be metaphysics.22 One of Guénon's translators made the same point in suggesting that if Guénon turns so often to the East it is because the West is in the position of the foolish virgins who, through the wandering of their attention in other directions, had allowed their lamps to go out; in order to rekindle the sacred fire, which in its essence is always the same wherever it may be burning, they must have recourse to the lamps still kept alight.23 The contrast between the riches of traditional civilisations and the spiritual impoverishment of modern Europe sounds like a refrain through Guénon's writings. In all his work Guénon's mission was twofold: to reveal the metaphysical roots of the "crisis of the modern world" and to explain the ideas behind the authentic and esoteric teachings that still remained alive... in the East.24 By way of an expedient we can divide Guénon's writings into five categories, each corresponding roughly with a particular period in his life: the occultist periodical writings of the pre-1912 period; the reaction against and critique of occultism, especially spiritualism and theosophy; writings on Oriental metaphysics; on aspects of the European tradition and on initiation; and, fifthly, the critique of modern civilisation. This is a rather arbitrary classification but it does help to identify some of the focal points in Guénon's work. Guénon's earliest writings appeared, as we have seen, in the organs of French occultism. In the light of his later work some of this periodical literature must be considered somewhat ephemeral. Nonetheless the seeds of most of Guénon's work can be found in articles from this period. The most significant, perhaps, were five essays which appeared in La Gnose between September 1911 and February 1912, under the title "La constitution de l'être humain et son évolution selon le Védânta"; these became the opening chapters of one of his most influential studies, Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta, not published until 1925. Other writings from this period on such subjects as mathematics and the science of numbers, prayer and incantation, and initiation, all presage later work. The shift in Guénon's intellectual orientation away from occultism is difficult to pinpoint precisely. However, as early as 1909 we find him attacking what he saw as the misconceptions and confusions abroad in the spiritualist movements.25 Whilst his misgivings about many of the occultist groups were growing in the 1909-1912 period it was not until the publication of two of his earliest books that he mounted a full-scale critique: Le théosophisme, histoire d'une pseudo religion (1921) and L'erreur spirite (1923). The titles are suggestive: these were lacerating attacks not only on theosophy and spiritualism but also on the "gnostic" groups founded by a certain Dr. Encausse (who achieved some celebrity as "Papus"), and on movements such as Rosicrucianism. Guénon's exposé was not merely a polemical fusillade but a meticulously detailed analysis. Of the groups in which Guénon himself had been involved only the Masons escaped relatively unscathed. As Eliade has noted: The most erudite and devastating critique of all these so-called occult groups was presented not by a rationalist outside observer, but by an author from the inner circle, duly initiated into some of their secret orders and well acquainted with their occult 22 Coomaraswamy in "Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge", AKC BL pp72-73. 23 Quoted in Gai Eaton op.cit.; p199. 24 Jacob Needleman in his "Foreword" to JN SG pp11-12. 25 R. Guénon: "La Gnose et les Ecoles Spiritualistes", LA GNOSE December, 1909. See also P. Charconac: "La vie simple de René Guénon" in the Special Issue of ÉTUDES TRADITIONNELLES, Nov. 1951; p321 and P.L. Reynolds: op.cit.; p3. 7 doctrines; furthermore, that critique was directed, not from a sceptical or positivistic perspective, but from what he called "traditional esotericism". This learned and intransigent critic was René Guénon.26 The details of this demolition job need not concern us here but it is worth noting the main lines of Guénon's attack. The most fundamental part of Guénon's indictment was that such movements, far from preserving traditional esotericisms, were made up of a syncretic mish- mash of distorted and heterogeneous elements forced into a false unity, devoid of any authentic metaphysical framework. Thus they were vulnerable to the scientistic ideologies of the day and inevitably fell prey to the intellectual confusions rampant in Europe. One of the most characteristic confusions of such groups, to cite but one example, was the mistaking of the psychic for the spiritual. Occultism as a whole he now saw as one of the "signs of the times", a symptom of the spiritual malaise in modern civilisation. Guénon took up some of these charges again in later works, especially The Reign of Quantity. Guénon's interest in Eastern metaphysical traditions had been awakened some time around 1909 and some of his early articles in La Gnose are devoted to Vedantic metaphysics. His first book, Introduction générale à l'étude des doctrines hindoues (1921) marked Guénon as a commentator of rare authority. It also served notice of Guénon's role as a redoubtable critic of contemporary civilisation. Of this book Seyyed Hossein Nasr has written, It was like a sudden burst of lightning, an abrupt intrusion into the modern world of a body of knowledge and a perspective utterly alien to the prevalent climate and world view and completely opposed to all that characterizes the modern mentality.27 However, Guénon's axial work on Vedanta was published in 1925, L'homme et son devenir selon le Védânta. Other significant works in the field of oriental traditions include La métaphysique orientale, delivered as a lecture at the Sorbonne in 1925 but not published until 1939, La Grande Triade, based on Taoist doctrine, and many articles on such subjects as Hindu mythology, Taoism and Confucianism, and doctrines concerning reincarnation. Interestingly, Guénon remained more or less ignorant of the Buddhist tradition for many years, regarding it as no more than a "heterodox development" within Hinduism and without integrity as a formal religious tradition. It was only through the intervention of Marco Pallis, one of his translators, and Ananda Coomaraswamy, that Guénon revised his attitude to Buddhism.28 During the 1920s when Guénon was moving in the coteries of French Catholicism he turned his attention to some aspects of Europe's spiritual heritage. As well as numerous articles on such subjects as the Druids, the Grail, Christian symbolism and folkloric motifs, Guénon produced several major works in this field, including L'esotérisme de Dante (1925), St Bernard (1929), and Le symbolisme de la croix (1931). Another work, Autorité spirituelle et pouvoir temporel (1929) was occasioned by certain contemporary controversies. A collection of Guénon's writings on symbolism has recently appeared in English translation for the first time under the title Fundamental Symbols of Sacred Science (1995). The quintessential Guénon is to be found in two works which tied together some of his central themes: La crise du monde moderne (1927) and his masterpiece, Le règne de la quantité et les signes des temps (1945). The themes of these two books had been rehearsed in an earlier work, Orient et Occident (1924). Each of these books mounted an increasingly elaborate and 26 M. Eliade: op.cit.; p51. 27 SHN K&S p101 28 This change in Guénon's attitude has been documented and discussed by several commentators. See Marco Pallis: Letter to the Editor, SCR VII, iv; p73; K.E. Steffens: Letter to the Editor, SCR XI, ii, 1977; pp116-117; J.M. Murray: Letter to the Editor, SCR XI, ii, 1977; pp191-192; W. Perry: "The Man and the Witness" in SS ACRR p5 ;and M. Pallis: "A Fateful Meeting of Minds: A.K. Coomaraswamy and René Guénon", SCR XII, iii & iv, 1978; pp180-181. 8 merciless attack on the foundations of the contemporary European worldview. We shall turn to the last of these works in some detail. The Reign of Quantity is a magisterial summation of Guénon's work. It is, characteristically, a difficult work. He was quite unconcerned with reaching a wide audience and addressed the book to those few capable of understanding it "without any concern for the inevitable incomprehension of the others".29 He set out to challenge nearly all of the intellectual assumptions current in Europe at the time. The book, he writes, is directed to ...the understanding of some of the darkest enigmas of the modern world, enigmas which the world itself denies because it is incapable of perceiving them although it carries them within itself, and because this denial is an indispensable condition for the maintenance of the special mentality whereby it exists.30 At first sight the book ranges over a bewildering variety of subjects: the nature of time, space and matter as conceived in traditional and modern science; the philosophical foundations of such typically modern modes of thought as rationalism, materialism and empiricism; the significance of ancient crafts such as metallurgy; the nature of shamanism and sorcery; the "illusion of statistics"; the "misdeeds of psychoanalysis"; the "pseudo-initiatic" pretensions of spiritualism, theosophy and other "counterfeit" forms of spirituality; tradition and anti- tradition; the unfolding of cosmic and terrestrial cycles. Some study of the book reveals that these apparently disparate strands have been woven into a work of subtle design and dense texture. The Reign of Quantity is a brilliantly sustained and excoriating attack on modern civilisation. It has less polemical heat and moral indignation than some of his earlier works but is none the less effective for that. The book is a controlled and dispassionate but devastating razing of the assumptions and values of modern science. At the same time it is an affirmation of the metaphysical and cosmological principles given expression in traditional cultures and religions. Guénon unfolds a startling thesis, in the light of the doctrine of cosmic cycles, about the present terrestrial situation. His vision is rooted in the Hindu conception of the Kali-Yuga but is not restricted to the purely Indian expression of this doctrine. There is a dark apocalyptic strain in the book which some readers are tempted to dismiss as the rantings of another doom- sayer. For Guénon the dire circumstances in which the modern world finds itself are largely to be explained through an elucidation of the cyclic doctrine whereby humankind is seen to be degenerating into an increasingly solidified and materialised state, more and more impervious to spiritual influences. Inversely, the world becomes increasingly susceptible to infernal forces of various kinds.31 The forced convergence of different civilisations is the spatial correlate of the temporal unfolding of the present terrestrial cycle, moving towards an inexorable cataclysm. Guénon took the inevitable end of the world absolutely seriously.32 By the time of writing this book he believed there were no possible "remedies", no escape from the apocalypse. To some readers this looks like a "despairing pessimism" to which Guénon might have retorted that neither optimism nor pessimism had anything to do with the case. Moreover, what from one angle might be seen as a "worldly pessimism", appears from another as a "celestial optimism" since the end of a cycle marks its completion and the restoration of a true order. 29 RG RQ p11. 30 ibid. 31 Herein, from the traditionalist viewpoint, lies the explanation for the modern excrescence of what Dr. Christopher Evans has called "cults of unreason" - scientology, UFO-ism, Lobsang Rampa-ism and so on. See C. Evans Cults of Unreason Harrap, London, 1973 and J. Webb: op.cit. 32 See J.P. Laurant: op.cit.; p58. 9 Closely related to the doctrine of cycles is Guénon's profoundly challenging thesis about the nature of time, space and matter, one based on traditional cosmologies. Contrary to the claims of modern science, says Guénon, time and space do not constitute a kind of uniform continuum in the matrix of which events and material phenomena manifest themselves. Rather, time-and-space is a field of qualitative determinations and differences. In other words, the nature of time and space is not a constant, fixed datum but is subject to both quantitative and qualitative change. Any exclusively quantitative and materialistic science such as now tyrannises the European mind cannot accommodate this principle. It strives rather to reduce qualitatively determined phenomena to the barren and mechanistic formulae of a profane and materialistic science. (One might add that some of the "discoveries" of physicists since Guénon's time have done nothing to disprove his thesis and indeed, to some minds, give it more credibility. Guénon himself would have argued that metaphysical and cosmological principles such as he was applying could in no way be affected by empirical considerations.33) Guénon's critique of scientism - the ideology of modern science - is something quite other than just another attack on scientific reductionism, although that surely is part of his case. Nor is it a catalogue of the inadequacies of this or that scientific theory. Rather, it is a radical and disturbing challenge to almost every postulate of modern European science. The critique hinges on the contrast between sacred, traditional sciences on the one hand, and a profane, materialistic science on the other. In an earlier work Guénon had elaborated the basis of this contrast in uncompromising terms: Never until the present epoch had the study of the sensible world been regarded as self- sufficient; never would the science of this ephemeral and changing multiplicity have been judged truly worthy of the name of knowledge... According to the ancient conception... a science was less esteemed for itself than for the degree in which it expressed after its own fashion... a reflection of the higher immutable truth of which everything of any reality necessarily partakes... all science appeared as an extension of the traditional doctrine itself, as one of its applications, secondary and contingent no doubt... but still a veritable knowledge none the less...34 For Guénon and the other traditionalists, the notion of a self-sufficient, self-validating, autonomous material science is a contradiction, an incongruity, for all sciences must have recourse to higher and immutable principles and truths. Science must be pursued in a metaphysical and cosmological framework which it cannot construct out of itself. In another work Guénon wrote that modern science, in disavowing the principles [of traditional metaphysics and cosmology] and in refusing to re-attach itself to them, robs itself both of the highest guarantee and the surest direction it could have; there is no longer anything valid in it except knowledge of details, and as soon as it seeks to rise one degree higher, it becomes dubious and vacillating.35 These principles, of course, are quite alien to the modern mentality. They are likely to provoke all kinds of quite irrelevant responses about the material inadequacies of traditional 33 For some discussion of the "fissures" in modern science see J. Needleman A Sense of the Cosmos Doubleday, New York, 1975 and T. Roszak Where the Wasteland Ends Doubleday, New York, 1972. For a traditionalist critique which follows on from Guénon see Section 1 of T. Burckhardt Mirror of the Intellect Quinta Essentia, Cambridge, 1987/SUNY, Albany, 1987. On the "new physics" see F. Capra The Tao of Physics Fontana, London, 1976. See also SHN K&S pp114ff. See also Wolfgang Smith Cosmos and Transcendence Sherwood Sugden & Co, La Salle, 1984, and The Quantum Enigma Sherwood Sugden & Co, La Salle, 1995. 34 This passage is quoted in G. Eaton: op.cit.; p196. The source is not given but for a more extended discussion of precisely this contrast see RG CMW Ch. IV, "Sacred and Profane Science"; pp37-50. 35 Quoted in W.T. Chan: "The Unity of East and West" in W.R. Inge et al Radhakrishnan: Comparative Studies in Philosophy Presented in Honour of His Sixtieth Birthday Allen & Unwin, London, 1951; pp107-108. (This passage is from "Orient et Occident"). 10 cosmologies - geocentricism, for example. Later we shall see how the traditionalist vision of both traditional and modern science cannot be so easily brushed aside. The Reign of Quantity also seeks to demonstrate the intimate connections between traditional metaphysics and the arts, crafts and sciences which are found in any traditional culture, and to show how many modern and profane sciences are really a kind of degenerated caricature of traditional sciences.36 Such a demonstration turns largely on Guénon's explanation of the nature of symbolism and of the initiatic character of many traditional sciences. What of the qualities of mind and temperament revealed in Guénon's writings? Marco Pallis wrote of Guénon ...a mind of phenomenal lucidity of a kind one can best describe as "mathematical" in its apparent detachment from anything savouring of aesthetic or even moral considerations; his criteria of what was right and what was inadmissible remained wholly intellectual ones needing no considerations drawn from a different order of reality to reinforce them - their own self-evidence sufficed.37 Another commentator speaks of Guénon's exposition as "so crystalline and geometric, so mathematically abstract and devoid of almost any human element"38 while Gai Eaton notes that "in him the blade of French intellectuality is tempered to a razor-sharp edge".39 Theodore Roszak writes of his "keen, spiritual discrimination"40 while Schuon, referring to the absence of any sentimental or even psychic dimension in Guénon's work, once used the image of "an eye without a body".41 These images of sharpness, of a finely-honed cutting edge, a mathematical precision and incisive penetration all testify to Guénon's clarity of thought in his metaphysical expositions and his pitiless exposure of the "signs of the times". Nonetheless, Guénon's work is by no means easy to assimilate. Gai Eaton, despite his admiration of Guénon, concedes that "It is questionable whether anyone with the normal tastes and intellectual background of our day can approach Guénon's work for the first time without a sense of revulsion."42 Why so? Firstly there is the substance of Guénon's work. It is not easy of access and, at first sight, often strange, startling, baffling. His premises are too radically at odds with conventional wisdom for him to gain any easy following. His critique of European civilisation is so ruthless, so unnerving in its implications that it often provokes a kind of defensive reflex, an emotional and intellectual resistance which makes for a failure to engage with what is actually being said. Without the right kind of predisposition the reader is unlikely to recover from the initial shock. An acceptance of Guénon's general thesis also entails a drastic intellectual and existential adjustment for most readers which very few are willing to make. André Gide typified this kind of response to Guénon's work when he wrote: If only I had known Guénon is my youth!... Now it is too late; the die is cast. My sclerosed mind has as much difficulty conforming to the precepts of that ancestral wisdom as my body has to the so-called "comfortable" position recommended by the 36 See RG RQ p14. 37 M. Pallis: "A Fateful Meeting of Minds" p178. The word "intellectual" in this passage does not mean "mental" but refers to the intellect as understood in medieval scholastcism, the faculty of transcendent realisation. See Chapter 8. 38 W. Perry:"Coomaraswamy" p163. See also W. Perry: "The Revival of Interest in Tradition" p11. 39 G. Eaton: op.cit.; p184. 40 T. Roszak: Unfinished Animal Harper & Row, New York, 1977; p15. 41 Quoted in W. Perry: "Coomaraswamy" p163. For photographs of Guénon see P. Charconac: op.cit.; facing p320; SS ACRR p223; and in TOMORROW accompanying his article "Oriental Metaphysics", Vol XII, i, 1964; pp10, 13, 15; and in RF UT pxv. 42 G. Eaton: op.cit.; p184. 11 Yogis... To tell the truth, I cannot even manage really to desire resorption of the individual into the Eternal Being they seek... I cling desperately to my limits and feel a repugnance for the disappearance of those contours that my whole education made a point of defining... I am and remain on the side of Descartes and of Bacon. None the less, those books of Guénon are remarkable...43 This is very much to the point. Guénon's vision cannot be accepted "a little". One might, of course, disagree over details but his fundamental premises must be either accepted or rejected. There is nothing of the smörgåsbord in Guénon's writings. Then, also, there is Guénon's claim to being a mouthpiece for a metaphysical vision or theoria which is beyond the reach of "proof", even of debate. Take for instance, the following: Those who are qualified to speak in the name of a traditional doctrine are not required to enter into discussion with the "profane" or to engage in polemics: it is for them simply to expound the doctrine such as it is, for the sake of those capable of understanding it, and at the same time to denounce error wherever it arises... their function is not to engage in strife and in doing so to compromise the doctrine, but to pronounce the judgement which they have the right to pronounce if they are in effective possession of the principles which should inspire them infallibly.44 Such a passage is likely, to say the least, to stick in the craw of many contemporary scholars for reasons obvious enough. For Guénon a genuine understanding of metaphysical principles represented a "permanent and changeless certitude" which left no room for debate: one either understood these principles or one did not. Guénon was not bent on "proving" anything whatsoever, only on making traditional doctrines more intelligible. Hand in hand with this perception of his role went a tone of implacable certitude, all too easily seen as a kind of intellectual arrogance. Roszak, for example, speaks of "a mind whose very precision led to an aristocratic intolerance and an elitism that risked sterility"45. Roger Lipsey refers to Guénon's "formidably intolerant"46 attitude to the modern West while Pallis writes of his "habitually hectoring tone...adopted in regard to people whose views he disapproved of".47 Bernard Kelly refers to the "withering, intransigent, unbending" tone of Guénon's writings.48 Jacques Lacarriere has regretted Guénon's "aristocratism, his exclusive attachment to esoterism, his arbitrary rejection - and at times indeed, his faulty knowledge - of contemporary philosophies, plus his ferocious intellectualism".49 There is in Guénon's work an adamantine quality, an austerity and inflexibility, and a combative tone as well as his "icy brilliance".50 He was not one to coax, cajole or seduce his readers. He wrote as a man convinced he was in possession of timeless truths and he will brook no compromises. There is no concession to alternative points of view, no sense of a dialogue with his readers, no hospitality to any ideas at odds with those he is expressing. Something of Guénon's unyielding posture is evinced in the following passage (and it needs be remembered that he is writing in the 1920s): 43 A. Gide The Journals of André Gide Vol IV, 1939-1949; Secker & Warburg, London, 1951, tr. J. O'Brien; entry for October, 1943; p226. 44 RG CMW p65. 45 T. Roszak: op.cit.; p15. 46 R. Lipsey CLW p273. 47 M. Pallis: Letter to the Editor, SCR I, i, 1967; pp47-48 48 B. Kelly: "Notes on the Light of Eastern Religions" in RH p160. 49 J. Lacarriere The Gnostics Peter Owen, London, 1977; p126. 50 G. Eaton: op.cit.; p183. 12 ...hitherto, so far as we are aware, no one else beside ourselves has consistently expounded authentic Oriental ideas in the West; and we have done so... without the slightest wish to propagandize or to popularize, and exclusively for the benefit of those who are able to understand the doctrines just as they stand, and not after they have been denatured on the plea of making them more readily acceptable...51 In an unusually personal vein he reprimanded a critic who had suggested that Guénon had "passed" from Hinduism to Islam: We have never "passed" from one thing to another, as all our writings abundantly prove; and we have no need to "seek the truth" since we know (and we must insist upon this word) that it exists equally in all traditions...52 Doubtless, for many contemporaries such claims smack of extravagant confidence. However, the crucial point is this: to be offended by Guénon's "arrogance" and to invalidate his message are two quite different matters. It is to the latter purpose that Guénon's would-be critics ought to address themselves. One should also perhaps add that in these times of a full-scale relativism any claim to certitude is likely to be dismissed, without any further consideration, as "fanaticism" or some such. Looked at from another angle Guénon's militant posture is nothing other than an expression of his fierce commitment to the truth and it is precisely his refusal to compromise first principles which gives his work its power and integrity.53 Another factor helps to explain Guénon's comparative obscurity in the West: his methodology and his attitude to scholarship. We have already seen how, for Guénon, metaphysical principles were self-evident and self-authenticating. This poses a problem for the scholarly mind. However, the problem runs deeper than this. If it were simply a matter of Guénon working from the basis of certain clearly-stated premises there would be no more reason to reject his work than that of many a philosopher or theologian. No, the fact is that Guénon was, in Whitall Perry's words, "somewhat slipshod in scholarship": his certitude about principles lent a false sense of security on the factual level, where a little research would have sufficed to protect him from the barbs of orientalists who, if incognizant of metaphysical and spiritual truths, had at least done their homework.54 Guénon was never primarily a scholar. Father Sylvain Lévi, to whom Guénon submitted a draft of Introduction générale as a possible doctoral thesis, recommended its rejection on the grounds that Il entend exclure tous les éléments qui ne correspondent pas à sa conception...tout est dans le Vedanta...il fait bon marché de l'histoire et de la critique historique...il est tout prêt à croire á une transmission mystique d'une vérité première apparue au génie humain dès les premiers âges du monde...55 This is not unjust. However, while Guénon can reasonably be reproached with a failure to "do his homework" on the empirical and historical level, we must remember that he was a metaphysician concerned with first principles. If his application of these principles to contingent phenomena sometimes left room for a more scrupulous scholarship then this is 51 RG CMW p103. 52 Quoted in G. Eaton: op.cit.; p185. 53 See I.R. Tucker: Letter to the Editor, SCR I, iii, 1967; pp141-144. (It was precisely Guénon's refusal to make concessions which Coomaraswamy much admired. See Letter to Paul Furfey, undated, AKC SL p158.) 54 W. Perry: "Coomaraswamy" p160 55 Quoted in J.P. Laurant: op.cit.; p43. (Translation: He intentionally excludes all the elements which do not correspond to his conception... all is in the Vedanta... he lightly dismisses history and historical criticism... he is entirely ready to believe in a mystical transmission of a primordial truth which appeared to humanity in the earliest ages of the world.) 13 indeed regrettable but it leaves the principles themselves quite unaffected.56 This is sometimes forgotten by those who wish to force Guénon into the mould of the historian, the sociologist, the anthropologist or the comparative religionist. Guénon was quite out of sympathy with the prevailing ideals of academic scholarship. Nothing could have been further removed from the spirit of his work than the notion of scholarship for its own sake. "Passion for research", he said, "taken as an end in itself is mental restlessness without end and without issue".57 As Roger Lipsey remarked, Guénon kept his distance from the academic intelligentsia: "he mistrusted the academic mind and received abundant mistrust in return".58 All of these factors conspired to limit Guénon's appeal. However, while his influence remains fairly minimal in the Western academic community at large, he is the seminal influence in the development of traditionalism. Along with Coomaraswamy and Schuon he forms what one commentator has called "the great triumvirate" of the traditionalist school.59 By way of concluding this introduction to Guénon we shall briefly consider his own perception of his role and the way in which he is seen by other traditionalists. For those who accept Guénon's premises his work is a voice crying in the European wilderness. However, as both Schuon and Perry have stressed, Guénon's function cannot strictly be termed "prophetic", the age of prophecy being over. Schuon: If on the doctrinal plane the Guénonian work has a stamp of unicity, it may not be useless to point out that this is owing not to a more or less "prophetic" nature - a supposition that is excluded and which Guénon had already rejected beforehand - but to an exceptional cyclical conjuncture whose temporal aspect is this "end of the world" in which we live, and whose spatial aspect is - by the same token - the forced convergence of civilisations.60 We have already met with Michel Valsan's contention to the same effect. Guénon himself did not doubt that he had access to the sophia perennis about which he wrote. In a conversation with Dr. Grangier in 1927 Guénon spoke of the wisdom to which he gave expression as "impersonelle, d'origine divine, transmise par révélation, détachée et sans passion".61 Although certain of his own intellectual realization of the truth Guénon never assumed the role of the spiritual master; he consistently refused those who requested initiation from him.62 Like other traditionalists, Guénon did not perceive his work as any kind of essay in creativity or personal "originality", repeatedly emphasising that in the metaphysical domain there was no room for "individualist considerations" of any kind. In a letter to a friend he wrote, "I have no other merit than to have expressed to the best of my ability some traditional ideas."63 When reminded of the people who had been profoundly influenced by his writings he calmly replied, "...such disposition becomes a homage rendered to the doctrine expressed 56 Furthermore, as Schuon has pointed out, "...one may have an intuition for pure principles without having one for a given phenomenal order, that is to say, without being able to apply the principles spontaneously in such and such a domain". FS SVQ p128. 57 From "Orient et Occident" per WP TTW p. 732. 58 RL CLW p272. 59 E.J. Sharpe Comparative Religion Duckworth, London, 1975; p265. 60 From F. Schuon: "L'Oeuvre" per W.Perry: "Coomaraswamy" p160. For some reflections by Frithjof Schuon on Guénon see "Definitions" in Sophia I, ii, Winter 1995; and Schuon's contributions to Les Dossiers H: René Guénon ed. Pierre-Marie Sigaud, L'Age d'Homme, Lausanne, 1984, and L'Herne: René Guénon ed. Jean-Pierre Laurant, Les Editions de l'Herne, Paris, 1985 (which also includes a letter from Guénon to Schuon, 16th April, 1946). 61 From T. Grangier Souvenirs sur René Guénon quoted by J.P. Laurant: op.cit.; p58. 62 See J.P. Laurant: op.cit.; pp62-64. For a traditionalist understanding of the term "spiritual master" see F. Schuon: "Nature and Function of the Spiritual Master" SCR I, ii, 1967; pp50-59. 63 W. Perry: "The Man and His Witness" p7. 64 65 66 M. Bastriocchi: op.cit.; p356. F. Schuon: "L'Oeuvre", quoted by M. Bastriocchi: op.cit.; p359. W. Perry: "Coomaraswamy" p163. 14 by us in a way which is totally independent of any individualistic consideration...".64 Like Coomaraswamy, Guénon certainly did not see himself building a new philosophy or creating a new school of thought. If it is sometimes necessary to speak of the traditionalist "school" this is, from a traditionalist viewpoint, merely an expedient. For the traditionalists Guénon is the "providential interpreter of this age".65 It was his role to remind a forgetful world, "'in a way that can be ignored but not refuted', of first principles and to restore a lost sense of the Absolute".
- [Interfaith Event at Ise Shrine–2014](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/interfaith-event-at-ise-shrine) - From the Alliance of Religions and Conservation, a unique news report about an interfaith meeting in the holiest shrine of the Shinto faith. In 1923, Shinto’s Shrine Precincts Preservation Committee set up a 200-year plan for replanting the shrine’s own forests. It will be another 120 years before most will be ready to be used.
- [Religious Morphology, Hermeneutics and Initiation in Andrei Scrima's <em>Il padre spirituale</em>](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/religious-morphology) - Religious Morphology, Hermeneutics and Initiation in Andrei Scrima’s Il padre spirituale (The Spiritual Father) MARCO TOTI This article deals mainly with some themes drawn from the Italian version of Andrei Scrima’s Timpul Rugului Aprins. Maestrul spiritual în tradi?ia r?s?ritean? (The Time of the Burning Bush. The Spiritual Master in Eastern Tradition), published in Bucharest in 1996 and partially translated into Italian in 2000. Scrima (1925–2000), a Romanian monk, was one of the most gifted Orthodox theologians of the 20th century. The subject here considered are, on the one hand, the development by Scrima himself of a ‘religious morphology’ founded on a profound intellectual and spiritual hermeneutics, using the historico-religious comparison especially between Christianity, Islam and Hinduism (and giving rise to the attempt to renew Christian theological language); on the other hand, the discussion on the value of a particular rite to which the Romanian theologian explicitly refers as ‘blessing of grace’, an ‘initiation’ transmitted in the Rugul Aprins – a hesychastic circle of monks and laymen, in which the young Scrima took part, active from 1944 until 1958, notably in the Antim monastery in Bucharest under the direction of the writer Sandu Tudor, later Fr Agathon (1899–1960?) – by Father John the Stranger (Ioan Kulygin). This latter topic is strictly connected with the intellectual relations Scrima had with the most significant spokesmen of the ‘traditional orientation’ (R. Guénon, F. Schuon), also as far as the question of the perennialist ‘universalism’ is concerned; on that, as is often the case with him, Scrima’s position is very nuanced. It should be clear that, given the complexity and the subtlety of the matters dealt with here, this work constitutes only an initial sample of a wider treatment (on which we are currently working). Keywords: A. Scrima; Rugul Aprins (Burning Bush); Father John the Stranger (Ioan Kulygin); R. Guénon; F. Schuon; hermeneutics; religious morphology; ‘blessing of grace’; Logos. Born in 1925 in Gheorgheni, A. Scrima graduated with the renowned theologian D. St?niloae and was the assistant of A. Dumitriu, professor of logics and metaphysics in Bucharest (through which he was introduced to Antim). Scrima became a monk in July 1956; between the beginning of 1957 and the spring of 1959 he managed to escape the Communist persecution thanks to a scholarship in India, which allows him to study Sanskrit and Hinduism. The anonymous article (published in two parts in the Dominican review Istina) ‘L’avènement philocalique dans l’orthodoxie roumaine’ dates back to that time. Back from India, he was ordained an orthodox priest and later appointed observer for the patriarch Athenagoras at the sessions of 1964 and 1965 of the Second Vatican Council; during that period, he wrote Duhul Sfânt ?i unitatea Bisericii. Jurnal de conciliu (The Holy Spirit and the Unity of the Church. A Journal of the Council, published in 2004 by the Romanian publishing house Anastasia), which constitutes a significant document with regard to the ‘intra-Christian ecumenicism’. Between 1968 and 1989 he taught in the University ‘Saint Joseph’ in Beirut. After the fall of the Communist regime, in 1992 Archimandrite Scrima went back in Romania; in the 90’s – during the half of which he published Timpul Rugului Aprins. Maestrul spiritual în tradi?ia r?s?ritean? (The Time of the Burning Bush. The Spiritual Master in Eastern Tradition) and the introduction to the Romanian edition of F. Schuon’s De l’unité transcendante des religions – he made his interest in the ‘traditional orientation’ more explicit; moreover, he was one of the ‘inspirers’ of the establishment in Bucharest of the ‘New Europe College’, an institute for advanced studies in humanities founded in 1994 by Andrei Ple?u, former Foreign Minister and Minister of Culture of the Republic of Romania. The Romanian hieromonk died in 2000 in Bucharest for cardiac complications. Scrima left a corpus of writings which, though not vast in size, was of particular density and undoubtedly central to the field of contemporary religious and Christian studies. We shall be dealing here with only a few of the themes of Il padre spirituale, Scrima’s only substantial work translated into Italian,1 but especially significant in that it is the mature synopsis of his writings. The identification of the main themes underlying his work will be used as a means of analysing Scrima’s own perspective, directed towards suggesting a morphological affinity between the traditional forms of various religions,2 an affinity which grows ever clearer the deeper the symbolic hermeneutics becomes and which occurs in monasticism – or, more accurately, ‘asceticism’.3 One of the immediately apparent characteristics, on even a superficial glance through Il padre spirituale in both its Romanian and Italian versions, is the subtlety of the language used and the starting points which, from the standpoint of ‘linguistic comparison’, tend to dwell on language itself as a means by which to bring out the depth and breadth of the Christian kerygma. Indeed, in reading Timpul Rugului Aprins, the formal and semantic refinement of the terminology used immediately springs to the eye – highlighting the delicacy of the subject dealt with. Scrima’s language is allusive and at times deliberately ‘obscure’,4 clearly at one with the profundity and restraint of the symbolism which it continually brings to mind. After having related the letter-testament (of which the text in question is substantially a comment with various excursus) with which 1 See, for original work, Scrima, Timpul Rugului Aprins. Maestrul spiritual în tradi?ia r?s?ritean?, and, for partial translation from Romanian into Italian, Mainardi (monk of the Bose Community), Il padre spirituale. In this brief article the focus will be on the first two, of a total of three chapters of the Italian translation of the work: ‘Un pellegrino forestiero’ (‘ A Foreign Pilgrim’), 915 (in the original version ’Scrisoarea P?rintelui Ioan cel Str?in’, 21-24), and ‘Il ministero del padre spirituale’ (‘The Ministry of the Spiritual Father’), 17-102 (‘Lectura hermeneutic? a scrisori’, 25-108). If no other information is reported in the footnotes below, translations of the passages taken from Scrima’s and Montanari’s works (originally not in English) are ours. 2 Dumbrav? called this perspective ‘isomorphism’ (see her ‘Storia delle religioni ed ecumenismo’). 3 See below. 4 Montanari, La fatica del cuore, 119 n. 150. On the subject a significant international Conference took place about a year ago in Rome: Andrei Scrima e il linguaggio teologico contemporaneo, 10/2930/2008, Romanian Academy and Pontifical Oriental Institute. 2 Father Ioan5 bid farewell to his spiritual sons before his Siberian exile6 – bearing witness to a ‘spiritual inheritance’7 – the work begins with the chapter Il ministero del padre spirituale, the first paragraph of which is meaningfully entitled L’apertura della parola (The Opening of the Word). This name alludes to the ‘word which opens’ the Divine Word, giving rise to an encounter and evoking a descent (which calls to mind the Koran and its Sura Fâtihah, the ‘Opening’, to which Scrima meaningfully refers), and the ‘word which has opened’ to reveal a path.8 In Christianity, the opening of the injury to the side of the crucified Logos (John 19.33-4) enables access to knowledge which ‘transcends from within’ the dogmatic sphere by those willing to receive it.9 This possibility is based on a re-velation10 which, while revealing the substance of a redeeming spiritual horizon, also etymologically implies a ‘double concealment’. As to the incipit of the letter by Father Ioan, Scrima says that every sacred text has its opening word, so that from that moment on a place, a topology is offered: within the latter, what is to be said afterwards can then take place, in the double sense of receiving a suitable place and that of being made able to occur there. Father Ioan therefore conforms, in an instinctive manner I would say, to a universal protocol.11 In relation to the ‘emptying’ (in Greek kénosis) of the Word, Scrima says that ‘the essential source of this “disappearance of the countenance” is once again the crucifixion of the Logos on – and only on – the cross. This is the birthplace of the christic (not Christian, historical) tradition’.12 It is here that Scrima implicitly takes up once again the widely-debated issue of the excessiveness of ‘cosmic Christ’-Logos compared to the historical Jesus. According to a theological 5 Born in 1885, he was the confessor of the metropolitan of Rostov, then the spiritual father of the Rugul Aprins. This Russian monk from Optina Pustyn’ managed to escape from the former USSR and took refuge in the monastery of Cernica, close to Bucharest, in 1943. He was interned in a Siberian Gulag at the beginning of 1947, and died in an unprecised date. On Fr Ioann’s letter see Dragan, ‘Une figure du Christianisme oriental’. 6 Fr Ioan spent almost three years (from 1943 until January 1947) in Romania. 7 On that see below. In another version mention is made of ‘ the “charismatic tradition of the spiritual inheritance”’ (cited by Vâlsan in Montanari, La fatica del cuore, 120). We agree with Montanari in believing that the first version (with the definite article) ‘refers to the spiritual lineage of Optina, and that therefore it indicates an act of humility more than an awareness – much less probable – of the multiplicity and equivalence of “initiatic ways”’ ( ibid., 121). 8 Il padre spirituale, 19. 9 Ibid. 10 On the mundus imaginalis, a symbolic dimension which connects – by distinguishing them – the world created to the ‘forms of creation’, see Florensky’s magisterial analysis in Le porte regali, 19 et seq. (with specific reference to Eastern Christian iconography). See also below, n. 59. 11 Scrima, Il padre spirituale, 19 (the second set of italics is ours: pay close attention to what we can call Fr Ioan’s ‘unconscious agreement’, although with some ‘significant nuances’ (ibidem), to ‘a universal protocol’ [cf. above, n. 7]). If and how much Scrima consciously ‘superimposes’ a ‘Guénonian’ interpretation onto Fr Ioan’s letter is entirely a different issue which cannot be tackled here. 12 Scrima, Il padre spirituale, 38 (on kénosis cf. also below). On the meaning of the ‘disfigurement’ of God and of the starets see Scrima, Il padre spirituale, 39. 3 line which leads, in the Catholic sphere, to the so-called ‘theology of pluralism’, the Logos, pre-existing to every ‘manifested’ form (including, as one of the possibilities, that of Jesus as a man) since eternally generated by the Father, is not limited sic et simpliciter to the ‘individual’ figure of Jesus.13 In any case, the symbolism of the cross, with which the ‘annihilation of God’ is connected, did not by simple chance develop more in the Islamic sphere than in the Christian one;14 moreover, the ‘annihilation of God’ constitutes the sign par excellence of ‘apophatism’, as negation of human ‘limits’.15 An apophatism which – almost as a sort of ‘lowest’ (or ‘highest’!) common denominator, closely linked, in its Eastern Christian formulation, to the antinomic orientation of theology16 – seems to be assumed as a sort of medium leading to a ‘zenithal’ unity not only of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, but also – at least tendentially – of other traditional ‘religions’.17 As concerns the disfigurement of Christ on the cross there is clearly, correlatively, ‘the seed of a paradox, with man becoming richer the more he empties himself [...] something of a universal nature and, above all, extremely specific for an existential apophatism which [...] is part of the orthodox tradition’.18 In this sense, ‘it is necessary that God hide, that he efface himself, so that we seek him. In this way nothingness becomes the supreme affirmation of being’:19 something which bears similarities with the Abgrund (German: ‘depth, 13 Cf. J. Dupuis, The Cosmic Christ in the Early Fathers, 53–83. Take, for example, some theologically fundamental implications: while it is true that Justin, Irenaeus, and Clement say that the manifestation of God in the Logos culminates in becoming man in the form of Jesus Christ, it is also true that ‘the Logos-theology of Justin, Irenaeus, and Clement is not lacking in similarity from one author to another. All three make reference to a manifestation of God in the Logos before the Incarnation of the Word, indeed throughout human history and from creation itself’ ( ibid., 70; our italics). The distinction between the generation of the Logos by the Father and the Incarnation of the Logos in Jesus would therefore allow for a ‘universalist’ (‘inclusive’) opening up of Christian ity to other religions. This thesis has also been used, on the basis of reasons which many times are reductionist in a social sense, by the ‘liberation theology’. The distinction between ‘christic’ and ‘Christian’ (see above), which implies an ‘asymmetry’ between Jesus and Logos, does not necessarily have a heterodox nature: we could say that Jesus Christ ‘is’ the Logos, but that the Logos is not only – it being not possible to be so – Jesus. On this subject, see Scrima’s judgement on the Schuonian thesis of the impossibility that the Logos be entirely contained in a single form (see be low). However, we must take into account that Scrima, although a sympathizer of the ‘traditional orientation’ with Schuonian ‘nuances’ (see below, nn. 25 and 26) and to some extent not far from some Catholic ‘pluralistic’ themes, is still an Orthodox archimandrite holding high-level posi tions in ecclesiastical spheres. 14 See Montanari, La fatica del cuore, 94. 15 Scrima, Il padre spirituale, 37 et seq. 16 Ibid., 42. 17 See below. Traditional ‘religions’, in Guénonian terms, generally include monotheistic ones and those of the Oriental tradition (in primis Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism). 18 Scrima, Il padre spirituale, 41-2 (first set of italics mine). 19 Ibid., 39. The idea finds confirmation ibid., 72-3: ‘through it [the cross] nothingness becomes a way to attest to being. The cross constitutes the “level zero” of God’s presence: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”. It is the Father’s abandonment of his Son, it is his expiring: “and He gave up the spirit”. But this final act is the “fulfilment”, of that leading to perfection of everything by which the Spirit is given, is communicated to others. And it implies the descent to the lowest regions of being’. 4 bottom, precipice’) of Eckhartian metaphysics, the Buddhist shunya (Sanskrit: ‘emptiness’) and the Hindu Brahman nirguna (Sanskrit: ‘non-qualified’).20 As concerns the theme of a ‘religious morphology’ delineated on the basis of a ‘wide-ranging’ comparison, in part by way of profound ‘spiritual hermeneutics’ (which clearly does not let itself be dragged into facile forms of occultism, nor so very fashionable heterodox references, much preferring suggestions and data outside of Christianity but tendentially compatible with it), Scrima explicitly speaks of a ‘Christian gnosis’, the mystery of which prevents its profanation, and bases it on Romans 10.2,21 with reference to 1 Corinthians 2.14–3.1 (in which Saint Paul distinguishes between spiritual, psychic and hylic, without separating them in the Gnostic manner).22 This gnosis is based on the transmission of an authentic and objectively active spiritual influence. In Christianity, transmission (Greek: parádosis) of such an influence dates back to – and has its foundation in – the outpouring of the Spirit (Greek parédoken in John 19.30: ‘gave up’, ‘passed on’ the Spirit) by Christ at the moment of his death.23 The theme of transmission raises the issue – in addition to that of the affirmation of the initiatory nature of hesychasm (in the case in point of the forms of transmission of the hesychastic method of prayer as part of the Antim Romanian confraternity)24 – of ‘inheritance’, meaning the authentic succession of startsy (plural of Russian: starets, ‘spiritual father’): a theme which Scrima links to the ‘resumption of the attention (and not mere curiosity) and relative debate over the initiatory nature of the spiritual life’, a debate in which R. Guénon was, according to the Romanian father, one of the forerunners.25 In addition to that, and with clear reference to ‘the 20 And yet, Scrima affirms – explicitly contra Schuon – that it is precisely the kénosis of the Christ on the cross which does not allow to ‘cataphatically reconciliate’ the di fferent ‘traditional forms’ (see below, n. 25). 21 Scrima rightly quotes the ‘important hapax’ in Romans 10.2, epígnosis (Il padre spirituale, 46). 22 Ibid. 23 Cf. ibid., 38–9. 24 Dragan, ‘Une figure du Christianisme oriental’, 11. That the ‘blessing of grace’ is a ‘virtual initi ation’ is explicitly attested by Scrima since 1958, the publication year of his ‘ L’avènement philocalique dans l’orthodoxie roumaine’ (see Montanari, La fatica del cuore, 124 and Scrima, Il padre spirituale, 57). 25 On the relations between Scrima and the ‘traditional orientation’ see Montanari, ‘Meta fisica e ascesi: le tracce di A. Scrima nel mondo moderno’ and Toti, ‘A. Scrima e l’’orientamento tradizionale’ (International Conference ‘Andrei Scrima e il linguaggio teologico contemporaneo’, Pontifical Oriental Institute, 10/30/2008), and Montanari, ‘Prospettiva di una élite intellettuale: A. Scrima e l’Occidente’, paper given at the Dragan Foundation in Rome, 04/02/2009. Of a ‘contiguity’ on the part of Scrima with ‘traditionalism’ there are also, obviously in addition to his writings, various clues and evidence, including the preface to the Romanian edition of De l’unité transcendante des religions by F. Schuon (Bucharest 1994) and the statements by A. Manolescu, who, close to the ‘traditional orientation’, knew and was an assiduous visitor of the Romanian monk (Dragan himself confirmed the thesis). On this subject, attention should be given to this passage, which comments on paragraph 3 of the letter-testament by Father Ioan (quoted in Scrima, Il padre spirituale, 14): ‘herein the text implies [...] that there is a topology of conceal ment. There are places, centres in which tradition has its well-springs, with custodians, sentinel guards, men invested with a special responsibility: places jealously “guarded” [...] The consciousness [...] and the evidence of such a region integrates orthodoxy (in an external sense) with what I would call oriental tradition, which extends to the edges – once again in an external sense – of Asia. These are spe- 5 problem of the initiatic transmission’ posed by Guénon himself, Scrima also said that ‘it seems very significant that these issues were formulated publicly at the very time when Father Ioan joined us’.26 On the matter of the ‘blessing of grace’ as word and act – therefore ritual consisting in an invocation and a placing of hands27 – reproducible on the ‘cosmic’ level, Scrima, after having defined the spiritual father as ‘transmitter’ of a spiritual influence by way of the blessing28 (on the subject drawing examples from both the Semitic and Sanskrit traditions), states that creation is necessarily followed by blessing as qualification of the fulfilment of the work. In this sense, the blessing is ‘the first article of a grammar of consent to manifestation’. It ‘has cific assonances that originate from their common direction, within a consciousness of the centre which appears, mutatis mutandis, in other traditions within the Orient’(ibid., 92; our italics); all that clearly calls to mind, for example, Guénon’s Le roi du monde. In addition, on the ‘consonances’ between Scrima and Guénon, see also the rigorous survey in Montanari, La fatica del cuore, 133-44, especially 138–9 (it would seem that herein we are approaching – though within a context of a ‘sym bolic hermeneutics’, and not an explicitly ‘operative’ one – some Schuonian ‘supra-formal syn theses’ [the expression is reported ibid.,, 164 n. 344, and can be applied, for example, to the ‘Marian’ character conferred by Shuon to the tarîqah he directed]); see also below, n. 36, 42, 43 and 46. It seems worthy of note to us that Scrima took part in the important week-long series of talks at the Rothko Chapel in Houston on Traditional Modes of Contemplation and Action, the proceedings of which were published in part as well as in a de finitive edition (Ibish and Lamborn Wilson, Traditional Modes of Action and Contemplation. A Colloquium Held at Rothko Chapel). The introduction to the complete edition was written by M. Pallis [ ibid., 1–11] and in the same edition there was also a message by F. Schuon: ibid., 13–19). In this symposium, participants included such eminent ‘traditionalists’ as H. Smith, S. H. Nasr (one of the organizers of the event), J. E. Brown, L. Schaya, V. Danner (all followers of Schuon), with in attendance Mr and Mrs Chittick, scholars ‘close’ to ‘traditionalism’ such as E. Zolla and T. Izutsu, and others which showed an in terest in this orientation (R. Panikkar and J. Needleman), as well as various authoritative reli gious figures. On this occasion Scrima gave a paper entitled ‘The Hesychastic Tradition: an Orthodox-Christian Way of Contemplation’ (published in Ibish and Marculescu, Contemplation and Action in World Religions. Selected Papers from the Rothko Colloquium ‘Traditional Modes of Contemplation and Action’, 157–68, and followed by discussion whose summary is found ibid., 169–76. Scrima also wrote an introduction for the abridged edition: ibid., 11–15). The event also included other lectures (among the others Scrima’s ‘Iconography and Architecture of the Eastern Church’) and documentaries by Smith on Sufism and Tibetan Buddhism. On the intellectual relations between Scrima and Schuon see the discussion below. 26 Scrima, Il padre spirituale, 47. The theme is once again engaged, with reference to the chronolo gical ‘coincidence’ between the publication of De l’unité transcendante des religions by Schuon (sign of a serious recognition of the sense and destination of the hesychastic tradition from a western stance and a work ‘scrutinized as suitable’ in Romania already at the time of its release) and the activities of the Rugul Aprins in Bucharest, in Scrima, Teme ecumenice, 157. The Romanian father agrees with Guénon’s conception of initiation, basing the view on the fact that ‘such distinctions [between initiation and exoteric rites] are also found in other Church Fathers; Basil the Great also spoke of a secret knowledge, of a ‘discipline of the arcane’ ( Il padre spirituale, 56). On the consonances between Scrima and Guénon as concerns the notion of ‘tradition’ see Dragan, Une figure du Christianisme oriental, 14 and n. 49 (even if we nurture doubts over the thesis of the ‘Gnostic’ character of the Burning Bush, and even of its being a forerunner of ‘new religious movements’ [ibid., 11 et seq. and 20]). However, accepting – from this point of view – Schuon’s thesis (Il padre spirituale, 57), Scrima states that ‘[however] reductive in Guénon is the thesis that in Christianity there was an initiatic tradition which in any case has been lost: in this way, everything would now accordingly be esoteric (doctrine, rite, initiation)’ (ibid., 56; see Dragan, Une figure du Christianisme oriental, 14 and, on the definition of initiation according to Scrima, Il padre spirituale, 57). In reality, Guénon simply said that this initiatory tradition, following the providential descent of Christianity in the esoteric domain, completed more or less about the 6 the role of a seal. What is blessed is in this way set up within the fullness opened up by the act of becoming [...] in Maximus the Confessor, the “essence” is the well-being (eu-eînai), not only being (eînai). The blessing constitutes an act of consent, and therefore of qualification, which goes beyond the level of phýsis, of the natural being. By way of blessing, one can establish communication between the spirit and the phýsis. Ens et bonum convertuntur was the assumption of mediaeval scholars, who still placed themselves in the transparency of this meaning of the blessing’.29 The ‘God saw that it was good’ (Hebrew: wa-yare’ Elohim ki tov) of Genesis refers both to the last word of Christ on the cross (Greek: tetélestai, ‘has been fulfilled’, ‘is perfect’), meaning ‘the blessing of a creation [...] reoriented’, and also to ‘the other end of the arché revealed by tradition and the holy text, and therefore in the Sanskrit sphere’, to the Sanskrit su asti (which precidely means “[it] is good”) from which we have ‘swastika’, a form of a rotating cross and therefore, as rotation, act.30 The terminological and semantic parallel is accompanied also by a significant correspondence in terms of ‘sacred chronology’ with ‘the commentaries of Brahmin saying that, at every rotation of the swastika, at the end of every cosmic rotation, su asti is said. This corresponds perfectly to the rhythm of the days in Genesis’.31 Therefore, here Scrima highlights a remarkable ‘morphological’ parallelism between the ‘act’ of creation and the words of blessing in the Old Testament, in the New Testament (cross as axis of the world32/last words of Christ on the cross) and in some commentaries of Hindu sacred texts (rotation of the swastika/su asti); moreover, it is interesting to notice that the ‘blessing of grace’ as authentic ‘initiation’ reproduces all that, in its join- time of the Council of Nicea, was knowingly relegated to circles being almost entirely inaccess ible (for example, the Fraternité du Paraclet and the Estoile internelle, on the subject of which see Salzani and Zoccatelli, Hermétisme et emblématique du Christ dans la vie et dans l’œuvre de Louis Charbonneau-Lassay [1871–1946], with special reference to 61-114, and Zoccatelli, Le lièvre qui rumine, autour de René Guénon, Louis Charbonneau-Lassay et la Fraternité du Paraclet) or ‘to branches of Christianity different from the Latin Church’ (Guénon, Considerazioni sull’esoterismo cristiano, 32 n. 4; cf. also, on the modes and causes of this ‘adaptation’ [not ‘loss’!], ibid., 20–22: ‘[...] to say that [the sacraments] have “lost” this [initiatory] character leads to a certain inappropriateness of lan guage, as if this had been something purely accidental. We, on the other hand, believe that it was an adaptation which, despite the unfortunate consequences that it necessarily had in certain senses, was entirely justified and made necessary by the circumstances in terms of time and place’ (ibid., 20–21). The search for an initiatic chain on Mt Athos by V. Lovinescu in 1935 should be seen within this context (on that see Mutti, Eliade, Vâlsan, Geticus e gli altri. La fortuna di Guénon tra i romeni, 59–60, and Dragan, Une figure du Christianisme oriental, 14–15). Of special interest, on the other hand, is Scrima’s affirmation that ‘also within the context of the Guénonian vision [...] Christ’s resurrection, éschaton fulfilled, is situated outside or beyond tradition: it is an extraor metatraditional datum. It goes without saying that the first expected to understand this are Christians [...]” (Il padre spirituale, 57 n. 28). 27 As attested by Sœur Devillers, Ce que fut dans ma vie la rencontre du père André Scrima, 264–5. 28 Scrima, Il padre spirituale, 50. 29 Ibid., 52–3. Cf. below, n. 32. 30 Scrima, Il padre spirituale, 52-4. 31 Ibid., 53. Cf., on the ‘ascendancy’ of this passage, Montanari’s observations above, n. 25 . 32 Scrima, Il padre spirituale, 54 n. 25. 7 ing act and words. In addition, at the fall – ‘necessarily’ induced by creation,33 creation in turn ‘confirmed’ by way of the blessing of God – by symmetric correspondence, the revelation of the divine function of omnitenens (Greek: pantocrator, Arabic: Dhabet al-Kull) ‘occurs’.34 Also significant – on the same subject – is the reception of the Hindu doctrine of the four ages: ‘our human history can be considered an unceasing succession of cycles which prepared for the end’.35 Scrima implicitly attributes to kâliyuga36 (Sanskrit: ‘age of the goddess Kâli’, goddess of destruction and, by no coincidence, ‘female hypostasis of time [kâla]’),37 in which humanity is considered to be currently, the ‘crystallization of time’38 of which Father Ioan had spoken and which Russian Communism had eminently caused – quantifying humanity and thereby ‘reifying’ it, like David who dared to take a census of the populace39 – by way of ‘the opposite face of exuberance, of momentum: parades, meetings, competitions [...]’, which acted as a counterpart to ‘the impossibility of still being pilgrims, whereas all Russians had traditionally been pilgrims until just before World War I broke out’.40 And movement, ‘attraction towards a centre’, was also attested in sacred Hindu chronology, for example in the Aitarêya Brahmana, which, according to what Scrima reports, says: ‘Kritia [yuga] [“golden age”]: travels and crosses (space)’.41 The same geometric symbolism of the circle and the 33 The creation is depicted in this sense as a primordial, cosmogonic sacrifice of the divinity, through which the One ‘becomes manifest’ in many. This is reproduced by ritual sacrifice, which is made of the two phases of ‘disintegration’ and ‘reintegration’ (the latter consisting in the bringing into being of the coincidentia oppositorum; on this subject see, with special reference to the Vedic sacrifice, Coomaraswamy, Selected papers. II. Metaphysics, 199). According to what is said of Scrima by Father Élie of Deir-el-Harf, ‘le fondement de la réalité est le sacri fice. “Si le grain ne meurt...”’ (quoted in ‘Témoignage’, 251). In addition, incarnation constitutes, beyond a ‘supreme’ divine sacrifice, the ‘course’ and peak of a constant, ongoing creation. 34 Scrima, Il padre spirituale, 54-5. 35 Ibid., 73. 36 Scrima explicitly supported (at least from the beginning of the 1970s) the idea that we are at the end of a cycle, with one of the ‘signs of the times’ being the general reduction of Christianity to a cultural and institutional fact historically understood: ‘Christianity, in this approaching end of our historical cycle, is first of all a fact of culture, of institutional structure and of temporal pres ence’ (discussion after Scrima’s speech at the Houston conference: Ibish and Marculescu, Contemplation and Action in World Religions. Selected Papers from the Rothko Colloquium ‘Traditional Modes of Contemplation and Action’, 169; our italics). Furthermore, the publication of The Way of a Pilgrim ‘was a sign that the end was approaching. The time was about to be fulfilled. The cycle was about to end, it was about to be completed and the contemplative had once again to become a for eigner and a pilgrim’ [ibid., 170; our italics; cf. below, n. 41)]. It is well-known that the exposition of the Hindu doctrine of the manvantara (‘period of a Manu’, of which the kâli-yuga is the last of its four ‘ages’, and the most ‘degenerated’ of all) is one of Guénon’s topoi (see for example his Formes traditionnelles et cycles cosmiques; cf. also below, p.). 37 Il padre spirituale, 95. 38 Ibid., 74. 39 Ibid., 75. 40 Ibid., 74 (our italics). 41 Ibid. (cf. ibid., n. 4), and, in another context, Guénon, L’écorce et le noyau, 31 n. 2: ‘the terms shariah and tarîqah both contain the idea of “to set out”, and therefore the idea of movement’, which confirms the concept of constant tension towards a constitutionally unreachable centre in 8 square refers to the being/becoming dichotomy, the two figures – the impossibility of the coincidence of which expresses an aporia of a symbolic nature42 – recalling, as symbols of the ‘dynamism of the cosmic form’ and ‘stability’, firm support of the ground’,43 the peregrinatio in stabilitate as an essential distinguishing feature of the life of a monk, of the Christian and therefore of man. Becoming is in this sense a form of being, which in turn is the meaning (cf. Latin sensus: destination and significance) and the fulfilment of the former.44 Moreover, one may easily spot a clear connection between what we just reported and the transition, which came into being with the advent of Christianity, of the ‘circular book’ – recalling the cyclical nature of time and the possibility inherent in the book to roll up/unroll – to the ‘rectangular’ one, that expressed the passage to the ‘symbolic closing of the text in Revelation 6.14’.45 In the final analysis, what emerges here is a hermeneutics which seems to be compatible with Guénon’s ‘thought’: the kâli-yuga is significantly characterized by the acceleration of time – tending to its final ‘crystallization’ (to be understood as an ‘alchemical precipitation’ into the solified space), on the base of which time will be turned into space – and, precisely, by the solidification of space: that’s why the end of times is the end of time and the end of a world.46 The theme of the Word – in connection with the Logos and the Scriptures (and the cosmos) – is widely dealt with in the paragraphs ‘Il libro circolare’47 (‘The Circular Book’) and ‘L’orizzonte dell’in-scrizione’48 (‘The Horizon of the In-scription’). In the former, the author highlights the synchronic and diachronic nature of the Scriptures since it is the ‘organic outline of [...] grámmata’,49 a succession of words and sounds, and therefore sheds light on the terminological its ‘essence’ (consider the Christian notions of epéktasis [see Deseille, Épectase, 785-8) and théosis. In particular, the latter turns out to be a sort of ‘down payment’ [Greek arrhabón], an anticipation of a blessedness which is fully achievable only in the life to come: Montanari, La fatica del cuore, 58-59 [especially n. 212] and 173). On epéktasis as a paradoxical ‘undefined fulfillment’ cf. also Scrima, Il padre spirituale, 102: one should perhaps realize that the ‘end’ (i.e., Truth, or Life) is precisely the Way (cf. Chinese Tao; on spiritual itinerance as a constituive character of the pil grim – other than one of the most significant fils rouges of Scrima’s book – whose ‘impossibility’ is a sign of the current ‘solified’ time, see above and n. 36). On the subject cf. also Scrima, Il padre spirituale, 74 et seq. We could also say, in passing, that modern travels are the ‘exteriorization’ and (etymologically) the ‘profanation’ of the contemplative aptitude typical of the traditional world, and best expressed by prayer and liturgy. 42 Scrima, Il padre spirituale, 83 n. 36 (cf. Guénon, Il regno della quantità e i segni dei tempi, 140). 43 Ibid., 82 n. 36 (cf. Guénon, Il regno della quantità e i segni dei tempi, 135-40: ‘Dalla sfera al cubo’ [‘From the Sphere to the Cube’]). 44 Cf. Scrima’s words in Il padre spirituale, 65: ‘Existence is nothing but a mobile image of stabil - ity’ (cf. also Plato’s Timaeus, 37d: ‘Time is a mobile image [eikôn] of eternity’). 45 Scrima, Il padre spirituale, 82-3. 46 On that see Guénon, Il regno della quantità e i segni dei tempi, 113-8 (‘Solidificazione del mondo’ [‘Solidification of the World’]), 155-9 (‘Il tempo mutato in spazio’ [‘Time changed into Space’]), and 267-70 (‘La fine di un mondo‘ [The End of a World’]). 47 Scrima, Il padre spirituale, 75-85. 48 Ibid., 85-6. 49 Ibid., 76. 9 connection between the semantic areas of writing and weaving (cf. Sanskrit sûtra, which designates both thread and sacred writing; in Latin textus and textura; in Arabic surat, which means ‘threads of wool’ and ‘chapters’ of the Koran; in Greek strophé and strophein, which ‘indicate the back and forth movement of the shuttle with the spool transversally to the warp’).50 Above all, it seems very significant that in all the great traditions, the holy text – as well as the text itself – evoke weaving [...] Weft and warp weave together the apparent sense, the visible one, and the hidden but fundamental one of the text. However, in the act of weaving the last act is that of cutting the thread so that the finished fabric is freed from the square of the tool, the frame that has created the form. When the carpet is finished, the link with the loom is removed and the fabric appears as a living, autonomous being, endowed with its own being.51 Scrima also stresses the theme of the rolled book, which can be rolled (hiding its meaning) or unrolled (revealing it), and sets this alongside Revelation, where it is repeatedly said that the sky is furled as a coil.52 The Logos can therefore have as ‘container’ (whether personal or not, and which is not the ‘whole’ of the ‘content’ or, better, of the Logos himself) either the book (in Islâm) or the flesh of the Man-God (in Christianity). As a consequence, in the latter case personal character will heighten the importance of freedom,53 without by this causing an essential divarication between ‘liberated’ and ‘free’ man. The truth will be revealed54 entirely in ‘history’ at the time of parousía (a view entirely accepted even in Islâm). According to Scrima, one of the more significant representations of the ‘apocalyptic’ sky, the Universal Judgement in the Chora monastery in Constantinople, is but ‘the iconographic transcription of a verse of Revelation: “the sky withdrew as a volume that rolls itself up, and all the mountains and islands were moved from their place” (Revelation, 6.14)’, in the Greek text: Kaì ho ouranòs apecorìsthe (‘retracted’) hos biblíon helissómenon (‘like a closed book’, ‘rolledup’).55 At the ‘unrolling’ of the manifestation, induced by the ‘overabundance of love’ of God, the annihilation and death on the cross, the crossing of all the 50 Ibid., 77. 51 Ibid. (my italics). Here it is clear that the carpet is the human being and the loom God, in his role as Logos creator. 52 Ibid., 77. 53 Ibid., 86. Cf. also, against all ‘miraculous’ drifting of the Christian faith, ibid., 101. 54 On the significance of the notion of ‘re-velation’ see above. 55 Scrima, Il padre spirituale, 77-8. In addition to the book and the sky, also human beings can ‘roll up’ and ‘unroll’. ‘Given the structure of our physical condition, to be stable we must be in move ment: “Those who stay in one place must be careful not to fall”. Stability here means an internal realization, not only within the personal self, but also of the spiritual being: it is, at one and the same time, a rolling up and an unrolling’ (ibid., 76; immediately afterwards Scrima underscores the ‘unexpected analogy [...] with the way of using books in antiquity’). On the related theme of peregrinatio in stabilitate see above. 10 states of being ad inferos (moments that recall the ‘Lesser Mysteries’) and Jesus’ Resurrection-rise to heaven (recalling the Greater Mysteries) ‘follow’.56 Creation will moreover be ‘followed’, in line with the necessary symmetry, by the retraction of the creation in the ‘non-manifested’ (one can think of the apocatastasis as a ‘return to the Beginning’ and the ‘end of a world’, which in turn is the anticipation of a ‘new creation’). The ‘microcosmic’ re-rolling of the Book clearly corresponds, on the macrocosmic plane, to the refurling of the sky, since the book sealed in Revelation 5.1 offers one of the celestial models of traditional writing, and this model results in a clear circularity. It is a book which one can roll and unroll, in its form and functionality, with cosmic circularity. Rolling up and unrolling, the book directs the vectorial becoming of the times, the cycles, God’s order and economy which runs through history, wrapping and unwrapping the stages of its revelation until its final fulfilment.57 Therefore, the Koran summarizes the cosmos, of which it is a ‘synthesis’ and a ‘model’: There is thus a sort of relation, innateness, in this vision, between the Book, the object which acts as a medium for the Scriptures (which by no coincidence is called the Bible), and the totality, which is the medium for its manifestation, rightly called cosmos. The one and the other are bearers of signs, and both can be grasped, as here suggested, from one end to the other of their offering themselves up as a form.58 It is not by chance that there are at least strong affinities between the Book and Jesus Christ as full ‘bearers’ (‘repositories’) of the Logos. At first, Scrima says that just in passing, almost allusively: In Byzantine liturgy and iconography, this hypostasis of the text-roll persists: for instance, the term kontákion – which designates a particular liturgical chant – comes from the act of rolling and unrolling a cylinder.59 After a while, in a very subtle passage of the paragraph The Horizon of the In-scription, the Romanian monk confirms these analogies and makes them explicit: The real Book is analogous to the uncreated Sophia – the function of which is ‘situated’ by the Orthodox thought – [...] In the ‘religions of the book’ [...] the Book offers the sense of eternity transmitted, that marks ‘every man coming into the world’, as it is said in the prologue of the Gospel of John. Whoever comes into the world is written in a book and his life ‘has written 56 On this subject, specifically as concerns Eastern Christian iconography, see the superb discus sion in Lindsay Opie, Il significato iniziatico delle icone pasquali, 164–76 and id., I sensi esoterici delle icone pasquali, 373–94. 57 Scrima, Il padre spirituale, 81. 58 Ibid., 78–80. 59 Ibid., 77. 11 itself’. And yet, it is a writing that may be rolled and unrolled, in a dynamics of fulfillment of being.60 Some Conclusions and Perspectives The summary analysis attempted above is obviously susceptible to further, more circumstantial studies.61 Nevertheless, some central elements have emerged. In addition to the issue of the linguistic reformulation of the Christian truth – a reformulation that, as already alluded to, did not give rise in Scrima’s case to heterodox satisfaction – there seems to be a pressing need to delineate a religious morphology common to some of the major spiritual traditions. This need to discover a hidden ‘meaning’ is typically modern and Western, since, incidentally, it is clearly not linked to an apologia of the classic soteriological mould, but appears closely moved by an ‘anthropological’ tension (as well as that, obviously, of a spiritual kind) to understand the other, and through the other, ourselves and what of ourselves has been ‘occulted’ (sometimes even by ‘tradition’!). It is significant that this type of operation was carried out without any theological yielding, firmly within the Eastern Christian tradition. Modern instruments of such an intellectual and spiritual elaboration are hermeneutics and morphological comparisons. The former also takes on the form of ‘intelligence of the Scriptures and therefore of the world’, and has a clear connection with the works of Scrima’s fellow countryman M. Eliade – which were not accidentally linked to a ‘religious morphology’, too – and the Frenchman H. Corbin (it is well-known that, for instance, the first spoke expressly of ‘creative hermeneutics’).62 Moreover, Scrima’s attempt to construct a ‘compared morphology’ of religions based on a profound intellectual and (in primis) spiritual hermeneutics could be contextualized within that ‘moving of constellations’ of which he himself wrote63 (having lived it personally: since the first half of the sixties, ‘publicly’ also) and that probably refers also to the ‘new policy’ of relations between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy and then, by extension, to the central theme of the ‘encounter of religions’: two real cultural and spiritual turning points in the framework of postmodernity. All this induced the Romanian archimandrite to elaborate a hermeneutics which is discreet, allusive and consciously ambiguous – we would say almost ‘suspended’, at times –, as well as programmatically evasive with regard to the theme of the ‘absolute equivalence’ 60 Ibid., 86. Cf. above, n. 55. 61 We especially intend to consider the original (and full) version of Scrima’s Timpul Rugului Aprins in a forthcoming study. 62 Eliade, La nostalgie des origines, Paris 1971, 131 et seq. (quoted by Montanari, La fatica del cuore, 119). For a study on the application of ‘creative imagination’ in the ‘mystical’ (su fi) sphere, see the cardinal work by H. Corbin, L’imagination créatrice dans le soufisme d’Ibn ‘Arabî, Paris 1958. On ‘esotericism’ as ‘hermeneutical perspective’ see Borella, Esoterismo guénoniano e mistero cristiano, 53-74; on the profound connections between mundus imaginalis, hermeneutics and spiritual practice see Toti, ‘Figure del mundus imaginalis: ascesi, iconografia, sogno, morte. Tra ermeneutica storico-religiosa e prassi spirituale’ (forthcoming). 63 Il padre spirituale, 47. 12 of the different religious traditions: a hermeneutics oriented towards the affirmation of their ‘apophatic unity’, and therefore not fully coinciding with what we could define as a ‘cataphatic unity’ of religions.64 On this point his introduction to the Romanian edition of Schuon’s De l’unité transcendante des religions is certainly very significant, for it constitutes a clear (and relatively late, thus tendentially ‘definitive’) document of the thought of the Romanian monk with regard to one of the central theses of the ‘traditional orientation’ (explicitly expressed by Schuon, but of course fundamentally accepted by Guénon, too). As a matter of fact, Scrima writes, with reference to that: ‘Schuon underlines the ‘particular’ aspect of the form manifested by the incarnated Logos: “If Christ had been able to be the only manifestation of the Logos, supposing that such a uniqueness of manifestation is possibile, his birth should have to have for effect the instant transformation of the entire universe in ash”. This is a claim which is too much ‘reasonable’ not to be somewhere mistaken. We are convinced that the great Christian thinkers of the first centuries were conscious of this argument of Platonic taste, always consonant with the too natural needs of the immanent cogency. It’s only that – and this is one of the components of what one defines the “folly of the cross” – the Logos incarnated in Christ chose, rather that the destruction of the world, “to destroy” himself to death – even the “death by the cross” (cf. Philippians 2.5-8]’.65 In addition, Scrima uses these ‘ambivalent’ terms to discuss Schuon’s central thesis, explicitly formulated in the title of the work by the Swiss author: ‘Our author has had the luck, or maybe the intuition, of a happy expression: “the transcendent unity of religions”... His semantic invention, his great victory, lies in its “banality”. It focuses the perception and the understanding on the truth of a cliché: the transcendent as an unmistakable referent of the unity, which is realized or in convergence, of a religious fact. Therefore, talking about a “transcendent unity” of religions means, in the end, to suggest a tautology that tries to let the meaning of the religious category pass from the exterior and the contingent to the essential and at the top. Saying that way, we may keep asking 64 This seems also to be the current position of another renowned theologian, J. Borella (see espe cially his ‘The Problematic of the Unity of Religions. Afterword to B. Bérard, Introduction à une métaphysique des mystères chrétiens’, 157-82). 65 ‘Cuvînt înainte (la traducerea volumului lui F. Schuon, Despre unitatea transcendent? a religiilor)’, 156 (our italics). See also, for a critique of Schuon on that point, Borella, ‘The Problematic of the Unity of Religions. Afterword to B. Bérard, Introduction à une métaphysique des mystères chrétiens’, 172-9, in particular 176. On this subject cf., with reference to the hulûl (‘specification of place’, ‘localization’ of the divinity in a form contained within a space whose erroneous attesta tion is thought to have been induced, according to the Islamic point of view, by the Christian no tion of the Incarnation), Montanari, La fatica del cuore, 175. On the question, from his point of view, there is the clarification by Â. K. Coomaraswamy: ‘Le Christ en tant que tel, étant une Personne, n’est pas le but final, mais plutôt la Voie elle-même. Le Christ est l’Axe de l’Univers, Agni “en forme de colonne [skambhah = ?????ó?] dans le nid de la vie immédiate, debout sur Son sol à la croisée des chemins” (pathâm visarge, RV X, 5, 6), le Soleil (savitâ satyadharmendrah) vers qui convergent tous les chemins (samare pathînam, VS XII, 66), et, de plus, la Porte du Monde, la voie pour entrer dans le temps et la voie pour retourner dans l’éternité. “Je suis la porte, par Moi, si un homme entre, il sera sauvé, et il entrera et sortira et trouvera à paître [...] Je suis la Voie, la Vérité et la Vie: personne ne va au Père si ce n’est par Moi“ (Jean 10, 9 et 14, 6)’ ( La signification de la mort. ‘Meurs avant que tu ne meures’. Études de psychologie traditionnelle, 138). 13 ourselves if this “cliché” (and we all know, at least from Léon Bloy on, which terrible truths a cliché can hide) has a sure referent in the concrete realities of the concept of unity. Yes and no’.66 In the late work by Scrima which has been mainly considered here, Il padre spirituale, we managed to find, among other things, some ‘borrowings’ of evident Guénonian origin. With special regard to the definition of ‘initiation’, Scrima completely and explicitly agrees with Guénon;67 it is also very interesting to note that at the same time the Romanian monk, in his discussion, confirms, through a first hand experience, Guénon’s theses on the existence (and on the sporadic and very reserved ‘survival’, at present times) of a specific, extrasacramental rite of initiation in Christianity,68 and the more nuanced views of Schuon about the ‘initiatic value’ of the sacraments themselves.69 Nevertheless, these evident influences do not necessarily coincide with the image of a fully ‘perennialist’ Scrima. In our opinion, Scrima recovers, develops, deepens and recontextualizes some typical ‘traditionalist’ themes – softening, for example, the ‘mathematical’ orientation given by Guénon to them, and placing in his treatment poetic and philosophical motives which are completely irrelevant to the French metaphysician. By the way, the issue of the ‘initiatory’ value of the ‘blessing of grace’ seems particularly urgent, linked as it is with the controversy of the possible ‘esoteric’ nature of Hesychasm.70 It should be also kept in mind that Scrima later passed on the ‘blessing of grace’ to some western Christians:71 a fact that makes the theme of an Hesychasm ‘in’ the West or ‘of’ the West very significant (also from an ecumenical perspective with regard to the relationships between Catholic and Orthodox monasticism). However, it seems that, from Scrima’s exegetical standpoint, Christianity, without denying it (how could it?), ‘assumes’ and ‘reverses’, for example, the Old Testament perspective of God as ‘majestic judge’. In the New Testament, where the stress is placed on the merciful character of the divinity, God is, in addition to a man, an infant (in-fans, or ‘non-speaking’, confirming his kénosis at the other end of his ‘descent’ – incarnation and death) who therefore reveals himself as a ‘discrete’ presence.72 Extending this type of relation to the major religious traditions, they (being clearly irreconcilable at the ‘dogmatic’ level) could be said to develop and deepen their various meanings and languages in accordance with their perspective, and therefore functionally from their ‘point of view’, taking up or excluding, rendering values, facts and symbolic contributions ‘relative’ or ‘absolute’ to the extent that they are compatible with those of its own general ‘system’. Whether all this leads or not to the thesis of an ‘essential equivalence’ of 66 ‘Cuvînt înainte (la traducerea volumului lui F. Schuon, Despre unitatea transcendent? a religiilor)’, 147-8 (our italics). 67 Scrima, Il padre spirituale, 56-7 (see also above, n. 26). 68 For references see ibid. 69 See his ‘Les Mystères christiques’, 191-203. 70 On the point see the sharable conclusions in Montanari, La fatica del cuore, 177. 71 Sœur Devillers, ‘Ce que fut dans ma vie la rencontre du père André Scrima’, 263–72 . 72 See what is quoted of Scrima by Père Élie of Deir-el-Harf in ‘ Témoignage’, 258. 14 traditional religions – and not simply to the classic confirmation of the justification-interpretation of other spiritualities as ‘seeds of the Word’ – Scrima does not expressly say, perhaps because it is not his main purpose. A metaphor taken from astronomy might appropriately conclude this treatment. Scrima’s spiritual ‘system of reference’ is Christianity, his ‘sun’ Jesus Christ, the Logos made flesh. However, the Romanian theologian seems to suggest – and not even in too disguised a manner – that the unequivocal fact that in our solar system we all draw life from the same and only sun does not rule out the existence and, above all the effectiveness, of other suns in other solar systems, which, ultimately, are analogous to73 (or, perhaps, the “same” as?) ours. Acknowledgements This article is largely a revised version of a paper presented at the International Conference ‘Andrei Scrima e il linguaggio teologico contemporaneo’, which took place in Rome (29–30 October 2008) at the Romanian Academy and Pontifical Oriental Institute (the title of the paper was ‘Andrei Scrima e l’orientamento tradizionale’). I would like to extend my warmest thanks to Prof. E. Montanari, Prof. J. Cutsinger, Fr E. Citterio, Dr D. Dumbrav? for stimulating discussions and invaluable suggestions, and to Ms Shelly Kittleson for her excellent and very generous work of translation. Notes on contributor Marco Toti was born in Rome in 1976. He got his PhD in the History of Religions (University of Messina) with a thesis devoted to a historical and typological comparison between Athonite Hesychasm and Sufism, and to the analysis of the theme of mundus imaginalis in Eastern Christianity and Islâm (Ibn ‘Arabî) and of recent debates on the supposed ‘initiatic’ nature of Hesychasm. His publications include Aspetti storico-religiosi del metodo di orazione esicasta (2006), and a wide range of articles and papers on comparative mysticism and on forms of postmodern religiosity. Of these, the most significant and recent are: ‘The Inner Dimension of the Pilgrimage to Mount Athos’, in R. GothóniG. Speake (eds.), The Monastic Magnet. Roads to and from Mount Athos (2008); ‘The Hesychastic Method of Prayer: Its Anthropological and Symbolic Significance’, IJSCC 8, no. 1 (2008); ‘L’ermeneutica quale veicolo di un “ecumenismo profondo” tra metodologia storico-religiosa e prassi spirituale’, Orientalia Christiana Periodica (forthcoming); ‘Figure del mundus imaginalis: ascesi, iconografia, sogno, morte. Tra ermeneutica storicoreligiosa e prassi spirituale’, Perennia Verba (forthcoming). Among other things, he is currently working on the English translation of his PhD dissertation and on the Italian translation of K. Ware’s How Are We Saved? The Understanding of Salvation in the Orthodox Tradition (1996). He has been Fulbright Visiting Researcher in the University of California, Berkeley, and in the University of South Carolina (June-December 2008). 73 Cf. Borella, ‘The Problematic of the Unity of Religions. Afterword to B. 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- [Knowledge and KNOWLEDGE](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/knowledge-and-knowledge) - Donald Macleod Matheson What has almost vanished today in Europe and America is the idea formerly current that besides the ordinary particulate and accumulating knowledge in which, through our schooling, we are all in some degree partakers, there is also another kind of knowledge, a knowledge imparticulate and incommensurable with our ordinary knowledge. Click here
- [The Deep Horizon](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-deep-horizon) - The Matheson Trust The Deep Horizon Stratford Caldecott "Wherever men and women discover a call to the absolute and transcendent, the metaphysical dimension of reality opens up before them: in truth, in beauty, in moral values, in other persons, in being itself, in God. We face a great challenge at the end of this millennium to move from phenomenon to foundation, a step as necessary as it is urgent. We cannot stop short at experience alone; even if experience does reveal the human being's interiority and spirituality, speculative thinking must penetrate to the spiritual core and the gound from which it rises. Therefore, a philosophy which shuns metaphysics would be radically unsuited to the task of mediation in the understanding of Revelation." [i] With such words as these, Pope John Paul II, in his 1998 encyclical letter on Faith and Reason addressed to the bishops of the Catholic Church, calls for a renewal of metaphysics, "because I am convinced that it is the path to be taken in order to move beyond the crisis pervading large sectors of philosophy at the moment, and thus to correct certain mistaken modes of behaviour now widespread in our society". He goes on, "Such a ground for understanding and dialogue is all the more vital nowadays, since the most pressing issues facing humanity - ecology, peace and the co-existence of different races and cultures, for instance - may possibly find a solution if there is a clear and honest collaboration between Christians and the followers of other religions and all those who, while not sharing a religious belief, have at heart the renewal of humanity" [section 104]. The encyclical itself, which exposes many of the philosophical and spiritual errors of modernity - including scientism, relativism and nihilism - does not claim to be an exposition of metaphysics. It is an invitation and a challenge to seek metaphysical Wisdom where she may be found; a challenge which, coming as it does at the end of the Pope's careful preparations for the end of one millennium and the beginning of another (the "hermeneutical key of my pontificate" as he writes in Tertio Millennio Adveniente), suggests that the rebirth of metaphysics forms part of the foundations of the new historical era that he believes is now close upon us. In one sense the dialogue of which the Pope speaks is already well underway, although it can hardly be said to have achieved a very high profile. The Islamic historian of science, Seyyed Hossein Nasr argued as long ago as 1968 that the degradation brought about by the prostitution of nature can only ultimately be reversed by a revitalization of theology and philosophy through metaphysical knowledge.[ii] Decades earlier, Ananda Coomaraswamy had exerted a strong influence on, among other Catholics, the craftsman and writer Eric Gill. Coomaraswamy, a remarkable Hindu scholar who worked as Research Fellow at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in the 30s and 40s, was one of three writers sometimes referred to as the founders of the "Traditionalist school" (of which Nasr is a later and eminent representative), the others being the Frenchman René Guénon and the Swiss Frithjof Schuon. Traditionalism crosses religious boundaries but (it claims) without eroding them. It insists that truth can only be attained through the practice and mediation of a religious tradition. Such forms can be transcended only from within: each revealed religion remains unique and precious in all its details, and must be accepted and practised as the condition for spiritual realization. The Thomist writer Bernard Kelly, a contemporary of Gill's, wrote of one work by Schuon (Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts), "The book has a fullness of light which we have no right to find in the twentieth century, or perhaps any other century." To Kelly and other Catholics (including the Catholic Anglican, T.S. Eliot), Schuon's achievement seemed to hold out the hope of a genuine dialogue with the Oriental cultures at their most profound level. As Kelly put it: "Neither the nineteenth century nor our own possesses a philosophical language able to render metaphysical truth with precision. The attempt to find words for exact metaphysical terms has baffled the translators of St Thomas no less than of the Upanishads. There is however a difference, for while the translators of St Thomas may be presumed to have one traditional intellectual discipline at their fingertips, the translators of the Upanishads who needed to have two generally had neither. It has been said, with some justice, that they appear to have taken their philosophical language from the newspapers. The Hindu texts are not the cause of confusion, but the occasion for its display." He goes on to say that while this fact was demonstrated in an incomparable way by Coomaraswamy, the necessary "common metaphysical language" was developed primarily by Guénon and Schuon. The three figures taken together - and notwithstanding what Kelly already perceived as their failure to appreciate certain key teachings of Christianity (a point I will touch on below) - have played a key role in reopening the "luminous eye" of each tradition "towards the source of its light". They are "situated far above the syncretism of an Aldous Huxley or a Gerald Heard".[iii] But the fact that the call for a dialogue between the religions on the basis of a renewed metaphysics has been taken up again by a Pope of the "Vatican II Church" must be regarded as a striking event by those who believe that the Council effectively ended access to Tradition for those who remained faithful to Rome. It raises hopes once more of what Guénon (himself a former Catholic) in the early years of the twentieth century referred to as the redressement, or restoration of traditional intellectuality within the Church. In this article, I want to try to establish what might be meant by the renewal of metaphysics in our present cultural situation within the Catholic Church, and then to go on to raise certain questions about the nature of the Christian tradition itself that will need to be answered in the course of such a renewal. The Degrees of Reality In the modern world, it is in the field of popular science rather than philosophy that many of our metaphysical concerns and assumptions are played out. As has frequently been noted, in the "new physics" the cosmos is compared to an organism rather than a machine. It is described as a pattern of relationships, preserving itself in a meaningful homeostasis or equilibrium in the midst of change - even while the matter of which it is composed is in constant flux. The development of the sciences of organization - cybernetics and General Systems Theory - established a conceptual framework for the study of systems as such: that is, of wholes whose properties depend not just on the sum of their parts but on their interrelationships. Whatever the exaggerations to which this view has led - examples of which abound in the popular science section of every bookstore - it seems clear that a fundamental shift in perception has occurred, or is occurring, in the consciousness of a great many people, symbolized by the rise of the science of ecology: a shift away from the mechanistic and reductionistic, towards the organicist and participatory. I have no intention of surveying the entire field of such writings, but will simply dwell for a moment on one particularly instructive example. Henri Bortoft was influenced both by the writings of the anthroposophist Owen Barfield and by the experience of working with the physicist David Bohm in the 1960s. He finds in the long-neglected scientific writings of the German Romantic poet Johann von Goethe practical guidelines for a new "delicate" or "participatory" empiricism.[iv] This requires the scientist to be trained to perceive the whole in its parts; to attain through imagination the Gestalt (form or figure) that unites the phenomena in their multiplicity: in other words, to understand before explaining. On this basis one may conceive of building up what Bortoft calls a "science of qualities" superior to the purely quantitative physics of Isaac Newton. For according to Goethe, cognition is not something imposed, but something received from nature, received within the "sensory imagination, when this is developed as an organ of perception" [ibid.]. A human consciousness trained in this way participates in the very being of the plant or animal under examination, so that the form perceived imaginatively, far from being a mere mental (nominalistic) representation of the thing, becomes its incarnation in consciousness. As this briefest of sketches tries to suggest, there is much that is appealing and important in Bortoft's writing. However, as in the case of most of the metaphysics offered by modern scientific writers as the underpinning or conclusion of their speculations, Bortoft's Goethean metaphysics seems to be partly based on a false contrast with the ancient or Platonic philosophy. For Bortoft, the enemy is a science based on "metaphysical separation". This is the view that behind this world we experience with the senses "there is another, nonsensory world, which is the intelligible origin of what appears," so that the "intelligibility of whatever we encounter in the world of sense experience is in another world that is separate from this sensory world" [ibid., 180, cf. 252]. This is seen by Bortoft as the "organizing idea" behind modern science, with its attempt to penetrate into the pure mathematical foundations of reality and reduce the cosmos to what is sometimes described as a "formula you can wear on your T-shirt". That is why he is attracted to Goethe, who (at least after the encounter with Schiller) rejected this fundamental principle. For Goethe, "There is no underlying reality behind the appearances, but only the intensive depth of the phenomenon itself" [ibid., p. 233]. Bortoft blames this metaphysical separation on Plato, thus locating the problem at the very root of the intellectual and spiritual tradition of European thought. Precisely here, I believe, the Traditionalist authors can offer a much-needed corrective not only to Bortoft but to much modern thought - and the contrast will enable me to establish more clearly what I mean by thesophia perennis. For these authors, who certainly regard themselves as being of one mind with Plato, there can be no question of a "separation" of the two worlds. If anything, the temptation lies in the other direction; that is, in a monism that would reduce the world of multiplicity to sheer illusion. According to Titus Burkhardt, who maintains a careful balance in this matter, the eide or logoi which are the archetypal forms of everything in the world have no reality apart from God on the one hand and the world on the other. As mental forms they are indeed mere abstractions. But as "possibilities" inherent in the Intellect and (principially) in the divine nature, they constitute the meaning and content of reality, which without them would fall back into nothingness.[v] Inseparable from the traditional ontology outlined in Burkhardt's book is an epistemology and an anthropology. The doctrine of the degrees of reality, in both macrocosm and microcosm, leads Traditionalists to reject any dualistic anthropology that might deprive the human subject of access to archetypal reality. The human subject is tripartite, consisting of body, soul and spirit, corresponding to the three main levels of reality. The faculty by which we know the divine Ideas, variously called Nous, Intellectus or Buddhi, constitutes a ray of the divine Sun in the heart of man. It knows the logoi by connaturality, by intuition. At the level of the soul, these intuitions are clothed in symbols by the imagination, which mediates between the intellect (supplier of the "form") and the bodily senses (which provide the "matter") for human cognition. The Orientalist Henry Corbin has written a series of impressive studies on the Persian tradition of Ibn Arabi, Suhrawardi and Mulla Sadra, bringing out the role of the "creative imagination" as an organ of perception, and the "theophanies" that these writers discovered in the mundus imaginalis.[vi] Though these ideas are today more closely associated with writers on Islamic than on Christian philosophy, it would not be hard to relate them (as Traditionalists often do) to Scholastic thought in the West. The Christian Scholastics were well aware of the Islamic philosophers, to whom in many cases they owed their knowledge of the great texts of Classical philosophy, and they spent a great deal of time refuting or transforming their ideas in the light of the Christian revelation. Nevertheless, though the Christian and Islamic thinkers of the Middle Ages were in many respects opposed, they were much closer to each other than to the Nominalists of the fourteenth or the Rationalists of the seventeenth centuries. The Catholic philosopher E.I. Watkin brings out many of these commonalities in his neglected book A Philosophy of Form, which could stand as a model of the kind of retrieval of medieval thought that needs to take place today if a serious metaphysical dialogue between the religions is to be possible. There he points out, among other things, that the Christian Scholastics (preeminently, of course, Aquinas and Bonaventure) were first of all contemplatives, rather than philosophers or theologians in the modern sense. Yet they stand at the very end of medieval thought, and the method they adopted for disputation was exploited by the less contemplative men that came after in the interests of Rationalism. Furthermore, the Thomistic principle nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu ("there is nothing in the understanding which was not first in the senses"), which was valid if understood as Aquinas intended it, "may be understood, and unfortunately has been understood, to mean that our perceptions of external objects are wholly sensible and our senses alone produce such perception. On the contrary, so-called sense perception is possible only because, in a confused medley of atomic sense data, the mind directly intuits the forms which give these data significance. Perception involves a factor of intellection. The denial of this truth has led directly to the proton pseudos of modern philosophical error - the positivist and sensationalist empiricism which admits only evidence derived from sense perception wrongly taken to be such".[vii] Another consequence of taking seriously the "degrees of reality" is a healthy scepticism with regard to purely materialist theories of evolution, which in fact make sense only to people who lack the sense of spiritual forms or essences. If that whole dimension is closed to our minds, if there is no conception of what might be meant by "vertical causality", then naturally there is nowhere else for species to come from than below, through a combination of chance and necessity. The successive temporal unfolding of species does not prove the truth of the theories that are adduced to explain it. According to Titus Burckhardt: "All 'matter' is like a mirror that reflects the activity of the essences by inverting it; that is why the seed comes before the tree and the leaf bud before the flower, whereas in the principial order perfect 'forms' preexist".[viii] And Watkin agrees: "Since the hierarchy of beings is, as we have seen, a scale of degrees between nothingness and Absolute Being, we should expect a priori corresponding continuity in their appearance" [ibid., 258-9]. And: "Matter cannot give birth to form. The new form therefore must derive from the Divine Mind where all forms are contained and all are perfect" [ibid., 260]. The inner form that makes a species what it is exists eternally, and is simply imprinted upon the matter that is ready to receive it at the right time. Here too we find ground for agreement - or at the least dialogue - between Catholic and Traditionalist thought. The Catholic Tradition Cardinal Henri de Lubac has devoted a long essay to the development and subsequent neglect of Pauline tripartite anthropology (see 1 Thess. 5:23) in the Christian West.[ix] In the first part of this he establishes that St Paul's references to this anthropology have deep roots in Scripture as well as in human experience. They were not simply imported from an alien Greek philosophy (de Lubac notes the existence of "Plato phobia" among many Christian scholars, especially in the modern period). But the term for "spirit" (pneuma) remains deliberately ambiguous in Paul. On the one hand it may refer to the Holy Spirit or divine life implanted in man by baptism; on the other, it may refer to a part of man, and specifically to that "breath of life" which God breathed into his nostrils at the very beginning (Gen. 2:7). It becomes clear as he proceeds that we are talking of the "highest point of the soul", and that the ambiguity in question is precisely due to the paradoxical relationship of nature to grace in our human destiny. We are created to share in the life of God, but we are not compelled to do so: we can attain that life only through the exercise of freedom. It is worth noting that Rudolf Steiner regarded the Fourth Council of Constantinople (870) as having effectively demolished this paradoxical, tripartite anthropology within orthodox Catholicism, replacing it with a dualistic understanding of man. However, that Council took the position it did in order to oppose an incipient dualism. It was concerned to ensure that the distinction of the spirit from the soul of man would not introduce a "Gnostic" duality into the human subject of salvation.[x] St Thomas, similarly, four centuries later, was concerned to defend the immortality of the soul by resisting the teaching of the Arabian Peripatetics who made a single angel the common source of intellectual illumination for all men. For Thomas, the light flows directly from God to the human spirit, and belongs to the essence of the soul, though it may be "strengthened" by an angel's light. St John of the Cross (in his "Counsels of Light and Love") seems to imply actual angelic transmission: "Consider that your guardian angel does not always move the desire to act, though he ever illumines the reason". De Lubac, at any rate, does not judge the decision of 870 worthy of mention, but sees the tripartite tradition continuing without interruption right through the early Scholastic period. In St Thomas, the distinction takes a slightly different form: that between action and contemplation, or the moral and the mystical life, or ratio and intellectus. It re-emerges fully in the Renaissance with Nicholas of Cusa and Ficino. Despite the triumph of the new Cartesian dualism in the universities, the authentic Christian tradition shines through in a continuous chain of authors up to and beyond Paul Claudel (who speaks of "this sacred point in us that says Pater noster"). How could it not, when the experience of every spiritual master confirms the existence in us of a place where we encounter God - the spirit, or "soul of the soul"? Another important reference-point for the contemporary dialogue on metaphysics is the work of Jean Borella, a Catholic Traditionalist who has in recent years distanced himself from Schuon, having concluded that both Schuon and Guénon had failed to understand some crucial elements of the Christian tradition (including the sacraments and the Trinity). His book The Sense of the Supernatural, building on de Lubac, is an attempt to wrestle with the question of what went wrong in the Church that led to the modern loss of the sense of the sacred, and to formulate a valid ontology and epistemology that will be acceptable within present-day Catholicism. He recognizes the "new evangelization" of John Paul II as "a project of vast proportions", undermining the recent tension with the Catholic Traditionalists. "By calling them to the task of recovery in which he has been involved, he is showing that henceforth it is not absurd to carry on this struggle from within the Church".[xi] Borella is particularly concerned, in the last part of his book, with the concept of "deification" and its implications. He argues that the loss of the sense of the sacred and the supernatural in the modern world (and among the Modernists in the Church) is linked, as de Lubac showed in the 1940s, with the loss of a sense of human transcendence - the possibility of "transformation into God" as taught by Scripture, the Church Fathers and the great mystics.[xii] Once again, he insists on the tripartite nature of the human being, with the spirit or "soul of the soul" as the actual place of our union with God. It is in the heart and centre of the soul that "the divine Essence unites with created being and becomes the very act of its intellect"; in other words, where the knowledge and will of the creature become one, in perfect receptivity to the actus purus which is God. Borella adds: "Does all this involve the literal identification of the creature's substantial being with God? Certainly not. The created being as such remains a created being, and never 'becomes' the Creator.... Far from effacing the creature, deification alone makes it possible for it to exist in its integral truth. If deification were equivalent to a negation of the creature, it would be a sheer contradiction, since to negate the creature is to negate the creative Will of God and therefore God himself. Deification is, to the contrary, the only possible affirmation of the creature" [ibid., 130-40]. It is, in fact, the completion of that process which the Christian tradition calls "creation". The final paragraph of Jean Borella's book is full of significance for us. "The grace of the active assumption of finiteness is conferred on us by the Passion of Christ's dying on the Cross. 'Abandoned' of God, he renounces the 'God' of his natural will and goes, with a single loving rush, right to the end, right to the exhaustion of created being. In him the human will, espousing in a mortal and crucifying union the creative Will of divine Love, accepts being only what it is; it wills its own ontological finiteness, it accomplishes the infinite Will of the Father." A Question Concerning "Transcendental Unity" We have seen that there could well be considerable scope for agreement between Catholic and Traditionalist - not just on the need for metaphysics, but to some extent on metaphysical doctrine itself, and even on its implications for cosmology and anthropology. But how far can this agreement extend before it runs aground on the Christian claim that Christ alone saves, let alone the claim that outside the Church there is no salvation? For Schuon, each religious tradition has a perfectly valid claim to be unique and central, superior to all others. Indeed, for the collectivity to which it is addressed, it is central and indispensable. Just as each man in a crowd may legitimately call himself "I", and cannot but view himself as situated at the centre of the world, so in each religion the Absolute says "I" and demands unqualified adherence.[xiii] One could perhaps demonstrate that the methods and aims, the doctrines and ethics of each religion are not directly in conflict with one another, but when correctly understood are somehow complementary (so that the "salvation" offered by Christianity is a different thing from the "Liberation" offered by Buddhism, or the denial of the Trinity in Islam is directed at an understanding of the Trinity different from that of Christians, for example). For the sake of argument let us assume that such has been shown. But the question remains, at least for Christians: is even this sufficient to safeguard our sense that Christianity itself transcends even such a "transcendental unity"? This forces us to look more closely at the precise relationship of metaphysics to theology. Traditionalist metaphysics rests on the self-evidence of the One as its first principle. S.H. Nasr, for his part, is "aware of the necessity, on its own level, of the theological formulations which insist on the hiatus between God and man or the Creator and the world." However, he believes the metaphysical knowledge of Unity "comprehends the theological one in both a figurative and literal sense, while the reverse is not true".[xiv] For Schuon similarly, theology (based on revelation) transcends philosophy, but equally metaphysics must transcend theology. "The latter is the Word of God spoken to his creatures, whereas intellectual intuition is a direct and active participation in divine knowledge and not an indirect and passive participation, as is faith. In other words, in the case of intellectual intuition, knowledge is not possessed by the individual insofar as he is an individual, but insofar as in his innermost essence he is not distinct from his Divine Principle".[xv] A corollary, therefore, of the transcendental unity of religions is the transcendence of theology by metaphysics. For a Christian, however, one of Schuon's least impressive books is Logic and Transcendence, where he struggles to make out that the Christian Trinity is merely an upaya - a provisional or skillful means, in the Buddhist sense, more or less effective as an aid to devotion but not finally "true". He treats the Persons as "aspects" of the divine Unity. "Whatever may be the necessity or the expediency of the Trinitarian theology, from the standpoint of pure metaphysic it appears to confer the quality of absoluteness on relativities." "Only Unity as such can be a definition of the Absolute." Of course, he points out, the Creator possesses a certain "relative absoluteness" with regard to creatures in its various aspects or modalities, "but to assert, as one has heard it done, that the Trinitarian relationships belong, not to this relative absoluteness, but to the pure and intrinsic Absolute, or to the absoluteness of the Essence, amounts to asking us to accept that two and two make five or that an effect has no cause, which no religious message can do and the Christian message has certainly never done."[xvi] (Thus he dismisses the Councils of the Church and many of the Church Fathers with a wave of the hand.) On the contrary, as a Christian who is faithful to tradition may wish to argue, this "absoluteness of relativity" is precisely what we are asking you to accept. Its other name is love. If the Christian is right that the Absolute has revealed to man a truth about its own inner life, and that this revelation of the Trinity can only be received in faith, then it must be faith rather than metaphysics that penetrates most deeply into the nature of reality. Theology (the science that reflects on revelation) must be permitted to transform metaphysics. Something like this is argued by the Traditionalist author Philip Sherrard, a member of the Greek Orthodox Church, in his final book, Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition.[xvii] Sherrard devotes a long chapter to the "Logic of Metaphysics" in René Guénon - although the points he makes are just as applicable to Schuon, as we shall see. Guénon did more than anyone else to reawaken metaphysical perception in our century, he says. But Guénon made two important assumptions that predisposed him against Christianity and towards Vedanta (and which help to explain his own conversion from Catholicism to Islam). The first of these assumptions was that a strict correlation must be preserved between the metaphysical and the logical order - thus ruling out in advance the more paradoxical Christian relationship between Unity and Trinity in the Godhead. The second assumption was that every "determination" of the Absolute must be some form of limitation, and is therefore incompatible with the divine nature. These two assumptions led Guénon into an apophaticism so radical that he could affirm nothing at all of the Absolute, except by way of negation - including, obviously, a negation of the Christian Trinity. Before his death, then, Sherrard had come to the conclusion that a Christian thinker who accepts Revelation must start from an entirely different point of view - must begin, in fact, from the knowledge that the supreme Principle is the Trinity, and furthermore that "personality" (indeed, triple Personality) in God is not necessarily a limitation. Without it, in fact, the Absolute has no actual freedom to determine itself or create a world: the freedom of God becomes merely the absence of external contraint. Although Sherrard assumes Schuon's "transcendental unity" approach throughout his book, it does seem to me that this particular insight calls into question one of the core teachings of the Traditionalists: that a personal (or Tri-Personal) deity derives from an impersonal Godhead and will be "dissolved" in the gnosis which transcends Being. (As Sherrard writes, "This view thus involves a total denial of the ultimate value and reality of the personal. It demands as a condition of metaphysical knowledge a total impersonalism - the annulment and alienation of the person.") Of course, the insight leaves the other religions intact. It even leaves open the possibility that the Traditionalists have correctly understood them. But it separates Christianity from them, and perhaps even raises Christianity above them, in a way that seems to me incompatible (more so than he himself realized) with the theory of "transcendental unity". Theological Metaphysics Much more food for thought on this vexed question of the "uniqueness" of Christianity is provided by the Catholic theologian and cultural historian Hans Urs von Balthasar. Widely recognized as a major influence on the thought of Pope John Paul II, Balthasar recognizes more than any other modern theologian the need for theology to transform metaphysics. In his own work he develops two themes that are of great relevance to us here. In the series called "The Glory of the Lord" (particularly the first volume) he makes the distinction between authentic Christian gnosis and the varieties of heretical Gnosticism, exploring the meaning of what it is to "see the form" (the Gestalt) of Christ as the revelation of the Father and the glory of God. This involves him in a retrieval of theological aesthetics - of theology under the aspect of "beauty". And in the subsequent series of volumes entitled Theo-Drama he develops a new understanding of what is meant by the relationship between the freedom of God and the freedom of man.[xviii] To take first the question of gnosis: Balthasar intends to "secure for gnosis the place which belongs to it in virtue of its outstanding importance and certainty" [GL, I, 136]. Biblical (and Alexandrian) gnosis is not merely a "preamble" to faith, but "the interior understanding of faith, the insight into the mystery of faith itself". In the interior appropriation of faith, its content unfolds before the "spiritual senses". "The gnostic Christian does not outgrow the proclamation of the Church, but in the kerygma he finds, revealing himself, the Logos, who, in the most comprehensive sense, 'enlightens' the believer ever more clearly and, indeed, draws him, as John was drawn, to his breast ever more intimately and unites him interiorly with himself" [GL, I, 137] - that is, on the Cross and in the Resurrection. Balthasar continues: "In his humanity and its symbolic character, the Logos then lets the light of the divine nature with its truth and beauty - the very glory of the Father - illumine the gnostic ever more brightly. To say that for the gnostic the earthly veil enveloping revelation has become transparent means equally that in the letter he sees the Spirit, in the Old he sees the New Testament, and in the latter the promised eternity; in Jesus' humanity he sees his divinity, and in the Son, through the Spirit, he sees the Father. What is here involved is, therefore, nothing other than the turning of faith to its own interior authenticity, as faith in a proposition ('belief that Christ') becomes faith in a person ('believing Christ')." Ultimately it is love that enables the spiritual senses to blossom in this way. "Love is the creative power of God himself which has been infused into man by virtue of God's Incarnation. This is why, in the light of the divine ideas, love can read the world of forms and, in particular, man correctly" [GL, I, 424]. So Balthasar can say (in the same passage) that it is in love for his neighbour that the Christian "definitively receives his Christian senses, which, of course, are none other than his bodily senses, but these senses in so far as they have been formed according to the form of Christ" - the form of love. If I may now compare this with Schuon's perspective, it is noticeable that while he writes a great deal on love, he generally refers only to our love for God (or for each other), and rarely to God's love for us. In fact he regards love as an "aspect" of God which for Christians becomes primary only because they are considering the Absolute at a relative level, having been forced by their interpretation of the Incarnation to introduce the distinction of Persons (thus "relativity") into the Absolute. As was suggested in the previous section, Schuon assumes that Christians are reading the Trinitarian relations into God "from below", as it were. For Balthasar and the Church Fathers, these are revealed "from above". They cannot therefore be "understood" (in the literal sense of that word), or rationalized (although this is a constant temptation in Western theology), but can only be known by being lived. Schuon, we might say, writes at length about the Trinity and often quite beautifully (for he is a poet as well as a metaphysician), but he does not have the eyes of faith, and so does not see as clearly as Philip Sherrard the lineaments of the Christian tradition. Christian gnosis, or Balthasar's "seeing the form" (the title of the first volume of The Glory of the Lord), is the place where we might integrate (with appropriate adjustments!) much of what the Persian tradition tells us about the Interworld or mundus imaginalis. Despite widespread suspicion of the imagination among the Desert Fathers and other Christian authorities, Balthasar concentrates less on the imagination as a capacity for deception and as a source of distraction and temptation than on its role in prophecy and in the revelation of spiritual truths, as the locus for visionary experience, and as the home of symbolism, of poetry and of creativity. It is, Balthasar seems to suggest, the world of the "heart" where the Virgin Mary ponders the words and deeds of God, and where she first conceives the Word in humble obedience to the great Angel. Thus from the gnosis of faith, hope and love, infused into the human soul by the Holy Spirit, we have moved easily to the "feminine": the Church or Bride of Christ, with Mary his Mother as the unblemished, esoteric heart mediating all his graces, radiating him into the world. Balthasar notes: "The terrible havoc which the 'historical-critical method' is today wreaking in the world of faith is possible only in a spiritual sphere from which the Church's Marian dimension has been banished and which has, therefore, forsaken all spiritual senses and their ecclesial communication. This devastation is spreading not only over the whole theological realm [he wrote this in 1961]; it is penetrating even the area of philosophy. Here the world is becoming imageless and valueless; it is a heap of 'facts' which no longer say anything and in which an equally imageless and formless naked existence is freezing and anguishing unto death. The philosophy and the theology of the image stand and fall together, and when the image of woman has vanished from the theological realm, and exclusively masculine, imageless conceptuality and thought-technique takes over, and then faith finds itself banished from the world and confined to the realm of the paradoxical and the absurd" [GL, I, 423]. A Theological Metaphysics The passage I have just quoted prepares the way for much in the later series, Theo-Drama, concerning the mediation of divine Glory by the feminine - as does his section on Vladimir Solovyev, whom he praises for having successfully synthesized and purified the whole history of Western Sophiology: he "integrates gnosis into Christianity" [GL, III, 285]. But what I want to concentrate upon here is the way in the second series Balthasar develops the idea of (feminine)receptivity as a function of personal relationship and communion at every level, including the divine, and as an intrinsic part of his account of divine and human freedom - especially the freedom of God to create, and the freedom of man to choose eternal damnation (thus raising two of the most fundamental questions for Christian esotericism). God, the supreme Act of existing, is also the supreme act of giving. Before giving existence to creation, the Father eternally and completely gives himself to the Son in the Spirit. This giving is in fact what constitutes both the Son and the Spirit (as being eternally "from" the Father, each in a different way). But if there is giving in God, there must equally be receiving - even on the part of the Father, who lovingly receives back the Son's gift of himself in the Spirit. Therefore, instead of rejecting the idea of receptivity in God as many Thomists have done because it seems incompatible with divine perfection, Balthasar argues that any imperfection in receiving applies only to a being who is receptive because needy. (The finite, of course, can add nothing to the Infinite; but not because it is strictly "nothing", only because the Infinite has always- already received it, always-already transcended it.) He builds upon the Aristotelian distinction between Act and Potency, and the Thomistic distinction between Existence and Essence, but within the Act which is God's nature he sees a further distinction, between the kenosis (self- giving) and receptivity that properly belong to love.[xix] The distinction is a function of the "otherness" of the divine Persons one from another, within the self-same nature and unity of love. This intra-Trinitarian "distance" (the Son is not the Father or the Spirit) provides Balthasar with the key to overcoming the cosmological problem noted by Philip Sherrard: the conventional interpretation of creatio ex nihilo, which sets up the created world as an "other" - and virtually a rival - to God.[xx] If there is this distance within God, because God is a Trinity, then there is a "space" within God for the act of creation, which takes place ab intra, not ad extra (to use Sherrard's terms). Balthasar's focus, however, is on the implications for divine freedom. According to Frithjof Schuon, "Divine freedom means that God is free not to create a particular world; it cannot mean that He is free not to create at all".[xxi] For both St Thomas and for Balthasar, on the other hand, the creation must be a free act on God's part, simply because its Existence is distinct from its Essence. It cannot be "necessary being".[xxii] But the creation is also not required even as an expression of God's goodness, because the need of goodness to communicate itself (the old Platonic principle) is forever already satisfied in the generation of the Son by the Father. The fact of the Trinitarian processions thus seems to opens up a new horizon of freedom within the Absolute. It also implies a new dimension of glory for the creature, if God's only motivation in creating is love. For love has a quality of superabundant delight in doing the unnecessary, in "surprising" the Beloved with an unlooked-for gift. "It is one of the laws of love that the lover cannot completely fathom the essence of the beloved.... He must always disclose and surrender himself afresh, continually surprising and overwhelming the lover. If ever this movement were to stop, to be replaced by a conclusive knowledge of each other, love would come to an end. What seemed to be complete knowledge would be the sign of a real finitude. But in God nothing is finite."[xxiii] In the very last pages of Theo-Drama, Balthasar confronts the question, "What does God gain from the world?" This connects two of his major themes: not only that of God's freedom in creating, but also the relationship of God's freedom to that of man: in particular, the possibility that some creatures may through the use of their freedom be damned forever and therefore lost to God. The question then becomes: what does Godlose in losing man? Balthasar had earlier written a controversial book entitled Dare We Hope (That All May be Saved)? arguing that we may indeed so hope, both on the basis of Scripture and on the basis of visions and insights granted to the mystics. (He draws the line, unlike Sergei Bulgakov, at the salvation of demons.)[xxiv] Schuon, of course, regards the doctrine of an eternal hell as pertaining to "exoteric" truth, not to esotericism, because the eternity of such a state cannot be located on the same level of reality as the eternity of God.[xxv] While Balthasar does not propose a simple rejection of the doctrine of hell, he stresses the defeat for God that the damnation of any person would in fact represent, and sees the separation of the sinner from God as encompassed and contained by the separation of Son from Father in the abandonment of the Cross. The otherness of the divine Persons from each other within the Trinitarian Act, which is the "result" of their unlimited self-giving, is therefore the basis not only for the free act of creation, but also for the redemption of that creation once it has fallen through the use of its own freedom into the depths of sin. Without going into detail, Balthasar has proposed the dogma of the Trinity as the basis for authentic Christian esotericism. Balthasar is not afraid to refer to it as such, though he stresses that the authentically Christian esotericist is one who has recognized the beauty of Christ and been initiated into into the mystery of his suffering: "For at this point one must have seen the same thing as they if one is to understand them, and this, therefore, is the point where a certain esotericism is unavoidable and where the proofs for the truth contemplated necessarily bear the character of a ritual initiation, as the Symposium showed long ago. Even so truly a Church of the People' as the Catholic Church does not abolish genuine esotericism. The secret path of the saints is never denied to one who is really willing to follow it. But who in the crowd troubles himself over such a path?" [GL, I, 34.] As for the freedom of God, Balthasar does not place it at the same level as that of man. In God, freedom and necessity coincide perfectly, and this is true preeminently of the "must" of love. As he says, "The whole thrust of this book has been to show that the infinite possibilities of divine freedom all lie within the trinitarian distinctions and are thus free possibilities within the eternal life of love in God that has always been realized."[xxvi] From Eckhart to Ruysbroeck Among Christian writers, we find the closest approach to Schuon's view of metaphysics in Meister Eckhart, whose Christian orthodoxy has often been called into question (notably, of course, by the Pope in his own lifetime). It is still not clear, however, that this perspective is straightforwardly heretical, or even entirely incompatible with the more mainstream Dominican tradition represented by St Thomas. It has been argued, for example, that Eckhart accepted and assumed everything the Church and St Thomas had taught, but was trying to write and speak from the point of view of divine knowledge - from God's point of view, rather than that of the creature.[xxvii] This makes him appear to be elevating a "Godhead" above the Trinity, when he might have been intending to do nothing of the sort. Balthasar - who is critical of this tendency in Eckhart, preferring the more explicitly Christocentric and love-centred mysticism of Suso, Tauler and John of the Cross - makes a useful distinction. He writes that "ideas have their own historical dynamic; they are governed by and obey their own laws, regardless of the meaning they had for their originator." (In fact, it is precisely the purpose of Balthasar's The Glory of the Lord to explore this historical dynamic and so to unravel the knot of modernity.) Consequently, he is able to view Eckhart's as an "authentically Christian" experience of God, "wholly limpid and shadowless", even though clothed in ill-fitting garments which bequeathed innumerable problems to his successors. The future "will not think, as he does, with a worshipping heart, and so will misuse his words and insights for the purposes of its Titanic Idealism". It was in this way that Eckhart unwittingly opened a way for Cusanus and Boehme, for Luther and Hegel, and even for modern atheism.[xxviii] Even if we assume there is more to Eckhart than simple heresy, it remains true for those of us who lack his evident purity that to neglect the perspective of the creature in a premature assumption of divine knowledge would be to risk falling into Luciferian intellectual pride. This is the spiritual danger that lies in wait for Traditionalism when it separates metaphysics too self- confidently from theology, in effect dispensing with the humble submission to revealed truth which is proper to the creature as such. (It should be remembered that Lucifer was an angel of light.) Humble faith, on the other hand, is a sure path that leads through hope to love, and in love to the most complete and active participation in divine knowledge, through the grace of the Holy Spirit. In this way theology as the "esotericism of the saints" will always overtake metaphysics. Balthasar regards Eckhart's successor John Ruysbroeck as having most successfully "purified" his thought of these tendencies, and in particular the tendency to separate the Trinitarian process from a dark primal Ground or Ungrund (his closest approach to Vedantic and Islamic mysticism). For Ruysbroeck it is the Father, not the "Godhead", who is the "unilluminable primal Ground" of the divine Unity, "utterly light, manifest to itself, in the reciprocal love that is effulgent in the Son". "The Son and the Spirit 'flow back' into the Father: this both the self-transcendence of the Persons into the simple identity of essence and the highest bliss of love of the Persons, who are perfected as such in this very self-transcendence. Thus God remains eternal event, yet without temporal becoming" [T-D, V, 459]. Thus in Ruysbroeck's understanding, as in Balthasar's, Trinity and Incarnation are bound up together in a way that must - when fully grasped - transform both the metaphysical conception of God and our conception of Being. "[What is] shown to us is that the limitless and all-embracing breadth of the trinitarian Father has replaced and far surpassed the compass of the philosophico-mystical Ungrounded Principle. To be sure, many who have grasped this difficulty have too quickly sought to clothe their answer in Neo-Platonist concepts.... But this can in no way diminish the legitimate urgency of grasping truly and immediately, within faith’s personal love-encounter, the ultimate transpersonal and trinitarian reality. The pantheistic tat tvam asi, which identifies subject and object in their depths, can be resolved only by virtue of the unity between God and man in the Son, who is both the ars divina mundi and the quintessence of actual creation (see Book III of Nicolas of Cusa’s Doctor Ignorantia), and by virtue of the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from this incarnate Son in his unity with the Father"[GL, Vol. I, 195]. With this we can pick up the theme we have already glimpsed in Jean Borella concerning that mysterious inner point of the human spirit which is in contact with the infinity of the divine Spirit. "Looking into his own ground," Balthasar writes, Ruysbroeck "sees beyond it into the eternal I, which for man is both the source of his own I as well as his eternal Thou, and in the final analysis this is because the eternal I is already in itself I and Thou in the unity of the Holy Spirit" [GL, V, p. 70]. The encounter with God in this Place is a nuptial encounter, a spiritual marriage. Thus Ruysbroeck integrates the feminine in a way that Eckhart fails to do. Conclusion In this essay, I have tried to suggest that Christians should pay some attention to the Traditionalist writers, who speak in the name of a metaphysics that they claim transcends religious divisions. If they wish to revive authentic metaphysics in our time, as the Pope has suggested, they cannot ignore the fact that in social and cultural terms the different religious traditions of the world now effectively interpenetrate. It is essential to work out how far a Christian can go in acknowledging the "seeds of truth" in other religions. A dialogue with the Traditionalists would help to force this question to the very deepest level. At the same time, I have argued that Traditionalists should pay more attention to some at least of the recent developments within Catholic theology. According to Balthasar (who affirms this even more strongly than Borella or Sherrard), what Christians have to say is not something less than, say, Vedanta or Sufism: Christians must necessarily take a step beyond the other earthly expressions of the "primordial tradition"; a step prompted and justified by God’s freely-given revelation. Balthasar believes that "the Christians of today, living in a night which is deeper than that of the later Middle Ages, are given the task of performing the act of affirming Being, unperturbed by the darkness and the distortion, in a way that is vicarious and representative for all humanity: an act which is at first theological, but which contains within itself the whole dimension of the metaphysical act of the affirmation of Being" [GL, V, 648]. This affirmation of being includes the cosmic hierarchy of forms and meanings. He writes, for example: "The gods cannot be interpreted as the personifications of human and cosmic forces which could just as well be given abstract names. As concrete forms, they are radiant, unique images and unveilings of Being, of human existence within experienced Being, of 'regions' of Being which cannot be divided by arbitrary borderlines. Within finite contours, these images validly encompass and embody the fulness of the universe. A Michelangelo, a Goethe, a Keats must still have seen such gods with their inner eye; many of their figures presuppose such encounters. And we must ask ourselves whether the inability of the modern heart to encounter gods - with the resultant withering up of human religions - is altogether to Christianity's advantage. The derision of the gods by Christian apologists, even by the great Augustine, is not indeed in every respect a glorious chapter of the Church's history" [GL, I, 500]. This passage, however, must be read in the context of Balthasar's entire argument, where he shows that the realm of the 'gods', of mythology, of symbolism, of poetry, ultimately becomes the receptacle of divine glory through the Incarnation. Christianity includes all that is true, and therefore of perennial value, in the other traditions, but at the same time it is possible to integrate this with what is uniquely shown in the Christian revelation.[xxix] The difference is irreducible. "It is not that an eternally present cosmic law is now brought to consciousness in a new way by Christ; rather, out of the freedom of God's love a mode of salvation is created by which all is safeguarded in God" [GL, I, 507, my emphasis]. Balthasar is surely a writer that the Traditionalists should take extremely seriously. But they may find hard to accept his view of Christianity as somehow "more" than all other religions, or his conclusion that "the Christian is called to be the guardian of metaphysics for our time" [GL, I, 656]. For on the face of it, what could seem more absurd? In the last few centuries, and particularly in the last fifty years, Christians have become the least metaphysical people on earth. It was Christianity that opened the door to modernity, which is virtually founded on the destruction of metaphysics. On the other hand, does not this very fact imply the role that Balthasar gives Christianity, for the worst is a corruption of the best? Only something quite unique among world religions could possess such an unprecedentedly destructive power. The reader will have to decide. One thing is clear. If such a transformation of Christians into "guardians of metaphysics" on a world scale is to take place - or even a much less ambitious recovery of a sense of the supernatural, and thus of the true meaning of their own sacraments and liturgy - Christians must look to the deepest springs of their tradition. Like Borella, Sherrard and Balthasar, they must become aware both of its distinctive character, as the revelation of a mystery within God, a "mystery hidden from all ages" (1 Cor. 2:7), the mystery of Christ - and also of all the elements of universal truth which Christianity seeks to integrate around that unique centre. The above article appears in the fourth issue of Sacred Web, which describes itself as “A journal of tradition and modernity”(understanding “tradition” in the sense given to this word by Frithjof Schuon), details of which may be obtained from Lakhani@uniserve.com. [i] John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, Vatican: 1998, section 83. [ii]The Encounter of Man and Nature, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968. [iii] These quotations are from B. Kelly, "Notes on the Light of the Eastern Religions", Blackfriars Publications, Vol. 7, 1954. [iv] H. Bortoft, The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way of Science, Edinburgh: Floris Books, 1996. For more on this theme, see my article "A Science of the Real", in Communio, XXV:3, Fall 1998. [v] T. Burkhardt, Introduction to Sufi Doctrine, Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1976, 62. [vi] For example, H. Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, Princeton University Press, 1969. See also William C. Chittick, Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-Arabi and the problem of Religious Diversity, State University of New York Press, 1994. Unless we take account of the nature of the imagination we cannot make much sense of the way visions and apparitions convey truth in a form that is nevertheless conditioned by culture and presupposition. Corbin, unfortunately (originally a Christian), is so carried away by the attractions of the Interworld that he can no longer conceive of a material Incarnation. [vii] E.I. Watkin, A Philosophy of Form, London: Sheed & Ward, 1950, 110. [viii] The Sword of Gnosis, Baltimore: Penguin, 1974, 144. [ix] H. de Lubac, S.J., in Theology in History, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996. [x] See Catechism of the Catholic Church, Para 367. [xi] J. Borella, The Sense of the Supernatural, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998, 43. [xii] Like E.I. Watkin on pp. 389-90 of A Philosophy of Form, he strongly objects to Jacques Maritain's denial of substantial or "entitative" contact of the human soul with God, contrasting this with the plain statement of St John of the Cross. [xiii] See, for example, his essay "Tradition and Modernity", reprinted in Vol. 1 of Sacred Web, July 1998. [xiv] S.H. Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989, 136-8. [xv] F. Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1975, xviii. [xvi] New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Quotations are from the chapter "Evidence and Mystery". [xvii] The book was published posthumously, by Holy Cross Press (Brookline) and T&T Clark (Edinburgh), in 1998. [xviii] The following abbreviations will be used for texts by Hans Urs von Balthasar. GL = The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Edinburgh and San Francisco: T&T Clark and Ignatius Press, 1982-91, seven volumes. T-D = Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988-98, five volumes. [xix] See G.F. O'Hanlon, The Immutability of God in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cambridge University Press, 1990. [xx] P. Sherrard, Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition, Brookline: Holy Cross, 1998, ch. 10. Sherrard sees this interpretation as lying at the root of secularization and also of the present ecological crisis. [xxi] Islam and the Perennial Philosophy, London: World of Islam Publishing Co., 1976, 173. [xxii] No Essence can exist unless "actualized": that is, only the act of existing makes it something rather than nothing. Here Balthasar sides in his interpretation with the so-called "existential Thomists", such as Etienne Gilson, for whom Existence reigns supreme, and God's Essence is infinite precisely because it is identical with his Existence. It should be noted for the sake of further dialogue between Catholic philosophers and the representatives of "Tradition" that a more Platonic interpretation has been developed by Josef Seifert and his colleagues at the International Academy of Philosophy, which still accepts the "real distinction" in St Thomas, but criticizes this view of the divine infinity and the exclusive priority of Existence over Essence on the gounds that not every essence is necessarily a limitation. See J. Seifert, "Essence and Existence", Aletheia, I and I.2, University of Dallas Press, 1977. [xxiii] Adrienne von Speyr, The World of Prayer, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1985, 42. See also H.U.von Balthasar, T-D, II, 258-9. [xxiv] But even here he makes an interesting qualification in T-D, V, 508: "the question of the fate of demons is insoluble in a theologia viatorum and must therefore be excluded". Does he mean that it is only necessarily to be excluded in a theologia viatorum? [xxv] F. Schuon, Understanding Islam, London: Allen & Unwin, 1963, 71-83. [xxvi] T-D, V, 508. Here, then, Balthasar comes closest to something Schuon would recognize as metaphysics, yet he comes to it by confronting more deeply the dogmatic mystery of the Trinity that Schuon cannot perceive except at the level of exotericism. [xxvii] C.F. Kelley, Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977, 37; Cyprian Smith, O.S.B., The Way of Paradox, London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1987, 65; Joseph Milne, “Eckhart and the Problem of Christian Non-Dualism”, Eckhart Review, March 1993. [xxviii] The quotations from Balthasar in this paragraph come from GL, V, 16-47.] [xxix] In this connection one can better understand Balthasar's interest in a remarkable but flawed work of Christian esotericism, Meditations on the Tarot (New York: Amity House, 1985), to which he contributed a Foreword in the German edition. One of the points he makes there is that the anonymous author, whom he calls "a thinking, praying Christian of unmistakable purity" (actually the former anthroposophist Valentin Tomberg) "is able to enter into all the varieties of occult science with such sovereignty, because for him they are secondary realities, which are only able to be truly known when they can be referred to the absolute mystery of divine love manifest in Christ. He does not in any way conceive of the Christian revelation as some kind of imprint - potential or real - of archetypes, be they subjective or objective. Rather, the latter merely form the cosmic material into which the unique Christian revelation finally incarnates; and since the incarnation of divine love, becoming human, is the ultimate aim of cosmic evolution, they comprise a round of allegories and schematic patterns announcing this event by way of 'mirrors and enigmas'." It is the Logos who is the Archetype of archetypes and revealer of the Father. By becoming man he gives to the fabric of existence a greater reality than it could otherwise have possessed. Article reproduced with the permission of Second Spring © Stratford Caldecott of secondspring.co.uk The Matheson Trust Communio 34 (Winter 2007). © 2007 by Communio: International Catholic Review
- [Towards a Deeper Ecumenism: Catholicism and Tradition](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/towards-a-deeper-ecumenism-catholicism-and-tradition) - Towards a Deeper Ecumenism: Catholicism and Tradition by Stratford Caldecott Wherever men and women discover a call to the absolute and transcendent, the metaphysical dimension of reality opens up before them: in truth, in beauty, in moral values, in other persons, in being itself, in God. We face a great challenge at the end of this millennium to move from phenomenon to foundation, a step as necessary as it is urgent. We cannot stop short at experience alone; even if experience does reveal the human being?s interiority and spirituality, speculative thinking must penetrate to the spiritual core and the ground from which it rises. Therefore, a philosophy which shuns metaphysics would be radically unsuited to the task of mediation in the understanding of Revelation. 1 With such words as these, Pope John Paul II, in his 1998 encyclical letter on Faith and Reason addressed to the bishops of the Catholic Church, calls for a renewal of metaphysics, “because I am convinced that it is the path to be taken in order to move beyond the crisis pervading large sectors of philosophy at the moment, and thus to correct certain mistaken modes of behaviour now widespread in our society.” He goes on, “Such a ground for understanding and dialogue is all the more vital nowadays, since the most pressing issues facing humanity—ecology, peace and the co-existence of different races and cultures, for instance—may possibly find a solution if there is a clear and honest collaboration between Christians and the followers of other religions and all those who, while not sharing a religious belief, have at heart the renewal of humanity” [section 104]. The encyclical itself, which exposes many of the philosophical and spiritual errors of modernity—including scientism, relativism and nihilism—does not claim to be an exposition of metaphysics. It is merely an invitation and a challenge to seek metaphysical Wisdom where she may be found; a challenge which nevertheless, coming as it does at the end of the Pope?s careful preparations for the end of one millennium and the beginning of another (the “hermeneutical key of my pontificate” as he writes in Tertio Millennio Adveniente), suggests that the rebirth of metaphysics forms part of the foundations of the new historical era that he believes is now close upon us. In one sense the dialogue of which the Pope speaks is already well underway, although it can hardly be said to have achieved a very high profile. Seyyed Hossein Nasr argued as long ago as 1968 that the degradation brought about by the prostitution of nature can only ultimately be reversed by a revitalization of theology and philosophy through metaphysical knowledge.2 Decades earlier, Ananda Coomaraswamy had exerted a strong influence on, among other Catholics, the craftsman and writer Eric Gill. Coomaraswamy, a remarkable Hindu scholar who worked as Research Fellow at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in the 30s and 40s, was one of three writers sometimes referred to as the leaders of the “Traditionalist school” (of which Nasr is the most eminent living representative), the others being the Frenchman René Guénon and the Swiss Frithjof Schuon. Traditionalism crosses religious boundaries but (it claims) without eroding them. It insists that truth can only be attained through the practice and mediation of a religious tradition. Such forms can be transcended only from within: each revealed religion remains unique and precious in all its details, and must be accepted and practised as the condition for spiritual realization. The Thomist writer Bernard Kelly, a contemporary of Gill?s, wrote of one work by Schuon (Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts), “The book has a fullness of light which we have no right to find in the twentieth century, or perhaps any other century.” To Kelly and other Catholics (including the Catholic Anglican, T.S. Eliot), Schuon?s achievement seemed to hold out the hope of a genuine dialogue with the Oriental cultures at their most profound level. As Kelly put it: Neither the nineteenth century nor our own possesses a philosophical language able to render metaphysical truth with precision. The attempt to find words for exact metaphysical terms has baffled the translators of St Thomas no less than of the Upanishads. There is however a difference, for while the translators of St Thomas may be presumed to have one traditional intellectual discipline at their fingertips, the translators of the Upanishads who needed to have two generally had neither. It has been said, with some justice, that they appear to have taken their philosophical language from the newspapers. The Hindu texts are not the cause of confusion, but the occasion for its display. He goes on to say that while this fact was demonstrated in an incomparable way by Coomaraswamy, the necessary “common metaphysical language” was developed primarily by Guénon and Schuon. The three figures taken together—and notwithstanding what Kelly already perceived as their failure to appreciate certain key teachings of Christianity (a point I will touch on below)—have played a key role in reopening the “luminous eye” of each tradition “towards the source of its light.” They are “situated far above the syncretism of an Aldous Huxley or a Gerald Heard.”3 But the fact that the call for a dialogue between the religions on the basis of a renewed metaphysics has been taken up again by a Pope of the “Vatican II Church” must be regarded as a striking event by those who believe that the Council effectively ended access to Tradition for those who remained faithful to Rome. It raises hopes once more of what Guénon (himself a former Catholic) in the early years of the twentieth century referred to as the redressement, a restoration in the West of the sophia perennis. In this article, I want to try to establish what might be meant by the renewal of metaphysics in our present cultural situation within the Catholic Church, but at the same time to raise certain questions about the nature of the Christian tradition as understood by the Traditionalist authors.4 The Degrees of Reality and Christian Anthropology Traditionalist ontology includes a doctrine concerning the degrees of reality, in both macrocosm and microcosm. This leads to a necessary rejection of any dualistic anthropology that might deprive the human subject of access to archetypal reality. The human subject is tripartite, consisting of body, soul and spirit, corresponding to the three main levels of reality. The faculty by which we know the divine Ideas, variously called Nous, Intellectus or Buddhi, constitutes a ray of the divine Sun in the heart of man. It knows the logoi by connaturality, by intuition. At the level of the soul, it may be added, these intuitions are clothed in symbols by the imagination, which mediates between the intellect (supplier of the “form”) and the bodily senses (which provide the “matter”) for human cognition. The Orientalist Henry Corbin has written a series of impressive studies on the Persian tradition of Ibn Arabi, Suhrawardi and Mulla Sadra, bringing out the role of the “creative imagination” as an organ of perception in the inner world of the soul, and the “theophanies” that these writers discovered in the mundus imaginalis.5 Though such ideas are today more closely associated with writers on Islamic than on Christian philosophy, it would not be hard to relate them (as Traditionalists often do) to Scholastic thought in the West. The Christian Scholastics were well aware of the Islamic philosophers, to whom in many cases they owed their knowledge of the great texts of Classical philosophy, and they spent a great deal of time refuting or transforming their ideas in the light of the Christian revelation. Nevertheless, though the Christian and Islamic thinkers of the Middle Ages were in many respects opposed, they were much closer to each other than to the Nominalists of the fourteenth or the Rationalists of the seventeenth centuries. The Catholic philosopher E.I. Watkin brings out many of these commonalities in his neglected book A Philosophy of Form, which could stand as a model of the kind of retrieval of medieval thought that needs to take place today if a serious metaphysical dialogue between the religions is to be possible. There he points out, among other things, that the Christian Scholastics (preeminently, of course, Aquinas and Bonaventure) were first of all contemplatives, rather than philosophers or theologians in the modern sense. Yet they stand at the very end of medieval thought, and the method they adopted for disputation was exploited by the less contemplative men that came after in the interests of Rationalism. Watkin defends the existence of what he calls “unimaged thought” or “metaphysical intuition” against orthodox Thomism. He adds that the Thomistic principle nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu (“there is nothing in the understanding which was not first in the senses”): may be understood, and unfortunately has been understood, to mean that our perceptions of external objects are wholly sensible and our senses alone produce such perception. On the contrary, so-called sense perception is possible only because, in a confused medley of atomic sense data, the mind directly intuits the forms which give these data significance. Perception involves a factor of intellection. The denial of this truth has led directly to the proton pseudos of modern philosophical error—the positivist and sensationalist empiricism which admits only evidence derived from sense perception wrongly taken to be such. 6 Cardinal Henri de Lubac has devoted a long essay to the development and subsequent neglect of Pauline tripartite anthropology (see 1 Thess. 5:23) in the Christian West7. In the first part of this he establishes that St Paul?s references to this anthropology have deep roots in Scripture as well as in human experience. They were not simply imported from an alien Greek philosophy (de Lubac notes the existence of “Plato phobia” among many Christian scholars, especially in the modern period). But the term for “spirit” (pneuma) remains deliberately ambiguous in Paul. On the one hand it may refer to the Holy Spirit or divine life implanted in man by baptism; on the other, it may refer to a part of man, and specifically to that “breath of life” which God breathed into his nostrils at the very beginning (Gen. 2:7). It becomes clear as he proceeds that we are talking of the “highest point of the soul,” and that the ambiguity in question is precisely due to the paradoxical relationship of nature to grace in our human destiny.8 We are created to share in the life of God, but we are not compelled to do so: we can attain that life only through the exercise of freedom. The Fourth Council of Constantinople (870) is sometimes said to have demolished this paradoxical, tripartite anthropology within orthodox Catholicism, replacing it with a dualistic understanding of man. However, that Council took the position it did precisely in order to oppose an incipient dualism. It was concerned to ensure that the distinction of the spirit from the soul of man would not introduce a “Gnostic” duality into the human subject of salvation.9 St Thomas, similarly, four centuries later, was concerned to defend the immortality of the soul by resisting the teaching of the Arabian Peripatetics who made a single angel the common source of intellectual illumination for all men. For Thomas, the light flows directly from God to the human spirit, and belongs to the essence of the soul, though it may be “strengthened” by an angel?s light. St John of the Cross (in his “Counsels of Light and Love”) seems to imply actual angelic transmission: “Consider that your guardian angel does not always move the desire to act, though he ever illumines the reason.” De Lubac, at any rate, does not judge the decision of 870 worthy of mention, but sees the tripartite tradition continuing without interruption right through the early Scholastic period. In St Thomas, the distinction takes a slightly different form: that between action and contemplation, or the moral and the mystical life, or ratio and intellectus. It re-emerges fully in the Renaissance with Nicholas of Cusa and Ficino. Despite the triumph of the new Cartesian dualism in the universities, the authentic Christian tradition shines through in a continuous chain of authors up to and beyond Paul Claudel (who speaks of “this sacred point in us that says Pater noster”). How could it not, when the experience of every spiritual master confirms the existence in us of a place where we encounter God—the spirit, or “soul of the soul”? Another important reference-point for the contemporary dialogue on metaphysics is the work of Jean Borella, a Catholic Traditionalist who has in recent years distanced himself from Schuon and Guénon. His book The Sense of the Supernatural, building on the achievement of de Lubac, is an attempt to wrestle with the question of what went wrong in the Church that led to the modern loss of the sense of the sacred, and to formulate a valid ontology and epistemology that will be acceptable within present-day Catholicism. He recognizes the “new evangelization” of John Paul II as “a project of vast proportions,” undermining the recent tension with the Catholic Traditionalists. “By calling them to the task of recovery in which he has been involved, he is showing that henceforth it is not absurd to carry on this struggle from within the Church.”10 Borella is particularly concerned, in the last part of his book, with the key concept of “deification” and its implications. He argues that the loss of the sense of the sacred and the supernatural in the modern world (and among the Modernists in the Church) is linked, as de Lubac showed in the 1940s, with the loss of a sense of human transcendence—the possibility of “transformation into God” as taught by Scripture, the Church Fathers and the great mystics.11 Once again, he insists on the tripartite nature of the human being, with the spirit or “soul of the soul” as the actual place of our union with God. It is in the heart and centre of the soul that “the divine Essence unites with created being and becomes the very act of its intellect;” in other words, where the knowledge and will of the creature become one, in perfect receptivity to the actus purus which is God. Borella adds: Does all this involve the literal identification of the creature?s substantial being with God? Certainly not. The created being as such remains a created being, and never „becomes? the Creator... Far from effacing the creature, deification alone makes it possible for it to exist in its integral truth. If deification were equivalent to a negation of the creature, it would be a sheer contradiction, since to negate the creature is to negate the creative Will of God and therefore God himself. Deification is, to the contrary, the only possible affirmation of the creature [pp.130-40]. It is, in fact, the completion of that process which the Christian tradition calls “creation.” (By which I mean that no created reality can truly be regarded as substantial unless it is eternal; and it can become eternal only by sharing directly in the eternity of God that is, through “deification.”) One of the greatest Catholic mystics—the author of The Cloud of Unknowing—writes most beautifully of this union with God that does not destroy the soul, alluding to what has sometimes been called the “gift of tears”: All men have reason for sorrow; but he who knows and feels that he exists has a very special experience of sorrow. In comparison to this, all other sorrows seem to be a sort of pretence... But he who has no experience of this sorrow, let him begin to make sorrow, because he is not yet experienced in perfect sorrow. This sorrow and the possession of it purifies a man?s soul, not only of sin, but also of the punishment that he has deserved because of his sin. It thus makes it possible for the soul to receive that joy which takes away all a man?s awareness and experience of his own being.... At the same time, in all this sorrow he has no desire not to be, because that would be the devil?s madness and contempt for God. Rather he is very glad to be, and he is sincere in his heartfelt thanks to God for the noble gift of his being, although he desires without seeking to lose the awareness and experience of his being. 12 Thus is the distinction between Christianity and Buddhism clearly drawn, but in such a way that the truth within Buddhism is fully integrated. “Transcendental Unity” and Christian Gnosis I have suggested that there is considerable scope for agreement between Catholic and non- Catholic Traditionalist; that is to say, agreement not just on the need for metaphysics, but to some extent on metaphysical doctrine itself, and even on its implications for cosmology and anthropology. But how far can this agreement extend before it runs aground on the Christian claim that Christ alone saves, let alone the claim that outside the Church there is no salvation? For Schuon, such dogmas belong to the “human margin”; in fact, not just Christianity but each religious tradition has a perfectly valid claim to be unique and central, superior to all others. Revelation means, God has said „I?, has revealed Himself to some human receptacle, to some section of humanity; every religion therefore presents itself as something absolute, and this is strictly comparable with our empirical subjectivity, the unique, exclusive and irreplaceable -though logically contradictory—character of the ego... All relative subjectivity is contradictory, since it is „objectivity? in relation to the pure Subject; the latter— the divine Self—„contains? all particular subjects while infinitely transcending them. It alone is without contradiction and therefore without illusion. 13 Here, in essence, is the basis for Schuon?s doctrine of the “transcendent unity of religions” (the title of his first book, so admired by T.S. Eliot). Traditionalist metaphysics rests on the self-evidence of the One as its first principle. S.H. Nasr, for his part, is “aware of the necessity, on its own level, of the theological formulations which insist on the hiatus between God and man or the Creator and the world.” However, he believes the metaphysical knowledge of Unity “comprehends the theological one in both a figurative and literal sense, while the reverse is not true.”14 For Schuon similarly, theology (based on revelation) transcends philosophy (based on reason), but equally metaphysics must transcend theology. “The latter is the Word of God spoken to his creatures, whereas intellectual intuition is a direct and active participation in divine knowledge and not an indirect and passive participation, as is faith. In other words, in the case of intellectual intuition, knowledge is not possessed by the individual insofar as he is an individual, but insofar as in his innermost essence he is not distinct from his Divine Principle.”15 As we have already begun to see, the idea that in our inmost essence we are “not distinct” from the Divine Principle is incompatible with Christianity, and even with Christian mysticism. (Nor, as we shall see later on, is it necessarily the case that faith is passive in comparison to intellectual intuition.) It is in fact the revealed doctrine of the Trinity that enables Christianity to maintain this ultimate distinction between creature and Creator, a distinction which is paradoxically deepened the more intimate the unity between them. We are speaking of the core mystery of Christianity: the love of which human affection and eros is a remote image, but into which it may be assumed and transformed. But all this is precluded by Schuon?s approach in Logic and Transcendence, where the Trinity has become merely an upaya—a provisional or skillful means, in the Buddhist sense, more or less effective as an aid to devotion but not finally “true.” “Whatever may be the necessity or the expediency of the Trinitarian theology,” he writes, “from the standpoint of pure metaphysic it appears to confer the quality of absoluteness on relativities.” For Schuon, Christian theology must almost inevitably confuse three distinct planes of reality—the undifferentiated Essence, the divine relativity or Personality, and cosmic Relativity.16 It is noticeable in this connection that while Schuon writes a great deal on love, he generally refers only to our love for God (or for each other), and rarely to God?s love for us. In fact he regards love as an “aspect” of God which for Christians becomes primary only because they are considering the Absolute at a relative level, having been forced by their interpretation of the Incarnation to introduce the distinction of Persons (thus “relativity”) into the Absolute. This is because he assumes that Christians are reading the Trinitarian relations into God “from below.” For the Church Fathers, on the other hand, they are revealed “from above.” They therefore cannot be “understood” (in the literal sense of that word), or rationalized (although this is a constant temptation in Western theology), but can only be known by being lived.17 Among Christian writers, we find the closest approach to Schuon?s view of the Trinity in Meister Eckhart, whose Christian orthodoxy has of course often been called into question (notably, of course, by the Pope in his own lifetime). It is not clear, however, that Eckhart?s perspective is straightforwardly heretical, or even incompatible with the more mainstream Dominican tradition represented by St Thomas. It has been argued, for example, that Eckhart accepted and assumed everything the Church and St Thomas had taught, but was trying to write and speak from the point of view of divine knowledge—from God?s point of view, rather than that of the creature. This makes him appear to be elevating a “Godhead” above the Trinity, when he might have been intending to do nothing of the sort.18 The Catholic theologian and cultural historian Hans Urs von Balthasar is critical of him for doing so—just as he is critical of Jacob Boehme and (in a different way) St Gregory Palamas for doing the same.19 But he does make a useful distinction. He writes that “ideas have their own historical dynamic; they are governed by and obey their own laws, regardless of the meaning they had for their originator.” (In fact, it is precisely the purpose of Balthasar?s remarkable series The Glory of the Lord to explore this historical dynamic, and so unravel the knot of modernity.) Consequently, he is able to view Eckhart?s experience of God as “authentically Christian,” “wholly limpid and shadowless,” even though clothed in “ill-fitting garments” which bequeathed innumerable problems to his successors. The future “will not think, as he does, with a worshipping heart, and so will misuse his words and insights for the purposes of its Titanic Idealism.” It was in this way that Eckhart unwittingly opened a way for Luther and Hegel, and even for modern atheism.20 Balthasar regards Eckhart?s successor John Ruysbroeck as having successfully purified his thought of all these tendencies, and in particular the tendency to separate the Trinitarian process from a dark primal Ground or Ungrund (which is Christianity?s closest approach to Vedantic and Islamic mysticism). For Ruysbroeck it is always the Father, not a “Godhead,” who is the “unilluminable primal Ground” of the divine Unity, “utterly light, manifest to itself, in the reciprocal love that is effulgent in the Son.” “The Son and the Spirit „flow back? into the Father: this both the self-transcendence of the Persons into the simple identity of essence and the highest bliss of love of the Persons, who are perfected as such in this very self-transcendence. Thus God remains eternal event, yet without temporal becoming” [T-D, V, p. 459]. “Looking into his own ground,” Balthasar writes, Ruysbroeck “sees beyond it into the eternal I, which for man is both the source of his own I as well as his eternal Thou, and in the final analysis this is because the eternal I is already in itself I and Thou in the unity of the Holy Spirit” [GL, V, p. 70]. The encounter with God in this Place is a nuptial encounter, a spiritual marriage. Thus Ruysbroeck integrates the feminine, and the creature, in a way that Eckhart fails to do. Even if we assume there is more to Eckhart than simple heresy—and even if we go further than Balthasar does in recognizing the validity of his metaphysical insight—it remains true for those of us who lack Eckhart?s evident moral purity that to neglect the fact that we are still creatures would be to risk falling into Luciferian intellectual pride. This is surely the spiritual danger, the “final temptation,” that lies in wait for Traditionalism when it separates metaphysics too self-confidently from theology, in effect dispensing with the humble submission to revealed truth which is proper to the creature as such. It should be remembered that Lucifer—that purest and highest of created intellectual substances—was, and knew himself to be, an Angel of light.21 Humble faith, on the other hand, is a sure path that leads through hope to love, and in love to the most complete and active participation in divine knowledge, through the indwelling grace of the Holy Spirit. In this way theology, or at least authentic theology—an expression of what Balthasar calls the “esotericism of the saints”— will always overtake metaphysics. It is along these lines that Balthasar intends to “secure for gnosis the place which belongs to it in virtue of its outstanding importance and certainty” [GL, I, p. 136]. Pauline and Alexandrian gnosis (which must be distinguished from the heresies which claimed that title) is not merely a “preamble” to faith, but “the interior understanding of faith, the insight into the mystery of faith itself.” In the interior appropriation of faith, its content unfolds before the “spiritual senses.” Thus the gnostic Christian “does not outgrow the proclamation of the Church, but in the kerygma he finds, revealing himself, the Logos, who, in the most comprehensive sense, „enlightens? the believer ever more clearly and, indeed, draws him, as John was drawn, to his breast ever more intimately and unites him interiorly with himself” [GL, I, p. 137]—that is, on the Cross and in the Resurrection. Ultimately it is only love that enables the spiritual senses to blossom in this way. “Love is the creative power of God himself which has been infused into man by virtue of God?s Incarnation. This is why, in the light of the divine ideas, love can read the world of forms and, in particular, man correctly” [GL, I, p. 424]. So Balthasar can say (in the same passage) that it is in love for his neighbour that the Christian “definitively receives his Christian senses, which, of course, are none other than his bodily senses, but these senses in so far as they have been formed according to the form of Christ” and the form of Christ is the form of love. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” The world of Christian gnosis is the world of the “pure in heart,” where the Virgin Mary ponders the words and deeds of God, and where she first conceives the Word in humble obedience to the great Angel. Thus from the gnosis of faith, hope and love, infused into the human soul by the Holy Spirit, we have moved easily to the “feminine”: the Church or Bride of Christ, with Mary his Mother the unblemished, esoteric heart mediating all his graces, radiating him into the world. The recovery of the feminine, of “Marian esoterism,” becomes in this perspective the great challenge of our time. Balthasar notes: The terrible havoc which the „historical-critical method? is today wreaking in the world of faith is possible only in a spiritual sphere from which the Church?s Marian dimension has been banished and which has, therefore, forsaken all spiritual senses and their ecclesial communication. This devastation is spreading not only over the whole theological realm [he wrote this in 1961]; it is penetrating even the area of philosophy. Here the world is becoming imageless and valueless; it is a heap of „facts? which no longer say anything and in which an equally imageless and formless naked existence is freezing and anguishing unto death. The philosophy and the theology of the image stand and fall together, and when the image of woman has vanished from the theological realm, and exclusively masculine, imageless conceptuality and thought-technique takes over, and then faith finds itself banished from the world and confined to the realm of the paradoxical and the absurd [GL, I, p. 423] A Theological Metaphysics? The passage I have just quoted prepares the way for much in Balthasar?s later series, Theo- Drama, concerning the mediation of divine Glory by the feminine—as does his section on Vladimir Solovyev, whom he praises for having successfully synthesized and purified the whole history of Western Sophiology: he “integrates gnosis into Christianity” [GL, III, p. 285]. But what I want to concentrate upon here is the way in the second series Balthasar develops the idea of (feminine) receptivity as a function of personal relationship and communion at every level, including the divine, and as an intrinsic part of his account of divine and human freedom— especially the freedom of God to create, and the freedom of man to choose eternal damnation (thus raising two of the most fundamental questions for Christian esotericism). One implication of Christian Trinitarian doctrine is that God, who is according to St Thomas the supreme Act of existing, is also the supreme act of giving. Even before giving existence to creation, the Father eternally and completely gives himself to the Son in the Spirit. This giving is in fact what constitutes both the Son and the Spirit (as being eternally “from” the Father, each in a different way). But if there is giving in God, there must equally be receiving—on the part of the Father too, who lovingly receives back the Son?s gift of himself in the Spirit. Therefore, instead of rejecting the idea of receptivity or “passivity” in God as many Thomists have done because it seems incompatible with divine perfection, Balthasar argues that any imperfection in receiving can apply only to a being who is receptive because needy. (The finite, of course, can add nothing to the Infinite; but not because it is strictly “nothing,” only because the Infinite has always-already received it, always-already transcended it.) Thus he builds upon the Aristotelian distinction between Act and Potency, and the Thomistic distinction between Existence and Essence; but within the Act which is God?s nature he sees a further distinction, between the kenosis (self-giving) and receptivity that properly belong to love.22 The distinction is a function of the “otherness” of the divine Persons one from another, within the self-same nature and unity of love. This intra-Trinitarian “distance” (the Son is not the Father or the Spirit) provides Balthasar with the key to overcoming the cosmological problem noted by the (Orthodox) Traditionalist author Philip Sherrard: the conventional interpretation of creatio ex nihilo, which sets up the created world as an “other”—and virtually a rival—to God.23 If there is this distance within God, because God is a Trinity, then there is a “space” within God for the act of creation, which takes place ab intra, not ad extra (to use Sherrard?s terms). Balthasar?s focus, however, is on the implications for divine freedom. According to Schuon, “Divine freedom means that God is free not to create a particular world; it cannot mean that He is free not to create at all.”24 For both St Thomas and for Balthasar, of course, the creation must be a free act on God?s part, simply because its Existence is distinct from its Essence. It cannot be “necessary being.”25 But the creation is also not required even as an expression of God?s goodness, because the need of goodness to communicate itself (the old Platonic principle) is forever already satisfied in the generation of the Son by the Father. The fact of the Trinitarian processions thus opens up a new horizon of freedom within the Absolute. (Of course, no more than Schuon does Balthasar place this at the same level as that of man. In God, freedom and necessity coincide perfectly, and this is true preeminently of the “must” of love.) It also implies a new dimension of glory for the creature, if God?s only motivation in creating is love. For love has a quality of superabundant delight in doing the unnecessary, in “surprising” the Beloved with an unlooked-for gift. “It is one of the laws of love that the lover cannot completely fathom the essence of the beloved.... He must always disclose and surrender himself afresh, continually surprising and overwhelming the lover. If ever this movement were to stop, to be replaced by a conclusive knowledge of each other, love would come to an end. What seemed to be complete knowledge would be the sign of a real finitude. But in God nothing is finite.”26 In the very last pages of Theo-Drama, Balthasar confronts the question, “What does God gain from the world?” This connects two of his major themes: not only that of God?s freedom in creating, but also the relationship of God?s freedom to that of man: in particular, the possibility that some creatures may through the use of their freedom be damned forever and therefore lost to God. The question then becomes: what does God lose in losing man? Balthasar had earlier written a controversial book entitled Dare We Hope (That All May be Saved)? arguing that we may indeed so hope, both on the basis of Scripture and on the basis of visions and insights granted to the mystics. Schuon, of course, regards the doctrine of an eternal hell as pertaining to “exoteric” truth, not to esotericism, because the eternity of such a state cannot be located on the same level of reality as the eternity of God.27 While Balthasar does not question the doctrine of hell, he stresses the defeat for God that the damnation of any person would in fact represent, and sees the separation of the sinner from God as encompassed and contained by the separation of Son from Father in the abandonment of the Cross. The otherness of the divine Persons from each other within the Trinitarian Act, which is the “result” of their unlimited self-giving, is the basis for the free act of creation (since if “otherness” from God is founded in the divine nature, then God is eternally free to create something that is genuinely other than himself without its having to be impossibly “outside”). It is also the basis for the redemption of that creation once it has fallen through the misuse of its own freedom into the depths of sin. Conclusion If Balthasar is right, what Christians have to say is not something less than Vedanta or Sufism, but in crucial ways more. Christianity is unique, and cannot be assimilated to the transcendental unity of religions, in that it does not reveal merely the relationship of the One to the Many or the Absolute to the world, but tells us something new about the relationship of the One to Itself. If this is so, then the divine Fatherhood to which Christianity bears witness is a reality that goes beyond any “fatherhood” belonging to the Absolute per se—for this is already revealed in the various religions and in the Intellect of man. The divine Sonship, similarly, is more than any “natural” deiformity of the human image apparent to the eyes of Intellect when contemplating the form of man and his place in the creation. Finally, then, the “deification” of which Christian masters speak has to be more than the realization of a universal truth (that in essence we are already one with God). It is the accomplishment or making true of something that was not, indeed could not, have been true “before” the Incarnation; a sharing in the life of the Absolute. This is not, however, simply to resurrect the old distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” or “revealed” religion—which would not allow for any element of supernatural revelation outside of Christianity. The true situation may be closer to that suggested by Romano Guardini, when he wrote: “Perhaps Christ had not only one precursor, John, last of the prophets, but three: John the Baptist for the Chosen People, Socrates from the heart of antiquity, and Buddha, who spoke the ultimate word in Eastern religious cognition.”28 Even Balthasar, whose at times harsh view of Asian religions (and Platonism) may have owed something to the intensity of his lifelong struggle with European Idealism, wrote towards the end of his life concerning the encounter with Asia: “The question is: does selflessness mean emptiness or Trinitarian love. The dialogue is possible.”29 Certainly Love—the Holy Spirit—is omni-present in the religions, “blowing where it wills,” and saving multitudes by making them invisibly a part of the Catholic Church. Yet Balthasar would no doubt stress that without the event of the Incarnation this would not have been the case: love is only possible in view of the Incarnation. There is a sense in which much of what is taught by the other religions is what would have been the case if Christianity had not been true: if man had not in fact been created with only one, supernatural destiny in Christ. As long as we do not know that God is a Trinity, and that we have been created in order to participate in the eternal love of the divine Persons (these being truths that are revealed in Christ), we have to project a very different kind of future for ourselves: a future very like Nirvana. Balthasar therefore believes that “the Christians of today, living in a night which is deeper than that of the later Middle Ages, are given the task of performing the act of affirming Being, unperturbed by the darkness and the distortion, in a way that is vicarious and representative for all humanity: an act which is at first theological, but which contains within itself the whole dimension of the metaphysical act of the affirmation of Being” [GL, V, 648, my emphasis]. A renewed metaphysical Catholicism has a place both for intellectual intuition and for the language of symbolism which has been disastrously neglected since the age of the cathedrals. At the same time, the difference between Christianity and the other religions is irreducible. “It is not that an eternally present cosmic law is now brought to consciousness in a new way by Christ; rather, out of the freedom of God?s love a mode of salvation is created by which all is safeguarded in God” [GL, I, p. 507, my emphasis]. The “Christian is called to be the guardian of metaphysics for our time” [GL, I, p. 656]. On the face of it, what could seem more absurd? In the last few centuries, and particularly in the last fifty years, Christians have become the least metaphysical people on earth. It was Christianity that opened the door to modernity, which is virtually founded on the destruction of metaphysics. On the other hand, does not this very fact imply the role that Balthasar gives Christianity, for only something quite unique among world religions could possess such an unprecedentedly destructive power (corruptio optimi pessima)? The reader will have to decide. One thing is clear. If such a transformation of Christians into “guardians of metaphysics” on a world scale is to take place—or even a much less ambitious recovery of a sense of the supernatural, and thus of the true meaning of their own sacraments and liturgy—Christians must look to the deepest springs of their tradition. Like Borella and Balthasar, they must become aware both of its distinctive character, as the revelation of a mystery within God, a “mystery hidden from all ages” (1 Cor. 2:7), the mystery of Christ—and also, increasingly, of all the elements of universal truth in its manifold symbolic and intellectual expressions, which Christian theology seeks (successfully or unsuccessfully) to integrate around that unique centre. * Also see From Phenomenon to Foundation: A Response to Stratford Caldecott by Lynn C. Bauman ________ 1 John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, Vatican: 1998, section 83. 2 The Encounter of Man and Nature, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968. 3 These quotations are from B. Kelly, “Notes on the Light of the Eastern Religions,” Blackfriars, Vol. 7, 1954. 4 In such a short essay, it is not possible to develop every point at length, so the treatment will be somewhat schematic. Footnotes are intended to direct the reader to important sources where these points may be pursued. A systematic exposition of the Traditionalist viewpoint may be found in S.H. Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred (Gifford Lectures), Edinburgh University Press, 1981. 5 For example, H. Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, Princeton University Press, 1969. See also William C. Chittick, Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-Arabi and the problem of Religious Diversity, State University of New York Press, 1994. Unless we take account of the nature of the imagination we cannot make much sense of the way visions and apparitions convey truth, but in a form conditioned by culture and presupposition. Corbin, who was originally a Christian, is unfortunately so carried away by the attractions of the Interworld that he can no longer conceive of a material Incarnation, and thus falls into a Docetic christology. 6 E.I. Watkin, A Philosophy of Form, London: Sheed & Ward, 1950, p. 110. 7 H. de Lubac, S.J., in Theology in History, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996. 8 In fact H.U. von Balthasar—who was a pupil of de Lubac?s—describes the “trichotomism” of St Irenaeus as an early attempt at formulating the relationship of nature and grace: “the call to grace and the life of grace belong to the concrete integrity of man.” The spirit is the thing in man that “comes down from above.” See The Scandal of the Incarnation: Irenaeus Against the Heresies, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990, p. 94. 9 See Catechism of the Catholic Church, Para 367. 10 J. Borella, The Sense of the Supernatural, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998, p. 43. 11 Like E.I. Watkin on pp. 389-90 of A Philosophy of Form, he objects to Jacques Maritain?s denial of substantial or “entitative” contact of the human soul with God, contrasting this with the statement of St John of the Cross. 12 Cloud of Unknowing, ed. James Walsh SJ, London: SPCK, 1981, pp. 203-5. (My emphasis.) 13 F. Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, London: John Murray, 1961, p. 91. 14 S.H. Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred, Edinburgh University Press, 1981, pp. 136-8. 15 F. Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1975, p. xviii. See also Kenneth Oldmeadow, “Metaphysics, Theology and Philosophy,” Sacred Web 1 (1998). 16 F. Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, New York: Harper & Row, 1975, pp. 96-109. A similar apparent lack of comprehension characterizes Schuon?s remarks (patronizing in tone) on the doctrine of Transubstantiation in the same chapter, as also in Christianity/Islam: Essays on Esoteric Ecumenism, Bloomington: World Wisdom Books, 1985, p. 56. In the latter he argues that the continued existence of the substance of bread in the eucharistic species is implied by the fact of the two natures in Christ, as if the two unities in question were somehow situated at the same level (true God/ man, true God/ bread). 17 Of course, Schuon is familiar with what he calls the “polemics” of love against knowledge, which he describes as wanting to put out the light of a fire by means of its heat (Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, London: Perennial Books, 1969, p. 144). “For love man is subject and God Object. For knowledge it is God who is Subject and man object,” he adds. But for Christianity it is God who loves first; God who is the Subject and Object of love: this is precisely the mystery of the Trinity (as Schuon almost implies when he states, in p. 149 of the same chapter, “God is Love, for by His Essence, He is „union? and „gift of Self?.”) 18 C.F. Kelley, Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977, p. 37; Cyprian Smith, O.S.B., The Way of Paradox, London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1987, p. 65; Joseph Milne, “Eckhart and the Problem of Christian Non- Dualism,” Eckhart Review, March 1993. 19 The following abbreviations will be used for texts by Hans Urs von Balthasar. GL = The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Edinburgh and San Francisco: T&T Clark and Ignatius Press, 1982-91, seven volumes. T-D = Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988-98, five volumes. For an overview of Balthasar?s work and guidance in further study of the topics raised in the present essay, see R. Gawronski SJ, Word and Silence: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Spiritual Encounter between East and West, Edinburgh and Grand Rapids: T&T Clark and Eerdmans, 1995. 20 The quotations from Balthasar in this paragraph come from GL, V, pp. 16-47. 21 “As St Thomas points out so clearly, the fallen spirits have lost none of their intellectual privileges; there is not the slightest obscurity in their mind... The incorruptibility of mind of the fallen angels is absolute, and to such an extent is this true, according to St Thomas, that neither God not the good Angels have ceased to communicate to them those lights which belong to the angelic nature. God still enlightens their intellects in all matters that belong to the natural state of the spirit. The only things about which they are kept in ignorance are the mysteries of divine grace. Those mysteries are communicated to the good Angels; their brightness is such that the bad spirits may be said to be in darkness.” This is from Dom Anscar Vonier, The Collected Works of Abbot Vonier, Vol. III, London: Burns Oates, 1953, pp. 181-3. 22 See G.F. O?Hanlon, The Immutability of God in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cambridge University Press, 1990. One might make comparisons here with the work of several important Orthodox theologians, including Sergei Bulgakov, John Zizioulas and Dmitru Staniloae. I have touched on some of the cosmological implications of this in “A Science of the Real: The Renewal of Christian Cosmology,” Communio (Fall, 1998). 23 P. Sherrard, Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition, Brookline and Edinburgh: Holy Cross press and T&T Clark, 1998, ch. 10. Sherrard sees this interpretation as lying at the root of secularization and also of the present ecological crisis. 24 F. Schuon, Islam and the Perennial Philosophy, London: World of Islam Publishing Co., 1976, p. 173. 25 No Essence can exist unless “actualized”: that is, only the act of existing makes it something rather than nothing. Here Balthasar sides in his interpretation with the socalled “existential Thomists,” such as Etienne Gilson, for whom Existence reigns supreme, and God?s Essence is infinite precisely because it is identical with his Existence. It should be noted for the sake of further dialogue between Catholic philosophers and the representatives of “Tradition” that a more Platonic interpretation has been developed by the Catholic philosopher Josef Seifert and his colleagues at the International Academy of Philosophy, which still accepts the “real distinction” in St Thomas, but criticizes the view of the divine infinity and the exclusive priority of Existence over Essence on the grounds that not every essence is necessarily a limitation. See J. Seifert, “Essence and Existence,” Aletheia, I and I.2, University of Dallas Press, 1977. 26 Adrienne von Speyr, The World of Prayer, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1985, p. 42. See also H.U.von Balthasar, T-D, II, pp. 258-9. 27 F. Schuon, Understanding Islam, London: Allen & Unwin, 1963, pp. 71-83. This provides another example of the clash between Christian doctrine and Schuonian orthodoxy. Schuon?s “solution” is not open to Balthasar precisely because of the seriousness with which the latter treats not only the Gospels, where the doctrine of possible damnation is clearly taught by Christ himself, but also the Christian understanding of human deification (creaturely participation in God?s eternity through the Blessed Trinity). 28 R. Guardini, The Lord, Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1954, p. 305. 29 Cited in Gawronski, Word and Silence, Edinburgh and Grand Rapids: T&T Clark and Eerdmans, 1995, p. 221.
- [Desert Spirituality](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-desert-in-christian-spirituality) - Both Christian Meditation and centering prayer come out of early monasticism, which itself is a development of desert spirituality.1 Christian Meditation is the prayer of the heart described by John Cassian, the historian of desert spirituality who brought the wisdom of the desert fathers and mothers of Egypt and the Middle East to the West. Centering prayer comes out of the Cloud of Unknowing, a 14th century English text that enshrines the contemplative traditions of the desert. It is no accident that both these contemplative prayer forms came to us by way of Benedictine and Trappist monasteries. Desert spirituality was the beginning of Christian monasticism and the matrix out of which Western monks developed their lifestyle. Contemplative prayer was at the heart of their life, and desert spirituality was the context. This article proposes to examine those ancient traditions and adapt them to our times. Desert spirituality is a technical term that has biblical and early Christian roots. The desert experience is a staple of both the Old and the New Testaments, for example, in the Exodus story, in the life of Elijah and the prophecy of Hosea, in John the Baptist, the forty-day fast of Jesus, and the three-year novitiate of Paul in Arabia (Ga 1:17). This desert experience was developed into a coherent spirituality by the desert fathers and mothers in the 3rd and 4th centuries of the Christian era. These fervent Christians fled to Egypt and the Middle East to escape the decadence of an effete Roman empire. The wastelands offered a stark and untrammeled setting for a life of penance and prayer. Its rugged emptiness and its silence and solitude invited the flight from the world (fuga mundi). A special appeal to heroic souls was the belief that the demons infested the wastelands and could be met there in open combat. It did not take long for the desert dweller to discover that the demons were within and to be engaged on the battleground of the soul. Life in the desert was simple. Manual labor broke the monotony of the silence and solitude of the cell and provided its own asceticism as well as sustenance and something for almsgiving. Desert dwellers spent their days in soul searching and the pursuit of the living God. Community life, especially when the solitary life prevailed, and outreach in ministry were clearly secondary and not really part of the interior struggle. Continuous prayer was the focus, and the abbas and the ammas spent their time in lectio divina, reading the psalms and the breviary, celebrating liturgy, and cultivating the prayer of the heart. These are the main features of desert spirituality. 1 Christian Meditation and centering prayer are two popular forms of contemplative prayer, designed by John Main OSB and the Trappists at Spencer, Massachusetts, respectively, the former promoted by the World Community of Christian Meditation under Laurence Freeman OSB and the latter by Contemplative Outreach, whose leader is Thomas Keating OCSO. ?1 larkin · desert spirituality In this setting Christian holiness was a kind of white martyrdom, a total giving over of one’s life to God, the shedding of all self-indulgence in favor of a single-minded search for God. The desert was a graphic symbol of the emptiness of life and the otherness of God. The emptiness translated into purity of heart, a heart freed from sinful affections and centered on God. Thus the beatitude that best sums up desert spirituality is “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.” Contemplation is the goal, and letting go of all lesser aims and surrender to the living God the condition. This general principle is abstract and can be lived out in an imaginary as well as a real desert. The desert as symbol universalizes desert spirituality as a possibility for everyone. There is, however, still place for the physical desert in ordinary Christian life. We examine this role in the next two sections of this paper, and we will return to the symbolic desert in the third section. Our first question is this: What can the desert do for me? In other words, why should I go out into the desert? The second question is a prophetic one: What can I do for a desert that is now under attack by the forces of neglect or consumerism? How do my efforts to protect the environment or my failure to participate affect my personal life? After these two reflections we will return to the overall principle of desert spirituality, the call to emptiness and encounter with God. What Can the Desert Do for Me? In Scripture the desert is primarily the wasteland, and it leads to the garden of the promised land, the desert come to life, as in Isaiah 35:1–2: “The desert shall rejoice and blossom... The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it, the majesty of Carmel and Sharon.” Both the bleak image and the flowering one apply to the physical desert as we use the term today. The desert means the wilderness, the great outdoors. This includes barren wastelands like sand dunes or the scrubby flatlands of Texas or Arizona, but also verdant gardens, scenic forests, majestic mountains, and rolling plains. The desert is all the places on this beautiful earth that are still largely untouched by city sprawl and offer themselves as a refuge for weary people. These lands can be gift for our spirits. They refresh us and challenge us. They beckon us to “come aside and rest awhile,” away from the noise and congestion of the city with its polluted air and harried traffic. The desert is the place to hike a trail, fish a stream, picnic with friends, or just smell the sage and be with one’s long thoughts. Except for some few families that have declared their independence and homesteaded in the wild and some rare hermits who have also settled there, people today only visit this desert; they do not dwell there. They go out for physical exercise and emotional refreshment, for meditation and for fun. They enter desert places hostile to human habitation very gingerly, armed with water jugs, proper sun gear, and ideally with companions. Some visit these “fierce landscapes” (Belden Lane) for excitement, others to deal with a crisis, a limit experience, a sorrow that overwhelms them. Perhaps unconsciously they are looking for an environment that mirrors their troubled soul. A good example of this kind of match between soul and terrain is a 2 larkin · desert spirituality retreat for middle-aged men described in a recent publication.2 It was conducted by Richard Rohr and designed to help men from many walks of life through their midlife crisis. The retreat took place at Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico in the summer of ad 2000. The men were challenged to let down their defenses and face themselves squarely. The retreat turned out to be a harrowing rite of passage. The torrid summer heat and the bleak lonely emptiness of the desert combined with soul-searching introspection and dramatic rituals to test the most stouthearted. More often retreats or “a day in the desert” are spent in more friendly spaces. An attractive pastoral setting calms the soul and provides the quiet that people need for facing the real issues of their life. God seems closer in pristine settings. One popular formula for such outings is the poustinia, a concept popularized by Catherine de Hueck Doherty. Poustinia means hermitage, and folks become poustiniaks for a day, bringing along only a Bible and a bit of bread and cheese. The poustinia can actually be a back room or the attic of one’s home, but there are advantages in going out to the woods or the seashore. Getting out in the country, breathing in the fresh air and fragrances of the meadows, walking around the lake or trudging along paths in hilly terrain, can be healthy physical exercise and spiritual refreshment. These are ways of slowing down, of refusing to be a couch potato and insuring the balance of mens sana in corpore sano (a sound mind in a sound body). Grace builds on nature, so a healthy body and soul are a good basis for the life of God in us. A good health regime works directly against anxious, workaholic tendencies or the equally bad habit of inertia and laziness. Recreational activities also develop the playful side of our lives. This is our contemplative side. Visitors to the desert know that God is everywhere and that they do not have to go up to the heavens or across the sea to find the word of God. “No,” Deuteronomy says, “the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe” (Dt 30:11–14). But the desert facilitates the search. The wide open spaces, the silence and solitude, reveal God. Silence is the best contact point with God, since God is always present, though beyond speech, images, and concepts. The desert fosters this silence, this emptiness, the letting go of everything that is not of God. The desert is built for kenosis, the self-emptying of Jesus, who was perfectly open to God and was therefore exalted with the pleroma, the fullness of the resurrection (Ph 2:5–11). The desert way is the way of emptiness and fullness. These reflections belong to the first step on the spiritual journey, the appreciation of creation. Original blessing preceded original sin, and immersion in creation and appreciation and love for this gift ought to precede the work of redemption. This is the thinking of Teilhard de Chardin, Matthew Fox, Francis Kelly Nemeck, and Marie Theresa Coombs. More recently Dorothee Soelle sees “being amazed” as the first of the three ways or stages of the spiritual life.3 Instead of the classical ways of purification, illumination, and union, she proposes “being amazed, letting go, and 2 Donal O’Leary, “High Noon at Ghost Ranch,” Furrow 52 (January 2001): 27–3 5. 3 Silent City: Mysticism and Resistance (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), pp. 88–93. ?3 resisting” as the three steps. Amazement and appreciation help us take an objective stance before the earth, and this makes it easier to let go, the second of the three ways for Soelle. This leads us to involvement, to compassion and commitment, regarding the world. She calls this resistance, because it involves working against the threats to the environment and society. That is to say, we resist and work for justice in all areas of life, such as the economic and the ecological orders. The unitive way calls to action as well as divine union. What Can I Do for the Desert? The work of saving the earth is a challenge and responsibility for people everywhere today. The call resonates among informed spiritual persons. They have listened to the new cosmology presented by scientists like Brian Swimme and the “geologian” Thomas Berry, and they have heard the plaintive warnings of the environmentalists that the earth is wounded and in danger of collapsing. The universe has become part of today’s spiritual journey. The whole universe and its crown, homo sapiens, are seen as one vast living organism in which they depend on each other and rise and fall together. In the past the earth was looked upon as an appendage of humanity. Humanity alone counted, and the rest of creation was expendable. Human beings pursued their own desires recklessly, without thought about the effects in the environment. They could trash the earth, abuse it or destroy it, without worry because there were always other virgin territories to exploit in the same way. This was an affront to creation; we see it now as an affront to human life as well, because, in the words of Edward Abbey, the wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit just as vital to our lives as water and good bread.”4 The universe is an integral part of our human life. We are partners, and we participate in growth or decline together. In the abuse or destruction of the universe, we are diminished and dehumanized. The commission in Genesis 1:26 to have “dominion” over the earth did not give humans the right to abuse it. We are only caretakers, not absolute owners; we cannot take the myopic view of looking for an immediate return in pleasure or profit with no thought about the long-term loss to creation and the shortchanging of future human beings. One reviewer of Thomas Berry’s latest book, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future, quotes Berry and then adds some strong words of his own: “‘What happens to the outer world happens to the inner world,’ Berry avers. ‘If the outer world is diminished in its grandeur, then the emotional, imaginative, intellectual, and spiritual life of the human is diminished or extinguished.’ Our inner being will die if we continue to transform natural beauty into the soul-deadening, concrete-laden, box-store landscapes of a consumer society.”5 The obligation to safeguard the environment has three aspects: personal, societal, and spiritual. Each person needs to treat the desert with love and respect. Some of that 4 Cited from his Desert Solitaire by Thomas J. McCarthy, “The Ultimate Sanctum,” America (9 April 2001): 6. 5 Stephen Bede Sharper, “A New Heaven and a New Earth,” Christian Spirituality Bulletin 8 (Fall– Winter 2000): 15. ?4 concern is cosmetic, like cleaning up after using the land and properly disposing of the debris, especially non-biodegradable material. Respect and moderation mean that we do not harm the plant life by careless trampling, that we obey rules about camp fires and camping, that we leave the natural beauty intact without pilfering plants or otherwise harming the vegetation, that we carefully control toxic substances like pesticides or poisonous chemicals. These are common sense suggestions. The societal obligation may take the form of joining groups like the Sierra Club that are dedicated to the environment, or of lending one’s name to, say, Robert Redford’s campaign to save the National Arctic Wildlife Refuge. Systemic problems can be addressed only by group action that can effect structural changes. We need to support these causes. There is no other way to stop the pollution of our waterways and atmosphere, to keep industrial wastes out of our rivers and lakes, to find adequate ways of dealing with nuclear waste, to stop the destruction of the ozone layer, to save the rain forests and wetlands, and to halt the woefully unbalanced over-consumption by the few. Elizabeth Johnson writes: “Every year, the twenty percent of Earth’s people in the rich nations use seventy-five percent of the world’s resources and produce eighty percent of the world’s waste.”6 There is a special spiritual component today because of the crisis in saving the earth. Time is running out, and experts say that there are only twenty-five or thirty years left to turn the destructive spiral around. The problems are overwhelming, and the laborers are few. We can organize and we can work, but the odds are against us. At such times we need overt divine help. Specifically the challenge is to pray contemplatively, to face the societal impasse which Constance FitzGerald, in a famous article several years ago, connected with the dark night of St. John of the Cross.7 The dark night occurs as impasse in all sectors of human life, whether prayer, human relationships, or societal renewal. One response to impasse is trusting acceptance, silence before God, and loving surrender, which bring wisdom and strength and which are qualities of contemplative prayer. We take our insoluble problems to God. We wait with faith and trust, ready to spring into action in changing what we can deal with and accepting what we cannot change. Contemplative prayer is an admission that our problems may be beyond human resources. But our prayer is full of hope, because contemplation may stretch our imagination and inspire new creative ways of dealing with the problem. Solid prayer will certainly strengthen our resolve to continue the struggle. The popularity of contemplative prayer in our time may well be connected with the magnitude of the problems of this age. Desert Spirituality in Its Purest Form We return now to the traditional meaning of desert in the spiritual life, namely, desert as physical place and as symbol. The desert of the first abbas and ammas was the real wasteland. Anthony and Pachomius spurned the fleshpots of the Roman cities and 6 “God’s Beloved Creation,” America (16 April 2001): 9. 7 “Dark Night as Impasse,” in Living with Apocalypse, ed. Tilden Edwards (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984). ?5 went to the bleak deserts of Egypt to be alone with God and to keep careful watch over the movements of their hearts. The purity of heart they sought meant that they tried to choose only the good, to do everything right, in perfect measure, for the right reasons. They prayed and fasted to put to death the old man within themselves, so that the new man could come alive. They underwent this discipline for one reason: They wanted to see God. This goal was not face-to-face vision, as heaven will be (1 Jn 3:1–3); nor was it seeing God as an object, the way I see a person in front of me. Neither was it simply a new understanding, a new image of God, or a new perception. It was a seeing that meant presence, companionship, walking with God. It was contemplative union with God. Contemplation follows purity of heart as night follows day. We have a window into the thinking of the desert fathers and mothers in the first conference of John Cassian.8 The immediate objective of life in the desert was purity of heart; this he called the skopos (English “scope”). The skopos is oriented to a further good, which he calls the telos, the end or final purpose. An example of these two aspects of human endeavor is the life of the farmer. The farmer prepares the soil, plants the seed, hoes and manures the field. All this is his immediate task, his skopos. But he does it all with a view to the harvest, which is the telos, the real purpose of his work. If the skopos of life in the desert is purity of heart, the telos is the fullness of the kingdom of God, the resurrected life. This program of seeking perfect purity of heart in order to find God can be applied to every Christian life. Purity of heart—as freedom from every actual sin and as right relationships with self, others, the world, and God—is the immediate task of the daily struggle. Purity of heart is more than chastity; it is all the virtues in perfect integration. This marvelous condition is often set in negative terminology. It is called detachment, or indifference, or freedom from sinful habits. But it is a very positive condition identified with biblical faith. This faith is the response to the word of God wherever it is recognized. It is the faith of the Virgin Mary in St. Luke’s Gospel. At the annunciation, for example, she is perturbed at the angel Gabriel’s message. How can she, a committed virgin, be the mother of the Messiah? When the angel assures her that God will provide, she gives her full assent to that word. She lets go of her own project in favor of God’s word. A high degree of purity of heart means a heart full of faith. It means a heart full of love. The pure of heart are loving persons. They will see God, that is, they will know and love God, as described in the First Letter of John: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love... No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us” (1 Jn 4:7–8, 12). For the desert fathers and mothers and especially for theologians like Evagrius and Gregory of Nyssa, seeing God meant contemplation. This gift was the reward for the purification, and it consisted in experiencing union with God. This contemplation was not one particular experience, nor an altered state of consciousness. It came out of transformation. By allowing one’s life to be brought under the movement of the Holy 8 Conferences of John Cassian, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), pp. 37–43. 6 ? Spirit, one was born a new person, a “new creation” (2 Co 5:17). This new creature lived in the world of God and experienced God in the whole gamut of his or her worldly occupations. Contemplation was thus a way of life, not a particular experience. The Carmelite Application The evolution of desert spirituality suggested in this paper has special reference to Carmelite history. Carmel came out of the desert, born on Mount Carmel, home to the Old Testament prophet Elijah and to hundreds of hermits at the time of the Crusades. The Carmelites were one group of such hermits; they sought a rule of life from the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Albert of Avogadro, who held the office between 1206 and 1214. The result was the Rule of St. Albert,9 a contemplative and eremitical document that was simple, practical, and eminently scriptural. The tides of politics and war, however, forced the Carmelites to leave their sacred mountain and go back to Europe as early as 1238. The eremitic style of life underwent change in the direction of community and ministry, eventually making the order a mendicant one like the Dominicans and Franciscans. One of the early general superiors, Nicholas the Frenchman, tried to stem the move to the city. In 1270 he wrote a strong letter, called “The Fiery Arrow,” calling the men to return to the desert. But the mendicant form of life had struck a chord in their hearts. They continued to foster their contemplative longing, but now they carried the desert in their hearts. The desert was a symbol now rather than the physical reality. A second charter of the order, called the Institution of the First Monks, dated 1370 and written by a Catalonian Carmelite, Philip Ribot, presented a symbolic life of Elijah and the example of the Blessed Mother as both a description and a defense of the new lifestyle. The book incorporated the thinking of John Cassian, especially on the structure of the religious life as the search for purity of heart and contemplation. The desert spirituality of Mount Carmel was adapted now to an active apostolic life. Henceforth Carmelite spirituality was at home in communities of active religious and lay people as well as cloistered contemplatives. The reform of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross two centuries later built on this document and renewed and perfected the eremitical–contemplative ideal of Carmel. They did so, not only by promoting desert houses of total contemplative life, but by organizing a way in which every Carmelite house could be, in the words of a great Carmelite of the next century, John of St. Samson, another Mount Carmel. The desert spirituality of Carmel’s beginnings had become democratized and available to all who espouse the ideals of the Carmelite tradition.
- [The Heart is the Throne of the All-Merciful (Audio)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/heart-is-the-throne) - Seyyed Hossein Nasr 2001 “Paths to the Heart” Conference, University of South Carolina. Republished with kind permission from The Foundation for Traditional Studies. Professor Nasr's key-note address touches upon the universal doctrine of the heart as the center of the human microcosm in all its levels, from the vital to the emotive to the intellectual and
- [The Light of the Intellect](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-light-of-the-intellect) - THE LIGHT OF THE INTELLECT Abraham Abulafia Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia was a Sicilian Kabbalist born in Saragossa, Spain, in 1240. He is considered as one of the most important, but also most complex, figures in Jewish mysticism. During his early youth he traveled to Palestine and Italy, studying philosophy under Hillel ben Samuel ben Eliezer of Verona. Upon his return to Spain, his thirst for knowledge led him, in his thirties, to the world of speculative and operative Kabbalah. He immersed himself in the Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Creation) and began to teach a kind of Kabbalistic “Yoga” based upon the ontological value of Hebrew letters, numbers, and vowel points, as well as a rigorous moral and spiritual ascesis. He taught that a complex science of combinations, permutations, and invocations of these symbols gives access to the highest spiritual realities and may even confer a “prophetic” status. Ater his attempt to convert the Pope—who died from apoplexy one day before Abulafia’s arrival—in 1280, he appeared as a prophet and Messiah in Sicily. He was condemned by Rabbi Solomon ben Adret and had to leave Sicily. His end is unknown. With him the Kabbalah took a definitely visionary and prophetic turn, with a special emphasis on the mysteries of the Tetragrammaton. It is well known that the letters (of the Hebrew alphabet) have no vibration of their own, and therefore the Blessed God set into nature, in accordance with the Intellect, powers into the whole mouth in order to bring the letters into pronunciation, according to the form of their existence as found in books. And vowel-points were set into the letters to demonstrate the vibration of pronunciation in their translation from the book to the mouth. h us the vibrations are essentially the letters of the mouth, and accidentally, the letters in the book. And joined to this by necessity with the places of the various vibrations, for nothing will vibrate without place and time. h e elements of space are the dimensions, and the elements of time that are the cycles through which it is measured in divisions such as years, months, days and the like. And because of the dimensions, a person must know (how) to lengthen the pronunciation of each of the letters. And this is the secret of the pronunciation when you wish to mention this glorious (divine) Name: Make yourself right and isolate yourself in a special place, so that no one will hear your voice except you, then purify your heart and your soul from all thoughts of this world. hen imagine in that moment that your soul is separated from your body, removed from this world, and living in the world-to-come, which is the source of the life that exists distributed in all that lives. his is (identical with the Active) Intellect, which is the source of all wisdom, understanding, and knowledge of the Supreme King of kings, the Holy, Blessed One, whom all revere with a great awe—and this awe of one who has attained (such spiritual heights) is a double awe: (comprising) the awe (that comes of) love (of God) and the awe (that comes from) ascent. When your mind (da‘at) comes to cleave to (the divine) Mind (da‘at), it puts knowledge (da‘at) into you. Your mind must turn aside from itself all extraneous knowledge, apart from the knowledge (da‘at) of (God), which joins you and (God) by virtue of (God’s) honored and awesome Name. And therefore, you must know the form of its pronunciation, and this is its configuration: hese are the twenty-i ve “forward” (permutations). here are another twenty-five “backward” (permutations), and here they are: In this same way, (permute) with (the letter) hay, and similarly with vav, and similarly with the last hay. (Note by Moses Cordovero: We have abbreviated this, and even corrected it accordingly, because the author of Sefer HaNikkud confused the issue by means of a poem to obscure it, but he reveals it at the end of his work, so we will explain it as is fitting and proper. Now we return to his words:) his is the configuration: When we begin to pronounce the ‘alef, in whatever configuration you pronounce it (i.e. with whatever vowel), because it alludes to the secret of (divine) unity, you should not lengthen it beyond one breathe. And do not interrupt it in any way at all until you have completed its pronunciation. Lengthen this particular breath, according to your breathing ability, for as long as you are able to hold it. And chant the ‘alef, or whatever letter, while in the form of the vowel-point (as explained below): h us the cholem (with the sound of “o”) is above (the letter). When you begin to pronounce it, turn your face to the east, (looking) neither up nor down, and sit wrapped in clean, pure white robes over all your garments, or with your tallit over your head, wearing tefillin (and) facing east because that is the direction from which light enters the world. With (each of) the twenty-i ve (pairs of letters) you must move your head (correctly). In the case of cholem, begin facing due east, purify your thoughts, and raise your head little by little as you breathe (out), until you are finished with your head facing upwards. Ater you have finished, prostrate yourself on the ground once. Do not make a distinction between the breath of the ‘alef and that of the letter attached to it (in the pair), apart from one breath, either short or long. Alternatively, between each letter of the name, whether “forward” or the reverse, you may breathe twice without pronouncing (anything), but no more; however, you have the option of fewer. When you have completed each row, you have the option of breathing five times only, but no more; however, you have the option of fewer. If you change or deviate from this order while (proceeding through) the row, return to the beginning of that row, until you have said it correctly. By analogy with the shape of the cholem which draws (one) upwards, (you must) sing the chirek (with the sound of “ee,” which) draws (one) downwards. hus you may draw down supernal power to adhere to you. In the case of shuruk (with the sound of “oo”), neither raise nor lower your head, but push it forwards at a middle level. In the case of tsere (with a sound of “ay”) push your head from let to right, and in the case of kamatz (with the sound of “ah”) from right to let . In any case, if ater completing this, you see a form before you, prostrate yourself before it immediately. And if you hear a voice, either loud or sot , and want to understand what it is saying, answer it immediately. Say: “Speak my lord, for your servant is listening” (I Samuel 3:9). (But then) do not speak at all, but listen carefully to what it may tell you. If you experience great terror, which you cannot bear, even in the middle of the pronunciation, prostrate yourself immediately. And if you do not hear or see (anything), abandon this for the rest of that week. It is good to use this pronunciation (technique) once a week, in a form that “runs and returns” (Ezekiel 1:14), for with regard to this matter a covenant has been made. So, what can I add further, to make this known to you? For it is well known that if you are wise, you can understand this entire order from hints. If you feel that your intellect is weak in wisdom, or in (knowledge of) kabbalah, or that your thought is strongly bound to the vanities of time, do not pronounce the name, lest you sin more.
- [The Divine Glory and the Divine Energies](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/divine-glory-and-divine-energies) - David Bradshaw To say that God “has no name,” or that He has only “the name above every name,” is a way of summarizing this fundamental aspect of Biblical revelation. Nor is it a coincidence that the revelation (or non-revelation) of the divine name occurs at the burning bush. If there is to be a
- [“Know Thyself” in the Christian Fathers](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/know-thyself-in-the-christian-fathers) - A sermon by Father Demetrios Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church of America He that is fond of outward glory and highly esteems the things present… is not permitted to understand himself; so he that overlooks these things will easily know himself; and having come to the knowledge of himself, he will proceed in order
- [The Islamic Concept of Human Perfection](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/islamic-human-perfection) - William C. Chittick Perfection demands the shedding of all attributes and definitions, since these are limitations. Perfect human beings manifest all divine attributes, so they are defined by none of them. They employ each divine attribute in the appropriate circumstances, recognize all things for what they are, and interact with all creatures in accordance with
- [The Philosopher’s Life: Seneca](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-philosophers-life-seneca) - Three selections from the Letters to Lucilius by Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC – AD 65) give us a vivid portrait of what it meant to be a philosopher in Rome at the beginning of the Christian era. Believe me, those who seem to be busied with nothing are busied with the greater tasks; they
- [Hagakure: Book of the Samurai](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/hagakure-book-of-the-samurai) - Yamamoto Tsunetomo …there is one transcending level, and this is the most excellent of all. This person is aware of the endlessness of entering deeply into a certain way and never thinks of himself as having finished. He truly knows his own insufficiencies and never in his whole life thinks that he has succeeded. He
- [Theology and the Contemplative Calling: The Image of Humanity in the <em>Philokalia</em>](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/humanity-in-philokalia) - Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury Delivered at St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in the US on 30 January 2010, this was the 27th annual Father Alexander Schmemann Memorial Lecture. Republished with kind permission from the Archbishop's Press office. With thanks to St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary. Dr Williams' lecture on the Philokalia deals with the
- [St John Climacus of Sinai and the Ladder of Spiritual Ascent in Iconography](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/john-climacus-and-the-ladder-icons) - Dr Elena Ene D-Vasilescu A pictorial exploration of The Ladder of Divine Ascent (Scala Paradisi), a formative text for Orthodox monasticism, the work of St John of the Ladder, Abbot of St Catherine's monastery, Sinai in the late sixth century. This film was made possible with the support of The Matheson Trust. Filmed at the St Theosevia
- [Coptic Liturgy](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/coptic-liturgy) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection The Divine Liturgy of St. Basil – Part 2 From Kyrie Eleison of the Offertory up to the Doxology (Coptic) Recording by The Institute of Coptic Studies, Department of Coptic Music. This is an excerpt of Ragheb Moftah’s (1898-2001) Collection of Coptic Orthodox Liturgical Music. According to
- [Hesychia: An Orthodox Opening to Esoteric Ecumenism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/hesychia-orthodox-opening) - Hesychia: An Orthodox Opening to Esoteric Ecumenism © 2007 James S. Cutsinger Lecture delivered at the University of South Carolina, 19 October 2001; published in Paths to the Heart: Sufism and the Christian East, ed. James S. Cutsinger (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2002) The smallest creaturely image that ever forms in you is as great as God is great. Why? Because it comes between you and the whole of God. As soon as the image comes in, God and all His Divinity have to give way. But as the image goes out, God goes in. Meister Eckhart When I first began planning this conference nearly two years ago, I never imagined that its theme would prove so timely. Had we any doubts before, the events of this past September 11th and their continuing repercussions throughout the world have proven conclusively that interfaith understanding is today more important than ever, and that no discussion is more urgently needed than that between Christians and Muslims. We know that during his captivity in Asia Minor in the 14th century, the Orthodox archbishop St Gregory Palamas, greatly impressed by the tolerance and kindness of the Muslims he met, became close friends with the son of the Turkish Emir, with whom he had many conversations, and in one of the letters which he wrote at that time, St Gregory expressed his hope that “a day will soon come when we shall be able to understand each other”.1 Now, nearly seven hundred years later, one prays all the more for such a day. But what exactly is the understanding we seek, and what kind of dialogue are we called to engage in? There are those for whom inter-religious understanding means doctrinal compromise. It is assumed in this case that religions are the creation of man, that dogmas are the lingering effects of a credulous and uncritical age, and that the surest way to tolerance and peace lies in the elimination, or humanistic reconstruction, of teachings that have served as the excuse for divisiveness and hatred in the past. Thus there are Christians, to pick the most obvious example from my own tradition, who insist that the only way to honor the convictions of other religious people is to jettison the idea of Christ’s Divinity, an idea often joined to the belief that Christianity is uniquely true and salvific. Because traditional faith in the Only-Begotten has so often been confused with an ideology of the “only correct”, it has seemed to these liberal ecumenists that the dogma must be discarded, and it is no surprise, given the reductionist tenor of religious conversation in the West, that such Christians have enjoyed a certain amount of success in promoting this method of dialogue with their counterparts in other traditions. Jesus was a preacher and a gifted teacher, they say, but there was nothing about Him of a supernatural or miraculous order: no virgin birth, no walking on the water or exorcism of demons, and no physical resurrection from the dead. Now of course, a reductionist mindset is not the only explanation for the success of such ventures, and I do not mean to be simplistic. Clearly a considerable measure of good must come from the discovery, however occasioned, that people who practice different religions from our own are human too, and we would seriously err, especially in these turbulent and frightening days, to dismiss or belittle any well-intentioned effort to overcome prejudice and xenophobia. But we would also err if we ignored the fact that dialogue of the kind I have described so far, besides being based upon a lie about Christ, cannot help but contribute to the very problems it aims to solve. For it is in the very nature of things that pious believers will seize all the more strongly upon their convictions, and with all the more unthinking fervor, when they feel themselves threatened with a betrayal coming from within the ranks of their co-religionists. The ecumenism of the de-mythologizers is certainly not the only cause of religious retrenchment. Nevertheless liberal dialogues and exclusivist monologues remain like two sides of one coin, and it is only the shortest of steps from the substitution of a purely human teacher for the incarnate Second Person of the Holy Trinity to the insistence that a conscious and explicit commitment to Jesus Christ is the only means of salvation. Is there any way out of this impasse? Is it possible, in other words, for people who follow different spiritual paths to acknowledge the presence of saving Truth in one other’s religions, but without undermining the dogmatic foundations of their own? To refer specifically to the traditions represented at this conference, and to put my question in a yet more pointed way: is it possible for an Orthodox Christian like myself to respect Islam as a fully valid religion, revealed by the same God whom I worship, but without denying what my own tradition teaches me about the Divinity of Jesus Christ, even though (as we know) what Muslims believe concerning this same “Jesus, son of Mary” is so considerably different? I believe very firmly that the answer is yes. Indeed I would go further and say that an affirmative response to these questions is not simply possible; it is necessary. For Christian faith in Christ, if genuine and if pursued to its depths, is inseparable from the double precept that we should touch but not cling. I have in mind Christ’s words in John 20. Speaking on the one hand to Thomas, Jesus commands him to stretch forth his hand, to “place it in my side”, and to “be not faithless, but believing”; and Thomas’s response is the greatest of all the confessions in scripture: “My Lord and my God” (Jn 20:27-28). On the other hand, speaking to Mary Magdalene, Christ instructs her, “Do not hold me”—the Greek verb haptô means to bind something fast—“for I have not yet ascended to my Father; but go to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (Jn 20:17). Taken together, these two commandments provide the model for every Christian’s proper relation to Jesus: one is to reach out and touch Him as “my Lord and my God,” acknowledging and embracing His true Divinity, but without clinging to the outward manifestation of that Divinity, and thus without binding Him in a way that would obstruct His ascent—and ours with Him—to His Lord and His God. This double relationship between the Christian and Christ adumbrates, in the idiom of one religion, a more general relationship, found in all religions, between the outward or exoteric form and the inward or esoteric Truth which that form conveys, and it opens us to the possibility of a different kind of dialogue, one based upon a common understanding of the metaphysical essence of traditional teachings, and not limited by the letter of their dogmatic expressions. As many in my audience know, the Swiss philosopher and perennialist author Frithjof Schuon has described this approach as an “esoteric ecumenism”,2 and he insists throughout his many books that it is only esoterism which can avoid the dilemma that I was speaking of earlier. It is obvious, he writes, that the “narrowly literal belief” of exclusivist dogmatism, while “feasible within a closed system knowing nothing of other traditional worlds”, has become “untenable and dangerous in a universe where everything meets and interpenetrates”.3 The solution, however, is not the “false ecumenism” of the liberals which “abolishes doctrine”, and which (as Schuon sharply notes) in order “to reconcile two adversaries . . . strangles them both”. No, a “true ecumenism” must honor and uphold the importance of traditional dogmas, irreconcilable as they may appear exoterically, while at the same time appealing, on the basis of prayer and contemplative insight, to “the wisdom that can discern the one sole Truth under the veil of different forms”.4 4 What this means for our conference will perhaps be surprising to some. It means—again I am quoting from Schuon—that “the Christian must be really Christian and the Muslim really Muslim, however paradoxical this may seem in view of the spiritual communion that has to be established between them,” for both parties, precisely for the sake of the mutual understanding they seek, are obliged to adopt “points of departure which are extrinsically and provisionally separative, not because they are separative or exclusive, but because, by their intrinsic veracity, they guarantee a true intuition of unity”.5 For those not familiar with the perennialist perspective, this is a subtle, but extremely important point, and it needs to be emphasized. We are to take traditional doctrines seriously, not out of some sentimental and ill-conceived nostalgia for the past, and certainly not with condescension toward those presumed to have a simpler and less intelligent faith than our own. One honors these teachings because they are true, and because they provide, each in its own way and within the symbolic and ritual context of a given tradition, an opening onto the Truth as such. It is only by conforming to “holy separation at the base,” Schuon therefore writes, that we can realize “holy union at the summit; one can attain to the latter only by first perceiving the element of unity in the revealed form itself, and by loving this form as an expression of the Supraformal.”6 What this implies, concretely, is that in a dialogue such as ours the Christian interlocutor can expect to reach a sympathetic understanding of Islam only by a continued insistence that Christ was indeed God incarnate, and not merely a prophet. The Christian must embrace this teaching with his full conviction, stretching forth his hand, like Thomas, in worshipful reverence to Jesus, and communicating in His divine body and blood, for it is by this means precisely that he will come to hear finally the words given to Mary, words spoken in the privacy and freshness of that first paschal garden: Do not hold Me back, but come with Me into the very heights of the only Real. Lâ ilâha illâ’Llâh. Now of course, to place the central teachings of Christianity and Islam so closely side by side is bound to create something of a shock, and this juxtaposition will be especially shocking for traditional Christians, who will strongly resist the suggestion that the Jesus of the Gospels was Himself a witness to the Muslim shahâdah, and who may therefore find themselves from the start deeply suspicious of the dialogue I am here proposing. Surely, they will say, there is an unbridgeable difference between the belief that Christ was just one in a series of human 5 messengers and the belief that He is God, and they may well suppose that the perennialists have done no less an act of violence to their religion than the liberals. I have elsewhere undertaken a doctrinal response to these criticisms and have attempted to explain in some detail how the formal dogmas of Christology promulgated by the early Councils of the Church themselves open up to precisely this esoteric equivalence.7 Nor, as I have endeavored to show, is this a question simply of some contrived and Procrustean compatibility. For unless we choose to be heretics, the Christian tradition forbids us to think that the Second Person of the Trinity is the same as the first, or that His Divinity was confined to the historical individuality of Jesus alone. On the contrary, in contemplating the mystery of the two natures in the single Person of Christ, we must remember that it was not the Father who was incarnate in Jesus, nor was it some particular man, but man as such, who was hypostatically assumed into God. Indeed we ourselves are that man in our essential humanity, and the God who took us into Himself was the Logos or Word, whose Divinity is itself derived from a yet more ultimate Source: “The Father,” as He Himself tells us, “is greater than I” (Jn 14:28). Jesus is most certainly God, and the perennialist would be among the first to defend the miraculous truth of that stunning ellipsis. But this does not mean that saving power was fully expended at a single moment of history, or that we should confuse the uniqueness of Him who was incarnate, the only begotten Son of God, with the human particularity of Jesus of Nazareth. There is only one eternal Son and one Logos, and “no man,” He tells us, “comes to the Father except by Me” (Jn 14:6). But nowhere do the creeds oblige us to equate His transcendent uniqueness with a singularity of the factual or temporal order.8 Today, however, my topic is not doctrine but method. I would like to look once again at the Christological question, so as to understand better the inward unanimity between the Christian and Muslim approaches to Christ, but I shall do so in a different and somewhat indirect way, by focusing our discussion on prayer. The goal is much the same, to encourage Christians, especially my fellow Orthodox, to keep their minds open to the possibilities of an esoteric ecumenism, but rather than examining the implications of traditional dogma as such, I wish to call your attention instead to the contemplative practice of the Christian East. “When a man seeks to escape from dogmatic narrowness,” Schuon has written, “it is essential that it be ‘upwards’ and not ‘downwards’”,9 for “truth does not deny forms from the outside, but transcends them from within.”10 As I shall suggest in what follows, there is no better way of 6 understanding what this transcendence or inward ascent may involve for the Christian than to consider that distinctive method of prayer, described in the Philokalia and other traditional sources, which we know by the name of Hesychasm. Of course, in the emphasis that it places upon the mystical and interior life, the East itself is already a kind of ascent within the larger tradition, an opening in the Christian carapace to truths of a less formal and less juridical order. But the hesychia which has been sought by its masters as the final goal of their Way points us even further upward and inward, to an opening within the opening, inviting us into the very heart of a distinctively Christian esoterism. *** It is customary for authorities on Eastern Christian spirituality to distinguish several senses of the term hesychia, a word often simply translated as “stillness”, and in doing so they sometimes call attention to one of the apothegmata that we find among the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. We are told that when the Abba Arsenios was still living in the city, he prayed to God, asking to be shown the path to salvation, and in response a voice came to him from Heaven and said, “Arsenios, be solitary, be silent, be at rest. These are the roots of a life without sin.”11 Only the last of these imperatives employs a cognate of the word hesychia itself, but it is traditionally understood, from the way in which the teaching is expounded in other Fathers, that the practice of Hesychasm includes all three of the dimensions contained in the answer to this Abba’s prayer. Corresponding to the three-fold structure of the human microcosm, there is first a physical or a bodily hesychia, which is apparent in the isolation of the hermit. “Be solitary,” were the heavenly words. Thus, on the material and most external level of our being, we are Hesychasts when we retreat from the world and live alone, exchanging our life in society, or perhaps even the cenobitical life of a cloistered monk, for the life of an anchorite. This is the mode of hesychia that St Gregory of Sinai has in mind in teaching that “the practice of stillness is one thing and that of community life is another”,12 and it is in this same vein that Evagrios Pontikos (who was himself styled the Solitary) advises us, “If you cannot attain stillness where you now live, consider living in exile”.13 Second, there is a hesychia as it were of the soul, which one observes above all in refraining from speech. “Be silent,” said the voice to Arsenios. In this case, we become Hesychasts, not in taking flight from the companionship of other men, but in guarding our tongues and in deliberately withdrawing, whether permanently or at certain set times, from verbal communication with our fellows. It is to this dimension of the method that St 7 Thalassios the Libyan refers in warning that “only spiritual conversation is beneficial; it is better to preserve stillness than to indulge in any other kind”.14 There remains, however, yet a third kind of stillness, hesychia proper, suggested to Arsenios by the words “be at rest”—hesychaze in Greek. This, we discover, is a spiritual stillness, a hesychia corresponding to the level of man’s nous or intellect and distinguished (say the Fathers) by an inward state of complete serenity, immobility, and peace. By far the most difficult of all to attain, this truest and deepest form of Hesychasm consists in a solitude that is no longer contingent upon one’s location in space and in a silence that is independent of speech. Reproving the monk who supposes that his desert cave is enough, St Symeon the New Theologian stresses that a “stillness” understood merely in terms of “withdrawal from the world” is of absolutely no benefit “if we are lazy and negligent”,15 and according to one of the most famous of the desert sayings, it was revealed to St Anthony the Great, called the father of monks, that there was a busy physician living in the midst of the city who was his spiritual equal.16 With these and similar texts in mind, Bishop Kallistos Ware has remarked that “solitude is a state of soul, not a matter of geographical location”.17 It seems from other sources, however, that we would be justified in extending his observation to a further level, adding that true silence is a state of the spirit, and not a matter of audible communication. Thus St John Cassian, warning about the wiles we must be on guard against in our battles with the demon of self-esteem, calls our attention to the fact that “when [this demon] cannot persuade [a man] to feel proud of his display of eloquence, it entices him through silence into thinking he has achieved stillness”.18 Such an admonition would obviously not be necessary if silence and stillness were exactly the same, nor if keeping our mouths closed were sufficient for entering into the perfection of peace. But no, even as solitude is no guarantee of silence, so silence is no guarantee of serenity. There is instead yet another, deeper, and considerably rarer level of hesychia, where one is no longer distracted even by an inward interlocutor and where the space of the heart remains unencumbered even by the conversations that we so often have with ourselves. As many of you know, the Fathers of the Philokalia often describe this third form of stillness as a freedom from thoughts. As we read their writings, however, what we soon discover is that the term itself “thought” has several meanings, and that there are accordingly, even within the domain of this profoundest kind of hesychia, several distinct degrees of freedom, and so depths within depths. At a first and most superficial level, “thoughts”—logismoi is the term in 8 the Greek—are taken to mean specifically bad thoughts or temptations, provoked by the demons, which attack a man through the two lower parts of his soul: either through the appetitive and desiring power, which when uncurbed gives rise to lust and gluttony, or through the incensive and irascible power, whence comes the temptation to anger. St Neilos the Ascetic seems to be speaking mainly of the former when he explains that “stillness will in time free the intellect from being disturbed by impure thoughts”,19 while in the Bible St Paul refers to thoughts proceeding from the latter source when he says that “in every place men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling” (1 Tim 2:8). As it happens, however, this same passage from scripture, 1 Timothy 2:8, provides the Hesychast with good reason for thinking that true stillness is something still deeper, involving more than just freedom from the obvious seductions of the world and their resulting passionate thoughts. For what St Paul actually says in the Greek of this verse is that men should pray without dialogismos, a word which can be translated as quarrel or argument, but which also means any mode of dialogue, conversation, or debate, whether taking an external or an internal form, and thus—even more fundamentally—any effect or operation of the mind. In order to pray as he ought, it is therefore essential for the Hesychast to undertake a much subtler detachment and to cultivate an inward state uncompromised by the sense-impressions, visual memories, and other conceptual contents which are at once the causes and the consequences of discursive consciousness. No longer are “thoughts” to be understood merely as the grosser images of sensuality, greed, and violence that dominate the thinking of the worldly man; the logismoi from which one is obliged to escape are instead the very apparatus of conceptual reasoning. Here again, however, we find that there is more than one level, and different texts from the Fathers call attention to different dimensions of consciousness. On the one hand, certain passages are focused primarily on thoughts which flow from our perception of the physical world and which are responsible for giving shape to empirical data. When your intellect “withdraws from the flesh and turns away from all thoughts that have their source in sense-perception, memory, or the soul-body structure”, says Evagrios, “then you may conclude that you are close to the frontiers of prayer”.20 Similarly St Hesychios the Presbyter counsels that we should pursue with all our strength “that perfect stillness of heart and blessed state of soul” that comes when the mind is “free from all images”, a state—he is quick to add—which “is all too rarely found in man”.21 Meanwhile St Gregory of Sinai teaches that we have begun to attain to a state of pure 9 hesychia only when “the intellect sees neither itself nor anything else in a material way. On the contrary”—he continues—“it is often drawn away even from its own senses by the light acting within it; for now it grows immaterial and filled with spiritual radiance”.22 As this last formulation suggests, yet another level of withdrawal is possible, for there remains a final movement of inward ascent, one in which ideas as such are set aside and transcended, quite apart from any empirical or sensory basis. In this case, the nous or intellect, which is the seat of man’s intuitive powers of apprehension and which, when activated through purgation, affords him an immediate knowledge of essences, becomes detached (says St Gregory) “even from its own senses”, and the category of logismoi is thus expanded to include every object of consciousness, whether originating from a physical or a spiritual source. One notes, for example, that when St John Klimakos writes that “hesychia is a laying aside of thoughts”,23 he does not qualify the term: it is not simply bad thoughts, or thoughts arising from the senses, or thoughts which take the form of visual images, but thoughts in themselves which must be placed in suspension. This teaching is reinforced by St Hesychios, who calls his reader to a “stillness of mind unbroken even by thoughts which appear to be good”,24 and St Gregory of Sinai takes the additional step of insisting that even thoughts which are good, and not merely those appearing that way, must be renounced by the true Hesychast, for “stillness means the shedding of all thoughts for a time, even those which are divine and engendered by the Spirit; otherwise through giving them our attention because they are good we will lose what is better”.25 What these spiritual masters are describing—at this deepest level of stillness—is the operative parallel to the doctrinal apophaticism for which Eastern Christianity is so well known, and which of course is so forcefully expressed in the works of St Dionysius the Areopagite. According to Dionysius, “the supra-essential being of God” is at “a total remove from every condition, movement, life, imagination, conjecture, name, discourse, thought, conception, being, rest, dwelling, unity, limit, infinity, the totality of existence”, and it therefore follows, if we wish to approach this God in true prayer, that “we call a halt to the activities of our minds”.26 Just as Moses entered into darkness in his confrontation with God, so must we “leave behind everything that is observed,” writes St Gregory of Nyssa, “not only what sense comprehends but also what the intelligence thinks it sees”.27 For in this way, says St Dionysius again, “by an undivided and absolute abandonment of yourself and everything, shedding all and freed from all, you will be uplifted to the ray of the divine shadow which is above everything that is”.28 Many passages in 10 the Philokalia underscore the necessity of this same final abandonment. “Do not think that avarice consists simply in the possession of silver or gold,” writes St Peter of Damaskos. “It is present whenever our thought is attached to something”,29 however noble and true. Therefore, as St Diadochos of Photiki teaches, true poverty—the faqr of the Sufis—can be attained only through a mode of “prayer, deep stillness, and complete detachment” in which “a man sets himself utterly at naught”.30 Here we come finally to the innermost goal of our quest. In order to be truly still, we discover, it is not enough for a man to live alone, or to refrain from speaking, or to resist temptation, or to close his eyes, or to think without images. If he wishes to pray without dialogismos, like a true Hesychast, he must become—in the words of St Hesychios—“totally empty of form”.31 *** Schuon has said that in authentic esoterism, “truth does not deny forms from the outside, but transcends them from within”, and we have been attempting to glimpse what this inward transcendence might involve for the Christian by tracing the depths within depths of Eastern teaching on stillness. But transcendence is not denial, and we would seriously err if we supposed that Hesychasm is meant to culminate in mental nebulosity, or in a collapse of concentration and contemplative focus. On the contrary, as St Hesychios and other Fathers understood the process, becoming empty of form is not the same as having no outward form or support, and detachment from every object of consciousness must not be confused with an abandonment of consciousness as such. “Pure concentration also is prayer,” writes Schuon, a concentration which is “none other than silence”. But this silence can be of operative value, he adds, only “on condition that it have a traditional basis and be centered on the Divine”.32 The Hesychast masters were well aware of this principle, and while insisting that we should set aside every thought and go beyond every form, they never relinquished their fidelity to one particular thought nor their dependence on a central and indispensable form. What I have in mind, of course, is their methodic use of the Name. As many of you know, the spirituality of the Christian East, in addition to its characteristic stress upon stillness, has also been distinguished historically by its practice of invocatory or monologic prayer. This is a method of contemplative orison, found also among the Sufis in their practice of dhikr, which involves the continual repetition of a single word or short formula as an aid to concentration. In 11 the case of Hesychasm, the word in question is usually the Name of Jesus, which is pronounced either on its own or, more commonly, as part of a brief petition often called the Jesus Prayer, consisting of the words (or some slight variation) “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” A prayer of this kind can be used by the Christian in a variety of ways and on several levels, not the least important being as a personal plea for help in times of danger or trouble, or as an expression of devotion and love for the Person of the Savior. But for the spiritual masters, it also has a strictly contemplative or yogic purpose, which is to serve as a focus and a point of stability in our efforts to overcome distraction and to eliminate thoughts. “Let the remembrance of Jesus be united with your every breath,” writes St John Klimakos, “and then you will know the value of stillness”,33 for through this remembrance, St Philotheus of Sinai explains, you can “concentrate your scattered intellect”,34 calming and unifying the turbulent and wandering mind.35 In more recent times, St Theophan the Recluse has offered the same advice. If you wish “to stop the continual jostling of your thoughts,” he writes, “you must bind the mind with one thought, or the thought of One only”36—namely, the thought of the Lord Jesus Christ. Here, though, we encounter a paradox. As we have seen, the distinguishing aim of the Hesychast method of prayer, hesychia itself, consists in a freedom from all conceptual forms. Our goal is a state of radical simplicity and purity, in which the mind is no longer occupied with the thought of anything, even (say the Fathers) something good and Divine: a state of utter openness and emptiness that only God Himself, and no conception, can fill. In order that we might enter this state, however—so say the masters of this path to the heart—we must deliberately retain the thought of Jesus. But how is this possible? Is it not a contradiction to think that we can become genuine Hesychasts while at the same time keeping ourselves bound to the form of His Name? It must be admitted that in many of the Eastern Christian fathers there is a contradiction, and that in spite of their continuing praise of contemplative stillness, what we find instead in their writings, whether in the Philokalia or elsewhere, is that a sentimental and devotional attachment to the incarnate person of Christ has in fact taken center stage in their practice. There is little doubt, for example, that the purity of true hesychia has been severely compromised, or at least greatly mitigated, in the teaching of St Theodoros the Great Ascetic when he advises his reader to “think of the blessings which await the righteous: how they will stand at Christ’s right hand, the gracious voice of the Master, the inheritance of the heavenly kingdom”—or again “that 12 sweet light, the endless joy, never interrupted by grief, those heavenly mansions, life with the angels, and all the other promises made to those who fear the Lord”. For—this same writer concludes—“unless a soul is strengthened with these thoughts, it cannot achieve stillness”.37 There is no denying, of course, that imaginative anticipations of this kind can be a powerful aid to a man’s devotional piety, and one can have no objection to the important part they play in the discursive prayers of the Christian, nor indeed to their presence among the provisional and preparatory meditations of the Hesychast himself. And yet it is surely just as obvious that such thoughts as those described by this saint, motivated as they are by individual interest and colored by scriptural and other traditional images, cannot but clutter and distract the mind when it is seeking to enter into the deepest dimension of stillness. Clearly they must be set aside, at least at certain times, if this final goal is to be realized. But how is this possible if one is praying the Jesus Prayer? Petitions by their very nature are constructed from concepts, they pertain to objects, and they express thoughts.38 I have called into question the advice of St Theodoros, but one might well ask in his defense how any man, even one who guards his imagination more closely, can pray the Jesus Prayer without thoughtfully considering the words that he uses and without allowing his attention to be shaped by their meaning. How am I to bind my thoughts by this thought without thinking about it? You may say that I am exaggerating the difficulty of the method, and that in demanding from our minds a thoughtless thought, I have put the matter in too elliptical and problematic a fashion. Consider, however, the words of St Gregory of Sinai: “Unceasingly cry out: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy’, and [he adds at once] do not allow yourself to retain any concept, object, thought, or form that is supposedly divine, or any sequence of argument or any color”.39 But how can we do that? How are we to invoke a formula containing Christ’s Name without our minds becoming enmeshed in its form? The answer has to do with what is meant by the Name. Preaching the good news of Christ’s redemptive death, in a much-quoted passage from the fourth chapter of Acts, the apostle Peter proclaimed that “there is no other Name under Heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). As the Christians in my audience know, this is a text often cited by exclusivists in defense of their belief that a conscious commitment to Jesus is the only sure path to God. In their case, the word “name” is taken to mean a proper name, and the Name of Jesus is understood to be the appellation of a specific figure of history, Jesus of Nazareth, without whom 13 salvation would not be possible. This, of course, is a perfectly legitimate and straightforward reading of the verse in question, for on one important and very obvious level, the Name “Jesus” surely is the name of Jesus. It is doubtless true also that when St Peter used the term “name” in this context, he was thinking specifically of the incarnate Son of God, the One who was “crucified, whom God raised from the dead” (Acts 4:10). Nevertheless it would be very wrong to assume that this is the only possible reference of the term, and to conclude therefore that the Name can mean only, or even that it does mean primarily, a given human name of the Logos. Those who would have us restrict the word to this single level of reference have failed to consider at least four telling points. They have forgotten, first, that “Jesus” is but one of numerous ways of referring to the Son of God in the Scriptures, many of which clearly bear a more universal significance than the proper name of a man. St Gregory the Theologian provides this partial list of Christ’s Biblical names: “Image, Vapor, Emanation, Effulgence, Creator, King, Head, Law, Door, Foundation, Rock, Pearl, Righteousness, Sanctification, Redemption, Man, Servant, Shepherd, Lamb, High Priest, Sacrifice, Firstborn of Creation, Firstborn of the Dead”.40 It would obviously be absurd to suppose that the Divine Person thus described in these terms is deprived of His saving power when the specific name “Jesus” is not being used. The Name of Jesus, one begins to see, must be something more than these two syllables alone.41 Second, unless we wish to side with the heretical modalists, who suppose that the three distinct names of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit apply alike to a single Person, we must admit that the name itself “Jesus” is not uniquely salvific, for, taking it strictly as a proper name, it clearly leaves unnamed the other two Hypostases of the Holy Trinity, upon whom salvation depends nonetheless, and whose own names must also be regarded as sacred. The Christian is reminded of this fact, of course, every time he prays the Lord’s Prayer, asking that the Father’s Name should be “hallowed”. It is of considerable interest to note, by the way, that at least one early Christian authority seems to have acknowledged the saving efficacy of an invocation based upon the Name of the Father and employed by the followers of another religion, who never used the proper name of the Son. St Irenaeus writes that just as “all things are subject to the Name of our Lord [Jesus Christ], so must they also be [subject] to His [Name] who made and established all things by His Word”, that is, the Father. “For this reason,” he continues, “the Jews even now”—that is, during Irenaeus’s time—“put demons to flight by means of this very adjuration, inasmuch as all beings fear the invocation of Him who created them”.42 Besides his own, 14 Irenaeus knew of no other orthodox religion than Judaism, but surely, given this ancient precedent, there is no reason for the Christian of our day to deny a like efficacy to the Name of Allah. Yet a third point is this. Quite apart from the question of its proper or particular usage, the word “name” is often used in the Bible, not in reference to a specific person at all, but as a synonym for authority and power, above all that of God, and in the context of Acts 4, where the subject is the Divine saving presence that was embodied in Jesus, it is certainly this meaning that must be regarded as central. To say with St Peter that there is salvation in “no other name” is not to name Jesus uniquely; it is a way instead of underscoring His intrinsic Divinity. We Orthodox see this deeper meaning of the Name portrayed in many of our icons of Christ, where, inscribed within the nimbus surrounding His head, one finds not the proper name “Jesus”, but the Greek words ? ??, meaning “the One who is” and referring of course to the Name of God given to Moses on Horeb (Ex 3:14).43 Finally, there is a fourth reason for rejecting the claim that salvation is limited by the name itself “Jesus”, and hence for a methodical detachment from the Person thus named, and it is a reason which Orthodox Christians, with their stress upon mystery and the way of negation, should be quick to understand. We have said that “Jesus” is only one of the names of God’s Son, that the Father and the Holy Spirit have their own saving names, and that the word itself “name” connotes Divine presence and power, regardless of the given form which this presence might take. But we must also remember that the ultimate Source of Divinity in the unknowable Godhead, however many names it might take in the world, cannot be named as It is in itself. Although rightly praised “by every name”, says St Dionysius, It is finally best named “the Nameless One”.44 St Gregory Palamas, among many others, concurs: “The super-essential nature of God is not a subject for speech or thought or even contemplation,” he writes, and hence “there is no name whereby it can be named, neither in this age nor in the age to come, nor word found in the soul and uttered by the tongue”.45 It is still true, of course, that there is salvation in none other than the Name of Jesus, and the Hesychast is no less obliged than other Christians to accept and to honor this principle. But at the same time no Christian, least of all the aspiring Hesychast, should allow himself to forget that Jesus is not the only name of the Son, that the Son is not the only name of God, that God is not the only name of the Named, and that the Named is truly named by no name. 15 *** One well known authority on the spirituality of the Christian East has written that “the Jesus Prayer is fundamentally Christocentric. We are not simply invoking God, but our words are addressed specifically to Jesus Christ—to God incarnate, the Word made flesh, the second Person of the Holy Trinity who was born in Bethlehem, truly crucified on Golgotha, and truly raised from the dead”. This same writer adds, with specific reference to the Sufi practice of dhikr, that “a religion such as Islam which rejects the incarnation cannot be invoking God in the same way as Hesychasm does”, and he suggests that we should compare the invocatory method of prayer to a picture frame, while the specific name that one invokes in any given prayer may be likened to the image within that frame. “Despite the resemblances between the ‘frame’ of the Jesus Prayer and certain non-Christian ‘frames’,” he concludes, “we should never underestimate the uniqueness of the portrait within the ‘frame’. Techniques are subsidiary; it is our encounter face to face, through the prayer, with the living person of Jesus that alone has primary value”.46 But is this really true? Is it thus, and thus only, that one may engage in this prayer? The teachings to which I have been calling your attention in this paper suggest otherwise, and I therefore find that I must respectfully disagree with this author. The inner emptiness which the Christian aspirant is encouraged to seek and the inner plenitude of the Name which he is taught to invoke prove, if anything, that Hesychasm and Sufism are all but identical.47 Indeed, it is precisely because of the often remarkable parallels between the teachings of certain Eastern Fathers and their counterparts in other religious traditions that Christian exoterists, including those of the East, are sometimes mistrustful of the Hesychast writers. The Orthodox scholar John Meyendorff, for example, voices his concern about what he calls the “individualistic and spiritualized tendency” of St Gregory of Sinai,48 and much the same reservation is expressed, more forcefully, by the Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, who complains that “the mystical teaching of Evagrius in its fully developed consistency stands closer to Buddhism than to Christianity”.49 The criticism of Protestant writers often goes even further, of course, extending to the via negativa as such and thus to one of the distinguishing marks of the Eastern perspective in general. Luther was doubtless speaking for many others when he wrote that “Dionysius is most pernicious; he Platonizes more than he Christianizes”.50 On the other hand, it is certainly true—and I have acknowledged this point already—that the writings of these same Fathers are at the same time strongly colored by a devotional 16 attachment to Christ’s Person; St Theodoros, whom I quoted earlier, is by no means unique in this respect. In fact, as one quickly discovers in reading the Philokalia and other traditional sources, even the most apophatic of Hesychast authors do not always practice what they preach, and the method of prayer which they follow and promulgate remains, not surprisingly, a largely bhaktic one. Schuon has written about “the unequal and often disconcerting phenomenon of average Sufism”, a Sufism that confuses first principles with “the categories of an anthropomorphist and voluntaristic theology”, and we must in all honesty acknowledge the existence, in the Christian East, of what might be called by analogy an average Hesychasm, in which the absolute imprescriptibility of the Divine Essence and the operative rigor of a truly intellective detachment are both sacrificed to the needs of a conventional piety. My interests here, however, are not of the historical or textual kind. I am not asking the question how in fact most Eastern Christians have prayed, and my chief concern is not with how best to describe the spirituality disclosed in the surviving works of their major authorities, nor again with whether these writers should be praised or blamed. I am concerned instead with what is possible for the Christian seeker today, especially one who finds himself called to a path of knowledge and who seeks to understand the inner essence of religion, and with whether that Christian, without in any way denying the truth of his own tradition, may acknowledge the equal truth of a way not his own—perhaps even drawing from it an encouragement and nourishment for his own spiritual practice. I believe that he can, and the point of my remarks has been to indicate how the hesychia of the Christian East might help to point him in the right direction. Historically, of course, the Hesychast writers were not themselves interested in these questions, and most of them would have been just as resistant as many other Christians to the claims of another religion, and hence to the possibility of an esoteric ecumenism. Nor is there is anything surprising in this, for as Schuon points out, “a man’s spirituality cannot be held to depend on knowledge of a historical or geographical kind”,51 and in the case of the Fathers, even those who, like St John Damascene and St Gregory Palamas, had contact with Islam, it is far from certain whether they encountered Muslims of their own spiritual stature, with whom they could have joined in a truly metaphysical dialogue. Nevertheless, for the Christian today, who lives in such different circumstances, and who does know about the mystical paths of other religions, the teachings of the Hesychasts can serve as a means for deepening his participation in Christ, while 17 at the same time providing the keys for inwardly transcending whatever limitations those teachers may have felt obliged to impose on themselves. When as a young man St Gregory of Sinai was taken prisoner in a Turkish raid, I do not know where he may have gone or with what Muslims he may have spoken, or what his own spiritual aptitude may have been at the time, or why he entered the monastic life after being released from captivity. But when he tells me to “concentrate solely on the pure, simple, formless remembrance of Jesus,”52 I presume that he must have meant what he said, and that he is inviting me to enter into a method of invoking Christ’s Name which does not involve thinking explicitly about the incarnation—about the One who was born in Bethlehem, truly crucified on Golgotha, and truly raised from the dead.53 To be in-carnate, after all, is to be circumscribed by a form, and a formless form is a sheer contradiction. On the other hand, a formless remembrance is still a remembrance. There is no indication that I should stop invoking the Name, which continues to serve as a support for my concentration and as a vehicle of Divine saving power. But I must do so, it seems, in a way that is deliberately detached from all conceptual contents, and thus from my thoughts, not only about the particularities of the Son’s earthly life, but even about His Person as such. Similarly, when St Dionysius explains that “the wonderful ‘name which is above every name’” (Phil 2:9) is the Name of “the Nameless One”, of the “hidden Divinity which transcends [even] being”,54 I do not know whether he is speaking as a pseudonymous 5th century Syrian monk, or (as my tradition tells me) as a disciple of St Paul’s. What I do know is that for this same Paul, writing in Philippians 2, the “name which is above every name” is the Name of Jesus, and I am once again obliged to conclude, therefore, that within the initiatic context of an authentic Hesychast method, the meaning of the word “Jesus” is not limited to the historical and individual order. St Dionysius adds strength to this conclusion: “Every affirmation regarding Jesus’s love for humanity,” he writes—and it is just such an affirmation that we find in the Jesus Prayer—“has the force of a negation pointing toward transcendence”. For even though God is fully present in Jesus, “He is hidden even after this revelation, or, if I may speak in a more divine fashion, is hidden even amid the revelation.” The “mystery of Jesus” can thus “be drawn out by no word or mind. What is to be said of it remains unsayable; what is to be understood of it remains unknowable.”55 18 If this is true, however, then clearly one’s invocation of this Name need not—and, in the case of the Hesychast, should not—be combined with an exclusive focus upon the incarnate Person of Christ, but should be accompanied instead by a gradual detachment of the mind from all associations and categories, whether empirical or dogmatic in character. Without in any way denying the miraculous facts of Christ’s life or the saving truths of Christological doctrine, the Christian pilgrim must make an effort to abstract from those facts to their essential meaning, and to look along these truths toward the Truth. For it is thus and thus only that, with Heaven’s help, he may come at last to that dimensionless center where, in the words of St Hesychios, “the Heart sees the God of gods in its own depths”—a God who is no longer approached as a distinct object of consciousness, but who Himself (the saint adds) is both “the Seer and the Seen”.56 “I saw my Lord with the eye of the heart,” echoes the Sufi saint Mansûr al-Hallâj. “I said, ‘Who art Thou?’, and He answered ‘Thou’”.57 According to Marco Pallis, “the essential question to be asked” of any religious tradition is whether it provides “the means for taking a man all the way in the spiritual life”—whether “the formal limits” are such as “to leave an open window looking towards the formless Truth, thus allowing for the possibility of its immediate or ultimate realization”.58 Unfortunately, we Christians have tended to keep our shutters closed. Not of course that we are lacking in windows, but they are usually made of stained glass or painted on wood, coloring the beams they are designed to transmit, and most Christian authorities, content with their own devotional piety, have done very little to make the serious seeker aware that it is possible for a man to go outside into the fresh morning air.59 Among the masters of the Christian East, however, one hears at least rumors of openings, and regardless of whether any given one of them was willing to look directly on the white light of the Truth, we find at least scattered hints in their writings as to how we might open a few windows for ourselves. The details of their practice are a subject for another time. How precisely to enunciate the invocation, and where to place it in the mind or the heart; how to coordinate the repetition of the Name with a persevering effort to prescind from all thoughts; how to support this inner work by the rhythm of one’s breathing or movement—these are important questions that I have not sought to address in this paper. Nevertheless, I think we can begin glimpsing, at least, the essential elements of the Hesychast method, and what we find, I suggest, is that they mirror the instructions of the risen Lord Himself. 19 Thomas, as you will recall, jnanic patron of those seeking an immediate certitude, was told that he must be patient and begin by touching the form, truly taking hold of what God had revealed, for Jesus is the Son, and the Son is God, and God is the Named, and the Named is its Name, which Name, for the Christian, is “Jesus”. As for Mary Magdalene, prototype of the bhakta, she was nonetheless warned against clinging, and thus against confusing the form with the Essence, for Jesus is not the only name of the Son, nor is the Son the only name of God, nor is God the only name of the Named, and the Named is truly named by no name.60 It has been suggested that the method of invocatory prayer is only the picture frame of one’s practice, and that it is the portrait within the Christian frame, Jesus Himself, to whom His followers must direct their undivided attention. But this, it seems, is not the best comparison. If we wish to follow the Hesychast path to the heart, it is Jesus who must be approached as the frame—the frame, not of a portrait, but a window. Seekers living in the Christian house must not turn their backs on this window, supposing it to be too narrow to show them the Truth. But neither should they remain at a distance, as if they were admiring a favorite painting from across a gallery. They must take a step forward and lift up the sash, placing their head and shoulders both inside its ample opening. What they shall see then, of course, is no longer the frame, but instead the bountiful emptiness of a mountain valley and across its grassy expanse, if they look carefully, the outlines of other houses with other windows not their own. 1 Quoted in John Meyendorff, St Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974), 106. 2 As in the title of his book Christianity/Islam: Essays on Esoteric Ecumenism (Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom Books, 1985). 3 Logic and Transcendence, trans. Peter N. Townsend (London: Perennial Books, 1975), 4. 4 Logic and Transcendence, 182. 5 Logic and Transcendence, 223-24. “The inward and essential knowledge of a theologically exclusive Muslim,” Schuon continues, “may be infinitely closer to the Christ-given mysteries than is the mental and sentimental universalism of a profane despiser of ‘separatist dogmas’” (Logic and Transcendence, 224n). We may add, mutatis mutandis, that the mystical insight of a theologically exclusive Orthodox saint is doubtless much closer to the Sufic tawhid or “union” than is the ecumenism of the modernist or liberal Christian, who has no qualms about destroying the very foundations of his religion in the interest of greater “understanding”. 20 6 Logic and Transcendence, 224. As examples of this “holy separation”, Schuon notes the following: “St John Damascene held a high position at the court of the caliph in Damascus [where he “wrote and published, with the approval of the caliph, his famous treatise in defense of images, which had been prohibited by the iconoclast Emperor Leo III”]; yet he was not converted to Islam, any more than were St Francis of Assisi in Tunisia, St Louis in Egypt, or St Gregory Palamas in Turkey. [“While a prisoner of the Turks for a year, he had friendly discussions with the Emir’s son, but was not converted, nor did the Turkish prince become a Christian”]. . . . Tradition tells that the Sufi Ibrahim ibn Adham had as his occasional master a Christian hermit, without either being converted to the other’s religion” (Christianity/Islam, 91). 7 See “The Mystery of the Two Natures”, Sophia: The Journal of Traditional Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Winter 1998), 111-141. 8 Schuon adduces the general principle: “A religion is a form—hence a limit—which contains the Limitless, if this paradox is permissible; every form is fragmentary because of its necessary exclusion of other formal possibilities.” For this reason “it is contradictory to base a certitude that demands to be considered as total on the phenomenal order . . . while demanding an intellectual acceptance” (Understanding Islam [Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom Books, 1994], 174). 9 Stations of Wisdom (Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom Books, 1995), 4. “Dogmatic form is transcended,” Schuon continues, “by fathoming its depths and contemplating its universal content, and not by denying it in the name of a pretentious and iconoclastic ideal of ‘pure truth’.” 10 Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, trans. Peter N. Townsend (London: Perennial Books, 1987), 118. 11 Quoted by Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, Vol. I of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1997), 136. See The Desert Christian: Sayings of the Desert Fathers, trans. Benedicta Ward (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 9. 12 “On Prayer: Seven Texts”, The Philokalia, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, Kallistos Ware (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), Vol. IV, 279. 13 “Outline Teaching on Asceticism and Stillness in the Solitary Life”, The Philokalia, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, Kallistos Ware (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), Vol. I, 33. 14 “On Love, Self-Control, and Life in accordance with the Intellect: Written for Paul the Presbyter”, The Philokalia, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, Kallistos Ware (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), Vol. II, 311. 15 “On Faith”, The Philokalia, Vol. IV, 19. 16 Sayings of the Desert Fathers, 6. 17 The Inner Kingdom, Vol. I of The Collected Works of Kallistos Ware (Crestwood, New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 93. One is reminded of the Sufi afrad and his mysterious master Al-Khidr, whose fard—that is, isolation or singularity—is manifest with a special, if paradoxical, clarity when he is present among men. 18 “On the Eight Vices”, The Philokalia, Vol. I, 91. 19 “Ascetic Discourse”, The Philokalia, Vol. I, 230. 20 “On Prayer”, The Philokalia, Vol. I, 62-63. “Structure” is my term. The translation of Palmer et al. says “soul- body temperament”. 21 21 “On Watchfulness and Holiness”, The Philokalia, Vol. I, 182. St Philotheos of Sinai agrees concerning the exceptional nature of spiritual hesychia. Speaking about “the noetic work that is the true philosophy of Christ”, he notes that “it is very rare to find people whose intelligence is in a state of stillness” (“Forty Texts on Watchfulness”, The Philokalia, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, Kallistos Ware [London: Faber and Faber, 1984], Vol. III, 17). 22 “On Commandments and Doctrines, Warnings and Promises; on Thoughts, Passions, and Virtues, and also on Stillness and Prayer”, The Philokalia, Vol. IV, 239. 23 Quoted by Ware, The Inner Kingdom, 96. Ware points out that St John is here “adapting an Evagrian phrase, ‘Prayer is a laying aside of thoughts’”. 24 “On Watchfulness and Holiness”, 180. 25 “On Stillness”, The Philokalia, Vol. IV, 270. Writes St Isaac the Syrian, “As the saints in the world to come no longer pray, their minds having been engulfed in the Divine Spirit, but dwell in ecstasy in that excellent glory; so the mind, when it has been made worthy of perceiving the blessedness of the age to come, will forget itself and all that is here, and will no longer be moved by the thought of anything” (quoted in Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church [Crestwood, New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976], 208). 26 The Divine Names in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 54, 53. 27 The Life of Moses, trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 95. 28 The Mystical Theology in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 135. 29 “A Treasury of Divine Knowledge: Obedience and Stillness”, The Philokalia, Vol. III, 107. 30 “On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination”, The Philokalia, Vol. I, 255. Lossky points out that “at the extreme height of the knowable, one must be freed from that which perceives as much as from that which can be perceived: that is to say, from the subject as well as from the object of perception” (28). And Schuon observes that hesychia is thus “the exact equivalent of the Hindu and Buddhist nirvana and the Sufic fana (both terms signifying ‘extinction’); the ‘poverty’ (faqr) in which ‘union’ (tawhid) is achieved refers to the same symbolism” (The Transcendent Unity of Religions, trans. Peter Townsend [London: Faber and Faber, 1953], 181n). 31 “On Watchfulness and Holiness”, 177. Similarly, in the continuation of The Way of a Pilgrim, we are told that “the spiritual and incomprehensible Being of God may be present to the mind and recognized in the heart in absolute ‘formlessness’ (The Pilgrim Continues His Way, trans. R. M. French [San Francisco: Harper and Row, n.d.], 222). 32 Stations of Wisdom, 124. This silence, Schuon continues, “has been called a ‘Name of the Buddha’ because of its connection with the idea of the Void”, for “Shunyâmûrti, ‘Manifestation of the Void’, is one of the Names of the Buddha” (125). 33 Quoted by Bishop Kallistos Ware, The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality (Oxford: The Sisters of the Love of God, 1974), 11. St Hesychios offers an almost identical formulation: “The strength of the heart’s stillness, mother of all the virtues, is preserved in us through our being helped by the Lord. . . . Let the Name of Jesus adhere to your breath, and then you will know the blessings of stillness” (“On Watchfulness and Holiness”, 179). 34 “Forty Texts on Watchfulness”, 27. 35 We are told that the value of the practice comes at least partly from the fact that the Name itself carries within it a power and beauty with which our other thoughts are unable to compete. St Hesychios admits that it is extremely 22 “difficult to still the mind so that it rests from all thoughts,” and yet there lies close at hand a ready solution to this problem in the Name, for “he who through unceasing prayer holds the Lord Jesus within his breast will not tire in following Him”, and “because of Jesus’s beauty and sweetness, he will not desire what is merely mortal” (“On Watchfulness and Holiness”, 188). 36 The Inner Kingdom, 101. The last phrase is added by Bishop Kallistos. 37 “A Century of Spiritual Texts”, The Philokalia, Vol. II, 25. 38 This is why some startsi recommend reducing the invocation to the name “Jesus” on its own. The Archimandrite Lev Gillet points out that “the name Jesus forms the core and motive force” of the Jesus Prayer, and he adds that “the oldest, the simplest, and in our opinion the easiest formula is the word ‘Jesus’ used alone” (The Jesus Prayer [Crestwood, New York: St Vladimir’s Seminar Press, 1987], 93). Speaking of japa yoga in general, Marco Pallis has observed that “the less the formula used lends itself to rational analysis, the better it will match the inward synthesis of which it is destined to become the operative support.” Within the operative context of a contemplative method, the discursive meaning of an invocation, including the Jesus Prayer, is not the issue. On the contrary, “it is the Holy Name, sonorous presence of the divine grace enshrined in the formula, that is both the source of its power to illuminate and a sharp sword to cut off ignorance and distraction at the root” (“Discovering the Interior Life”, The Sword of Gnosis: Metaphysics, Cosmology, Tradition, Symbolism, ed. Jacob Needleman [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974], 195). 39 “On Stillness”, 270n. 40 Oratio 40:4; quoted by Tomáš Špidlík, S.J., The Spirituality of the Christian East: A Systematic Handbook (Kalmazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications, 1986), 35. In his book The Name of Jesus, bearing the significant subtitle The Names of Jesus Used by Early Christians, Irénée Hausherr points out that while the name “Jesus” is “one of the names of the well-beloved Son”, for “Hermas [author of the second century “Shepherd”] and others like him the very person of the Son was the name, the only name which perfectly expressed the Father (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications, 1978), 18. 41 This of course is not to deny the powerful symbolism of this name and its letters. Like every name of God, “Jesus” is rich in meanings, which have been somewhat more elaborated in the West than in the East. Schuon observes that “it is not by chance that [St] Bernardino [of Siena] gave to his cipher of the Name of Jesus the appearance of a monstrance: the divine Name, carried in thought and in the heart, through the world and through life, is like the Holy Sacrament carried in procession. This cipher of the Greek letters I H S, signifying Iesous, but interpreted in Latin as In Hoc Signo or as Jesus Hominum Salvator and often written in Gothic letters, can be analyzed in its primitive form into three elements—a vertical straight line, two vertical lines linked together, and a curved line—and thus contains a symbolism at once metaphysical, cosmological, and mystical; there is in it a remarkable analogy, not only with the name of Allah written in Arabic, which also comprises the three lines of which we have just spoken (in the form of the alif, the two lams, and the hâ), but also with the Sanskrit monosyllable Aum, which is composed of three mâtrâs (A U M) indicating a ‘rolling up’ and thereby a return to the Center. All of these symbols mark, in a certain sense, the passage from ‘coagulation’ to ‘solution’” (Stations of Wisdom, 131-132n). Symbols, even so, they remain, no one of which manifests the Truth uniquely; there is always more to the Name than a name. 42 Against Heresies, II.6; Vol. I of The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1967), 365-366. One wonders whether this means that the Jews of the late second century A.D. had retained the proper pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton. 43 The Fathers sometimes quote Psalm 46:10 in this connection to underscore the relationship between the Divine Name and the practice of hesychia: “Be still, and know that I AM God”. Nikitas Stithatos comments that “this is the voice of the divine Logos and is experienced as such by those who put the words into practice” (“On the Inner Nature of Things”, Philokalia, Vol. IV, 109). 44 The Divine Names, 54. 23 45 Quoted by Lossky, 37. 46 Ware, “Praying with the Body”, 31. 47 The focus of this paper is spiritual method, but one may note in passing that the ultimate goal of these two traditions is described by their masters in remarkably similar terms. It is impossible not to think of the maxim of Islamic mysticism that “the Sufi is not created” when St Gregory Palamas describes theosis or deification as “unoriginate (not only uncreated), indescribable, and supratemporal” and when he says that “those who attain it become thereby uncreated, unoriginate, and indescribable, although in their own nature they derive from nothingness” (The Triads, ed. John Meyendorff and trans. Nicholas Gendle [New York: Paulist Press, 1983], 86). St Gregory says that he is here following “the divine Maximus”, that is, St Maximos the Confessor, who tells us in turn that the supreme spiritual state involves ‘the complete reversion of created beings to God. It is then that God suspends in created beings the operation of their natural energy by inexpressibly activating in them His divine energy” (“First Century of Theology”, The Philokalia, Vol. II, 123). Meanwhile Ibn al
- [The Syrian Orthodox Church and its Diaspora: Modern History and Contemporary Challenges](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/syrian-orthodox-diaspora) - Sebastian Brock Recorded at Heythrop College, London, 30 November 2011. To Download the mp3 file click here - This will automatically begin the download to your computer. 1:03:29 (61MB) This talk was organised by the Centre for Eastern Christianity, as part of their Michaelmas Term 2011 Seminar Programme. The Matheson Trust thanks the Centre for Eastern
- [Hesychia: An Eastern Orthodox Opening to Esoteric Ecumenism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/hesychia-orthodox-opening-audio) - James Cutsinger 2001 Paths to the Heart Conference, University of South Carolina Republished with kind permission from Serious Seekers. Based on Frithjof Schuon's maxim that "truth does not deny forms from the outside but transcends them from within", Professor Cutsinger's talk addresses the question of how one can adhere to the form of Orthodox Christian practice
- [What is Prayer?](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/what-is-prayer) - Kallistos Ware “How are we to stop talking and start listening in our prayer? This is where the Jesus prayer can help us. It is a contemplative prayer, a prayer of listening. It is a prayer in words, but because the words are simple, frequently repeated, they reach out into the living silence of God.”
- [How do we enter the heart?](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/how-do-we-enter-the-heart) - Kallistos Ware This talk was part of the Paths to the Heart conference, hosted by the University of South Carolina in October 2001. “I say a few prayers each day, I make prostrations, I keep the fast, I try not to lose my temper with my brothers; what more can I do?” How do we
- [The Holy Icon – Doorway into Heaven](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-holy-icon-doorway) - Kallistos Ware Lecture given from Constantinople for an Orientale Lumen session, June 2007. “An icon is not just a work of art on a level with other works of art, but part of an act of prayer and worship. The art of the icon is par excellence a liturgical art. That is the first consequence
- [For the Peace from Above](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/peace-from-above) - Kallistos Ware Talk given on November 14, 2011 at The Academic Forum for Peace, held by Wroclaw University, Poland, and the Institute for the Study of Islam. For the Peace from Above Click here to download – 32:35 (31.3MB) “Peace is the freedom to be oneself, it means our normal state, corresponding to the will of
- [Cuthbert, Guthlac and the Life of St Antony](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/cuthbert-guthlac-antony) - Dr Benedicta Ward SLG Christians far from Egypt have drawn inspiration from the Life of St Antony, including England's two most popular pre-Conquest hermit saints: Cuthbert of Lindisfarne (c. 634–687) and Guthlac (c. 673–714) whose hermitage in the fens became the Abbey of Crowland. This film was made possible with the support of The Matheson Trust. Filmed at the St. Theosevia
- [On Death](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/metropanthony-on-death) - Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh (1914–2003) Most of the time we live as though we were writing a draft for the life which we will live later. We live not in a definitive way, but provisionally, as though preparing for the day when we really will begin to live. We are like people who write a
- [On the Creation of Women](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/creation-of-women) - Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh … the creation of Eve is the fulfilment of the creation of man; yes: without her, man, the human being is yet potentiality but not reality. Click here to view the PDF Or click here to download a special eBook and tablet formatted PDF With thanks to the Metropolitan Anthony of
- [The Three-Character Rhymed Classic on the Ka‘bah](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/three-character-rhymed-classic) - Ma Fu-ch’u (Yusuf Ma Dexin, 1794–1874) Translated and annotated by J. Peter Hobson The primordial Doctrine was preserved by the Ka‘bah alone; sage followed sage, the stream flowed from its source until it reached our Prophet. Click here to view the PDF With thanks to Studies in Comparative Religion.
- [The Prayer of an Islamic-Christian Heart](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/prayer-of-islamic-christian-heart) - ?The Prayer of an Islamic-Christian Heart Fr. Paolo Dalloglio “Christ, Isa Son of Mary, forgive me, the sinner, and have mercy on us” The Prayer of the Heart, also known as the Prayer of the Name of Jesus, can be traced back to the early Christian communities. According to St. Paul, we should “pray without ceasing” (Thessalonians 5: 17).This prayer has been widely taught in Eastern monachism and theologically reflected upon throughout the history of the Eastern Churches. It is repeated continually as personal ascetic practice, being an integral part of the eremitic spiritual tradition known as Hesychasm (to keep stillness), and largely described in The Philokalia, a collection of quotations from the Eastern Fathers. The spiritual father/mother proposes the prayer wording to the beginner who will repeat it seeking deepness and sincerity until his heart opens up and unites with the mystery of Jesus himself. There rises the prayer of the Holy Spirit, the most personal and intimate, a spring welling up from deep within. The Prayer of the Heart has somehow an equivalent in the Roman Catholic rosary which has developed to hold a similar place in the Christian West. Muslims have their own rosary related to the 99 Names of God, Allah, and used as well for other kinds of dhikr, formulas to continuously remember the divine mystery. The Prayer of the Heart tunes in the double bodily rhythm of breathing and heartbeat. Those two cosmic rhythms in us interact deeply, whereby heartbeat is prior to breathing. In our mother’s womb, our heart started beating well before we were able to breathe on our own. In the instants of silence between inspiration and expiration, the person praying will ?hear the Spirit repeating the name of God, Allah, in the heart which is transformed into a space of peace and quiet, abandonment and devotion, Istislâm ???????? and Islâm ????? – a space of communion with God, pleasure in his presence, Wisdom delighting to be with the children of men (cf. Proverbs 8: 31). “ Isa – ????? – ’Îsa ” In the heart of the believer, there is no opposition between the abyssal mystery of God, Allah, the One, the Unique, and the name of “his Act in our favor”, “his Event in humanity” – Jesus, the Son. The Prayer of the Heart is simple: we wake up, work, study... and sleep with the name of Jesus, Yasû’- ’Îsa, on our lips. Isa is the Coranic denomination of the Son of Mary. It is known that the name of Jesus as it is in the Greek New Testament depends on the Greek translation from Hebrew of the First Testament. In fact, it is the same name as the conqueror of the Promised Land, known in English as Joshua. In Hebrew, the original name is in fact Yehoshua’ ????? “the Lord saves”. But this last name was already shortened in the form of Yeshûa’ ?????? ?? in the 5th Century BC (cf. Nehemiah 8:17). Arab Christians normally use the name “Yasû’ ” rooted in Aramaic and Hebrew. How come does the Coran have a version of the name of Jesus that sounds phonetically corrupt in spite of the common Semitic linguistic context? Personally, I do not feel that the Arabic name “Isa” sounds much more different from the original Hebrew “Yeshû’ ” than the English “Jesus” or the Italian “Gesù” – aside from the different etymologic stories of the pronunciations. Arab Christians often feel the same and are therefore pleased to name “islamically” their children Isa. Some scholars say that the Coranic name of the Son of Mary, Isa, comes most probably ?from Esau ??? , the rejected brother of Jacob. In the Talmud, the name of Jesus is Yeshû Most of the scholars explain this corruption of the name of Jesus with the desire of .??? Jews to strip off his person any references to the holy biblical person of Joshua. According to them, this traditional Talmudic version of the name of Jesus echoes the name of Esau. Knowing that in the Jewish tradition, the Roman empire and the Christians are considered as the hated Edom, the enemy of the Chosen People, this similarity between Jesus-Yeshû and Esau, Edom’s ancestor, becomes meaningful. Obviously, for a Muslim believer, the Coranic name of Jesus, Isa, is simply his real name as revealed in the holy Book of God. We take into serious consideration this position of faith. Nevertheless, the Coran was revealed in Arabic, and so far all reasonable etymological research and theological reflections based upon it are licit and useful. Let us try a Christian reflection in the perspective of dialogue with Islam and Judaism. We know from the First Testament that Esau, Edom’s (cf. Genesis 36:8) and Amalek’s father (cf. Genesis 36:12), became the son-in-law of Ishmael, the Arabs’ biblical ancestor (cf. Genesis 28:8-9). In the biblical tradition, Esau’s descendants symbolize the absolute evil to be eradicated through extermination (cf. Exodus 17:14; Numbers 24:18-20; Deuteronomy 25:19). Like Ishmael (cf. Genesis 16:10-12) and even more heavily, Esau represents the excluded ones, and nevertheless his salvation is foreseen in an eschatological dimension (cf. Genesis 27:40). The word “Edom” is rooted in the red lentil stew prepared by Jacob that the red-haired and hairy Esau ate, despising his birthright (cf. Genesis 27). But if we consider that Jesus himself sided with the sinners, the rejected, the dangerous..., the name of Isa shows to be somehow appropriate and does not lessen but to the contrary emphasizes the value of the meaning of the name announced by the Angel: “The Lord saves”. Jesus, Yeshûa’-Isa, “has made the two into one entity and Page 3 of 11 ?broken down the barrier which used to keep them apart, by destroying in his own person the hostility [...] and through the cross to reconcile them both to God in one body; in his own person he killed the hostility.” (Ephesians 2: 14-16) In the tragedy of the Shoah, the genocide of Jews (together with Gypsies, homosexuals, handicapped etc.) looks like inverting roles, and the announced destiny of the Edomites became the destiny of the Chosen People for the shame of the Churches of the Prince of Peace. In opposition to this tragic destiny, in Genesis 33, there is a beautiful encounter between Esau and Jacob after Jacob’s fight against the Angel of the Lord and his crossing the ford of the Jabbok river to the Holy Land. This encounter bears witness to the desire of reconciliation of Esau and Jacob. We see Jacob bowing down to the ground seven times before his brother Esau whom he had stolen the blessing after having taken his birthright (cf. Genesis 27). Esau runs to meet Jacob, embraces and kisses him. Both weep. While urging Esau to accept his gift, Jacob says to him: “For to see your face is like seeing the face of God...” (Genesis 33: 10). This memorable encounter of the two brothers weeping reminds us of Isaac and Ishmael burying together their father Abraham in the cave of Machpelah (cf. Genesis 25: 9). Both Ishmael and Esau are ancestors of the Arabs. The last ones worthy to be saved happen to be the last ones to be named at Pentecost among the devout people from every nation under heaven assembled in Jerusalem; who heard the apostles preaching in their own language about the marvels of God: the Arabs (cf. Acts 2: 10). So far, reconciliation with Arabs becomes an eschatological sign of salvation. The good neighborhood of Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Arabic civilization is also a prophecy of peace for the world. My use of the Coranic name Isa – given to Christ in the language of the last people saved, the Arabs – is an expression of the desire to bring back Esau’s and Ishmael’s birthright. Islam, the first born heir, sets himself up as the jealous defender of the Page 4 of 11 ?holiness, honor and uniqueness of God – Allah. “Christ, Isa Son of Mary – In my prayer, I say “Christ, Isa Son of Mary ” which appears in verse 171 of Sûrat an-Nisâ’: “The Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, is only Allah’s messenger, and His word which He conveyed unto Mary, and a spirit from Him” (Coran, IV, 171) “Son of God” – missing words? This version of the Prayer of the Heart is slightly different from the “classical” one that reads: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”. There seems to be missing the title “Son of God”. In my opinion, the title “Son of God” is deeply related with “Christ” inside the biblical tradition. In Arabic – also in Coranic Arabic –, Christ, the Anointed, is “al-Masîh ????????” directly depending on Syriac and Hebrew. The name Christ/Messiah constitutes a concentration and synopsis of all attributes of the coming Savior and the King of the Last Day. As a Christian committed to interreligious dialogue and harmony-building, I enter into a deep communion with Muslims and Jews when using the title Christ which becomes in my heart an eschatological symbol of hope, source of reconciliation for the children of Abraham. “Son of Mary” ? ?The words “Son of Mary” are not just a Muslim expression, but rather an invitation to pray with the heart of Mary, the ever Virgin. Hallâj, the mystic martyr of Islam, speaks about the virgin point in the human heart (“Asrârunâ bikr), our abyssal mystery longing for God as the original and ultimate partner, wherein the virginal solitude with God becomes the source of all communion. When speaking about the resurrection of the dead, Jesus says that men and women do not marry, but are like the angels in heaven (cf. Matthew 22: 30). In the gospel of Luke, this looks like happening now: “But those who are considered worthy of taking part in that age and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God's children, since they are children of the resurrection.” (Luke 20:35-36) This shifting from marriage to spiritual union occurs with and through the intercession of Mary, the Mother, the mediator. The wedding at Cana (cf. John 2: 1-12) shows this movement: the newlyweds are not named in the story; the main protagonists are Jesus and his mother who he calls “woman”. The Son of God and the Daughter of Zion elevate mankind to a new and everlasting dignity of union with God, Allah almighty, through their coming passion (symbolized by the wine). By grace, monks and nuns chose to follow the path of evangelical chastity leading to a revolutionary spiritual anthropology. They are called to go through an “angelical” mutation. It is the always ongoing transformation, break, crisis in the language and the experience of faith. Meditating in the poverty of faith upon the mystery of Mary in the history of salvation helps us recognize her being the name of all creation, the partner of God – the Compassionate and Merciful –, the Mother of God and still a concrete woman in the village of Nazareth. In the orthodox and catholic awareness alike, Mary is the starting point and the model ?of a new humanity. In the Islamic tradition, she is the upright and “chosen” woman: “Behold! the angels said: ‘O Mary! Allah hath chosen thee and purified thee – chosen thee above the women of universes.’ ” (Coran III, 42) Those who meditate the Prayer of the Heart find in Mary an anchor that helps them bear in their heart the infinite and wide intercession of Jesus. “Forgive me, the sinner” When asking in my prayer for forgiveness, I said for a while “forgive us”, meaning the Community. (The suffering and interceding souls of Sufi Abdâl (redeemers through mystical substitution) recite in their hearts the request: “Allâhumma ghfer lil-Umma wa ?aslih It took me eight days of spiritual exercises to understand the danger and to realize that I was fleeing my awareness of guilt. “Forgive me” helps me feel personally responsible for the death of Jesus and deadly in need of it. It also helps me see the extent of God’s love for me, God who considers me worth losing his Firstborn for. In “me”, the ego, the memory of the sin itself, is stressed: my being self-centered, away from communion with God, aiming to use the power of God for my own glory: I am Adam and Eve, the Sinner. I am Peter after the miraculous catch, falling at Jesus’ knees and saying: “Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:8) Confessing “forgive me” restores the radically personal relationship with God through the blood of his Son, Jesus of Nazareth, who by his sacrifice on the cross reestablished communion. ?“Have mercy on us” Here, there is a dynamic opposition between “me” and “us”, “forgive me” and “have mercy on us” – confessing one’s sin on the one side and asking mercy for the community on the other. What seems to be in opposition is in reality connected: when the sinful “me”, the ego, is healed by the personal attention of God, the “us” is healed through communion. It is the “us” of the Church and the “us” of the Good Shepherd’s desire to gather in one sheepfold all his sheep, including the ones who never had the chance to hear his voice. Such communion elevates and sublimates bonds that are natural such as family, nation, ethnicity, religious community etc. to the level of spiritual belonging in the heart of God, the Merciful – ? More and again... In the depths of his soul, the disciple looks up at his rabbi, Jesus. He learns from him the relationship with God, Allah, because the master teaches him the Our Father, his own prayer. A disciple naturally ought to tune in the spiritual consciousness of his master. In Jesus of Nazareth, he discovers with wonder that the Messiah goes to the Father through his own self, his own mystery as Christ and Lord, Word of God, Act of God revealing himself to humanity. This does not occur elsewhere, in a detached section of his consciousness, in a somehow conceptually separate and separable part. His divinity is rather entirely united with his human intimacy. The Council of Chalcedon (451) says that the divine nature of Christ is conceptually and in reality other than his human nature – both being still united in the only person – ?(“in Christ the human and the divine nature retain each its own properties”); while the Council of Ephesus (431), in an anti-dualistic position, taught that Christ divinity represents the main actor of this original movement of salvation, the first protagonist of all that is inherent to his person. (This is said even if, because of Incarnation, this divine actor appropriates a humanity as complete as “normal” – and even normative – with created body, soul and spirit – including free human will –, and has expressed himself through humanity. Paradoxically, this humanity that looks completely overwhelmed by divinity is in fact radically promoted to its full human destiny of divinization!). With his master, the disciple addresses God through his master’s Mystery which by baptism and grace of faith is henceforth more intimate to him than his own intimacy. It is through his holy universal Spirit that Jesus of Nazareth can be active in my spirit today. “But very truly I tell you, it is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him.” (John 16:7) I ask myself whether the soul of a believer in Jesus is therefore different from that of a believer of another religious tradition, in particular of a Muslim believer. Muslims are our neighbors, our brothers, our guests! I am aware of the fact that the phenomenology of the – male or female – spiritual guide (the “guru sacrament” according to Henri Le Saux) demonstrates how the spirit of the disciple relates to that of his master in an openness to the Absolute that appears profoundly parallel and analogue to the “Christification” and thus divinization of the believer. Sufism has thereabout interesting, clear and fascinating teachings. The Christian friend of a Muslim joins in prayer in the depths of his soul the intimacy of prayer of Muslim souls standing before the One. Those souls are modeled after the soul of the absolute and ultimate believer, a soul perfectly confided to God in faith, completely open to his ?Word and so entirely united to the prophetic revelation that the latter comes out of his mouth as Arabic Coran and flows through his life as prophetic existentiality – as such imitable, or rather to be imitated, Sunna. It goes without saying that we are speaking about the soul of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. In essence, the Muslim spiritual master and even the imam at the mosque act as prophetic vicars to such an extent that in some schools of Sufi teaching, the murîd (novice) has to imagine while praying the face of his spiritual master, for it is through his master’s soul that he will reach authentic monotheism, union. But let us revert to our poor Christian prayer. When I say “Christ” and Isa Ibn Maryam, I address in the first place my master in the context of a mystical interpersonal religious practice which is entirely assumed by his divinity in a humanity like mine. Then I tell him “Have mercy on me, the sinner”, and I dare ask him to forgive me since I now acknowledge, hope and believe that He is the One rushing off in search of me, He alone has life in himself, His only concern is to reinstate me in a life of communion. (The analogy is with the “psychology” of Christ. Jesus, the Son of Mary, is a man asking the eternal Father to forgive us our sins. At the same time, he is the forgiveness of God, the Merciful, offered to us. The prayer looks like coming first, but it is the answer that is first. The one asking God to forgive us is in fact His forgiveness offered by grace for free! My relationship to the master comes first, but it ends with the divine initiative in my favor represented by him. Eventually I discover that he was first.) And I say “the sinner” without knowing anymore who is speaking: is it I invoking mercy, for I am aware of my failings, my limits, my betrayal, the disease of my ego which transforms into rot every holy thing. And I do not really know any longer if it is him in his humanity who in me descends into hell to seek me, the deaf and dumb. From my depths (De profundis) he cries to his divinity tragically united to the disaster of his humanity and yet never separated from God, the Lord and Father. They are One in the ?divine substance, in the communion of Trinitarian participation, but most of all in the love of human beings. In me, his humanity cries to his divinity. And he has mercy on us. Who? The Merciful, the Compassionate, Allah, the Father, present in his Son to make of us children fully participant in divine communion. How could this separate me from the prayer of my Muslim brothers and sisters and from all my brethrens in humanity, and so to speak in divinity?
- [In the Beginning Was Consciousness](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/in-the-beginning-consciousness) - Seyyed Hossein Nasr In this talk, delivered as the 2003-04 Dudleian Lecture at Harvard Divinity School, Dr Nasr argues eloquently for the need to return to a sacred cosmological paradigm. When you negate that in the beginning was consciousness, and you end up with this idea of consciousness being an island within certain creatures known
- [“Yudhishthira and His Dog” (<em>Mahaprasthanika Parva</em>)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/mahaprasthanika-parva) - From the sacred Indian epic, Mahabharata, we present the “Book of the Great Journey”, in which the Pandava brothers, their wife and an enigmatic dog reach the boundaries of this world and the threshold of Heaven. Here is also recounted the second examination of Yudhishthira by his divine father, Dharma. • Click here to view
- [Vishnu Sahasranama](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/sahasranama) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection A sahasranama is a type of Hindu scripture in which a deity is referred to by 1,000 (sahasra) or more different names (nama). Vishnu Sahasranama is one of the most sacred and commonly chanted stotras in Hinduism. It is found in the Shanti Parva of the Mahabharata
- [Exploring Human Interiority](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/exploring-human-interiority) - Fr Giuseppe Scattolin …the mystical, the heart of the religious experience, has to become the privileged place of inter-religious dialogue and the basis for a more serious intercultural dialogue. Inter-religious dialogue that does not achieve communication at the level of spiritual experience is a dialogue that is still incomplete, and maimed. Click here to read
- [Intellectual Freedom](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/intellectual-freedom) - Lord Northbourne The sacred traditions in all their diversity manifest the unity of the Absolute; they do so most evidently in what may be called their common celestial orientation; the message is always essentially the same though the symbolical “language” that conveys it be diverse. It is the diversity of that language that strikes most
- [<em>Bhagavad Gita</em> with Shankaracharya’s Commentary](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/bhagavad-gita-shankara-commentary) - “The seven things to be realised by meditation” a chapter from the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna overcomes Arjuna’s doubts and misgivings with a deepening exposition of metaphysics. “Practice” consists in the repetition of one and the same idea, uninterrupted by any other thought, with reference to Me, the sole object of your thought. Such a
- [The Analects of Confucius](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/analects-lun-yu-audio) - Confucius (Kong Zi) In the Far East, and for many centuries, the Confucian Analects (Lun Yu) have informed an enduring social order rooted in cultivation of the self through adherence to tradition. They continue to play a determinant role which could hardly be exaggerated. We present here a bilingual edition of the first two chapters,
- [Islam-Buddhism Common Ground Project Film](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/islam-buddhism-event) - May 2010, Bloomington, USA: His Holiness the Dalai Lama, joined by a panel of Muslim and Buddhist scholars, officially launches a book, Common Ground between Islam and Buddhism, which he described in his own foreword as ‘pioneering’. Written by Dr Reza Shah-Kazemi, the book is the result of collaboration between HRH Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad
- [Signs of the Times and the Light of Tradition](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/signs-of-the-times) - INTRODUCTION: SIGNS OF THE TIMES AND THE LIGHT OF TRADITION The title of this anthology alerts us to the spiritual crisis of modernity and to its root cause: the betrayal of tradition. That there is indeed a spiritual crisis will hardly be denied by anyone who has pondered the condition of the contemporary world. We need not rehearse the whole catalogue of inter-related symptoms, but here are a few of the more conspicuous: ecological catastrophe, a material sign of the rupture between Heaven and Earth; a rampant materialism and consumerism, signifying a surrender to the illusion that man can live by bread alone; the brutal extirpation of traditional cultures by the runaway juggernauts of “modernization”; political barbarities on an almost unimaginable scale; a religious landscape dominated by internecine and inter-religious strife and by the emergence of aggressive fundamentalisms in both East and West; social discord, endemic violence and dislocations of unprecedented proportions; widespread alienation, ennui and a sense of spiritual sterility amidst the frenetic confusion and din of modern life; the loss of any sense of the sacred, even among those who remain committed to religious forms. These “signs of the times”— and the inventory is by no means exhaustive—are plain enough to those with eyes to see. No amount of gilded rhetoric about “progress,” the “miracles” of modern science and technology, or the “triumphs of democracy” (to mention just three shibboleths of modernity) can hide the fact that our age is tyrannized by an outlook inimical to our most fundamental needs, our deepest yearnings, our most noble aspirations. More problematic is the question of how we arrived at this state of affairs and in which direction we might turn for some remedy. In the luminous essay with which this volume opens, Frithjof Schuon observes: “That which is lacking in the present world is a profound knowledge of the nature of things; the fundamental truths are always there, but they do not impose themselves because they cannot impose themselves on those unwilling to listen.” Those truths, so often derided in the modern world, can be found in tradition—and by this term we mean something very different from the jaundiced senses it has accumulated in the modern mentality (“the blind observance of inherited customs,” and the like). St. Augustine speaks of “wisdom uncreate, the same now that it ever was, the same to be forevermore.”1 This timeless wisdom has carried many names: philosophia perennis, Lex Aeterna, Hagia Sophia, Din al-Haqq, Akalika Dhamma, and Sanatana Dharma are among the better known. In itself this truth is formless and beyond all conceptualizations. Any attempt to define it is, to borrow a metaphor, like trying to catch the river in a net. This universal wisdom, in existence since the genesis of time and the spiritual patrimony of all humankind, can also be designated as the Primordial Tradition. René Guénon refers to “... the Tradition contained in the Sacred Books of all peoples, a Tradition which in reality is everywhere the same, in spite of all the diverse forms it assumes to adapt itself to each race and period ...”2 In this sense tradition is synonymous with a perennial philosophy or wisdom which is eternal, universal and immutable. The Primordial Tradition or sophia perennis is of supra-human origin and is in no sense a product or evolute of human thought. It is the birthright of humanity. All the great religious teachings, albeit in the differing vocabularies appropriate to the spiritual economy in question, affirm just such a principle. Recall Krishna’s declaration, in the Bhagavad Gita, of the pre-existence of his message, proclaimed at the dawn of time.3 Likewise Christ, speaking in his cosmic function as incarnation of the Truth, states, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, before Abraham was, I am.”4 “Tradition,” then, in its most pristine sense is this primordial Truth and as such takes on the status of a first cause, a cosmic datum, a principial reality woven into the very fabric of the universe and ingrained in the human spirit. “Tradition” also has a secondary meaning, directly pertinent to our theme. Etymologically it simply means “that which is transmitted.” Here the term cannot be equated with a formless and 1 Quoted in S. Radhakrishnan, “Fragments of a Confession,” in The Philosophy of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, ed. P.A. Schilpp (New York: Tudor, 1952), p. 80. 2 R. Guénon in La Gnose, 1909, quoted in Whitall Perry, A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom (London: Allen & Unwin, 1971), p. 20. 3 Bhagavad Gita IV.5.i. 4 St John VIII.58. immutable Truth but is, rather, that Truth as it finds formal expression, through the medium of a divine Revelation, in the myths, doctrines, rituals, symbols, and other manifestations of any religious culture. As Lord Northbourne has observed, “Tradition, in the rightful sense of the word, is the chain that joins civilization to Revelation.”5 In this context “tradition” becomes more or less synonymous with “religion,” always with the proviso that it is integral, orthodox religions of which we speak. Let us also not forget that, When people talk about “civilization” they generally attribute a qualitative meaning to the term, but really civilization only represents a value provided it is supra-human in origin and implies for the civilized man a sense of the sacred ... A sense of the sacred is fundamental for every civilization because fundamental for man; the sacred—that which is immutable, inviolable, and so infinitely majestic—is in the very substance of our spirit and of our existence.6 Traditional societies are grounded in an awareness of this reality. Society itself represents nothing of permanent or absolute value but only insofar as it provides a context for the sense of the sacred and the spiritual life which it implies. At radical odds with Tradition, in all of its senses, stands the world of modernity and the Promethean philosophy which underpins it. For want of a better word we might call the dominant worldview of the post-medieval West “modernism” (not to be confused with the more restricted meaning sign-posting certain artistic and literary movements in the early 20th century). For present purposes the term comprises the prevalent assumptions, values and attitudes of a worldview fashioned by the most pervasive intellectual and moral influences of recent European history, an outlook in conformity with the Zeitgeist of the times. One might classify the constituents of modernism under any number of different schemata. Lord Northbourne typifies it as “anti-traditional, progressive, humanist, rationalist, materialist, experimental, individualist, egalitarian, free-thinking, and intensely sentimental.”7 Seyyed Hossein Nasr gathers these tendencies together under four general marks of modern thought: anthropomorphism (and by extension, secularism); 5 Lord Northbourne, Religion in the Modern World (London: J.M. Dent, 1963), p. 34. 6 Frithjof Schuon, Understanding Islam (London: Allen & Unwin, 1976), p. 33. 7 Lord Northbourne, Religion in the Modern World, p. 13. evolutionist progressivism; the absence of any sense of the sacred; an unrelieved ignorance of metaphysical principles.8 Modernism is nothing less than a spiritual disease which continues to spread like a plague across the globe, destroying traditional cultures wherever they are still to be found. Although its historical origins are European, modernism is now tied to no specific area or civilization. Its symptoms can be detected in a wide assortment of inter-related “mind sets” and “-isms,” sometimes involved in cooperative co-existence, sometimes engaged in apparent antagonism, but always united by the same underlying assumptions. Scientism, rationalism, relativism, materialism, positivism, empiricism, evolutionism, psychologism, individualism, humanism, existentialism— these are some of the prime follies of modernist thought. The pedigree of this family of ideas can be traced back through a series of intellectual and cultural upheavals in European history and to certain vulnerabilities in Christendom which left it exposed to the subversions of a profane science. The Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and the so-called Enlightenment were all incubators of ideas and values which first ravaged Europe and then spread throughout the world like so many bacilli. Behind the bizarre array of ideologies which have proliferated in the last few centuries we can discern a growing and persistent ignorance concerning ultimate realities and an indifference, if not always an overt hostility, to the eternal verities conveyed by tradition. Not without reason did William Blake characterize the modern worldview as “Single Vision,” a horizontal understanding of reality which strips the “outer” world of its mystery, its grandeur and its revelatory function, and denies our human vocation as the “arks of God.” The contrast between tradition and modernity is a motif to be found in many of the essays in this anthology. The contrast is likely to be most illuminating when it is informed by the following considerations: When the modern world is contrasted with traditional civilizations, it is not simply a question of seeking the good things and the bad things on one side or the other; good and evil are everywhere, so 8 See S.H. Nasr, “Reflections on Islam and Modern Thought,” The Islamic Quarterly 23, no. 3 (1979): 119-131. xiv Introduction that it is essentially a question of knowing on which side the more important good and on which side the lesser evil is to be found. If someone says that such and such a good exists outside tradition, the answer is: no doubt, but one must choose the most important good, and it is necessarily represented by tradition; and if someone says that in tradition there exists such and such an evil, the answer is: no doubt, but one must choose the lesser evil, and again it is tradition that embodies it. It is illogical to prefer an evil which involves some benefits to a good which involves some evils.9 No one will deny that modernity has its compensations, though these are often of a quite different order from the loudly trumpeted “benefits” of science and technology—some of which are indubitable but many of which issue in consequences far worse than the ills which they are apparently repairing. Furthermore, many so called “advances” must be seen as the poisoned fruits of a Faustian bargain which one day must come to its bitter conclusion. What indeed is a man profited if he gain the whole world but lose his own soul? On the other hand, one real advantage of living in these latter days is the ready access we have to the spiritual treasuries of the world’s religious and mythological traditions, including esoteric teachings which hitherto have been veiled in secrecy. Many of our contributors are traditionalists who cleave uncompromisingly to the sophia perennis—we need only mention such towering figures as René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Frithjof Schuon, and Titus Burckhardt. Readers unfamiliar with their work will find here an introduction to some of the most sagacious thinkers of the last century. However, the anthology is not intended as a compendium of traditionalist thinkers alone but embraces a variety of viewpoints and perspectives, united by the conviction that the modern world stands in the most urgent need of the wisdom of the ages. The Betrayal of Tradition complements the other volumes already published by World Wisdom in the Perennial Philosophy series, especially Science and the Myth of Progress (edited by Mehrdad M. Zarandi) and Every Branch in Me (edited by Barry McDonald). It is my hope that the juxtaposition of essays by traditionalists 9 Frithjof Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds (London: Perennial Books, 1966), p. 42. xv The Betrayal of Tradition: Essays on the Spiritual Crisis of Modernity and other eminent contemporary thinkers will illuminate some common ground and thereby help to dispel the false charges sometimes leveled at traditionalists that they are dusty obscurantists “out of touch” with the contemporary world, that they want to “wind back the clock,” that they are romantic reactionaries escaping into an idealized past. The essential message of tradition is timeless and thus ever new, ever fresh, and always germane to both our immediate condition and to our ultimate destiny. As Schuon remarks, a “nostalgia for the past” is, in itself, nothing; all that is meaningful is “a nostalgia for the sacred” which “cannot be situated elsewhere than in the liberating ‘now’ of God.”10 10 Frithjof Schuon, “On the Margin of Liturgical Improvisations,” in The Sword of Gnosis, ed. J. Needleman (Baltimore: Penguin, 1974), p. 353.
- [Beauty and the Sunna](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/beauty-and-the-sunna) - Abdal Hakim Murad (T. J. Winter) Beauty is not the random concatenation of dull essence in a source-less and direction-less universe: Beauty is something that calls us to a higher vocation, that reminds us of our source, and invites us to the beauty of the Eternal Abode. The Holy Prophet… turned these people outward: instead
- [Gold](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/gold) - Abdal Hakim Murad (T. J. Winter) Oftentimes we construct mountains of wealth and barricades of gold as a protection from the reality of death. Click here to download – 25:12 (24.2MB) Republished here by kind permission of Cambridge khutbas etc. Format: MP3
- [The Meaning of the Temple](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-meaning-of-the-temple) - Leo Schaya Only thus purified may the soul enter the Holy, and, once penetrated and filled with the Spirit, it assumes the nature of the spiritual soul (ruah). Then is revealed to it the seven-armed candlestick, the sacred Face of God in His seven universal properties, with which the soul is clothed. Now the soul
- [La mort du saint en Islam](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/la-mort-du-saint-en-islam) - Eric Geoffroy Les soufis de tous les temps ont médité, puis expérimenté pour certains d'entre eux, la parole du Prophète : “ Mourez avant de mourir ! ”, c'est-à-dire mourez à vous-mêmes, à votre ego avant de quitter ce monde. Cette mort initiatique est à leurs yeux la seule mort véritable, l'autre ne consistant qu'en
- [Sacred Web Conference—An Introduction](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/sw-conference-introduction) - An Introduction from His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales September 23rd and 24th, 2006 Myer Horowitz Theatre, University of Alberta Edmonton, Alberta In these uprooted times, there is a great need for constancy; a need for those who can rise above the clamour, the din and the sheer pace of our lives to help us to rediscover those truths that are immutable and eternal; a need for those who can speak of that eternal wisdom which is called the perennial philosophy. Looking at the programme for this Conference being organized by Sacred Web on the theme of “Tradition in the Modern World”, and at the list of speakers, I know that you will be hearing just this kind of teaching from just these kinds of people. Within the overall theme, there would seem to be a marvellous diversity of matters being discussed – matters related to religion, the arts, the economy, the environment and much else. Although, very sadly, I cannot be with you, I do want to say that I am always delighted to receive the latest issue of Sacred Web because, so often, I come across such deeply revealing and enlightening articles, rich in content and diverse in subject matter. In addition, through the work of the Temenos Academy, of which I am Patron, I have been fortunate to enjoy the writings of some of your colleagues – people such as Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr and, of course, the late Dr. Martin Lings, whose presence amongst us is so profoundly missed. The Temenos Academy has been, and remains, closely associated with many of those who have written, and continue to write for Sacred Web and, indeed, for Sophia and other related journals. From the beginning, with the launch of the original Temenos review, the Temenos Academy has not only been devoted to what its founders have referred to as “the arts of the imagination”, but has also been committed both to the perennial philosophy and to the notion that Man is, at root, a spiritual creature with spiritual and intellectual needs which have to be nourished if we are to fulfil our potential. Both of these matters are at the heart of the teachings of Sacred Web. Temenos Academy and Sacred Web are also, of course, dedicated to an exploration of the role of Tradition in the modern world, the subject of this Conference, and, indeed, to a critique of the false premises of Modernity – a critique set out in one of the seminal texts of the traditionalists, René Guénon?s The Reign of Quantity. Many find this teaching difficult, not least because it asks us to question our very mode of being; and perhaps because it asks us to question an ideology, in the form of Modernism, that has become so set in our minds that any other way of being seems in some sense fanciful and “unrealistic”. However, the teachings of the traditionalists should not, in any sense, be taken to mean that they seek, as it were, to repeat the past – or, indeed, simply to draw a distinction between the present and the past. Their?s is not a nostalgia for the past, but a yearning for the sacred and, if they defend the past, it is because in the pre-modern world all civilizations were marked by the presence of the sacred. As I understand it, in referring to Tradition they refer to a metaphysical reality and to underlying principles that are timeless – as true now as they have ever been and will be. And, by way of contrast, in referring to Modernism they refer to a particular (though false) definition of reality; a particular (though false) manner of seeing and engaging with the world that, likewise, is distinguished not by time, but by its ideology. In an article written in 1983 for the traditionalist journal Studies in Comparative Religion, Professor Nasr put it this way: When we use the term „modern? we mean neither contemporary nor up-to-date... Rather, for us „modern? means that which is cut off from the Transcendent, from the immutable principles which in reality govern all things and which are made known to man through revelation in its most universal sense. Modernism is thus contrasted with tradition...; the latter implies all that which is of Divine Origin along with its manifestations and deployments on the human plane while the former by contrast implies all that is merely human and now ever more increasingly subhuman, and all that is divorced and cut off from the Divine source. 1 Most especially, therefore, we can see that it is the very timeless quality of these immutable principles of Tradition that makes its teachings so timely. For me, the teachings of Tradition suggest the presence of a reality that can bring about a reality of integration, and it is this reality that can be contrasted with so much of Modernism?s obsession with dis-integration, dis-connection and de-construction – that which is sometimes termed the “malaise of modernity”. Cut off at the root from the Transcendent, Modernism has become deracinated and has separated itself – and thereby everything that comes within its thrall – from that which integrates; that which enables us to turn towards and reconnect with the Divine. In this way, the loss of Tradition cuts to the very core of our being since it conditions that which we can “know” and “be”. For Modernism, by its unrelenting emphasis on the quantitative view of reality, limits and distorts the true nature of the Real and our perception of it. Whilst it has enabled us to know much that has been of material benefit, it also prevents us from knowing that which I would like to refer to as the knowledge of the Heart; that which enables us to be fully human. This dilemma is captured in ancient notions of balance and harmony; notions that are, for example, expressed in many guises in that wonderful Kabbalistic diagram of the Tree of Life. As the Temenos Fellow, Warren Kenton, so beautifully explains in his lectures to the students of the Academy, the teaching of the Tree of Life is that the “active” and the “passive” aspects of life, which on their own may lead to imbalance and disharmony, must be, can only be, brought together in harmony by the influx into our lives of the Divine and the Sacred. Whether or not we interpret this image as an explanation of an outer or an inner orientation, it is in this way, and only in this way, that the forces, or characteristics, of expansion and constraint can be brought into balance. But, of course, in both the inner and outer dimensions of our lives, many of us, at present, experience the very imbalance and disharmony that this mystical framework, and, indeed, the teachings of mystics of all times, show to be harmful or, to use a contemporary term, “unsustainable”. And this leads me to a final and somewhat troubling matter that lies at the heart of Tradition and its critique of Modernism. None of us, I imagine, can fail to be conscious of, and be concerned about, those matters that might together be called “the environmental crisis of the twenty-first century”. Indeed, none other than Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society, in his book Our Final Century, has said that: ...in the twenty-first century, humanity is more at risk than ever before from the misapplication of science. And the environmental pressures induced by collective human actions could trigger catastrophes more threatening than any natural hazards. 2 For many years, I have been trying – often in the face of relentless criticism and ridicule – to draw attention to some of the elements of this crisis and to the ways in which they are linked to conventional values. At times, when in optimistic mood, I am encouraged to believe that we can come to our senses in time and change our ways of being before we are obliged to do so by catastrophic circumstances. But I am afraid that I do not always take this view. Often, I find myself convinced of the warnings given not only by Sir Martin Rees but also, of course, by sages and mystics of all faiths and of all time; warnings of the coming of a Dark Age, an age in which our ignorance and arrogance – a dangerous combination, surely – will lead us, indeed may already have led us, towards catastrophe. The present examples of pestilence, flood, famine, storm and climatic disruption are surely evidence enough. At the very least, they seem to foretell of conditions of chronic imbalance and disharmony – no doubt as much a part of our inner as our outer condition. In all of this, the practice of modern science more or less ignores the question of what the ultimate goal and purpose of intelligence and knowledge is. Materialist science, it seems, more or less assumes that a continuous and progressive exploratory expansion of knowledge of the physical world will inevitably lead to a desirable end where all but a few of our problems will be solved. I note, however, that it does this in the face of very considerable evidence – evidence that science itself provides – that it will not. Indeed, our ignorance in these matters seems to me to be in direct proportion to our obsession with information. More than ever before, we have information from everywhere and about everything – and it is available to us literally at the press of a button. But information, often it would seem for its own sake, is not knowledge; and knowledge is not wisdom. We have no lack of information but, with the loss of the values and principles of which Tradition speaks, we lose touch with that perennial wisdom to which this Conference is dedicated. In this, I am reminded of those prophetic lines from T. S. Eliot: Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust. The traditionalist perspective is that we are living at the end of an historical cycle. At the beginning of this cycle all and every possibility is latent. However, as the cycle evolves or unfolds, these possibilities begin to manifest themselves in the world of time and space, beginning with the highest and gradually moving towards the lower. At the end of the cycle, the very lowest possibilities manifest themselves. The traditionalists tell us that at the cosmic level this process cannot be withheld or interrupted. It must take place. The cycle, they say, must exhaust itself before a new one can replace it. I know that this might seem to suggest that we are entirely the passive victims of this cosmic unfolding. However, as I understand it, the traditionalists would go on to say that if this were the only reality then all attempts to pursue and align ourselves with spiritual realities and experience would be in vain. And that cannot possibly be. Indeed, it is precisely on the individual plane and through our understanding of and attachment to traditional norms of metaphysical doctrine and spiritual practice that we can, in a measure, transcend the baleful influence of the descent that is the eventual exhaustion and end of our cycle of history and prepare ourselves and the world for the beginning of the next. It is in this way, and perhaps only in this way, that we can overcome the mind-numbing despair of Modernism – not by false optimism, but by an understanding of and an attachment to the truly Real. I hope that some part of your deliberations at this Conference will address these issues and, perhaps, provide guidance for those of us who do not claim to be scholars. For much of my life has been, and remains, devoted to finding practical solutions to what, at first, seem to be impossible difficulties – and sometimes to speak for those whose voices are unheard amidst the clamour of Modernism. In this, I recognize that true action is dependent upon constant reflection – the redeeming aspect of the nature of harmony and balance. I pray that your deliberations will help in this task through not only describing the difficulties that we face, but also showing us the ways in which we might seek to make the necessary changes in our lives. Despite not being able to join you in Edmonton, I much look forward to reading the texts of the conference that will be delivered. I hope that you will also find inspiration from them and that they will be widely distributed and discussed, especially beyond those who already subscribe to the teachings of the traditionalists. Whatever our view, and whatever our tradition, I am sure that we will have much to learn from your deliberations – I wish you a most harmonious Conference. 1 This quotation is taken from an article by Professor Nasr entitled „Reflections on Islam and Modern Thought?,which was published in the journal Studies in Comparative Thought, Summer-Autumn 1983, Volume 15, Nos. 3 and 4 (Double Issue), 164-165. 2 Martin Rees, Our Final Century, Arrow Books, 2003, 186. 3 This quotation is taken the Opening Stanza of T. S. Eliot?s „Choruses from „The Rock?, from The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950, Harcourt, Brace & World Inc. , New York, 1952, 96
- [The Rule of St Albert and the Ten Books](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/rule-of-st-albert-and-ten-books) - Two foundational documents of the Carmelite order, which continue to guide the contemplatives of this congregation over the centuries. The Rule of Saint Albert You should do some work, so that the devil will always find you occupied and he may not through your idleness find some entrance to your souls. Click here to view
- [The Image of God](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-image-of-god) - Lift up your eyes on high and see who hath created these? Isaiah 40:26 I The principal aim of tradition in regard to the forms and laws of the cosmos is to connect all things with their first and divine cause and thus show man their true meaning, the sense of his own existence being likewise revealed to him thereby. Now, in the sight of the “One without a second,” the whole of existence has no being of its own: it is the expression of the one reality, that is to say the totality of its aspects, manifestable and manifested, in the midst of its very infinity. Things are no more than symbolic “veils” of their divine essence or, in a more immediate sense, of its ontological aspects; these aspects are the eternal archetypes of all that is created. If one understands creation in this way, it is revealed as a multi­tude of more or less perfect images of God or of his qualities, as a hierarchy of more or less pure truths leading towards the only truth; for if God is the first origin and highest prototype of creation, he is also its final end as Proverbs (16:4) testifies: “YHVH1 has made everything for his own purpose.” The only reality cannot do otherwise than work for itself and in itself. But in its pure selfness, it does not act or wish for any; in it nothing whatsoever is determined, there is no distinction between subject and object, cause and effect, a god and a creation. In this non-duality, God rests in himself, nameless, and without any know­able 1. The tetragrammaton YHVH represents the sacrosanct name of God in the Jewish tradition. For more than two thousand years the Jews have been forbidden to pronounce this name, and its vocalization is no longer known. aspect; it is only on this side of the supreme and superintelligible essence that his knowledge “makes its appearance,” which is to say his intelligent and intelligible being, including his causal and efficient will. His being, his knowledge, his will and his action are indivisible aspects of his ontological unity; this unity is not affected by any of his attributes nor by any of his manifestations: the One is what he is, knows himself, through himself, and works in himself for himself without becoming other than himself. His work is the manifestation of all the aspects of his being in the midst of his being itself. In Sefirothic language it is said that kether, the supreme principle, sees itself through hokhmah, the “wisdom” or first irradiation, in the mirror of binah, the “intelligence” or infinite receptivity. In this supreme mirror God contemplates his seven lordly aspects: hesed, his “grace”; din, his “judgement”; tifereth, his “beauty”; netsah, his “victory”; hod, his “glory”; yesod, the cosmic “foundation” or his eternal act; and malkhuth, his “kingdom,” or immanence. The irradiations of his aspects come together in the last Sefirah, malkhuth, as in a lower mirror, and there form the multiple picture of what in reality is only one; this image of the infinite and indivisible aspects of the One is the Creation. All created things emanate from God’s being and from his knowledge; they are essentially his ontological and intelligible pos­sibilities, the “sparks” of his light, the “ideas” that spring from his “wisdom” or “thought” like so many spiritual and existential “rays.” When God designed to create the universe, his thought compassed all worlds at once, and by means of this thought were they all created, as it says, “In wisdom hast thou made them all” (Psalms 104:24). By this thought (mahshabah)—which is his wisdom (hokhmah)—were this world and the world above created. . . . All were created in one moment (the eternal moment of divine action). And he made this (terrestrial) world corresponding to the world above (the celestial and spiritual worlds which are them­ selves “pictures” of the infinite world of the Sefiroth or supreme archetypes), and everything which is above has its counterpart here below . . . and yet all constitute a unity (because of the causal sequence of all things and their essential identity with the only reality) (Zohar, Shemoth 20 a). The knowledge of God is the alpha and omega of the work of creation. The world is born from the knowledge that God has of him­ self; and by the knowledge that the world has of God, it is reabsorbed into him. God made everything for this knowledge that unites to him; all other knowledge is only an ephemeral reflection of it. When the world sees God—through man—it sees its supreme archetype, its own uncreated fullness, and is effaced in its essence, in the infinite. This cognitive and deifying act is the ultimate fulfillment of the creative work; it is for that—for himself—that God created the world. The knowledge of God does not depend on any science, but all human knowledge depends on it and derives from it. Receptivity alone, face to face with God, is enough, in principle, to obtain the influx of his light in which the spirit can see him. A science, even a revealed science such as cosmology, is only a possible, not an obligatory way of searching for knowledge of God; it is a way which makes it possible to receive the truth through his symbolic “veils,” that is through the worlds, on whatever scale. To see the eternal cause in cosmic effects raises a man above the illusions of the phenomenal world and brings him closer to reality. Baal-Shem2 said: At times, man has to learn that there are an indefinite number of firmaments and spheres beyond, and that he himself is located in an insignificant spot on this small earth. But the entire universe is as nothing in the face of God, the Infinite, who brought about the “contraction” and made “room” in himself so that the worlds could be created in it. But although man may understand this with his mind, he is not able to ascend toward the higher worlds; and this is what is meant by: “The Lord appeared to me from afar”—he con­ templates God from afar. But if he serves God with all his strength, he actualizes a great power in himself and rises in spirit, and suddenly pierces all the firmaments, and ascends beyond the angels, beyond the celestial “wheels,” beyond the Serafim and the “thrones”; and that is the perfect “service.” II When Baal-Shem says that “God, the infinite, brings about a ‘con­ traction’ and makes ‘room’ in himself where the worlds can be created 2. Israel ben Eliezer, called Baal-Shem (Master of the Divine Name), 1700-60, was the greatest Jewish saint of the last centuries. He founded Polish and Ukrainian Hasidism; this term comes from the word hasid, the “devout” in regard to God. His movement developed towards the middle of the eighteenth century in Poland and spread into all the Slav countries; in the last century it included nearly four million adepts. ” he is alluding to the Kabbalistic doctrine of tsimtsum. The term tsimtsum can be translated by “contraction,” “restriction,” “retreat,” or “concentration”; it had been used in Jewish esotericism chiefly since Isaac Luria (1534-72) to describe the divine mystery on which creation depends. “The Holy One, blessed be he, withdrew his powerful light from one part of himself, and left a void to serve as ‘a place’ for cosmic expansion”; it concerns “that part of the divine essence in which the light was weakened to allow the existence of souls, angels and the material worlds.” Through this symbolic language, the Kabbalah, then, tries to express the mysterious genesis of the finite in the midst of the infinite. In reality, God, the absolute One, has no “parts,” but an infinity of possibilities, of which only the creatural possibilities have the illusory appearance of separate forms; in themselves, these forms are integrated, as eternal archetypes, in the all-possibility of the One. As for that “part from which the light has been withdrawn” to make room for the “place” of the cosmos, it is nothing other than the receptivity of God that actualizes itself in the midst of his unlimited fullness; this receptivity has a transcendent aspect and an immanent aspect: “above,” it is identified with binah, the “supreme mother,” which is eternally filled with the infinite and luminous emanation of the “father,” hokhmah; “below,” it is malkhuth, the “lower mother,” or cosmic receptivity of God. The latter absorbs both the influx from the Sefiroth of mercy which are luminous and overflowing, and the influx from the Sefiroth of rigor which are “dark” or “empty”; that is why, in contrast to binah, which is always revealed as filled with the infinite, malkhuth, or divine immanence, can take on the appear­ ance of a dark void in the midst of its radiant fullness. Indeed, binah is said to be “without all rigor, although rigor emanates from it”; while malkhuth receives the emanations of rigor together with those of grace, to produce and dominate the cosmos and hold it in equilibrium through the interpenetration of the two simultaneously opposite and complementary influxes. Now, the rigor which emanates from binah is din, “judgment” or universal discernment, the principle of concentration, distinction and limitation; it produces tsimtsum, divine “contraction,” in the heart of malkhuth, the plastic cause. Through the effect of tsimtsum, the divine fullness withdraws to a certain extent from the “lower mother,” and awakens creative receptivity in her; the latter, when actualized, takes on the aspect of the void or “place of the world,” ready to receive cosmic manifestation. Then, all created possibilities spring up from the existential seed which is left behind by divine fullness on its withdrawal—as a luminous “residue” (reshimu) in the midst of immanent emptiness. Thus, thanks to the divine “contraction” and to the void it brings about in the shekhinah, the expansion of the world takes place; and everything living in the immanence of God is a small world created in the image of the macrocosm: it is a void to which life is given by a luminous “residue” of the only reality, by a central and divine “spark” that projects onto it the reflection of some eternal archetype. The Kabbalah expresses the same cosmogonical process in other symbolic terms as the pargod or cosmic “curtain.” The Idra Rabba Kadisha (the “great and holy assembly,” included in the Zohar) says of the “Ancient of Ancients” that “he draws a curtain down before him” through which his kingdom begins to take shape. This image and that of the tsimtsum not only point to the same truth but from one point of view also complement each other. Thus it can be said that God appears to “withdraw” himself into himself to the extent that he draws down a “curtain” before him. The “curtain” hangs before him like a darkness; and this darkness in reality is nothing other than his cosmic receptivity, which allows his reality to appear through it as a light. But his infinite light appears through the dark veil only in a “weakened,” fragmented and limited way, which is the mode of existence of the finite. God is hidden in everything he creates, somewhat in the way that light is contained in the innumerable reflections that produce a mirage. To go further in this symbolism, it could be said that the desert where the mirage is produced represents the “void” or the “place” of the world made by tsimtsum, and the imperceptible screen on which appear the vanishing forms that lead the pilgrim astray represents the pargod, which is the “curtain” or “mirror” of the shekhinah. In fact, in the face of the “One without a second,” creation—the apparition of a “second”—as well as the creative causes themselves, come to appear as existential illusions. That is why the Kabbalah brings in a third idea, in addition to those of tsimtsum and pargod, to define the nature of creation, namely, habel, “vanity,” derived from Ecclesiastes (1:2): “Vanity of vanities (habel habalim), all is vanity!” The Zohar (Shemoth 10 b) teaches on this subject: King Solomon, in his book (Ecclesiastes), treated of seven “vanities” (habalim, lit. “breaths”) upon which the world stands, namely the seven (Sefirothic) pillars (of universal construction) which sustain the world in (causal) correspondence with (their first created effects) the seven firmaments, which are called respectively Vilon, Rakiya, Shehakim, Zebul, Ma’on, Makhon, Araboth. It was concerning them that Solomon said: “Vanity of vanities . . . all is vanity” (ibid, 1:1). As there are seven firmaments, with others (existential planes such as the seven earths and seven hells) cleaving to them and issuing from them, so there are seven habalim and others emanating from these (and filling all creation), and Solomon in his wisdom referred to them all (as well as to their causes and archetypes, the seven Sefiroth of construction). The Kabbalah does not say that the seven cosmological Sefiroth are illusions in themselves, for they represent the creative aspects of one and the same reality; nevertheless, in so far as they project the mirage of an existential multitude in the midst of its undifferentiated unity, they manifest as so many principles of illusion or causal “vanities.” But if they are considered outside of their relation with creation, they are integrated into absolute unity. In so far as the One is looking at himself alone, he does not go out of his supreme triunity, kether-hokhmah-binah; but when he wishes to contemplate the creative possibilities in himself, he opens his “seven eyes” or “`Sefiroth of construction,” projecting all the cosmic “vanities” through their look. “Vanity,” according to Ecclesiastes, is to be found “under the sun”—a symbol of the Sefìrah tifereth, which synthesizes the six active Sefiroth of “construction”—and is made upon the earth; now the “earth” is one of the synonyms of malkhuth, the receptive and substantial Sefirah of cosmic “construction”: there alone, in the divine immanence, the mirage of creation is pro­duced, maintained and effaced. “That is why the beginning of Genesis,” says the Tikkune Zohar: is concerned only with the elohim (principle of immanence) designating the shekhinah (and not with the transcendental principle, YHVH). Everything created, from the hayoth and the serafim (higher angels) down to the smallest worm on the earth, lives in elohim and through elohim . . . The creation is the work of the shekhinah who takes care of it as a mother cares for her children. The entire creation is an illusory projection of the transcendental aspects of God into the “mirror” of his immanence. The Zohar notes, in fact, that the verb baro, “to create,” implies the idea of “creating an illusion.” But although the creation is by nature illusory, it contains something of reality; for every reflection of reality, even remote, broken up and transient, necessarily possesses some­ thing of its cause. Even if the creation is taken as being pure illusion, that real something which constitutes its essence still cannot be excluded. Illusion itself is not a mere nothingness, for there cannot be any such thing. By its very existence it would no longer be nothing; illusion is a “mixture” of the real and the ephemeral or—in Kabbalistic terminology—of “light” and “darkness.” Creation is made from the “dark void” that God established in the midst of his luminous fullness and which he then filled with his existential reflections. This “dark void” is the “mirror” or plane of cosmic reflection, inherent in the receptivity of the shekhinah. Indeed, receptivity is both emptiness and darkness; but while the nature of the void is transparency or translucence, that of darkness is opacity or contraction. Thus, when the creative influx of the Sefiroth fills the receptivity of the “lower mother,” its emptiness or translucence transmits the divine radiation in all the directions of the cosmos, while its darkness contracts, condenses and becomes substance-enveloping light. In its first and celestial condensation, substance is still subtle and resplendent with the radiation that only lightly veils it; but it becomes opaque and gross in its corporeal and terrestrial solidification, which hides the light from above, as thick clouds mask the sun. The “vanity” of things consists in this darkness which fleetingly takes on the appearance of substance; however, substance becomes a mirror of truth when the forms it assumes are recognized as the symbolic expressions of the eternal archetypes, which are none other than the divine aspects. III The ten fundamental aspects of God, or Sefiroth, are manifested at first on the macrocosmic level in the form of ten heavens. The three supreme Sefiroth, kether-hokhmah-binah, are revealed in the three “heavens of heavens,” the triple immanent principle: that is, shekhinah-metatron-avir. Shekhinah is the immanence of kether, the presence of divine reality in the midst of the cosmos. Metatron, the manifestation of hokhmah and the active aspect of the shekhinah, is \the principial form from which all created forms emanate; avir, the ether, is a manifestation of binah: 3 it is the passive aspect of shekhinah, its cosmic receptivity, which gives birth to every created substance, whether subtle or corporeal. The triple immanent principle, shekhinah-metatron-avir, in its undifferentiated unity, constitutes the spiritual and prototypical “world of creation”: olam haberiyah. The seven Sefiroth of universal construction, hesed-din-tifereth­ netsah-hod-yesod-malkhath, which emanate from the supreme tri-unity, are the causes and archetypes of the seven created heavens; the latter issue from the three “heavens of heavens,” as the constituent degrees of the “world of formation,” olam hayetsirah. In this world all creatures undergo their first and subtle formation; it is situated beyond space and time, in the indefinite expansion and duration of the supra-terrestrial cosmos. Olam hayetsirah is imperceptible to the senses and serves as a dwelling place for souls—before or after they pass through the earth—for angels and for spirits. Between the seven subtle heavens and the “seven earths” which issue from them, are situated as further manifestations of the Sefiroth of construction, the seven degrees of the “lower Eden” or earthly Paradise, inhabited by angels and blessed souls; in this intermediary world there exist also darkened inversions of the heavens, namely the seven hells or abodes of the demons and of the damned. The corporeal universe comprising the “seven earths,” is called the “world of fact,” olam ha’ asiyah; it is conditioned by time, space, the material elements and, from the microcosmic point of view, by sensory perception. The seven earths represent so many different states of our universe; they are described as “seven countries,” hierarchically “super-posed and all populated”; one of them, the “higher earth,” is our own, which the six others resemble without attaining its perfection; in the same way their inhabitants possess only an incomplete or unbalanced kind of human form. On the other hand, the seven Sefiroth of construction—which are also called the “seven days of (principial) creation”—are manifested in time in the following septenaries: the seven days of the week; the seven years forming a “sabbatical” cycle; the seven times seven years between one “Jubilee” and another; the seven thousand years rep­ 3. Sometimes avir is identified, by metaphysical transposition, with the supreme principle, kether; it is the substantial indistinction of the ether which, in this case, serves as a “symbol” of the indeterminateness of the absolute essence. resenting a great cycle of existence; and the “seven times seven thousand years” ending at the fiftieth millennium, on the “great Jubilee,” when the world is reintegrated into the divine principle. 4 Finally, the seven Sefiroth of construction determine the six directions of space and their spiritual center, called the “Holy of Holies.” Man is the most perfect image of universal reality in the whole of creation; he is the “incarnated” recapitulation of all the cosmic degrees and of their divine archetypes. Indeed, through his spiritual faculties, psychic virtues and corporeal forms, he represents the most evident symbol of the ten Sefiroth, and his integral personality embraces all the worlds: his pure and uncreated being is identified with the Sefirothic “world of emanation” (olam ha’ atsiluth); his spirit, with the prototypical “world of creation” (olam haberiyah); his soul with the subtle “world of formation” (olam hayetsirah); and his body, with the sensory “world of fact” (olam ha’ asiyah). The law of man, the decalogue, is a manifestation of the ten Sefiroth, as is the “sacred community” of Israel, which is complete only when ten Jewish men come together. The human being is the principal “point of intersection” of the Sefirothic rays in the midst of the cosmos; through him, the divine riches are revealed in all their spiritual radiance and by the explicit symbolism of thought, word, forms and corporeal gestures. Of all beings, man alone—in his perfect state—is the one being whom God causes to participate fully in his infinite knowledge; and through man’s intermediary God brings everything back to himself. IV If creation is the image of God, cosmogony operates—just like a reflected projection—by the law of inversion or, more precisely, by inverse analogy. This law derives from the principle of divine “con­traction 4. When the Kabbalah says that the total duration of the world is fifty thousand years, this figure should be taken as a symbolic expression of the law which constitutes its eternal foundation. This law resides in the mystery of the seven Sefiroth of construction, each one of which recapitulates, in its way, the whole. Thus one is faced with a unity of “seven times seven” or forty-nine Sefirothic degrees, which are manifested through as many cyclical phases, its total duration being that of the indefinite existence of the cosmos; these forty-nine degrees issue from binah and return to it. Binah, as their “end,” is the “fiftieth” degree, or the supreme and pro­totypical “Jubilee.” tsimtsum; by the effect of this “contraction,” the infinite, en sof, appears as nekuda, the causal “point” or supreme “center” of the finite, and the limits of the finite are extended and take on the appearance of unlimited existence. The “contraction” or first inver­ sion is reflected in the midst of existence itself, with the actualization of a multitude of “central points,” each surrounded by an expanse, which serves both as “veil” and “mirror” for its contents. All these “centers” are connected among themselves and with the “supreme Center,” by the “middle pillar” or universal axis, which is none other than the creative, regulating and redemptive “ray” of the divine principle. The “spheres of activity,” which surround their respective centers, are all the worlds, great and small, together making up the cosmic expanse; whether they appear as worlds properly so called, as beings or as things, each of these spheres constitutes, therefore, the “envelope” or “shell” of such and such a “kernel” or existential point of departure, hierarchically included in the “middle pillar.” Finally, as was explained in the last chapter, every “point” representing the center, the immediate principle or prototype of such a world, itself functions as the “field of action” of a higher center, and so on up to the supreme center, which is its own “sphere of activity” embracing all the others. Thus we are confronted by an indefinite series of existential states, formed by as many “inversions” or exteriorizations of their respective points of departure. We have just seen that all these “points” are co-ordinated, in accordance with the law of causality, in the universal axis, which is the “descent” of the “supreme point” across the center or “heart” of everything; thus, each thing, in spite of its dependence on what is hierarchically above it, contains in its innermost depth the “center of centers,” the real presence of God. Every created thing is in its own way a synthesis of the whole of creation, whether in a conscious, developed or seminal mode and it includes in its essence the principle itself. The principle or universal and divine center is not comparable, therefore, to a point or geo­ metric axis, localized in any one place: 5 it is the omnipresent medium. 5. It should be made clear that if the divine immanent center is not “localized” in any one place—because it penetrates all—it nevertheless reveals itself by preference in a sanctified place or being; the latter thereby represents the living expression of the universal center. 250 Creation, the Image of God Terrestrial man, “last born” of the creation, is the “lower point” where cosmogony stops in its creative inversions and returns toward the “supreme point.” When this “inversion of inversions” starts to work in man, it is said that he is seized by teshubah, “conversion,” “repentance,” or the “return” to God; indeed, when man “performs teshubah,” with all his heart, all his soul, and all his might, he ends by being absorbed into his pure and divine “self” and by integrating—within himself—the whole of existence in the cause. This is given to man by the mystery of his inner and universal person which embraces everything from the terrestrial “world of fact” to the very principle of the “world of emanation”; that is why the voluntary “return” of man to God involves the “return” of all the worlds. “Great is teshubah, for it heals the world. Great is teshubah, for it reaches the throne of glory. Great is teshubah, for it brings about redemption” (Talmud, Yoma 86 a). By his absorption in God, man actualizes universal deliverance in himself and thereby “hastens” cosmic redemption. The latter occurs when the entire multitude of subtle and corporeal manifestations has been exhausted in the midst of the two created worlds. At that moment the “grand Jubilee” takes place, the total and final deliverance; 6 it is the ultimate phase of tsimtsum, the “inversion of inversions,” which is not only the “contraction” of the corporeal uni­ verse, but of the entire cosmic expanse: the “withdrawal” of the whole creation into its uncreated center and principle. Then, every immanent spiritual fight regains its transcendent brightness, and every terrestrial and celestial substance is reabsorbed in the “higher ether” (avira ilaah), which is eternally integrated into the infinite essence. Such is the return of the cosmic “image” to divine reality. 6. The definitive reintegration of the cosmos into the principle, which is to be accomplished at the end of “seven times seven millennia” or great cycles of existence, is prefigured by transitory restorations of the paradisal state, which take place every “seventh millennium” or “great Sabbath” of creation. One of these “moments of rest” or transient absorptions of the created into the divine immanence was the cycle of the Fiat Lux, the other, that of the adamic Eden; according to tradition, we are now at the dawn of a new cosmic Sabbath, the “Reign of the Messiah.”
- [The Buddhist Monastic Codes](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-buddhist-monastic-codes) - Translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu (Geoffrey DeGraff) Dhamma-Vinaya was the Buddha’s own name for the religion he founded. Dhamma—the truth—is what he discovered and pointed out as advice for all who want to gain release from suffering. Vinaya—discipline—is what he formulated as rules, ideals, and standards of behavior for those of his followers who go forth
- [The Great Name of God](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/great-name-of-god) - The Judaic confession of divine unity, the scriptural formula of which—the Shema—combines several names of God, represents for the Jew one of the most important “means of union”; another central or direct means of attaining union with God lies in the invocation of a single one of his names. he tetragrammaton YHVH—the “lost word”—was above all others the “saving” name in the tradition of Israel; it is known as shem hameforash, the “explicit name,” the one, that is, of which every consonant reveals and symbolizes one of the four aspects or fundamental degrees of divine all reality. It is also called the “complete name” and the “synthesis of syntheses,” because it includes all the other divine names, each of which, by itself, expresses only one or another particular aspect of the universal principle; it is also called the “unique name” because it is for the “unique people,” and more especially because of its incomparable spiritual efficacy, in that it gives the possibility of direct actualization of the divine presence (shekhinah). It was exactly on account of the direct outpouring of divine grace brought about by the invocation of the name YHVH that the traditional authority in Israel found it necessary, even before the destruction of the second Temple, to forbid the spiritually fallen people to invoke, or even merely to pronounce the tetragrammaton. In his “Guide of the Perplexed,” Maimonides says on this subject: “A priestly blessing has been prescribed for us, in which the name of the Eternal (YHVH) is pronounced as it is written (and not in the form of a substituted name) and that name is the ‘explicit name.’ It was not generally known how the name had to be pronounced, nor how it was proper to vocalize the separate letters, nor whether any of the letters which could be doubled should in fact be doubled. Men who had received special instruction transmitted this one to another (that is, the manner of pronouncing this name) and taught it to none but their chosen disciples, once a week. . . . h ere was also a name composed of twelve letters, which was holy to a lesser degree than the name of four letters; in my opinion it is most probable that this was not a single name but one composed of two or three names which, joined together, had twelve letters (representing their synthesis). This was the name which was substituted for the name of four letters wherever the latter occurred in the reading (of the Torah), just as today we use the name beginning with the consonants Alef, Daleth (ADoNaY, ‘My Lord’). Doubtless this twelve letter name had originally a more special meaning than that conveyed by the name Adonai; it was not at all forbidden to teach it and no mystery was made of it in the case of any well-instructed person; on the contrary, it was taught to anyone who wished to learn it. his was not so in respect to the tetragrammaton; for those who knew it taught it only to their sons and disciples, once a week. However, as soon as undisciplined men, having learnt the twelve-letter name, began thereafter to profess erroneous beliefs— as always happens when an imperfect man is confronted by a thing which differs from his preconceived notion of it—they began to hide this name also and no longer taught it except to the most devout men of the priestly caste, for use when blessing the people in the sanctuary; it was indeed on account of the corruption of men that the pronunciation of the shem hameforash had already been abandoned, even in the sanctuary: ‘After the death of Simeon the Just,’ so say the Doctors, ‘his brother priests ceased to bless by the name (YHVH) but blessed by the name of twelve letters.’ hey also say: ‘At first it was transmitted to every man (in Israel), but after heedless men increased in number, it was no longer transmitted save to men of the priestly caste and the latter allowed (the sound) of it to be absorbed (during the priestly blessing) by the (liturgical) melodies intoned by their fellow-priests.’” Even after the destruction of the second Temple, however, invocation of the “explicit name” appears to have continued as the sacred prerogative of a few initiates who were unknown to the outside world and who served as the spiritual poles of the esoteric “chain of tradition” (shalsheleth hakabbalah). h e function of this chain is the initiatic transmission—uninterrupted through the ages—of the “mysteries of the Torah,” which include, among others, the mystery of the invocation of the holy names; except for the extremely restricted “elect” who retain the high function of guarding and secretly invoking the 1 Like the eight-letter name: YAHDVNHY, which is the synthesis of the two names YHVH and ADoNaY (My Lord). “complete name,” no one may know its exact pronunciation. Although today Hebrew scholars render the name YHVH by “Jehovah” on the strength of the Masoretic vocalization given in the Bibles and prayerbooks, or by “Yahveh,” in an attempt to imagine some way to pronounce it, these introductions of vowels into the tetragrammaton certainly do not correspond to the authentic pronunciation, and that is why it is written here only in the form of the four consonants which are its known basis. he prevailing ignorance as regards the pronunciation of the “explicit name” is certainly not the result of mere “forgetfulness” nor of a purely human decision arrived more than two thousand years ago. h e suppression of the teaching and pronunciation of this name—by decree of the traditional authority—is so categorical and so radical in its consequences that it can be affirmed that God himself has withdrawn this name from the mass of the people of Israel. However, such intervention “from above” expresses not only the rigor, but also the mercy of God, who foresaw that the human recipients of “the last days,” no longer possessing the requisite theomorphism, would be shattered by the weight of his lightning descent. he “complete name,” therefore, cannot be the medium for deifying invocation in our age, which in the prophecies is called the “end of time”; this being so, we must consider its fragmentary substitutes without particular reference to the “twelve-letter name,” the ritual use of which lasted only a short time. As we have seen, it had to be replaced by the name Adonai, which has been pronounced, ever since the destruction of the Temple, every time the tetragrammaton occurs in the reading of the Torah and the daily prayers. It should be noted that the substitution of the name Adonai was decreed only in respect to the exoteric ritual, whether performed in the synagogue or in private, the aim of which is the salvation of the soul in a restricted sense, that is, within the conines of the ego; it does not have in view the invocation which is intended to raise man’s being to the highest “place” (hamakom) which embraces all that is. he restriction does not apply to the “two-letter directly substituted for the shem hameforash, this name must have the same esoteric potentialities as the latter, without, however, involving the danger of According to the word of God addressed to Moses: “thou shalt say unto the children of Israel: ‘YHVH, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob hath sent me to you. his is my name for ever, and this is my memorial (zikhri, the invocation of God) unto all generations’” (Exodus 3:15). ” YH (name, ??) which is pronounced Yah and is nothing other than the first half of the “name of four letters,” YHVH ( ????); from the very fact that it is a too sudden actualization of the divine. 3 This even appears obvious, firstly because the “name of two letters” has the same transcendent significance as the tetragrammaton, which includes it and further, in a more general way, because every divine name not referring to a particular quality to the exclusion of other qualities, refers to the being or essence of God. * * * Since the “complete name” was withdrawn from the Jewish people, they have used above all the following three names, which together replace the unity of the “four letters”; firstly the name YaH which integrates the two first letters— the “transcendental half ”—of YHVH; secondly the name Elohenu, “Our God,” which includes the six active causes of cosmic construction and represents divine immanence as first revealed in the subtle, celestial, and psychic world, symbolized by the vav; thirdly the name Adonai—an exoteric replacement for the name YHVH—designates malkhuth, the final he, representing divine immanence as manifested particularly in the corporeal world. But the name which concerns us here is Yah, the transcendental nature of which leads, in principle, to the state of Yobel (Jubilee), final “deliverance” (in the same sense as the Hindus understand the word moksha). his name seems to represent not only the “means of grace” par excellence of the final cycle of Jewish history, but also that of its beginning. In fact, it can be deduced from Scripture that Yah was the divine name used particularly by Jacob and his people, whereas YHVH was the “name of Israel” so long as Israel represented the “portion of YHVH.” In the Psalms (135:3-4) it is said: “Praise Yah, for he is good! YHVH, sing praises to his name, for it is pleasant! For Yah has chosen Jacob unto himself, and Israel for his costly possession,” the possession, that is, of YHVH, according to Deuteronomy (32:9): “For the portion of YHVH is his people.” And Isaiah (44:5) explicitly distinguishes between the “name of Jacob” and the “name of Israel”: “One shall call himself by the name of Jacob (Yah) and another shall subscribe with his hand, unto YHVH and surname himself by the name of Israel.” his distinction can be explained in 3 In his commentary on the Sefer Yetsirah written in 931, Gaon Saadya de Fayyum says: “When it is said: ‘YaH has two letters, YHVH has four letters,’ what is meant is that YaH is one half of the name YHVH. Now, the half was said everywhere and at all times, but the whole was only said in the Sanctuary in a particular period and at the moment of the blessing of Israel.” And the Talmud (Erubin 18b) states: “Since the destruction of the Sanctuary, the world need only use two letters (as a means of invocation, that is, the two first letters of YHVH, forming the name YaH).” relation to the history of Israel, all the phases of which are contained in three fundamental cycles: the first, or “patriarchal” cycle, from Shem to Jacob’s victorious struggle at Peniel with the divine manifestation; the second, or “Israelite,” cycle, from Peniel, where Jacob and his people received the name of Israel, to the destruction of the second Temple; and the third, or “final,” cycle, from the collapse of the priestly service and theocracy to the advent of the Messiah. Now Shem was the “seed” of the Jewish race; Abraham was the “father of many peoples” and Isaac the “sacrifice of oneself to God,” while Jacob gave birth to the twelve tribes and the “mystical body” of Israel; so the latter is considered above all others as the patriarch of Israel and the people of God are called “Jacob” until the struggle at Peniel. “Jacob was chosen to belong to Yah,” that is, to be raised up in spirit to divine transcendence. But at Peniel there was a fundamental change in the mystical destiny of Jacob and his people, for it was said to him (Genesis 32:28): “thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel (he who struggles with God), for thou hast striven with God and with men and hast prevailed.” In the language of the Kabbalah this means that after having “wrestled with God until victory”—absorption in the transcendence of Yah—Jacob prevailed also at Peniel over the divine manifestation called “man,” that is, over the “descent” of God into humanity. his revelatory and redemptive “descent” is symbolized, in sacred ideography, by the vav (?). According to the Zohar (Ter umah 127a): “When the vav emerges mysteriously self-contained from the yod-he (YaH), then Israel attains to his costly possession,” its corpus mysticum, which is identical with the Sefirah malkhuth, represented by the last he of the tetragrammaton. hus, thanks to the sacred struggle of its patriarch, the people entered into possession of the reality hidden in the last two letters of the shem hameforash—the spiritual (V) and substantial (H) fullness of the divine immanence—and itself became, in its mystical body, the “final He,” the “portion of YHVH.” It appears, therefore, that during the “Jacobite” phase the people were not yet the “possession of YHVH,” just as YHVH—the “complete name” or actualized unity of divine transcendence (YH) and divine immanence (VH)—was not yet the “possession of Israel.” he people of “Jacob” was centered on the transcendent aspect of God: Yah. In that cyclical moment and in that environment, spiritual realization must not necessarily have required initiation into the sacred sciences (symbolized by the vav), any more than it needed the priestly service in the sanctuary (represented by the last he of the tetragrammaton). It was only when YHVH established the roots of the earthly center of his presence in the midst of Jacob’s family—which thereby became “Israel,” or the Chosen People—that the vav or “mysteries of the faith” had to be communicated to it through the intermediary of its patriarch. These mysteries, transmitted from generation to generation to the “children of Israel,” were lost at the time of their servitude in Egypt, but were reborn and permanently crystallized in the revelation on Sinai; and the “final he” of YHVH, the pure and imperceptible substance of the shekhinah, called the “Community of Israel,” entered into the Holy Land and took up its abode in the Temple of Jerusalem, where the High Priest blessed all the people by the shem hameforash. By the grace of the “complete name,” the Chosen People long ago actualized the “kingdom of God” in the Holy Land, but on account of their sins the first Temple was destroyed and Israel had to suffer exile in Babylon: “. . . during the whole seventy years of exile,” says the Zohar (Shemoth 9b), “Israel had no divine light to guide her and, truly, that was the essence of the exile. When, however, Babylon’s power was taken away from her and Israel returned to the Holy Land, a light did shine for her, but it was not as bright as before (when Israel received the emanation of the ‘complete name,’ which was broken up by the sins which also caused the destruction of the first Temple), being only the emanation of the ‘lower he’ (the shekhinah, or ‘mystical body’ of Israel, identical with that of the second Temple), since the whole of Israel did not return to purity to be a ‘peculiar people’ as before. Therefore, the emanation of the supernal yod did not descend to illumine in the same measure as before, but only a little. Hence Israel was involved in many wars until ‘the darkness covered the earth’ and the ‘lower he’ was darkened and fell to the ground (so that Israel was forbidden to invoke the ‘complete name’) and the upper source was removed as before (as at the time of the destruction of the first Temple), and the second Temple was destroyed and all its twelve tribes went into exile in the kingdom of Edom. h e he also went into exile The name of the biblical kingdom of Edom (situated between the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Elath) is here used as a symbolic term of the whole Roman Empire. According to the Kabbalah, Edom symbolizes sometimes the imperfect or unbalanced state of creation preceding its present state—the latter being an ordered manifestation of the Fiat Lux—and sometimes the idolatrous world of antiquity and, by extension, every materialistic, profane, or atheistic civilization, such as our own. he Bible (Genesis 36) identifies Edom with Esau, who sold his birthright—implying the right of the first-born, the major patriarchal blessing—for “a mess of pottage.” therefore, in the Jewish tradition, Esau or Edom is opposed to Jacob or Israel, as the animal and materialistic tendency of man is opposed to his spiritual and theomorphic tendency. there. . . .” the shekhinah was “decentralized,” dispersed with Israel all over the world. It continued to radiate only through weak “reflections” wherever there was a community of orthodox Jews; nevertheless, its sacred “embers” have continued to flare up with an increased light and, sporadically, its true “grandeur” has been recaptured amidst the elect; these are the Mekubbalim, or initiated Kabbalists, who—with certain exceptions, such as the “false Messiahs”—formed the “pillars” of the exiled people; but they appear to have become a negligible minority in the era of the triumph of “Edomite” civilization, this modern world of ours which has even been transplanted to the Holy Land itself. According to the Zohar, David, through the holy spirit, foresaw the end of the last exile of Israel—identifying it with the very “end of days” in accordance with the prophecies—and revealed it in Psalm 102:19: “this shall be written for the future (or the last) generation and a people which shall be created (in the time of the ‘end’) shall praise Yah!” he same prophecy is hidden in the verse from Malachi (3:23): “Behold, I will send you Elijah (my God is Yah) the prophet (whose very name reveals which divine name was to be invoked during his pre-Messianic ministry and who represents, not only the type of the eternal master of masters, but also the type of all prophetic activity preceding and directly preparing the universal redemptive act of God’s anointed), before the coming of the great and terrible day of YHVH.” Finally, the Zohar shows the exact reason why the name Yah —as in the time of Jacob—represents the means above all others of salvation in the period from the destruction of the Temple to the advent of the Messiah; and this reason becomes fully apparent in our day, when even the believing Jews can no longer live in freedom from the materialistic and profane organization of the modern world and so are unable any longer perfectly to carry out the Mosaic law, which presupposes as its “sphere of activity” either a theocracy or a closed traditional world. Now, the Zohar (Terumah 165b) says, referring to this Psalm is called the “prayer of the unhappy man” whose “days vanish into smoke” and “are like a shadow at its decline.” These phrases refer to the end of time. 6 hat the “name of two letters” applies to the present time is made clear not only in the saying from the Talmud (Erubin 18b) which we have quoted, but also in the following formulation, amongst others, which was used in the school founded by the great master Isaac Luria (1534­ 72) and which shows that a spiritual method was based upon it as modern times approached: “For the sake of union of the Holy One, be he blessed, with his shekhinah, in fear and in love, that the name YaH, be blessed, may be uniied in complete uniication.” It should be remembered that the phrase “to unify the name” has the meaning, from the point of view of method: to invoke the divine name. the name Yah: “All is included in this name: those that are above (epitomized in the yod, the ideogram of pure transcendence, kether-hokhmah) and those that are below (hidden, in its principal and undiferentiated state, in the ‘upper he,’ binah, the archetype of immanence). In it the six hundred and thirteen commandments of the Torah, which are the essence of the supernal and terrestrial mysteries, are included.” When this name is invoked sincerely, then it is as though one were carrying out all the commandments of the Jewish religion. his name compassionately forgives and compensates for the inadequacy of man in relation to the divine will; that is why the psalmist and “prophet of Yah” cried out: “In my anguish I called upon Yah; Yah heard my prayer and set me in a large place” (Psalm 118:5). “I shall not die, I shall live and declare the works of Yah. Yah has chastened me sorely, but he has not given me over to death. Open the gates of righteousness before me; I will enter into them, praising Yah!” (Psalms 118:17-19). God can and will save Zion, not by his rigor, but by his compassion, when “time shall have come to its end”: “thou wilt arise and have compassion upon Zion; for it is time to be gracious unto her, for the appointed time is come!” (Psalms 102:13). h e name Yah does not have the “descending” efficacy of the shem hameforash; it lacks the direct influx of the vav or “living God,” the spiritual brilliance of which cannot be borne without the presence of the “final he,” represented at the same time by the Temple and its priestly service, the transmission and practice of the sacred sciences, the functioning of theocratic institutions, and the conformity of an entire people to the divine will. Yet the reasons for the substitution of the name Yah for that of YHVH are not only restrictive, for, since they are connected, from the cyclical point of view, with the “end of time,” this end ceases also to be of a purely negative character; on the contrary, according to the prophets, it precedes a positive renewal, namely, the creation of “a new Heaven and a new earth”—more perfect than “For He hath looked down from the height of his sanctuary; from heaven did YHVH behold the earth to hear the groaning of the prisoner (of the civilization of ‘Edom’) and to loose those that are appointed to death (represented by the anti-spiritual life of the modem world)” (Psalms 102:19-20). “YHVH is full of compassion and gracious, slow to anger and plenteous in mercy. He will not always contend, neither will he keep his anger forever. He hath not dealt with us ater our sins, nor requited us according to our iniquities, for as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his goodness towards them that hear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed us from our transgressions. Like a father hath compassion upon his children (and Yah is precisely the name of the divine ‘father,’ hokhmah) so hath YHVH compassion upon them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame; He remembereth that we are dust (and can in no way change the cyclical conditions in which we are born and have to live)” (Psalms 103:8-14). those now existing—as well as the creation of a new Jerusalem, whose “places shall be sacred to YHVH and will never be laid waste nor destroyed.” By the very fact that it is the name to be invoked by the “last generation,” Yah is also the name for the return to the “beginning,” to the perfect original of all things. It is different from the tetragrammaton, the efficacity of which is above all “descending,” revelatory, and existential, for the name Yah is in fact the name of “ascent” and of redemption; it is exactly the name of the “beginning” and of the “end” of every ontological emanation and cosmic manifestation of God, while the name YHVH is the whole emanation, and the whole manifestation. he “upper (or transcendent) YHVH” manifests through the “lower (or immanent) YHVH”; in the same way, the “upper (or ontological) Yah” manifests through the “lower Yah” or cosmic principle, which retains its transcendent nature everywhere, even “below.” Therefore, if the “lower YHVH” represents divine immanence, the “lower Yah” then represents “transcendent immanence.” h e yod which, in its pure transcendence “on high” is the unity of kether and hokhmah, signiies “below,” in the metacosmic center of the cosmos, the unity of the shekhinah and its active aspect, metatron, the cosmic intellect, the inner regulator of creation, while the following he represents its passive aspect avir, “ether,” the quintessence—the he having in fact the numerical value of five—of the four subtle and the four coarse elements; it is, as we have already seen, the undif erentiated principle of all subtle, celestial, or psychic substance and of all coarse or corporeal matter. If the shekhinah, in so far as it dwells in the prototypical and spiritual world (olam haberiyah), is the “transcendent immanence” of kether, then metatron is that of hokhmah, and avir that of binah; now just as the three highest Sei roth cannot be separated one from another, since they represent the one infinite and indivisible principle, Yah, so also metatron and avir must not be separated from the shekhinah, of which they are respectively the active or regulating aspect and the receptive or generative aspect. These three immanent principles, undifferentiated, compose the “lower Yah,” also called the “heaven of heavens,” the inseparable unity of the tenth, ninth, and eighth heaven being “the one who rides in Araboth, 9 (the seventh heaven): These two aspects of YHVH are revealed to Moses in the Scriptures (Exodus 34:6) when God shows him His attributes (Middoth) beginning with the twice repeated: “YHVH, YHVH El rahum wehanun. . . .” (YHYH, YHVH, God merciful and compassionate. . . .) 9 It should be remembered that the word Araboth for the seventh heaven, translated sometimes as “clouds,” sometimes by “plains,” “desert,” or “heaven,” is derived from the root ARB, which means something mixed. In fact, avir, the undifferentiated ether, that “pure and imperceptible Yah is his name” (Psalms 68:5). he “heaven of heavens,” identical with the prototypical “world of creation” (olam haberiyah) is the intermediary plane between the Sefirothic “meta-cosmos” and the created cosmos which begins in the seventh heaven, Araboth, the “surface of the lower waters.” h e “lower Yah” is therefore “transcendent immanence,” the mediator between pure transcendence and immanence in that it penetrates that which is created and ” 10 is called by the last two letters of the “lower YHVH. When YHVH comes down from the highest “place” to the center of this world, he brings the secrets of all the divine and cosmic degrees, the “mysteries of the Torah” with their various graces; thus his “four letters” form what is preeminently the revealing name, while Yah is enthroned on the “surface of the waters,” where the “heavens and the earth” begin and end, that is to say the whole of the world “created in one single instant”; there it is that all creatures emerge from God and return to him, in a single “cry of joy” which is nothing other than the “primordial sound.” h e name Yah is the revealed utterance of this inarticulate and universal “cry” or “sound” which manifests and reabsorbs the entire cosmos; it is the name of creative and redemptive joy. Thus the Psalmist cries out: “Make way for him who rides in Araboth: Yah is his name. Rejoice before him!” “What the verse tells us,” comments the Zohar (Ter umah 165b), “is that the ancient of ancients (the supreme principle) rideth in the Araboth (that he is really present) in the sphere of Yah, which is the primordial mystery emanating from him, namely the inef able name Yah, which is not identical with him (the absolute), but is a kind of veil emanating from him. his veil is his name, it is his chariot, and even that is not manifested (in the cosmos, but is enthroned on the ‘surface of the waters’). It is his ‘great name.’ . . . For when all is well with this name, then harmony is complete, and all worlds rejoice in unison.” Yah, in its immanent aspect, is the immediate cause of the cosmos, the air” of the eighth heaven, is manifested in Araboth in its first differentiation, subtle substance or “water” which reflects the uncreated light, or spiritual “ire” descending from the shekhinah or from its universal irradiation, metatron. Now the “surface of the waters” shines so brightly in the light of the divine “fire” that it seems to be utterly fused or “mixed” in it. h is “mixture” or more precisely this “immanence” of the spirit in the subtle substance, which endures as long as the cosmos subsists, produces the whole of the seven “heavens,” shamaim, this word being composed of esh, spiritual “fire” and of maim, substantial “waters.” 10 The vav of the “lower YHVH—having the numerical value of six—symbolizes the shekhinah which penetrates the irst six of the seven heavens constituting the subtle “world of formation” (olam hayetsirah). The “final he of the lower YHVH”—having the numerical value of five— represents avir, the quintessence, in that it has descended into the lowest heaven, there to dwell as the ether or undifferentiated principle of the four elements constituting olam haasiyah, the sensory or corporeal “world of fact”; thus the “i nal he,” dwelling in the lowest heaven, is the immediate and omnipresent center of our world. cause that transcends all its effects: it remains hidden in the prototypical world, as uncreated and infinite light. But its irradiation transpierces its envelope, the ether, with a “sound” which is that of the revelatory, creative, and redemptive “word”; this is the “voice” of the Creator, the “primordial sound” which produces the two lower worlds, the world of subtle “formation” and the sensory world of “fact.” It is the “inner voice” which sounds in the innermost depths of all things, so that it is said that “the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech and night unto night revealeth knowledge. here is no speech, no language where the sound is not heard: their voice resounds through all the earth and their words go out to the end of the world. . .” (Psalms 19:2-5). he “inner” (divine) voice is in truth the very light of God, an infinite light which, by refraction in the ether, has been transformed into revelatory, creative, and redemptive “sound.” hat is the universal “name” of God, inwardly his light, outwardly his voice, emitted spontaneously and in innumerable modes—articulate or inarticulate—by “everything that has a soul.” his is why the psalmist calls, not only to men, but to everything he sees as animated by the universal name, to invoke that name for the glory of the “named” and the salvation of the world; he even goes so far as to exhort the “heaven of heavens” to join in the invocation, because it is from there, from Yah itself, that the voice in effect descends and resounds on the “surface of the waters”—where the created heavens begin—and is thence transmitted throughout the whole of existence, even to the earthly “abysses.” “Praise Yah! Praise YHVH from the height of the heavens! Praise him in the heights! Praise ye him, all his angels! All his hosts, praise ye him! Praise ye him, sun and moon! Praise him, all ye stars of light! Praise him, ye heavens of heavens and the waters that are above the heavens! . . . Praise YHVH from below on the earth, ye sea-monsters and all ye deeps; ire and hail, snow and vapors, stormy wind fulfilling his word, mountains and all hills; fruitful trees and all cedars; beasts and all cattle; creeping things and winged fowl! Kings of the earth and all peoples, princes and all judges of the earth; both young men and maidens, old men and children; let them praise the name of YHVH! For his name alone is exalted; his glory is above the earth and heaven. . .” (Psalms 148). For the prophet-king, the synonym of this universal praise is either the call to the “great name,” Yah, or the call to the “complete name,” YHVH; 11 this 11 The name Yah is the direct and synthetic articulation of the “primordial sound,” whereas the name YHVH is the indirect and “explicit” articulation of the same; every holy name moreover represents a more or less explicit utterance of the divine voice, but to a lesser degree than the name YHVH. is why his exhortation begins with the words: “Praise Yah! Praise YHVH! . . .” his universal invocation is made up of the indefinite multitude of modes in which the divine voice chooses to speak through his “organs” which are his creatures; however, where all worlds, all beings, all things emerge directly from their first and divine unity, that is, from Yah “who rides on Araboth,” there is only one mode of invocation, a single sound, a single cry, which expresses the joy of myriads of creatures in union with the One, the Unique. For where all beings issue from God is the place where all return to him without delay; here, on the “surface of the waters,” in the seventh heaven, Araboth, all that becomes separated from the Lord is separated only in order to be reunited with him. In effect, his creative act and his redemptive act are experienced there as one and the same thing: thanks to separation from him, union with him takes place. Beings emerge like so many “sparks” from the irradiation of the shekhinah, that is to say of metatron, the divine “sun” which contains them all in so far as they are immanent and unseparated archetypes. On leaving this luminous world, where all is one with God, the sparks become enveloped in the differentiated manifestation of avir, that is, in the subtle “waters” of the seventh heaven, over the surface of which the “wind of Elohim” breathes and produces innumerable “waves.” his wind is the cosmic spirit, metatron, which sets avir, the universal substance, in motion in order for it to produce subtle “waves,” that is, souls each one of which is animated, illuminated, and inhabited by a spiritual “spark,” a “living being.” Each “wave” appearing on the “surface of the waters,” whether issuing from God or returning from the depths of the cosmic “ocean,” bursts into a single cry of joy and expands over the whole extent of the existential sea, the whole of Araboth. Over this hovers the eighth heaven, avir, the undifferentiated and translucid ether, which is wholly penetrated by the spiritual sun, metatron, so that the whole firmament itself appears like a sun, illuminating the “surface of the waters” from one end to the other. As we have said, each “wave” produced on this surface instantly expands in the supreme invocation and becomes the whole of the indefinite expanse, the immense “mirror,” which is so filled with divine light that it mingles—in essential “fusion” and not in qualitative “confusion”—with the “radiant face” of Yah inclined towards it. Thus each being is simultaneously united with the whole of existence and with the infinite source of existence. But if it is said that this integral union takes place at the very instant when the created being issues from uncreated being, one may wonder how the being then descends to the lower heavens and down to this earth in the form of a separate individual or separate “world.” This descent takes place as follows: the “fine upper point” of the created being, which is its spiritual or divine “spark,” remains in the seventh heaven in constant fusion with the infinite light of God, whilst its extension downwards—inwardly a spiritual vibration, outwardly a subtle “wave”—begins to expand on the “surface of the waters” and descend into the midst of the cosmic “ocean,” there to follow its predestined path. he created being is similar in this way to a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, which, starting from its upper point, opens out irst in the form of a horizontal stroke and is prolonged in one fashion or another in the direction of its lower limit. Just as letters, when pronounced, return to their origin—the silent world of the uncreated and creative Word—so do animate beings or subtle “waves,” having issued with the “primordial sound” from the divine silence and having vibrated through the heavens as far as here below, then return from their terrestrial end-point towards their celestial point of departure, from which they have never been separated and which is itself in permanent union with God. We have seen that all created beings without exception issue through the same invocation—the “primordial sound”—from their divine origin and return to it through this same “cry for joy.” his simultaneously creative and redemptive sound is heard when the vibration of the divine light falls on the first subtle and cosmic expanse of the ether, on the “surface of the waters.” Each of the waves formed therein truly “bursts” with joy and is nothing but an exclamation of gladness which expands over the whole of Araboth; each being there is just a “voice” vibrating with bliss, joined with all the other “cries” in the one “voice of YHVH” which “resounds over the waters” (Psalms 29:3). his “voice,” this first and universal sound, expressed simultaneously by the Creator and by all his creatures, is symbolized in sacred ideophony by the vowel a; this issues from the y (yod)—from the unity of shekhinah­ metatron—and spreads out indefinitely to the confines of the existential “ocean,” through the h (he) or avir, that “very pure and imperceptible air” coming from the mouth of God. Such is the genesis of the divine great name, Yah, of which it is said (Psalms 150:6): “Let everything that hath breath praise 12 Yah! Halaluyah! (praised be Yah). 12 In the Apocalypse (19:6-7) there is also an allusion to the invocation of Yah by the “waters” of the cosmic ocean; St. John speaks of their “voice” which says Hallelujah! and of the redemptive joy which goes with the invocation: “And I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying: Hallelujah: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth!” Let us remember that “Hallelujah” represents not only a form of invocation of Yah in Judaism, but also became, by way of the Psalms, a praise of God in the Christian tradition. God, by invoking his creative and redemptive name, causes everything that exists to issue from him and to return into him; by invoking his name with him, every being is born from him, lives by him, and is united with him
- [Anniyya — Anitas](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/anniyya-anitas) - Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny In this seminal article, the author studies the Arabic term anniyya and the Latin anitas, “thatness”, and their related concepts in Greek, Jewish, Christian and Islamic sources. Click here to view the PDF (3.8MB) Originally published in Melanges offerts a Etienne Gilson. Paris: J. Vrin, 1959. Reproduced here by kind permission.
- [Praying the Passion](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/praying-the-passion) - Fr. Donal O’Sullivan The Eucharist is for Catholics no nuda commemoratio, no empty memorial service. It is a memoriale, in the “above-nature” sense of a memory that contains the thing remembered. Calvary is no “green hill far away”: it is the altar in my parish church, in my community chapel. When the negro-spiritual asks: “Were
- [Psycho-Analysis and Spirituality](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/psycho-analysis-and-spirituality) - There are innumerable English jokes about how there is nothing a Scotsman likes better than a prolonged metaphysical discussion. Whatever truth there may be in this there is no denying that the Englishman of today, perhaps through some form of mental laziness, tends to be allergic to metaphysics or to subtleties of dialectic. We are assured that in the Eighteenth century the leading officials of John Company learned in contact with Mogul courts to lard their conversation freely with tags from Hafiz and other Persian poets rather as they would have larded it with Horace in London; but for all that we may suspect that they remained strangers to the subtle symbolisms of this Sufi poetry. Warren Hastings was atypical in grasping the importance of the Bhagavadgita and sponsoring years ago the first English translation. Since there have been many translations into English of Hindu sacred texts and of commentaries on these texts, although there are still large fields almost untouched. Moreover books setting out popularized, simplified and distorted versions of Hindu doctrines are to be found in bookshops everywhere. Many of these claim to teach disciplines which give new powers to mind, memory or body. There are also gramophone records on sale giving instruction in Hatha yoga exercises and one Midland town has even organized large and very popular public classes in which some of the simpler asanas and control of breathing are taught to pupils whose aim—one may suspect—is a rather indefinite one of learning relaxation and getting better health. Nobody could deny that an ill-organized body, undisciplined imagination and uncontrolled attention involve waste of precious energy and are a handicap in any serious undertaking, but all this is a very long way from the metaphysics or the spiritual paths which are the central concern of Hinduism and its sacred scriptures. There is a gulf between the outlook of the world in which we live and that of traditional India and very few are the authors who have been able with true understanding to bridge that gulf and set out faithfully for the West what can be put into books of its doctrines. Some books have been distorted by methodical misrepresentation, others by powerful preconceptions in the writers’ minds. Above all, and very understandably, there has been incomprehension of subtle and complex ideas which Hindus would not have thought of trying to master without the personal guidance and experiment involved in actually following a spiritual discipline under a qualified guru. In recent years Hindu doctrines have been approached by some Europeans from a new angle—that of one or other of the schools of analytical psychology. This does not apply to Freud, who was a skeptic in these matters, so much as to Jung and many who were in some degree his disciples. Jung’s uncomprehending and arrogant approach to Hindu doctrines has been compared to that of a Chinese emperor to the learning of barbarians from the West. Notably his misunderstanding of the doctrine of the Atman, the Self, helped to falsify the whole of his interpretation. But other workers in this field have also gone exploring India and some have come to suspect that certain tenets of Western psycho-therapy based on a study of mental and psychic maladies among Europeans have not their supposed universal validity and that there are confusions between different levels and a blindness to realms beyond the psyche. Some of the resulting books have been very slight but Western Psycho-Therapy and Hindu Sadhana by Dr. Hans Jacobs1 can be welcomed for a number of reasons. The author tells us that from an early age he was concerned to find an answer for himself to some of the problems side-stepped by Western science. After study in the Vienna school he became a pupil of Jung and then practiced as a psycho-therapist, mainly in Australia, for nine years before going to Ceylon and India for four years. Since writing this book in Germany he seems to have returned to India. As he says he is personally responsible for the translation of most of the wide range of Sanskrit texts he quotes, it would seem that he must have made a serious study of Sanskrit. From internal evidence one supposes the author’s mother tongue to be German and there are occasional unfortunate turns of phrase, some of which may be due to careless proof-reading, but on the whole the style is admirably clear. A good deal of the book is taken up with criticism—forceful and clear—of Jung and Freud and of the treatment of schizophrenics and psychotics by shock, chemical and surgical techniques. There are also, regrettably, extensive case-histories of his own psychotic patients, reproductions of the pictures they painted for him during treatment and his interpretation of those pictures. In all this part he appears to lose sight of the profound difference between psycho-analysis and Hindu sadhana which he so clearly expounds in other passages. It is as if he could not get away from his past. A more important criticism of the book may be connected—if one may thus psychologise—with something in the author’s past colouring his judgment. It is when he says of the traditional religious beliefs of the West as they come down to us that they 1 Allen and Unwin, 1961. 2 There is no satisfactory English equivalent and Dr. Jacobs rejects the frequent misuse of the word yoga as a translation. are now too trivial, too insignificant and too used-up to be any longer usable. Nobody could dispute that they are denied or ignored by a very large part of our peoples today and are often presented in a form so watered-down as to be barely recognisable, but it is not intelligent of Dr. Jacobs thus to denigrate the value of what remains. He tells us he has traversed India from its Southern tip to Kedarnath, from Bombay to Calcutta, that he has lived in Banaras, that he watched the great gathering of Kumbha Mela (which takes place only once in twelve years), and that he has taken part in sessions of prayer and chanting, of japa, lasting round the clock and he has also had the benefit of contact with some of the great exponents of orthodox schools of Hindu doctrine and spiritual practice. He will have seen how the peoples of India, often excitable and credulous, are very much swept up in the agitations of corrupt politics and the industrialising and modernising of their country, and are often, as he says, seemingly indifferent and skeptical about religion. But he must surely have seen that underneath all this there is still widely persistent a belief in the reality of the Goal spoken of by the sages of old; even if the genuineness of this or that sadhaka may be questioned in circles of Western-style culture, the idea of the Delivered Sage will be in some sense venerated. And this could not persist apart from the omnipresence of something of the Hindu tradition—its external forms as well as its devotees and sages. The great merit of Dr. Jacobs’s book lies in his sympathetic and understanding exposition of the Hindu point of view. He shows very clearly the nature of the blinkers worn by most Indologists and especially by many of the Germans. Among the exceptions he singles out René Guénon, whose expositions are the more remarkable because he never went to India, and Sir John Woodroffe, who managed to combine with a distinguished official career study under a guru at Banaras, and is indeed believed by many to have received the initiation of the Gayatri Mantra. He warns us, not only against the prejudices of Indologists but also against those ashrams from which there today emanates a stream of literature in English and where one is liable to meet Americans and Europeans. In these he says that a teaching is presented which is in fact simplified, denatured and distorted. This is a sweeping judgment and indeed he himself cites with reverence more than one spiritual master— Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi is one of them—whose ashram is or was sought by European admirers. None the less the warning is valuable and he might well have taken warning to approach with more caution the writings of Sri Aurobindo and Swami Vivekananda. A number of investigators have been intrigued and puzzled by the way in which some African tribes settle all their tribal problems by arriving without voting at a unanimous consensus of opinion, so firmly are we conditioned to a divisive, “ this- or-that” way of looking at things. The traditional Hindu world exemplifies a strong adsorptive tendency; it relies on the general atmosphere to make one out of two, to ingest points of view which stray from orthodoxy. Even in our own times aberrant manifestations have been thus neutralised; probably Dr. Jacobs met persons who would be considered traditionally fully orthodox but spoke admiringly of Vivekananda and Aurobindo having in mind only the positive aspects of their work. We do not live in such an atmosphere. We are busily preoccupied with peripheral matters where fields of study are increasingly fragmented and often manage to hold in different fields an astonishing variety of mutually incompatible views. St Bernard wrote with scorn of the many whose “supreme desire and only care it is to investigate the manner and order of things done. They call themselves natural philosophers but by us they are more rightly called vain and curious men.” They represent what is the most admired aim of our modern educational system in seeking to meet the “need” for more rapid technological advance. On the one hand many would define man as deriving from a fertilised ovum in which is imprinted a genetic pattern—a mathematical or physico-chemical formula—which determines everything of the subsequent cellular multiplication and diversification and maintains the structure more or less intact till it perishes. In this definition thoughts and memories are defined as electro-chemical impulses. Man is then no longer thought of as coming on the scene “not in entire forgetfulness but trailing clouds of glory”; from beginning to end he is in this view a material compound. But they do not apply such thinking to themselves. Scientists may devise elaborate series of experiments for the express purpose of proving that all animals including man are automata and that the inconvenient idea of bodily operations being purposive to a foreseen end can be safely eliminated as an unneeded hypothesis, but somehow they exclude themselves from the category of those whose operations are not purposive. For all their theories they none the less try to hide even from themselves the sharp ineluctability of their own death and decay, or to drape it in the fanciful periphrases of the “mortician.” Christians would no doubt say that besides the body and the genetic structure of the scientists there is an immortal soul, though they are not always very clear what they mean. Sometimes they think of the soul as something like the life-principle, rather as Hadrian probably did when composing on his death-bed the poem addressed to his soul: “Animula, vagula, blandula, Hospes, comesque corporis, Quae nunc abibis in loca...?”3 Sometimes perhaps they think of it as just themselves, “not leaving out the warts” but only the materiality. In any case all of us in the West are accustomed to envisage things historically—even immortality. ?Little, winsome, wandering thing, Bosom friend and guest today, Whither now, my soul away... Modern logicians and mathematicians would say it is possible for a series not to have a first term in contrast to the common view that what has no end has no beginning, but human immortality is none the less apt to be envisaged as an endless extension of time after death which yet has its beginning at birth. A very different outlook is to be found in the East and it is not easy for us to divest ourselves of our view of time and really understand it. There is a much more definite approach both to the idea of time and “outside time” and to what we are to mean by “man.” Scientists now assure us that psychic life in man begins some time before birth and that, if he is not considered as beginning at the moment of conception, his life really begins with his psychic life. Psycho-analysts even claim to have contacted and brought to expression intra-uterine memories. Be this as it may, it is rare for man to retain in adult life conscious memories even of the first year or two of life; in that period he seems to live in the moment and in the animal field of sensory needs and satisfactions while learning to interpret sensory data and to control bodily functions. Such memories as we do consciously retain even from the first three years or so are usually connected with bodily discoveries or acute sensations. Even from the first four or five years the memories we retain are often in part spurious; either adults built them up by talk or we ourselves did so in frequent telling of them. On such grounds I strongly suspect my seemingly clear memories of Swinburne and of Queen Victoria; perhaps Dr. Johnson’s memory of Queen Anne was also built up in this way. Instead of taking man’s life as starting before birth we might in another sense take it as starting after he begins to talk—not in isolated words recognised as symbols (in the original Greek sense of the word) for a particular object or for a whole category of objects, but in connected speech. At this stage a hierarchy of quality or value begins to be established, emanating either from himself or from his environment, and dreams and imaginations begin to range widely. I and other are separated. The developments noticeable at this stage it is fashionable to explain, after Freud, as incidental concomitants of the development towards reproductive maturity. There is no need to rush to the other extreme and maintain that they have no close connection with sex because one believes their primary importance to be connected with the beginnings of a new and supra-sensory possibility, though one which in most cases soon fades into the light of common day. At each moment we are assailed by a battery of potential stimuli to our various senses but we respond only to such as appear to be significant. Undeniably most men live out their lives on the basis that significance is attributable only, or almost only, to what concerns their “animal” nature—sex, food, physical danger, comforts, dominance of others and the like. Dr. Jacobs quotes an Indian saying that what we think we become, and it applies not only to our thinking. If, as Blake asserted, the wise man and the fool do not see the same tree, it is because the former has learned to see the tree not as a Cedrus atlantica or as so much vendable timber but as a symbol or reflection from a supra-sensual order. When Plato related, or invented, his account of a feast or drinking party at which Socrates relates a story of his meeting with Diotima, he wrote for readers who in this sense had something of wisdom and were also familiar with the idea of the inadequacy of words in relation to things divine. Eleusis did not teach through words and, though Plato has warned us that we do not know all he taught, we can be fairly sure that words were not the sole means of instruction at the Academy. The new horizons of which we catch glimpses in early childhood introduce us to the Muses; poetry, for example, is not just a matter of rhythms and surface meaning, for it seeks to convey through subtle overtones arousing in us sympathetic vibrations more than can be explicit in words. Among illiterate and “primitive” peoples one can still meet with diction and images which are in this sense poetry, but everything in our world conspires to banish divinities; even music tends to be regarded just as a sensory stimulant, its composition as mental ingenuity in producing novel and exciting effects. And, sad to tell, Indian music has begun to be affected in the same way as one cannot but note from the loud speakers which blare out sentimental music from films in every bazaar. The intuitions of childhood are most likely to fructify where the climate of opinion favours belief in the existence of higher possibilities for man, where religious faith and symbolisms are in the air and, above all, if there is contact with someone in whom the possibilities in question have been in large measure actualised. But our society is dedicated to a worship of technics and quantity. The economics of machine production require the making of large batches of goods as nearly identical as possible and this in turn requires that the mass media of propaganda should be directed to creating a corresponding market. Uniformity in “keeping up with the Joneses” must be inculcated so that these goods come to be regarded as necessities. Suitable titillation of sex appetites disastrously becomes a means for inducing a conviction that fullness of life means a more elaborate standard of living. Fortunately for the advertisers there is, alas, no limit to the number of things people can be trained to look on as necessary. It was not always so in the West. Such founders of the modern scientific method as Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo deliberately abstracted from the total range of impressions we receive from nature those elements having quantitative aspects between which mathematical relations could be shown to exist and held other qualities to be wholly subjective and without existence apart from our senses, but we must remember that Copernicus had been influenced by the Pythagorean and neo-Platonic doctrines he had met in Italy to believe that numbers were primarily symbols of quality and that somehow mathematics held the key to the manifest universe. He cannot be supposed to have foreseen that the scientific method would lead to the vivid world of the Middle Ages, rich in beauty and instinct with purpose, being dismissed by science as an illusion, and the real world being conceived as consisting of “material particles” moving according to mathematical laws. For anyone literate in elementary algebra 4x=y2=2(x+y) is a precise statement, but it is a statement about quantities only, whereas in human experience there is always some element of quality. The stronger the element of quality the less can the words of prose fully and explicitly correspond to it. Words have not only such private and personal associations as psychologists lay stress on in their free association tests, they also often have “historical” associations for a given society and at least some have a well nigh universal significance as symbols. “The Tao which can be named is no longer the Tao,” and the nearer to the Tao, we might say, the less can words directly serve to define. “Whatever is here is there; Whatever is there is here: From death to death he goes who sees things here as different.” This dictum of the Kathopanishad could be paralleled in many other sacred writings. It is possible to study the material and psychic worlds as books in which are reflected truths that lie above and outside the world of form. If that is not the case with modern science is it not because scientists have prejudices, false preconceptions and blind spots—they are not unique in this— and so pose loaded questions, carry out loaded experiments and refrain from asking themselves questions about “awkward” phenomena? But, to return to the Hindu approach to the questions of time and man’s relation to it, it is useful to recall what was more than once said by Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi: “Why do you want to know what you will be before you know what you are now? If you do not understand yourself, what is the use of trying to understand the world?” Certainly Hindus speak of leaving the body at death only to be somehow reborn, but the real Goal is envisaged as a Deliverance or a Realisation going beyond conditions and so also beyond time. “If thy bonds be not broken while thou livest,” sang Kabir, “what hope is there of deliverance in death? It is an empty dream that the soul must pass to union with Him because it hath passed from the body. If He is found now, He is found then, if not, we go to dwell in the city of Death.” Both in Hinduism and in Buddhism there exist disciplines related to the question: “Who am I?” They sound rather like stripping an onion of its skins: not this; not this; not this. The very process of thought is stilled and what remains is in one sense no thing, in another a vision of Reality. The Mahasatipatthana Sutta describes an analogous Buddhist practice for the setting up of Mindfulness, one which would appear horrible to an unprepared Westerner who tried to carry it out. It calls for sitting in a suitable posture in a quiet, solitary, place and establishing by meditation and visualisation a tranquil consciousness of the body as impermanent in all its doings; then it must be realised as dying, as dead, as decomposing, as reduced to dust; there follows a dispassionate externalising in turn of all feelings, all thoughts and all ideas. It must be deeply understood that none of all these have real existence. But it would be quite wrong to suppose that this leads to a negative result as might seem inevitable from a Western standpoint. Dr. Jacobs believes that the essential content of Hinduism will come to be known and rightly understood by at least an elite in the West and will then have as great an effect as the Renaissance, though in the sense of a true spiritual rebirth. I would be glad to feel able to share his confidence but can only pray that his own sadhana may be protected from error and blessed. He quotes from the Kularnava Tantra one warning passage worth requoting. “In this world are countless masses of beings suffering all manner of pain. Life ebbs away as if it were water out of a broken pot... The individual soul passes through hundreds of thousands of existences. Yet only as man can he obtain the truth. It is with great difficulty that one is born as a man. Therefore he is a self-killer who, having obtained such excellent birth, does not know what is for his good. Some there be who, having drunk the wine of delusion, are lost in worldly pursuits, reck not the flight of time and are not moved at the sight of suffering. There are others who have tumbled in the deep well of the six Darshanas (the orthodox Hindu schools)—and are idle disputants tossed on the bewildering ocean of the Vedas and Shastras. They study day and night and learn words. Some again, overpowered by conceit, talk of Unmani (the state beyond thinking) though not in any way realising it. Mere words and talk cannot dispel the delusion of the wandering... What then is there to do? The Shastras (sacred texts) are many, life is short and there are a million obstacles. Therefore their essence should be mastered...”
- [The Book of Tea](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/book-of-tea) - The Cup of Humanity Tea and grew into a beverage. In China, in the eighth century, it entered the realm of poetry as one of the polite amusements. The fifteenth century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion of æstheticism—Teaism. Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life. The Philosophy of Tea is not mere æstheticism in the ordinary acceptance of the term, for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe. It represents the true spirit of Eastern democracy by making all its votaries aristocrats in taste. The long isolation of Japan from the rest of the world, so conducive to introspection, has been highly favourable to the development of Teaism. Our home and habits, costume and cuisine, porcelain, lacquer, painting—our very literature—all have been subject to its influence. No student of Japanese culture could ever ignore its presence. It has permeated the elegance of noble boudoirs, and entered the abode of the humble. Our peasants have learned to arrange flowers, our meanest labourer to offer his salutation to the rocks and waters. In our common parlance we speak of the man “with no tea” in him, when he is insusceptible to the serio-comic interests of the personal drama. Again we stigmatise the untamed æsthete who, regardless of the mundane tragedy, runs riot in the springtide of emancipated emotions, as one “with too much tea” in him. The outsider may indeed wonder at this seeming much ado about nothing. What a tempest in a tea-cup! he will say. But when we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup. Mankind has done worse. In the worship of Bacchus, we have sacrificed too freely; and we have even transfigured the gory image of Mars. Why not consecrate ourselves to the queen of the Camellias, and revel in the warm stream of sympathy that flows from her altar? In the liquid amber within the ivory-porcelain, the initiated may touch the sweet reticence of Confucius, the piquancy of Laotse, and the ethereal aroma of Sakyamuni himself. Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others. The average Westerner, in his sleek complacency, will see in the tea ceremony but another instance of the thousand and one oddities which constitute the quaintness and childishness of the East to him. He was wont to regard Japan as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace: he calls her civilised since she began to commit wholesale slaughter on Manchurian battlefields. Much comment has been given lately to the Code of the Samurai,—the Art of Death which makes our soldiers exult in self-sacrifice; but scarcely any attention has been drawn to Teaism, which represents so much of our Art of Life. Fain would we remain barbarians, if our claim to civilisation were to be based on the gruesome glory of war. Fain would we await the time when due respect shall be paid to our art and ideals. When will the West understand, or try to understand, the East? We Asiatics are often appalled by the curious web of facts and fancies which has been woven concerning us. We are pictured as living on the perfume of the lotus, if not on mice and cockroaches. It is either impotent fanaticism or else abject voluptuousness. Indian spirituality has been derided as ignorance, Chinese sobriety as stupidity, Japanese patriotism as the result of fatalism. It has been said that we are less sensible to pain and wounds on account of the callousness of our nervous organisation! Why not amuse yourselves at our expense? Asia returns the compliment. There would be further food for merriment if you were to know all that we have imagined and written about you. All the glamour of the perspective is there, all the unconscious homage of wonder, all the silent resentment of the new and undefined. You have been loaded with virtues too refined to be envied, and accused of crimes too picturesque to be condemned. Our writers in the past —the wise men who knew—informed us that you had bushy tails somewhere hidden in your garments, and often dined off a fricassée of newborn babes! Nay, we had something worse against you: we used to think you the most impracticable people on the earth, for you were said to preach what you never practised. Such misconceptions are fast vanishing amongst us. Commerce has forced the European tongues on many an Eastern port. Asiatic youths are flocking to Western colleges for the equipment of modern education. Our insight does not penetrate your culture deeply, but at least we are willing to learn. Some of my compatriots have adopted too much of your customs and too much of your etiquette, in the delusion that the acquisition of stiff collars and tall silk hats comprised the attainment of your civilisation. Pathetic and deplorable as such affectations are, they evince our willingness to approach the West on our knees. Unfortunately the Western attitude is unfavourable to the understanding of the East. The Christian missionary goes to impart, but not to receive. Your information is based on the meagre translations of our immense literature, if not on the unreliable anecdotes of passing travellers. It is rarely that the chivalrous pen of a Lafcadio Hearn or that of the author of The Web of Indian Life enlivens the Oriental darkness with the torch of our own sentiments. Perhaps I betray my own ignorance of the Tea Cult by being so outspoken. Its very spirit of politeness exacts that you say what you are expected to say, and no more. But I am not to be a polite Teaist. So much harm has been done already by the mutual misunderstanding of the New World and the Old, that one need not apologise for contributing his tithe to the furtherance of a better understanding. The beginning of the twentieth century would have been spared the spectacle of sanguinary warfare if Russia had condescended to know Japan better. What dire consequences to humanity lie in the contemptuous ignoring of Eastern problems! European imperialism, which does not disdain to raise the absurd cry of the Yellow Peril, fails to realise that Asia may also awaken to the cruel sense of the White Disaster. You may laugh at us for having “too much tea,” but may we not suspect that you of the West have “no tea” in your constitution? Let us stop the continents from hurling epigrams at each other, and be sadder if not wiser by the mutual gain of half a hemisphere. We have developed along different lines, but there is no reason why one should not supplement the other. You have gained expansion at the cost of restlessness; we have created a harmony which is weak against aggression. Will you believe it?—the East is better off in some respects than the West! Strangely enough humanity has so far met in the tea-cup. It is the only Asiatic ceremonial which commands universal esteem. The white man has scoffed at our religion and our morals, but has accepted the brown beverage without hesitation. The afternoon tea is now an important function in Western society. In the delicate clatter of trays and saucers, in the soft rustle of feminine hospitality, in the common catechism about cream and sugar, we know that the Worship of Tea is established beyond question. The philosophic resignation of the guest to the fate awaiting him in the dubious decoction proclaims that in this single instance the Oriental spirit reigns supreme. The earliest record of tea in European writing is said to be found in the statement of an Arabian traveller, that after the year ??? the main sources of revenue in Canton were the duties on salt and tea. Marco Polo records the deposition of a Chinese minister of finance in ???? for his arbitrary augmentation of the tea-taxes. It was at the period of the great discoveries that the European people began to know more about the extreme Orient. At the end of the sixteenth century the Hollanders brought the news that a pleasant drink was made in the East from the leaves of a bush. The travellers Giovanni Batista Ramusio (????), L. Almeida (???), Maffeno (????), Tareira (???), also mentioned tea. In the last-named year ships of the Dutch East India Company brought the first tea into Europe. It was known in France in ??, and reached Russia in ???. England welcomed it in ??? and spoke of it as “That excellent and by all physicians approved China drink, called by the Chineans Tcha, and by other nations Tay, alias Tee.” Like all good things of the world, the propaganda of Tea met with opposition. Heretics like Henry Saville (???) denounced drinking it as a filthy custom. Jonas Hanway (Essay on Tea, ???) said that men seemed to lose their stature and comeliness, women their beauty through the use of tea. Its cost at the start (about fifteen or sixteen shillings a pound) forbade popular consumption, and made it “regalia for high treatments and entertainments, presents being made thereof to princes and grandees.” Yet in spite of such drawbacks tea-drinking spread with marvellous rapidity. The coffee-houses of London in the early half of the eighteenth century became, in fact, teahouses, the resort of wits like Addison and Steele, who beguiled themselves over their “dish of tea.” The beverage soon became a necessity of life—a taxable matter. We are reminded in this connection what an important part it plays in modern history. Colonial America resigned herself to oppression until human endurance gave way before the heavy duties laid on Tea. American independence dates from the throwing of tea-chests into Boston harbour. There is a subtle charm in the taste of tea which makes it irresistible and capable of idealisation. Western humourists were not slow to mingle the fragrance of their thought with its aroma. It has not the arrogance of wine, the selfconsciousness of coffee, nor the simpering innocence of cocoa. Already in ????, says the Spectator: “I would therefore in a particular manner recommend these my speculations to all well-regulated families that set apart an hour every morning for tea, bread and butter; and would earnestly advise them for their good to order this paper to be punctually served up and to be looked upon as a part of the tea-equipage.” Samuel Johnson draws his own portrait as “a hardened and shameless tea drinker, who for twenty years diluted his meals with only the infusion of the fascinating plant; who with tea amused the evening, with tea solaced the midnight, and with tea welcomed the morning.” Charles Lamb, a professed devotee, sounded the true note of Teaism when he wrote that the greatest pleasure he knew was to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident. For Teaism is the art of concealing beauty that you may discover it, of suggesting what you dare not reveal. It is the noble secret of laughing at yourself, calmly yet thoroughly, and is thus humour itself,—the smile of philosophy. All genuine humourists may in this sense be called tea-philosophers,— Thackeray, for instance, and of course, Shakespeare. The poets of the Decadence (when was not the world in decadence?), in their protests against materialism, have, to a certain extent, also opened the way to Teaism. Perhaps nowadays it is our demure contemplation of the Imperfect that the West and the East can meet in mutual consolation. The Taoists relate that at the great beginning of the No-Beginning, Spirit and Matter met in mortal combat. At last the Yellow Emperor, the Sun of Heaven, triumphed over Shuhyung, the demon of darkness and earth. The Titan, in his death agony, struck his head against the solar vault and shivered the blue dome of jade into fragments. The stars lost their nests, the moon wandered aimlessly among the wild chasms of the night. In despair the Yellow Emperor sought far and wide for the repairer of the Heavens. He had not to search in vain. Out of the Eastern sea rose a queen, the divine Niuka, horn-crowned and dragon-tailed, resplendent in her armour of fire. She welded the five-coloured rainbow in her magic cauldron and rebuilt the Chinese sky. But it is told that Niuka forgot to fill two tiny crevices in the blue firmament. Thus began the dualism of love—two souls rolling through space and never at rest until they join together to complete the universe. Everyone has to build anew his sky of hope and peace. The heaven of modern humanity is indeed shattered in the Cyclopean struggle for wealth and for power. The world is groping in the shadow of egotism and vulgarity. Knowledge is bought through a bad conscience, benevolence practised for the sake of utility. The East and the West, like two dragons tossed in a sea of ferment, in vain strive to regain the jewel of life. We need a Niuka again to repair the grand devastation; we await the great Avatar. Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things. The Schools of Tea T?? ?? ? ???? ?? ??? and needs a master hand to bring out its noblest qualities. We have good and bad tea, as we have good and bad paintings—generally the latter. There is no single recipe for making the perfect tea, as there are no rules for producing a Titian or a Sesson. Each preparation of the leaves has its individuality, its special affinity with water and heat, its own method of telling a story. The truly beautiful must always be in it. How much do we not suffer through the constant failure of society to recognise this simple and fundamental law of art and life; Lichilai, a Sung poet, has sadly remarked that there were three most deplorable things in the world: the spoiling of fine youths through false education, the degradation of fine art through vulgar admiration, and the utter waste of fine tea through incompetent manipulation. Like Art, Tea has its periods and its schools. Its evolution may be roughly divided into three main stages: the Boiled Tea, the Whipped Tea, and the Steeped Tea. We moderns belong to the last school. These several methods of appreciating the beverage are indicative of the spirit of the age in which they prevailed. For life is an expression, our unconscious actions the constant betrayal of our innermost thought. Confucius said that “man hideth not.” Perhaps we reveal ourselves too much in small things because we have so little of the great to conceal. The tiny incidents of daily routine are as much a commentary of racial ideals as the highest flight of philosophy or poetry. Even as the difference in favourite vintage marks the separate idiosyncrasies of different periods and nationalities of Europe, so the Tea-ideals characterise the various moods of Oriental culture. The Cake-tea which was boiled, the Powdered-tea which was whipped, the Leaf-tea which was steeped, mark the distinct emotional impulses of the Tang, the Sung, and the Ming dynasties of China. If we were inclined to borrow the much-abused terminology of art-classification, we might designate them respectively, the Classic, the Romantic, and the Naturalistic schools of Tea. The tea-plant, a native of southern China, was known from very early times to Chinese botany and medicine. It is alluded to in the classics under the various names of Tou, Tseh, Chung, Kha, and Ming, and was highly prized for possessing the virtues of relieving fatigue, delighting the soul, strengthening the will, and repairing the eyesight. It was not only administered as an internal dose, but often applied externally in form of paste to alleviate rheumatic pains. The Taoists claimed it as an important ingredient of the elixir of immortality. The Buddhists used it extensively to prevent drowsiness during their long hours of meditation. By the fourth and fifth centuries Tea became a favourite beverage among the inhabitants of the Yangtse-Kiang val- ?? ley. It was about this time that modern ideograph Cha was coined, evidently a corruption of the classic Tou. The poets of the southern dynasties have left some fragments of their fervent adoration of the “froth of the liquid jade.” Then emperors used to bestow some rare preparation of the leaves on their high ministers as a reward for eminent services. Yet the method of drinking tea at this stage was primitive in the extreme. The leaves were steamed, crushed in a mortar, made into a cake, and boiled together with rice, ginger, salt, orange peel, spices, milk, and sometimes with onions! The custom obtains at the present day among the Thibetans and various Mongolian tribes, who make a curious syrup of these ingredients. The use of lemon slices by the Russians, who learned to take tea from the Chinese caravansaries, points to the survival of the ancient method. It needed the genius of the Tang dynasty to emancipate Tea from its crude state and lead to its final idealization. With Luwuh in the middle of the eighth century we have our first apostle of tea. He was born in an age when Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism were seeking mutual synthesis. The pantheistic symbolism of the time was urging one to mirror the Universal in the Particular. Luwuh, a poet, saw in the Tea-service the same harmony and order which reigned through all things. In his celebrated work, the “Chaking” (The Holy Scripture of Tea) he formulated the Code of Tea. He has since been worshipped as the tutelary god of the Chinese tea merchants. The “Chaking” consists of three volumes and ten chapters. In the first chapter Luwuh treats of the nature of the tea-plant, in the second of the implements for gathering the leaves, in the third of the selection of the leaves. According ?? The Book of Tea ??. The Schools of Tea to him the best quality of the leaves must have “creases like the leathern boot of Tartar horsemen, curl like the dewlap of a mighty bullock, unfold like a mist rising out of a ravine, gleam like a lake touched by a zephyr, and be wet and soft like fine earth newly swept by rain.” The fourth chapter is devoted to the enumeration and description of the twenty-four members of the tea-equipage, beginning with the tripod brazier and ending with the bamboo cabinet for containing all these utensils. Here we notice Luwuh’s predilection for Taoist symbolism. Also it is interesting to observe in this connection the influence of tea on Chinese ceramics. The Celestial porcelain, as is well known, had its origin in an attempt to reproduce the exquisite shade of jade, resulting, in the Tang dynasty, in the blue glaze of the south, and the white glaze of the north. Luwuh considered the blue as the ideal colour for the tea-cup, as it lent additional greenness to the beverage, whereas the white made it look pinkish and distasteful. It was because he used cake-tea. Later on, when the tea masters of Sung took to the powdered tea, they preferred heavy bowls of blue-black and dark brown. The Mings, with their steeped tea, rejoiced in light ware of white porcelain. In the fifth chapter Luwuh describes the method of making tea. He eliminates all ingredients except salt. He dwells also on the much-discussed question of the choice of water and the degree of boiling it. According to him, the mountain spring is the best, the river water and the spring water come next in the order of excellence. There are three stages of boiling: the first boil is when the little bubbles like the eye of fishes swim on the surface; the second boil is when the bubbles are like crystal beads rolling in a fountain; the third boil is when the billows surge wildly in the kettle. The Cake-tea is roasted before the fire until it becomes soft like a baby’s arm and is shredded into powder between pieces of fine paper. Salt is put in the first boil, the tea in the second. At the third boil, a dipperful of cold water is poured into the kettle to settle the tea and revive the “youth of the water.” Then the beverage was poured into cups and drunk. O nectar! The filmy leaflet hung like scaly clouds in a serene sky or floated like waterlilies on emerald streams. It was of such a beverage that Lotung, a Tang poet, wrote: “The first cup moistens my lips and throat, the second cup breaks my loneliness, the third cup searches my barren entrail but to find therein some five thousand volumes of odd ideographs. The fourth cup raises a slight perspiration,—all the wrong of life passes away through my pores. At the fifth cup I am purified; the sixth cup calls me to the realms of the immortals. The seventh cup—ah, but I could take no more! I only feel the breath of cool wind that rises in my sleeves. Where is Horaisan? Let me ride on this sweet breeze and waft away thither.” The remaining chapters of the “Chaking” treat of the vulgarity of the ordinary methods of tea-drinking, a historical summary of illustrious tea-drinkers, the famous tea plantations of China, the possible variations of the tea-service and illustrations of the tea-utensils. The last is unfortunately lost. The appearance of the “Chaking” must have created considerable sensation at the time. Luwuh was befriended by the Emperor Taisung (??–???), and his fame attracted many followers. Some exquisites were said to have been able to detect the tea made by Luwuh from that of his disciples. One mandarin has his name immortalised by his failure to appreciate the tea of this great master. In the Sung dynasty the whipped tea came into fashion and created the second school of Tea. The leaves were ground to fine powder in a small stone mill, and the preparation was whipped in hot water by a delicate whisk made of split bamboo. The new process led to some change in the tea-equipage of Luwuh, as well as in the choice of leaves. Salt was discarded forever. The enthusiasm of the Sung people for tea knew no bounds. Epicures vied with each other in discovering new varieties, and regular tournaments were held to decide their superiority. The Emperor Kiasung (????–????), who was too great an artist to be a well-behaved monarch, lavished his treasures on the attainment of rare species. He himself wrote a dissertation on the twenty kinds of tea, among which he prizes the “white tea” as of the rarest and finest quality. The tea-ideal of the Sungs differed from the Tangs even as their notion of life differed. They sought to actualize what their predecessors tried to symbolise. To the Neo-Confucian mind the cosmic law was not reflected in the phenomenal world, but the phenomenal world was the cosmic law itself. Æons were but moments—Nirvana always within grasp. The Taoist conception that immortality lay in the eternal change permeated all their modes of thought. It was the process, not the deed, which was interesting. It was the completing, not the completion, which was really vital. Man came thus at once face to face with nature. A new meaning grew into the art of life. The tea began to be not a poetical pastime, but one of the methods of ? self-realisation. Wangyucheng eulogised tea as “flooding his soul like a direct appeal, that its delicate bitterness reminded him of the aftertaste of a good counsel.” Sotumpa wrote of the strength of the immaculate purity in tea which defied corruption as a truly virtuous man. Among the Buddhists, the southern Zen sect, which incorporated so much of Taoist doctrines, formulated an elaborate ritual of tea. The monks gathered before the image of Bodhi Dharma and drank tea out of a single bowl with the profound formality of a holy sacrament. It was this Zen ritual which finally developed into the Tea-ceremony of Japan in the fifteenth century. Unfortunately the sudden outburst of the Mongol tribes in the thirteenth century which resulted in the devastation and conquest of China under the barbaric rule of the Yuen Emperors, destroyed all the fruits of Sung culture. The native dynasty of the Mings which attempted re-nationalisation in the middle of the fifteenth century was harassed by internal troubles, and China again fell under the alien rule of the Manchus in the seventeenth century. Manners and customs changed to leave no vestige of the former times. The powdered tea is entirely forgotten. We find a Ming commentator at loss to recall the shape of the tea whisk mentioned in one of the Sung classics. Tea is now taken by steeping the leaves in hot water in a bowl or cup. The reason why the Western world is innocent of the older method of drinking tea is explained by the fact that Europe knew it only at the close of the Ming dynasty. To the latter-day Chinese tea is a delicious beverage, but not an ideal. The long woes of his country have robbed him of the zest for the meaning of life. He has become modern, ?? The Book of Tea ??. The Schools of Tea that is to say, old and disenchanted. He has lost that sublime faith in illusions which constitutes the eternal youth and vigour of the poets and ancients. He is an eclectic and politely accepts the traditions of the universe. He toys with Nature, but does not condescend to conquer or worship her. His Leaf-tea is often wonderful with its flower-like aroma, but the romance of the Tang and Sung ceremonials are not to be found in his cup. Japan, which followed closely on the footsteps of Chinese civilisation, has known the tea in all its three stages. As early as the year ??? we read of the Emperor Shomu giving tea to one hundred monks at his palace in Nara. The leaves were probably imported by our ambassadors to the Tang Court and prepared in the way then in fashion. In ??? the monk Saicho brought back some seeds and planted them in Yeisan. Many tea-gardens are heard of in succeeding centuries, as well as the delight of the aristocracy and priesthood in the beverage. The Sung tea reached us in ???? with the return of Yeisai-zenji, who went there to study the southern Zen school. The new seeds which he carried home were successfully planted in three places, one of which, the Uji district near Kioto, bears still the name of producing the best tea in the world. The southern Zen spread with marvellous rapidity, and with it the tea-ritual and the tea-ideal of the Sung. By the fifteenth century, under the patronage of the Shogun, Ashikaga-Yoshimasa, the tea ceremony is fully constituted and made into an independent and secular performance. Since then Teaism is fully established in Japan. The use of the steeped tea of the later China is comparatively recent among us, being only known since the middle of the seventeenth century. ?? It has replaced the powdered tea in ordinary consumption, though the latter still continues to hold its place as the tea of teas. It is in the Japanese tea ceremony that we see the culmination of tea-ideals. Our successful resistance of the Mongol invasion in ???? had enabled us to carry on the Sung movement so disastrously cut off in China itself through the nomadic inroad. Tea with us became more than an idealisation of the form of drinking; it is a religion of the art of life. The beverage grew to be an excuse for the worship of purity and refinement, a sacred function at which the host and guest joined to produce for that occasion the utmost beatitude of the mundane. The tea-room was an oasis in the dreary waste of existence where weary travellers could meet to drink from the common spring of artappreciation. The ceremony was an improvised drama whose plot was woven about the tea, the flowers, and the paintings. Not a colour to disturb the tone of the room, not a sound to mar the rhythm of things, not a gesture to obtrude on the harmony, not a word to break the unity of the surroundings, all movements to be performed simply and naturally—such were the aims of the tea-ceremony. And strangely enough it was often successful. A subtle philosophy lay behind it all. Teaism was Taoism in disguise. ?? The Book of Tea ???? ???? ????????????? ???? ????? ???. Taoism and Zennism T?? ?????????? ?? Z?????? with tea is proverbial. We have already remarked that the tea-ceremony was a development of the Zen ritual. The name of Laotse, the founder of Taoism, is also intimately associated with the history of tea. It is written in the Chinese school manual concerning the origin of habits and customs that the ceremony of offering tea to a guest began with Kwanyin, a well-known disciple of Laotse, who first at the gate of the Han Pass presented to the “Old Philosopher” a cup of the golden elixir. We shall not stop to discuss the authenticity of such tales, which are valuable, however, as confirming the early use of the beverage by the Taoists. Our interest in Taoism and Zennism here lies mainly in those ideas regarding life and art which are so embodied in what we call Teaism. It is to be regretted that as yet there appears to be no adequate presentation of the Taoists and Zen doctrines in any foreign language, though we have had several laudable attempts. ?? The Book of Tea ???. Taoism and Zennism Translation is always a treason, and as a Ming author observes, can at its best be only the reverse side of a brocade,—all the threads are there, but not the subtlety of colour or design. But, after all, what great doctrine is there which is easy to expound? The ancient sages never put their teachings in systematic form. They spoke in paradoxes, for they were afraid of uttering half-truths. They began by talking like fools and ended by making their hearers wise. Laotse himself, with his quaint humour, says, “If people of inferior intelligence hear of the Tao, they laugh immensely. It would not be the Tao unless they laughed at it.” The Tao literally means a Path. It has been severally translated as the Way, the Absolute, the Law, Nature, Supreme Reason, the Mode. These renderings are not incorrect, for the use of the term by the Taoists differs according to the subject-matter of the inquiry. Laotse himself spoke of it thus: “There is a thing which is all-containing, which was born before the existence of Heaven and Earth. How silent! How solitary! It stands alone and changes not. It revolves without danger to itself and is the mother of the universe. I do not know its name and so call it the Path. With reluctance I call it the Infinite. Infinity is the Fleeting, the Fleeting is the Vanishing, the Vanishing is the Reverting.” The Tao is in the Passage rather than the Path. It is the spirit of Cosmic Change,—the eternal growth which returns upon itself to produce new forms. It recoils upon itself like the dragon, the beloved symbol of the Taoists. It folds and unfolds as do the clouds. The Tao might be spoken of as the Great Transition. Subjectively it is the Mood of the Universe. Its Absolute is the Relative. ?? It should be remembered in the first place that Taoism, like its legitimate successor Zennism, represents the individualistic trend of the Southern Chinese mind in contradistinction to the communism of Northern China which expressed itself in Confucianism. The Middle Kingdom is as vast as Europe and has a differentiation of idiosyncrasies marked by the two great river systems which traverse it. The Yangtse-Kiang and Hoang-Ho are respectively the Mediterranean and the Baltic. Even to-day, in spite of centuries of unification, the Southern Celestial differs in his thoughts and beliefs from his Northern brother as a member of the Latin race differs from the Teuton. In ancient days, when communication was even more difficult than at present, and especially during the feudal period, this difference in thought was most pronounced. The art and poetry of the one breathes an atmosphere entirely distinct from that of the other. In Laotse and his followers and in Kutsugen, the forerunner of the Yangtse-Kiang nature-poets, we find an idealism quite inconsistent with the prosaic ethical notions of their contemporary northern writers. Laotse lived five centuries before the Christian Era. The germ of Taoist speculation may be found long before the advent of Laotse, surnamed the Long-Eared. The archaic records of China, especially the Book of Changes, foreshadow his thought. But the great respect paid to the laws and customs of that classic period of Chinese civilisation which culminated with the establishment of the Chow dynasty in the sixteenth century B.C., kept the development of individualism in check for a long while, so that it was not until after the disintegration of the Chow dynasty and the establishment of innumerable independent ?? The Book of Tea ???. Taoism and Zennism kingdoms that it was able to blossom forth in the luxuriance of free-thought. Laotse and Soshi (Chuangtse) were both Southerners and the greatest exponents of the New School. On the other hand, Confucius with his numerous disciples aimed at retaining ancestral conventions. Taoism cannot be understood without some knowledge of Confucianism and vice versa. We have said that the Taoist Absolute was the Relative. In ethics the Taoist railed at the laws and the moral codes of society, for to them right and wrong were but relative terms. Definition is always limitation—the “fixed” and “unchangeless” are but terms expressive of a stoppage of growth. Said Kutsugen,—”The Sages move the world.” Our standards of morality are begotten of the past needs of society, but is society to remain always the same? The observance of communal traditions involves a constant sacrifice of the individual to the state. Education, in order to keep up the mighty delusion, encourages a species of ignorance. People are not taught to be really virtuous, but to behave properly. We are wicked because we are frightfully self-conscious. We nurse a conscience because we are afraid to tell the truth to others; we take refuge in pride because we are afraid to tell the truth to ourselves. How can one be serious with the world when the world itself is so ridiculous! The spirit of barter is everywhere. Honour and Chastity! Behold the complacent salesman retailing the Good and True. One can even buy a so-called Religion, which is really but common morality sanctified with flowers and music. Rob the Church of her accessories and what remains behind? Yet the trusts thrive marvellously, for the prices are absurdly cheap, —a prayer for a ticket to heaven, a diploma ?? for an honourable citizenship. Hide yourself under a bushel quickly, for if your real usefulness were known to the world you would soon be knocked down to the highest bidder by the public auctioneer. Why do men and women like to advertise themselves so much? Is it not but an instinct derived from the days of slavery? The virility of the idea lies not less in its power of breaking through contemporary thought than in its capacity for dominating subsequent movements. Taoism was an active power during the Shin dynasty, that epoch of Chinese unification from which we derive the name China. It would be interesting had we time to note its influence on contemporary thinkers, the mathematicians, writers on law and war, the mystics and alchemists and the later nature-poets of the Yangste-Kiang. We should not even ignore those speculators on Reality who doubted whether a white horse was real because he was white, or because he was solid, nor the Conversationalists of the Six dynasties who, like the Zen philosophers, revelled in discussions concerning the Pure and the Abstract. Above all we should pay homage to Taoism for what it has done toward the formation of the Celestial character, giving to it a certain capacity for reserve and refinement as “warm as jade.” Chinese history is full of instances in which the votaries of Taoism, princes and hermits alike, followed with varied and interesting results the teachings of their creed. The tale will not be without its quota of instruction and amusement. It will be rich in anecdotes, allegories, and aphorisms. We would fain be on speaking terms with the delightful emperor who never died because he had never lived. We may ride the wind with Liehtse and find it absolutely quiet because we ourselves are the wind, or dwell in mid-air with the Aged one of the Hoang-Ho, who lived betwixt Heaven and Earth because he was subject to neither the one nor the other. Even in that grotesque apology for Taoism which we find in China at the present day, we can revel in a wealth of imagery impossible to find in any other cult. But the chief contribution of Taoism to Asiatic life has been in the realm of æsthetics. Chinese historians have always spoken of Taoism as the “art of being in the world,” for it deals with the present—ourselves. It is in us that God meets with Nature, and yesterday parts from to-morrow. The Present is the moving Infinity, the legitimate sphere of the Relative. Relativity seeks Adjustment; Adjustment is Art. The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings. Taoism accepts the mundane as it is and, unlike the Confucians or the Buddhists, tries to find beauty in our world of woe and worry. The Sung allegory of the Three Vinegar Tasters explains admirably the trend of the three doctrines. Sakyamuni, Confucius, and Laotse once stood before a jar of vinegar—the emblem of life—and each dipped in his finger to taste the brew. The matter-of-fact Confucius found it sour, the Buddha called it bitter, and Laotse pronounced it sweet. The Taoists claimed that the comedy of life could be made more interesting if everyone would preserve the unities. To keep the proportion of things and give place to others without losing one’s own position was the secret of success in the mundane drama. We must know the whole play in order to properly act our parts; the conception of totality must never be lost in that of the individual. This Laotse illustrates by his favourite metaphor of the Vacuum. ? He claimed that only in vacuum lay the truly essential. The reality of a room, for instance, was to be found in the vacant space enclosed by the roof and the walls, not in the roof and walls themselves. The usefulness of a water pitcher dwelt in the emptiness where water might be put, not in the form of the pitcher or the material of which it was made. Vacuum is all potent because all containing. In vacuum alone motion becomes possible. One who could make of himself a vacuum into which others might freely enter would become master of all situations. The whole can always dominate the part. These Taoists’ ideas have greatly influenced all our theories of action, even to those of fencing and wrestling. Jiu-jitsu, the Japanese art of self-defence, owes its name to a passage in the Taoteking. In jiu-jitsu one seeks to draw out and exhaust the enemy’s strength by non-resistance, vacuum, while conserving one’s own strength for victory in the final struggle. In art the importance of the same principle is illustrated by the value of suggestion. In leaving something unsaid the beholder is given a chance to complete the idea and thus a great masterpiece irresistibly rivets your attention until you seem to become actually a part of it. A vacuum is there for you to enter and fill up the full measure of your æsthetic emotion. He who had made himself master of the art of living was the Real man of the Taoist. At birth he enters the realm of dreams only to awaken to reality at death. He tempers his own brightness in order to merge himself into the obscurity of others. He is “reluctant, as one who crosses a stream in winter; hesitating as one who fears the neighbourhood; respectful, like a guest; trembling, like ice that is about ?? The Book of Tea ???. Taoism and Zennism to melt; unassuming, like a piece of wood not yet carved; vacant, like a valley; formless, like troubled waters.” To him the three jewels of life were Pity, Economy, and Modesty. If now we turn our attention to Zennism we shall find that it emphasises the teachings of Taoism. Zen is a name derived from the Sanskrit word Hyaena, which signifies meditation. It claims that through consecrated meditation may be attained supreme self-realisation. Meditation is one of the six ways through which Buddhahood may be reached, and the Zen sectarians affirm that Sakyamuni laid special stress on this method in his later teachings, handing down the rules to his chief disciple Kashiapa. According to their tradition Kashiapa, the first Zen patriarch, imparted the secret to Ananda, who in turn passed it on to successive patriarchs until it reached Bodhi-Dharma, the twenty-eighth. Bodhi-Dharma came to Northern China in the early half of the sixth century and was the first patriarch of Chinese Zen. There is much uncertainty about the history of these patriarchs and their doctrines. In its philosophical aspect early Zennism seems to have affinity on one hand to the Indian Negativism of Nagarjuna and on the other to the Gnan philosophy formulated by Sancharacharya. The first teaching of Zen as we know it at the present day must be attributed to the sixth Chinese patriarch Yeno (??–???), founder of Southern Zen, so-called from the fact of its predominance in Southern China. He is closely followed by the great Baso (died ???) who made of Zen a living influence in Celestial life. Hiakujo (???–???) the pupil of Baso, first instituted the Zen monastery and established a ritual and regulations for its government. In the discussions of the Zen school after the time of Baso we find the play of the Yangtse-Kiang mind causing an accession of native modes of thought in contrast to the former Indian idealism. Whatever sectarian pride may assert to the contrary one cannot help being impressed by the similarity of Southern Zen to the teachings of Laotse and the Taoist Conversationalists. In the Tao-teking we already find allusions to the importance of self-concentration and the need of properly regulating the breath—essential points in the practice of Zen meditation. Some of the best commentaries on the Book of Laotse have been written by Zen scholars. Zennism, like Taoism, is the worship of Relativity. One master defines Zen as the art of feeling the polar star in the southern sky. Truth can be reached only through the comprehension of opposites. Again, Zennism, like Taoism, is a strong advocate of individualism. Nothing is real except that which concerns the working of our own minds. Yeno, the sixth patriarch, once saw two monks watching the flag of a pagoda fluttering in the wind. One said “It is the wind that moves,” the other said “It is the flag that moves”; but Yeno explained to them that the real movement was neither of the wind nor the flag, but of something within their own minds. Hiakujo was walking in the forest with a disciple when a hare scurried off at their approach. “Why does the hare fly from you?” asked Hiakujo. “Because he is afraid of me,” was the answer. “No,” said the master, “it is because you have murderous instinct.” The dialogue recalls that of Soshi (Chaungtse), the Taoist. One day Soshi was walking on the bank of a river with a friend. “How delightfully the fishes are enjoying themselves in the water!” exclaimed Soshi. His friend spake to him thus: “You are not a fish; how do you know that the fishes are enjoying themselves?” ?? The Book of Tea ???. Taoism and Zennism “You are not myself,” returned Soshi; “how do you know that I do not know that the fishes are enjoying themselves?” Zen was often opposed to the precepts of orthodox Buddhism even as Taoism was opposed to Confucianism. To the transcendental insight of the Zen, words were but an incumbrance to thought; the whole sway of Buddhist scriptures only commentaries on personal speculation. The followers of Zen aimed at direct communion with the inner nature of things, regarding their outward accessories only as impediments to a clear perception of Truth. It was this love of the Abstract that led the Zen to prefer black and white sketches to the elaborately coloured paintings of the classic Buddhist School. Some of the Zen even became iconoclastic as a result of their endeavour to recognise the Buddha in themselves rather than through images and symbolism. We find Tankawosho breaking up a wooden statue of Buddha on a wintry day to make a fire. “What sacrilege!” said the horror-stricken bystander. “I wish to get the Shali out of the ashes,” calmly rejoined the Zen. “But you certainly will not get Shali from this image!” was the angry retort, to which Tanka replied, “If I do not, this is certainly not a Buddha and I am committing no sacrilege.” Then he turned to warm himself over the kindling fire. A special contribution of Zen to Eastern thought was its recognition of the mundane as of equal importance with the spiritual. It held that in the great relation of things there was no distinction of small and great, an atom possessing equal possibilities with the universe. The seeker for perfection must discover in his own life the reflection of the inner light. The organisation of the Zen monastery was very significant of this point of view. To every member, except the ?? abbot, was assigned some special work in the caretaking of the monastery, and curiously enough, to the novices was committed the lighter duties, while to the most respected and advanced monks were given the more irksome and menial tasks. Such services formed a part of the Zen discipline and every least action must be done absolutely perfectly. Thus many a weighty discussion ensued while weeding the garden, paring a turnip, or serving tea. The whole ideal of Teaism is a result of this Zen conception of greatness in the smallest incidents of life. Taoism furnished the basis for æsthetic ideals, Zennism made them practical. The Tea-Room T? E??????? ?????????? brought up on the traditions of stone and brick construction, our Japanese method of building with wood and bamboo seems scarcely worthy to be ranked as architecture. It is but quite recently that a competent student of Western architecture has recognised and paid tribute to the remarkable perfection of our great temples. Such being the case as regards our classic architecture, we could hardly expect the outsider to appreciate the subtle beauty of the tea-room, its principles of construction and decoration being entirely different from those of the West. The tea-room (Sukiya) does not pretend to be other than a mere cottage—a straw hut, as we call it. The ideographs for Sukiya mean Abode of Fancy. Latterly the various tea-masters substituted various Chinese characters according to their conception of the tea-room, and the term Sukiya may signify Abode of Vacancy or Abode of the Unsymmetrical. It is an Abode of Fancy inasmuch as it is an ephemeral structure built to house a poetic impulse. It is an Abode of Vacancy inasmuch as it is devoid of ornamentation except for what may be placed in it to satisfy some æsthetic need ?? The Book of Tea ??. The Tea-Room of the moment. It is an Abode of the Unsymmetrical inasmuch as it is consecrated to the worship of the Imperfect, purposely leaving some thing unfinished for the play of the imagination to complete. The ideals of Teaism have since the sixteenth century influenced our architecture to such degree that the ordinary Japanese interior of the present day, on account of the extreme simplicity and chasteness of its scheme of decoration, appears to foreigners almost barren. The first independent tea-room was the creation of SennoSoyeki, commonly known by his later name of Rikiu, the greatest of all tea-masters, who, in the sixteenth century, under the patronage of Taiko-Hideyoshi, instituted and brought to a high state of perfection the formalities of the Tea-ceremony. The proportions of the tea-room had been previously determined by Jowo—a famous tea-master of the fifteenth century. The early tea-room consisted merely of a portion of the ordinary drawing-room partitioned off by screens for the purpose of the tea-gathering. The portion partitioned off was called the Kakoi (enclosure), a name still applied to those tea-rooms which are built into a house and are not independent constructions. The Sukiya consists of the tea-room proper, designed to accommodate not more than five persons, a number suggestive of the saying “more than the Graces and less than the Muses,” an anteroom (midsuya) where the tea utensils are washed and arranged before being brought in, a portico (machiai) in which the guests wait until they receive the summons to enter the tea-room, and a garden path (the roji) which connects the machiai with the tea-room. The tea-room is unimpressive in appearance. It is smaller than the smallest of Japanese houses, while the materials used in its construction are intended to give the suggestion of refined poverty. Yet we must remember that all this is the result of profound artistic forethought, and that the details have been worked out with care perhaps even greater than that expended on the building of the richest palaces and temples. A good tea-room is more costly than an ordinary mansion, for the selection of its materials, as well as its workmanship, requires immense care and precision. Indeed, the carpenters employed by the tea-masters form a distinct and highly honoured class among artisans, their work being no less delicate than that of the makers of lacquer cabinets. The tea-room is not only different from any production of Western architecture, but also contrasts strongly with the classical architecture of Japan itself. Our ancient noble edifices, whether secular or ecclesiastical, were not to be despised even as regards their mere size. The few that have been spared in the disastrous conflagrations of centuries are still capable of aweing us by the grandeur and richness of their decoration. Huge pillars of wood from two to three feet in diameter and from thirty to forty feet high, supported, by a complicated network of brackets, the enormous beams which groaned under the weight of the tile-covered roofs. The material and mode of construction, though weak against fire, proved itself strong against earthquakes, and was well suited to the climatic conditions of the country. In the Golden Hall of Horiuji and the Pagoda of Yakushiji, we have noteworthy examples of the durability of our wooden architecture. These buildings have practically stood intact for nearly twelve centuries. The interior of the old temples and palaces was profusely decorated. In the Ho ?odo temple at Uji, dating from the tenth century, ?? The Book of Tea ??. The Tea-Room we can still see the elaborate canopy and gilded baldachinos, many-coloured and inlaid with mirrors and mother-of-pearl, as well as remains of the paintings and sculpture which formerly covered the walls. Later, at Nikko and in the Nijo castle in Kyoto, we see structural beauty sacrificed to a wealth of ornament which in colour and exquisite detail equals the utmost gorgeousness of Arabian or Moorish effort. The simplicity and purism of the tea-room resulted from emulation of the Zen monastery. A Zen monastery differs from those of other Buddhist sects inasmuch as it is meant only to be a dwelling place for the monks. Its chapel is not a place of worship or pilgrimage, but a college room where the students congregate for discussion and the practice of meditation. The room is bare except for a central alcove in which, behind the altar, is a statue of Bodhi Dharma, the founder of the sect, or of Sakyamuni attended by Kashiapa and Ananda, the two earliest Zen patriarchs. On the altar, flowers and incense are offered up in the memory of the great contributions which these sages made to Zen. We have already said that it was the ritual instituted by the Zen monks of successively drinking tea out of a bowl before the image of Bodhi Dharma, which laid the foundations of the tea-ceremony. We might add here that the altar of the Zen chapel was the prototype of the Tokonoma,—the place of honour in a Japanese room where paintings and flowers are placed for the edification of the guests. All our great tea-masters were students of Zen and attempted to introduce the spirit of Zennism into the actualities of life. Thus the room, like the other equipments of the tea-ceremony, reflects many of the Zen doctrines. The size of the orthodox tea-room, which is four mats and a half, or ? ten feet square, is determined by a passage in the Sutra of Vikramadytia. In that interesting work, Vikramadytia welcomes the Saint Manjushiri and eighty-four thousand disciples of Buddha in a room of this size,—an allegory based on the theory of the non-existence of space to the truly enlightened. Again the roji, the garden path which leads from the machiai to the tea-room, signified the first stage of meditation,—the passage into self-illumination. The roji was intended to break connection with the outside world, and produce a fresh sensation conducive to the full enjoyment of æstheticism in the tea-room itself. One who has trodden this garden path cannot fail to remember how his spirit, as he walked in the twilight of evergreens over the regular irregularities of the stepping stones, beneath which lay dried pine needles, and passed beside the moss-covered granite lanterns, became uplifted above ordinary thoughts. One may be in the midst of a city, and yet feel as if he were in the forest far away from the dust and din of civilisation. Great was the ingenuity displayed by the tea-masters in producing these effects of serenity and purity. The nature of the sensations to be aroused in passing through the roji differed with different tea-masters. Some, like Rikiu, aimed at utter loneliness, and claimed the secret of making a roji was contained in the ancient ditty: “I look beyond; Flowers are not, Nor tinted leaves. On the sea beach A solitary cottage stands In the waning light Of an autumn eve.” The Book of Tea ?? ??. The Tea-Room Others, like Kobori-Enshiu, sought for a different effect. Enshiu said the idea of the garden path was to be found in the following verses: “A cluster of summer trees, A bit of the sea, A pale evening moon.” It is not difficult to gather his meaning. He wished to create the attitude of a newly awakened soul still lingering amid shadowy dreams of the past, yet bathing in the sweet unconsciousness of a mellow spiritual light, and yearning for the freedom that lay in the expanse beyond. Thus prepared the guest will silently approach the sanctuary, and, if a samurai, will leave his sword on the rack beneath the eaves, the tea-room being preeminently the house of peace. Then he will bend low and creep into the room through a small door not more than three feet in height. This proceeding was incumbent on all guests,—high and low alike,—and was intended to inculcate humility. The order of precedence having been mutually agreed upon while resting in the machiai, the guests one by one will enter noiselessly and take their seats, first making obeisance to the picture or flower arrangement on the tokonoma. The host will not enter the room until all the guests have seated themselves and quiet reigns with nothing to break the silence save the note of the boiling water in the iron kettle. The kettle sings well, for pieces of iron are so arranged in the bottom as to produce a peculiar melody in which one may hear the echoes of a cataract muffled by clouds, of a distant sea breaking among the rocks, a rainstorm sweeping through a bamboo forest, or of the soughing of pines on some faraway hill. ?? Even in the daytime the light in the room is subdued, for the low eaves of the slanting roof admit but few of the sun’s rays. Everything is sober in tint from the ceiling to the floor; the guests themselves have carefully chosen garments of unobtrusive colours. The mellowness of age is over all, everything suggestive of recent acquirement being tabooed save only the one note of contrast furnished by the bamboo dipper and the linen napkin, both immaculately white and new. However faded the tea-room and the tea-equipage may seem, everything is absolutely clean. Not a particle of dust will be found in the darkest corner, for if any exists the host is not a tea-master. One of the first requisites of a tea-master is the knowledge of how to sweep, clean, and wash, for there is an art in cleaning and dusting. A piece of antique metal work must not be attacked with the unscrupulous zeal of the Dutch housewife. Dripping water from a flower vase need not be wiped away, for it may be suggestive of dew and coolness. In this connection there is a story of Rikiu which well illustrates the ideas of cleanliness entertained by the teamasters. Rikiu was watching his son Shoan as he swept and watered the garden path. “Not clean enough,” said Rikiu, when Shoan had finished his task, and bade him try again. After a weary hour the son turned to Rikiu: “Father, there is nothing more to be done. The steps have been washed for the third time, the stone lanterns and the trees are well sprinkled with water, moss and lichens are shining with a fresh verdure; not a twig, not a leaf have I left on the ground.” “Young fool,” chided the tea-master, “that is not the way a garden path should be swept.” Saying this, Rikiu stepped into the garden, shook a tree and scattered over the ?? The Book of Tea ??. The Tea-Room garden gold and crimson leaves, scraps of the brocade of autumn! What Rikiu demanded was not cleanliness alone, but the beautiful and the natural also. The name, Abode of Fancy, implies a structure created to meet some individual artistic requirement. The tea-room is made for the tea master, not the tea-master for the tea-room. It is not intended for posterity and is therefore ephemeral. The idea that everyone should have a house of his own is based on an ancient custom of the Japanese race, Shinto superstition ordaining that every dwelling should be evacuated on the death of its chief occupant. Perhaps there may have been some unrealized sanitary reason for this practice. Another early custom was that a newly built house should be provided for each couple that married. It is on account of such customs that we find the Imperial capitals so frequently removed from one site to another in ancient days. The rebuilding, every twenty years, of Ise Temple, the supreme shrine of the Sun-Goddess, is an example of one of these ancient rites which still obtain at the present day. The observance of these customs was only possible with some form of construction as that furnished by our system of wooden architecture, easily pulled down, easily built up. A more lasting style, employing brick and stone, would have rendered migrations impracticable, as indeed they became when the more stable and massive wooden construction of China was adopted by us after the Nara period. With the predominance of Zen individualism in the fifteenth century, however, the old idea became imbued with a deeper significance as conceived in connection with the tea-room. Zennism, with the Buddhist theory of evanes- ?? cence and its demands for the mastery of spirit over matter, recognized the house only as a temporary refuge for the body. The body itself was but as a hut in the wilderness, a flimsy shelter made by tying together the grasses that grew around,—when these ceased to be bound together they again became resolved into the original waste. In the tea-room fugitiveness is suggested in the thatched roof, frailty in the slender pillars, lightness in the bamboo support, apparent carelessness in the use of commonplace materials. The eternal is to be found only in the spirit which, embodied in these simple surroundings, beautifies them with the subtle light of its refinement. That the tea-room should be built to suit some individual taste is an enforcement of the principle of vitality in art. Art, to be fully appreciated, must be true to contemporaneous life. It is not that we should ignore the claims of posterity, but that we should seek to enjoy the present more. It is not that we should disregard the creations of the past, but that we should try to assimilate them into our consciousness. Slavish conformity to traditions and formulas fetters the expression of individuality in architecture. We can but weep over the senseless imitations of European buildings which one beholds in modern Japan. We marvel why, among the most progressive Western nations, architecture should be so devoid of originality, so replete with repetitions of obsolete styles. Perhaps we are passing through an age of democratisation in art, while awaiting the rise of some princely master who shall establish a new dynasty. Would that we loved the ancients more and copied them less! It has been said that the Greeks were great because they never drew from the antique. ?? The Book of Tea ??. The Tea-Room The term, Abode of Vacancy, besides conveying the Taoist theory of the all-containing, involves the conception of a continued need of change in decorative motives. The tea-room is absolutely empty, except for what may be placed there temporarily to satisfy some æsthetic mood. Some special art object is brought in for the occasion, and everything else is selected and arranged to enhance the beauty of the principal theme. One cannot listen to different pieces of music at the same time, a real comprehension of the beautiful being possible only through concentration upon some central motive. Thus it will be seen that the system of decoration in our tea-rooms is opposed to that which obtains in the West, where the interior of a house is often converted into a museum. To a Japanese, accustomed to simplicity of ornamentation and frequent change of decorative method, a Western interior permanently filled with a vast array of pictures, statuary, and bric-a-brac gives the impression of mere vulgar display of riches. It calls for a mighty wealth of appreciation to enjoy the constant sight of even a masterpiece, and limitless indeed must be the capacity for artistic feeling in those who can exist day after day in the midst of such confusion of colour and form as is to be often seen in the homes of Europe and America. The “Abode of the Unsymmetrical” suggests another phase of our decorative scheme. The absence of symmetry in Japanese art objects has been often commented on by Western critics. This, also, is a result of a working out through Zennism of Taoist ideals. Confucianism, with its deep-seated idea of dualism, and Northern Buddhism with its worship of a trinity, were in no way opposed to the expression of symmetry. As a matter of fact, if we study ?? the ancient bronzes of China or the religious arts of the Tang dynasty and the Nara period, we shall recognize a constant striving after symmetry. The decoration of our classical interiors was decidedly regular in its arrangement. The Taoist and Zen conception of perfection, however, was different. The dynamic nature of their philosophy laid more stress upon the process through which perfection was sought than upon perfection itself. True beauty could be discovered only by one who mentally completed the incomplete. The virility of life and art lay in its possibilities for growth. In the tea-room it is left for each guest in imagination to complete the total effect in relation to himself. Since Zennism has become the prevailing mode of thought, the art of the extreme Orient has purposefully avoided the symmetrical as expressing not only completion, but repetition. Uniformity of design was considered fatal to the freshness of imagination. Thus, landscapes, birds, and flowers became the favourite subjects for depiction rather than the human figure, the latter being present in the person of the beholder himself. We are often too much in evidence as it is, and in spite of our vanity even self-regard is apt to become monotonous. In the tea-room the fear of repetition is a constant presence. The various objects for the decoration of a room should be so selected that no colour or design shall be repeated. If you have a living flower, a painting of flowers is not allowable. If you are using a round kettle, the water pitcher should be angular. A cup with a black glaze should not be associated with a tea-caddy of black lacquer. In placing a vase of an incense burner on the tokonoma, care should be taken not to put it in the exact centre, lest it divide ?? The Book of Tea ??. The Tea-Room the space into equal halves. The pillar of the tokonoma should be of a different kind of wood from the other pillars, in order to break any suggestion of monotony in the room. Here again the Japanese method of interior decoration differs from that of the Occident, where we see objects arrayed symmetrically on mantelpieces and elsewhere. In Western houses we are often confronted with what appears to us useless reiteration. We find it trying to talk to a man while his full-length portrait stares a
- [My Spiritual Home (Autobiography of a Zen Master)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/my-spiritual-home) - My Spiritual Home Autobiography by Yamada Mumon Roshi In the mountains of northeast Aichi Prefecture, not far from the Mikuni Pass on the border between the ancient feudal provinces of Mino and Shinano, lies a valley at the headwaters of the Yahagi River. In this valley, lying at nearly two thousand feet above sea level, is a village named Busetsu, a rustic community where the old beliefs still persist. Even now the villagers believe that swallowing live salamanders from the river will keep summer fevers at bay. The local delicacy, regarded by the villagers as the rarest of treats, is made by spreading a thin rectangular piece of cryptomeria wood with rice paste, roasting it over charcoal till the surface turns a light brown, then spreading miso or sesame soy sauce on top of it. In the past Busetsu provided lodgings for travelers on the Iida Highway, the road that ran from Nagoya over the mountains to the town of Iida in Shinsh Province.1 During the summer, white-­robed pilgrims heading for the holy mountain Ontake2 would walk by, ringing their little handbells. Worshippers returning from the great temple Zenk-­ji in the north of Shinsh could be recognized by the pretty souvenir baskets strapped to their backs. Nowadays the village has a small bus station served by buses of the Toky Meihan Line. This is the village where I was born, with a barely noticed cry, in a neighborhood listed in the government register as aza Chji Yashiki. The name, yashiki) in the main part of the village (aza chji once had a fort guarding the border between the Mino and Shinano domains, and the samurai garrisoning the outpost had their estates in the more developed section of town. I also wondered about the why the village was named Busetsu. The fact that the two characters composing the name, ? and ?, are pronounced in the Chinese fashion rather than the native Japanese fashion (in which case the village would have been called Takefushi),3 would ordinarily suggest that the name is of comparatively recent origin. In addition, the two characters somehow suggest an underlying story. When I was a child I thought it might have something to do with the history 4 in the late sixteenth century, the castle, which was allied with the general Tokugawa Ieyasu,5 was overrun by the forces of Takeda Shingen.6 The commander, Suganuma Sadaaki, commited suicide by his own sword, and his wife followed him into death by throwing herself down a village well. So, I imagined, since the commander died in carrying out his soldierly ? duties while his wife died in accord with her principles ? as a samurai wife, the name of the village became Busetsu ??. 1 The origins of the name turned out to be much older, however. When I was in middle school one of my older relatives showed me the genealogical records of the Yamada family. The chart comprised two volumes, one that had been in the family for many generations and another that my relative had compiled in greater detail using information gathered from interviews with various relatives. According to the latter volume, Yamada Shigetada,7 who later died during the Jky Disturbance8 fighting for the imperial forces, was appointed feudal lord of the Owari Domain9 in the late twelfth century. There, in the village of Yamada Kigasaki, he established the great temple Chmo-­ji in memory of his mother. His descendent in the seventh generation, Yamada Yorinori, left the fief during the period of the Genk Conflict10 and the Kenmu Restoration11 and relocated to the northern part of Sansh (present Aichi Prefecture), an area controlled by his relatives, the Asuke Clan. There Y son, Yamada Shigetaka, accompanied Prince Munenaga12 to Ensh,13 then followed where Busetsu village was located. It appears that Munenaga resided for some time in Busetsu, as there exists even today a neighborhood named Goshogainai (Inside the Palace Walls). In addition, Shsh-­ji, a temple in the village, possesses a copy of the Great Prajna Paramita Sutra and drafts of poems made by the prince. Munenaga was later killed in battle at Namiai in Shinsh (present Nagano Prefecture). His grave in Namiai is still maintained by the Imperial Household agency. It would seem that the region around the headwaters of the Yahagi River was a base for supporters of the Southern Court, 14 much like the Totsukawa district in Yamato (present Nara Prefecture). The name Busetsu may have originated in this tradition of loyalty (??) to the Southern Court. At the beginning of the Tokugawa period Yamada Kagetaka, the lord of Kawate Castle, who went by the name of Kawate Mondonosuke and served the Ii 15 During the summer campaign of the Siege of Osaka Castle he was killed in battle fighting against Kimura Shigenari.16 The subsequent Tokugawa Period was an era of peace and order under the Shogunate that continued for nearly three centuries, but as it drew to its end there was an upsurge in support for the imperial family. In the region where I was raised people like Furuhashi Terunori,17 advocating reverence for the emperor and supporting nativist scholars like Sat 18 conspired with the royalists of the Nakatsugawa and Iwamura Domains19 to restore the Mikado to political power. Hearing that the royalist general Takeda Køunsai20 of the Mito Domain would be coming down the Iida Highway21 that ran through town, they gathered a force of militiamen and waited to join him. Takeda headed from Nakatsugawa toward the 2 Hida Mountains, however, and was captured there by the Shogunate forces, so this plan came to nothing. After the Shogunate was defeated by the forces supporting the emperor, political power was returned to the imperial family in the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Five years later in Busetsu the Meigetsu Seif K (Bright Moon Pure Wind School) was opened at the temple Ichion-­ji, located at the foot of Castle Mountain, with a faculty consisting of the aforementioned Sat of the temple Zuiry-­ji. Although the Haibutsu Kishaku movement22 was quite strong in the area, so much so that for a time everyone in Busetsu declared themselves followers of Shinto, it was largely due to the high regard that Rev. Maish erudition and priestly virtue were held in that the movement never reached the point where temples were actually destroyed. Even now there are at Zuiry-­ji two scholarship. One of the students at the Bright Moon Pure Wind School was shima 23 who later attained the rank of general in the Imperial Army. While still a let not Kou Chien die / The time will surely come when a Fa -­Daigo.24 The cherry tree, with its carving, still stands today. From the time I was born I was raised in this remote little village with its long history of loyalty to the country and the imperial throne. From the time we were first graders we were toughened with hard training in the winter cold, all the while singing in loud voices such songs as: Behold ye, Asuke Shigenori! Demonstrating his reverence for The words of the Kenmu Emperor25 He raised high the banner of righteousness And fought with single-­minded valor Meeting his fate at the castle on Mount Kasagi Boundless was his distinguished service.26 Though later in my life I developed a considerable interest in socialist thought, I think I have the influence of this early training, and perhaps of the blood of my ancestors, to thank for the fact that I never went on to espouse communism. Childhood Days The family I was born into operated a warehouse and transport agency on the highway that passed through the village. Teamsters on their way up and down the 3 road would often stop to unload or reload their wagons, or to shift cargoes to vehicles heading for different destinations. Cargoes from Asuke to the south usually consisted of salt;; most of this was destined, I think, for the town of Shiojiri in Shinsh. In addition to salt, a fair amount of trade took place in general goodsI recall seeing loosely woven baskets full of lamps and containers of fish like salted salmon and dried sardines. There were sweets, too, and traders would sometimes me give me one of these rare treats. From Shinsh to the north came cargoes consisting largely of logs, sawn lumber, and charcoal, but I also remember seeing bark from the mitsumata shrub for paper-­making. There was also bark from the maki tree, which might have been used to make dye. At noontime the wagon drivers would gather around the hearth in the middle of our large kitchen and eat their boxed lunches. My father always made a point of preparing warm bowls of miso soup or vegetable stew for them. The nearby mountains were also full of sawyers, as well as charcoal burners who had moved up from the Ibi River area in Mino Province.27 My father always enjoyed asking strangers in for some dinner, so whenever these people came to town they would stop at our house for something to eat before returning to the mountains. At certain times of the year monks from the lodging-­temples at Zenk-­ji,28 tay priests from Ise Shrine, ascetics from Mount Ontake, and mountain priests from Togakushi29 would come to town to distribute talismans and perform invocations. They would stay for several days, basing themselves at our house as they made the rounds of the neighboring villages. Every evening my father would entertain these people with saké and snacks. My mother would wait on them with help from the maids, as though she were the proprietress of a tavern or inn. I never heard her complain, though, as she quietly went about serving complete strangers. difficultif you k spending always generous when it came to supporting religion or showing hospitality to others. On the other hand, my fa him shouting as he took the rod to a manservant bound to a post in one of the brutal, my father became even angrier and turned around to hit her. She fled out the back gate toward the rice paddies in her bare feet, with me following after her, crying. Apparently my father had found out that the manservant was gambling on the side. Another time he heard that one of the men in the local shrine association had -­legged 4 My father was completely unbending on matters like this. When one of my older brothers sent a letter home using an envelope from the company he worked for, That being the way he was, my father would thunder at anyone and everyone in the village who he felt had acted improperly. It was always my long-­suffering mother who had to step in and try to calm my father in his implacable rages and do what she could to prevent the other person from taking offense. From my father I learned that there are such things as right and wrong, and that sometimes anger is justified in the service of what is right. From my mother I learnedcontradictory though it may seemthat forgiveness must be accorded to everyone and that all human beings must be treated kindly. In the midst of that turbulent household I grew up as an introverted child who recall running around Nihon Shnen and Shnen Kurabu first appeared, along with Japanese translations of Western novels like The Count of Monte Cristo. I used to order these new publications, then pass them around among my friends when I was finished with them. For some inexplicable reason I also enjoyed staying at home practicing calligraphy and painting, like some old retired gentleman. I would take up my brush and produce sumi-­e something. That was the sort of child I was. receiving high marks on occasion. If any of these early efforts were still around someone might mistake them for the work of some prodigy, but fortunately all have disappeared. I have no idea why the young son of a rural transport agent came to be so fascinated by in with our present existence but has its roots far in the past, so that this world is the first time I no, not somewhere, but in a previous existence. e Peak together such feelings arise from some mysterious intuition deep in our physical being? 5 School in Tokyo When I was fourteen years old my brother took me to Tokyo. My father woke me up in the predawn darkness and took me to the ancestral shrine in Ubasuna no Mori, where he told me to say farewell to the family deities. I pressed my small palms returned. Conjuring up dreams of coming back one day as, say, prime minister of Japan, I took my leave of that grassy village in the mountains. Travel conditions at the time were much worse than they are now. The first twenty-­three kilometers, as far as the town of Asuke, had to be walked. On the way -­-­ viewing Pass), since on a very clear day one could see all the way to Ise, almost one hundred kilometers to the southwest. Every year at the time of the Kanname Ritual, when the emperor made offerings of new rice to Ise deity on October 17th, a simultaneous observance was held at this pass. When elementary school pupils reached the higher grades they would attend the observance, and the whole occasion became something of a pleasant outing. On this day only food stalls would be set up on the pass, and they did a lively business. I remember how unusual I thought it was to see ripe pomegranates for sale, their mouths open to show their beautiful red enough for them. After the long walk to Asuke we made our way to the city of Okazaki in a horse-­drawn coach, a vehicle I had never before ridden in. It swayed and clattered its way along the road on the banks of the Yahagi River, with a transfer halfway to our destination. It was about four kilometers from the town center of Okazaki to the railroad station, with an electric trolleythe first I had ever seenconnecting the two. It was already dark by the time we boarded, so as I looked out of the windows it seemed not so much that the trolley was moving but that the streetlights were flowing steadily by. I thought it a beautiful sight. Reaching the station, we boarded the night train for Tokyo. Needless to say, riding a train was also a first-­time experience for me. We arrived in Tokyo the following morning and stopped for a while at the home of my aunt. Everything in Tokyo was a surprise to meit was almost as though I had gone straight from the wilds of Africa to the city of London. My aunt served us some tuna sashimi tuna was an ocean fish. When she ever eaten had been salted salmon and dried sardines, so I thought that all ocean fish were salty. 6 My brother was attending Waseda University, so I enrolled at Waseda Middle School and took lodgings in Otsuka Kubo at the student dormitory run by the Mikawa Friendship Society (Mikawa being the region where my home village was located). Every day I commuted to school from the dormitory, walking over Kuze Hill and along the Edo River. kuma Nobutsune (18711947), the kuma Shigenobu.30 Shigenobu was still alive at the time, and I would often catch sight of his carriage along Tsurumaki-­ch Avenue. At the time the ties between the various schools in the Waseda network were still strong, so the middle school was fortunate enough to have young teachers from the university come to teach. I remember several of them particularly well. Aizu Yaichi (18811954) was a large-­bodied man who reminded me English teacher, and had no idea that he would later go on to become a renowned waka poet, calligrapher, and authority on Buddhist art history. Not long after the end of the Second World War I was in the ancient city of Izumo lecturing at a certain temple when by sheer coincidence I ran into And Ksei, an old classmate of mine under Prof. Aizu. It was the first time in thirty years that I had met And, who in the meantime had succeeded Aizu at Waseda University and made quite a name for himself as an art historian. He was dhist statuary when we met. In the course of our conversation we reminisced, of course, about Prof. Aizu, who at the time was living in retirement in his native Niigata. As soon as I returned from Izumo I sent a letter to Prof. Aizu, the first I had written to him since graduation. He wrote a warm reply, saying he remembered me well, and we went on to correspond for some time. One autumn I received a letter from him saying that he would be visiting Nara the following fall, and that he would call on me while he was in the area. The trip never came to pass, however, as he passed away that spring. His death deeply saddened me. Another of my teachers at Waseda was Tanabe Hisao (18831984), who taught us physics, although he later became well known in Japan as a music critic. Not long ago I met him, again by pure chance, in the baths of the hot springs resort of Unzen in Kyushu, both of us stark naked. Unlike Prof. Aizu, he had no memory of me whatsoever. This was probably because I was quite poor at physics, and Prof. Tanabe may have dismissed me as a hopeless student. It was disappointing, but I have only my own lack of study to blame. The teacher who has most profoundly influenced my subsequent life is Matsumoto K (18761965), who was a professor of Chinese literature. Although his health is not quite as vigorous as before, at the time of this writing he remains hale at the age of ninety. When I celebrated my Kaid ceremony31 at Myshin-­ji 7 some time ago he came all the way from Tokyo to attend, delighted that the headstrong student who had given him so much trouble had finally managed to make something of himself. He is a wonderful teacher whose old eyes well up with tears whenever he meets me. at middle school the Confucian Analects became for me an indispensable guide. I kept the text always at hand, becoming so addicted to it that I practically had it am the e (12:13). It was this line that first disrupted the smooth flow of my life. Confucius was confident that as a judge he could adjudicate lawsuits in as just a manner as possible. What he truly sought was not this, though, but the creation of a peaceful society in which lawsuits never occurred. had the wind knocked out of me. Painful thoughts poured through my mind. The fact riving toward as human beings? Lawsuits and trials are no more than stopgap measures that take problems and paper them over. Prosecuting and defending are simply ways a barrier before which I stood in a daze, not knowing what to do. doctor I could equal any man in curing disease, but what I truly yearn for is a world businessman I could outd All of this is fine, but what is the ultimate goal of our human existence? When I pondered how I might go about resolving this question, I came up with nothing. Thus began my years of spiritual drifting. I became a strange boy who, during chemistry and physics classes, would look down and read the Lotus Sutra. I was a great admirer of Takayama Chogy (whose novel Takiguchi Nyd was a bestseller at the time),32 as well as of Kunigida Doppo33 and Tolstoi. By this time I had lost any desire to continue my education, and as a result my grades dropped dramatically. I managed to graduate by the skin of my teeth, but I nothing to me. 8 I nevertheless took the entrance exams for the Daiichi Kt Gakk (First Higher School) in Tokyo,34 knowing that my father expected it of me. I failed, of coursethere was no way I could have passed, given my mood at the time. I spent the following year studying and sat for the entrance exams at the Daihachi Kt Gakk (Eighth High School) in Nagoya, but the result was the same. Perhaps if they had posed questions about the Tannish35 or the Bible I could have done better, but that was hardly likely. Meanwhile all of my friends from Waseda Middle School were being accepted to the schools of their choice. I viewed them with some envynot because they had succeeded in entering famous institutions, but because they were able to proceed with their lives free of any hesitation or sense of questioning. During the years following the First World War, Tokyo was the scene not only of many social and political movements but also of much religious activity. Anyone walking in Kanda at night was sure to come across soldiers of the Salvation Army beating their drums or followers of the Buddhist Revival Army blowing their trumpets. At the temple Rinsh-­in in Yushima one could hear Zen lectures at the gatherings held by Sugawara Jiho,36 while at the Gudkan in Morikawa a lively schedule of Dharma meetings was offered by the Jdo Shin minister Chikazumi Jkan.37 In Fujimi-­ch the sermons of the Christian minister Uemura Masahisa38 won a wide audience among the student population. Uchimura Kanz,39 too, had an enthusiastic following of younger believers. Meanwhile Miyazaki T oranosuke, 40 the prophet of the new religion Shinsei Kydan, could be seen in Ueno Park haranguing the crowds, his long hair blowing in the wind and his frock-­coated chest thrust out. If you went to the Central Buddhist Hall you could hear someone lecture each and every evening. It truly was a time of religious ferment. Like a starving stray I wandered about Tokyo, sniffing out the slightest scent of truth. My favorite destination was probably Chikazumi J Gudkan. I also frequented the Shinsei Kydan in Hakusanshita. There, in a desolate, abandoned-­looking house with nothing in it, Miyazaki was usually asleep in bed with his little daughter Teruko. The rice bin was almost always empty, so I there assumed they were too hungry to do anything but sleep. Many years later, after I had moved to Kyoto, I ran into Miyazaki and his daughter on the grounds of Myshin-­ji. He and Teruko, by then a beautiful young woman, were living in the Nagata district of Kobe. Not long afterwards I heard that both of them had passed away, leaving me wondering what sort of life they had lived in Nagata and what kind of end they had met. I also wonder sometimes what became of End One day I heard that Uchimura Kanz was holding a prayer gathering at a church in Tsunohazu,41 rousing sermon we were told that the Second Coming of Christ would occur that 9 very evening, so the entire congregation offered fervent prayers far into the night. The Lord never did descend from Heaven. It seemed pointless to study with no intention of attending college, so I finally entered the Department of Indian Philosophy at T y University in order to learn more about Buddhism. The courses I took thereBuddhist history, by Sakaino Ky, president of the school;; Buddhist doctrine, by Prof. Shimaji T ait ;; the history of Chinese thought, by Dr. Uno Tetto;; sociology, by Prof. Nakajima Tokuz;; English literature, by Prof. Tanabe Jji;; and otherswere all of great interest and contributed much to my intellectual development. But they provided no key to understanding the ultimate purpose of life. One day at the invitation of a friend I listened to a lecture on Shantidev Way of the Bodhisattva given by Kawaguchi Ekai Roshi,42 a Zen priest who had established the Snow Mountain Monastery43 in the Yayoi-­ch neighborhood of passage that went roughly as follows: If I could cover the entire surface of the Earth with leather I could freely walk anywhere in bare feet. But that would not be possible. However, with just covered the entire surface of the earth. Likewise, it is probably impossible to make this Earth an ideal paradise. But if I arouse the mind of bodhithat is, if I vow to offer all that I have for the sake of humankindthen it is just as though the Earth had become a paradise. How deeply moved I was when I read this passage! These lines precipitated the second turning point of my spiritual life. Devotion to the Way said, I think, for the progress of the human race. Even if it were possible to achieve paradise on Earth, it would probably require hundreds of millions of years and an effort equal to covering the entire surface of the Earth with leather. But if I put just nine i the entire surface of the earth. If I just arouse the mind of bodhi, it is just as though an ideal Pure Land in all its perfection had come into existence. So the sacred text said. paththe path of immediately manifesting the Pure Land, of immediately perfecting the self, of right here, right now saving the world and saving myselfwas the only path f 10 mind, my life, my everything, all of these from this very day I offer for the sake of none I had ever experienced before. For the first time I knew the bright clarity of the mind that is attached to nothing and the richness of the heart that has given everything. I composed a long appeal (I have no idea now what it said) and handed it to Hanzui was there by his side, sternly lecturing me on the severity of monastic through. I remained determined, though. Seeing this, Ekai Roshi decided to check and without a word to me sent him a letter. I have no idea how surprised, how disappointed, or how angry my father might have been when he read it. All I remember is that he came and took me to tsu-­ch in Nagoya, where we called upon a fortune-­teller named Watanabe Ichigy the features of someone who prefers solitude. Even if you make him take a wi when she comes upstairs. Best to have him become a fortune-­teller, Shinto priest, or My wish having finally been granted, I entered the Snow Mountain Monastery as a postulant at the end of my nineteenth year. The monastery had just moved from Yayoi-­ch to Miyanaga-­ch attended T y University, with my head shaved slick as an egg. art the day by wiping the floors and making preparations for breakfast. At five we would hit the wooden han 44 with the plaintive cadences of the baku Zen school. After school we would sweep the garden and heat the bath. Once a week Iwata Takuh (my senior at Snow Mountain) and I would go to the vegetable market in Dsaka to buy supplies. I was a combination housemaid and live-­in working student. And since I was there at my own request, I was a housemaid and working student who also paid for his own room and board. The master was eighty years old at the time but his mother was still alive, living at the monastery though largely bedridden. It was my job to prepare her meals and take care of her bedpan, and I was genuinely happy to be allowed to do so. My lay name was Chjir-­yan, Ch-­ the master.45 If he was out she would pull some money out from under her mattress 11 vegetarian, to the point where on trips he would take his own pots since he found special pot she kept. When I brought it her face would break out in a huge smile of delight. It made me think that a pure-­living monk makes an unfilial son. Ekai Roshi, a rigid follower of the precepts, would not allow any solid food to be taken between noon and the following morning. Breakfast consisted of a large Tibetan-­style pot of dark miso soup in which the cook would boil a handful of dried noodles until they were soft. Lunch, which apparently followed the dietary ideas , was a stew containing one sh (1.8 liters) of brown rice, one g (.18 liters) of azuki beans, and one g of rolled barley together with various chopped vegetables. Ekai Roshi was the sort of person who would put down his chopsticks and stop eating the moment the noon bell sounded, even if he was still in the middle of his meal. If he happened to be out on day. At the beginning of the next school semester Iwata Takuh finally had enough. his things and left, all the while entreating me to take good care of myself. With his departure I was the only monk there. Even so I labored devotedly from morning till night in t impressed by the single-­minded devotion to the Way that I was capable of at that time in my life. I still had a kind of childlike purity and innocence;; the various bad uired since then had yet to manifest themselves. Even so, fatigue, lack of sleep, and malnutrition gradually undermined my congenitally weak constitution. I finally suffered a physical breakdown during the final exams for my sophomore year at Ty University. A week-­long fever left my lymph nodes swollen to the point where my neck was wider than my face. Early in the summer I made my way to Taguchi, a town not far from my home village that served as the county seat, to take my physical examination for military conscription. The inspecting officer measured my height, weight, and the weight, as I still clearly remember, was a mere 37 kilograms. I received a paper ?? 46 and a red official seal. My physical condition being what it was, I had no choice but to quit Snow Mountain Monastery, which I had entered with such great expectations, and take my leave of Tokyo. Once again I was home in the village I thought I had left for good, my emaciated body prostrate in bed with its swollen neck. Facing Death 12 The doctors at the Kseikan Hospital in Nagoya recommended surgical excision of my tuberculosis (for that was what my illness was), while the radiologists at Aichi Hospital assured me that they could disperse the lesions with X-­rays. The internists at Matsunami Hospital then advised against both, telling me that after surgery the tuberculosis would soon recur and that radiation therapy would simply drive the opinion it was best that I return to Busetsu to recuperate, since the village had good clean air. Following their advice, I returned to my home and resumed my bedridden existence. By a strange coincidence, at just around this time my older brother (the one who had used the envelope at the company he was employed at) was also taken ill, and was accepted as an in-­patient at Matsunami Hospital. In June of the following year my mother, who had been staying at the hospital caring for him, came back tuberculosis had spread to his throat and infected his larynx, finally taking his life. In the end he was unable even to swallow water, and his death had been a painful one. One day toward the end of the rainy season the nanten bushes were covered with white buds. For the first time in quite a while I left my bed and went out on the veranda to look at the garden. A cool, pleasant breeze blew softly against my cheek, as though to soothe my exhausted body. I wondered how many years it had been is a sudden it struck me that wind is simply moving air. The moment I realized this I air and nurtured by the air, but had never been truly aware of its existence. Yet even though I had paid no attention to the air, the air had constantly and unfailingly embraced me. When I realized this I broke out in tears and wept uncontrollably. The thought the marrow of my bones that our life is not our own, but something given to us. My heart became clear and bright, and I recited a simple poem to myself: Ever since falling ill I had taken a great liking to tanka poetry. Writing verse and reading contemporary poets such as Wakayama Bokusui,47 Kitahara Hakush,48 and 13 14 Kubota Utsubo49 in the popular collection Ichiaku no suna50 were the only things that eased my loneliness and suffering. At about this time an old fortuneteller from Neba in Shinsh who used to visit us regularly advised that fortune would be with me if I stayed for forty days or longer somewhere to the north of Busetsu. It was therefore decided that I would spend the summer with my younger brother in the city of Kaga taking the waters at the Yamanaka Hot Springs resort. I rented rooms at the Yamatoya Bekkan, a hotel that overlooked the mountain stream flowing through the valley, and spent the summer soaking in the mineral baths, writing poetry, and visiting temples. The temples I visited were three that were associated with the Jdo Shin school. These temples had taken it upon themselves to offer sermons three times a day, morning, afternoon, and evening, with the temples taking turns of one week each to provide this service every day of the year. As they were located in a well-­ known hot springs resort they found it easy to attract first-­rate speakers, whose talks I made sure never to miss during the months I was there. Listening to these speakers was an invaluable help to me in learning the art of public speaking. By this time I had recovered sufficiently to go to Nagoya and receive radiation therapy. I stayed at a temple called Ryj-­ji, not far from the great Shinto shrine Atsuta Jing.51 For meals I would go to a fish wholesaler named Toyotoshi, the owner of which had close ties to my father, where I would be treated to raw fish. After about two or three months the proprietress of Toyotoshi asked me how the her what she meant, she explained that just north of Lake Hamana to the east of Nagoya there was a temple named Konchi-­in, the priest of which could cure even the most intractable illnesses. She said that she herself had been cured of uterine cancer. convinced that Buddhism which dabbled in healing was deviant and that any priest who engaged in such activities was a fraud. But I paid more attention when I heard that Konchi-­ the priest was a fraud, I thought, surely he would welcome new patients, not get angry. With this in mind I decided to call upon Konchi-­in and meet its priest, Rev. Kno Daikei. This priest was to become my second master. I still remember the date on which I met him: November 26th of my twenty-­second year. I can truly say that it is thanks to Rev. Kno that I am alive today. My meeting him was a fortuitous encounter oddly similar to that of Zen master Hakuin with the Taoist hermit Hakuy. I will not go into the details of Rev. K temple would no doubt be inundated by an endless wave of the incurably ill, and I would be swamped with more requests for advice than I could possibly handle. For better able to deal with it physically. Rev. Kno passed away in 1953 at the age of eighty-­one, but to the best of m the no as one of the great men of recent times. Memories of Hanazono When I first visited Konchi-­in Rev. K your strong -­style wake-­up call, but it left me feeling more dazed than ever. Even so Rev. Kno treated me very kindly, allowing me to stay at Konchi-­in and receive treatment. In March of the following year, when three months had feel free to go wherever you like. Do you plan to go back to Tokyo and resume that K in April I would enter Rinzaish College, affiliated with Myshin-­ji, the great Rinzai Zen head temple in Kyoto. This was the school that is now called Hanazono University. My recovery was nothing short of miraculous. Though still not one hundred percent cured, I was nevertheless in good enough health after a mere three months of treatment to fully resume my university studies. During the forty years since then I have continued to use this form of therapy to maintain my health, and have never once had to see a doctor. After moving to Kyoto I became increasingly active. Not long after entering the college I recruited a few like-­minded students and established a club for the advancement of Buddhism. On the fourteenth of every month we would go in front of the main hall of Seigan-­ji in Shinkygoku in downtown Kyoto, set up flags and paper lanterns, and deliver streetside sermons to whoever wished to listen. On the twenty-­fifth of each month we would do the same at Kitano Tenmang, the great Shinto shrine in northwest Kyoto. I would stand there on the stone steps and start 15 with ears to possible for a young man who had been at the door of death mere months before. Even as I engaged in such activities, however, I never felt the desire to abandon Christianity and the Bible. Each and every Sunday I would attend services at a church somewhere. At the time Rinzaish College only accepted the disciples of Konchi-­ The church I frequented the most was the Rakuy Church, headed by Rev. End, and the Muromachi Church, headed by Rev. Hatanaka Hiroshi. Rev. Hatanaka was most welcoming toward me, allowing me to attend not only services but also Bible study classes and even the English conversation group. He later spent some time in Hawaii and was eventually promoted to his present position of congratulations, and I hope some time to call upon him and thank him for his kindness in the past. He probably still remembers the pale young man in coarse robes who used to sit in the corner listening to him. One event that helped me feel more confident was my participation in the English speaking contest for university students hosted by the Osaka Mainichi Newspaper. This was the first such contest ever held in Japan. There were about fourteen or fifteen contestants, one of whom was a young woman who stood out for the bright red clothes she wore, while I, as usual, stood out for my plain black robes. The event was held in the red brick lecture hall of the Christian university Kwansei Gakuin, located on the site of what is now jien Ken Park. Parrot who worked for a Bible publisher, came over to my seat. He shook my hand, ask perhaps to strike up a conversation, but unfortunately my English speaking abilities ch more than delivering a speech at a podium. Mr. Parrot must have been disappointed. In any event, quite to my satisfaction I made it through to the final round of the contest at the Mainichi Hall in Osaka, where I received some sort of commemorative gift. Prior to the contest I had asked Rev. Hatanaka to look my speech over. One a profound impression on me. Indeed, I took it more to heart than anything I had read in the Bible. It brought home to me the principle that we must never emphasize One more event associated with Kwansei Gakuin that remains in my memory was a talk I gave there on the introduction of the famous golf sportswriter Nishimura 16 Kanichi. This was long after the speech contest, in about 1941, I believe. By that time the university had relocated to its new campus in Nikawa, where public presentations of this sort were delivered in the university chapel. It strikes me now that I must be the only robed Buddhist monk, either before or after, to have ever given a speech in the chapel of that staunchly Christian school. Rinzaish College When I was an undergraduate at Rinzaish College it was still a small, intimate institution rather like one of the old Edo-­period temple schools, with ten to fifteen students in a class studying together in a family-­like atmosphere. When Prof. Takada Yasuma, who taught at the college for four or five years as a young man, was at the school during the anniversary ceremonies last autumn he commented to me of the warmth with which he still remembers the place. Professors who taught at Rinzaish College while I was there included Matsumoto Bunzabur, whose lectures on Buddhist studies were among the helpful and considerate I have ever heard;; Hidane Jzan Roshi, who offered us his distinctive interpretation of Zen studies;; Dr. Nogami Toshio, who taught us psychology;; and Prof. ya Tokuj, who lectured on the history of Buddhism. The taught there, as did Prof. K philosophy. However, the teacher who most influenced my personal development was Prof. Teranishi Kensan, whose field was Confucian thought. Prof. Teranishi devoted the great Confucian scholar Rai of the Inuyama Domain of Tokugawa-­era Japan. Later he was adopted into the family of the Osaka scholar Teranishi Ekid at Kyoto Imperial University, but he never accepted, remaining throughout his life a gentleman of refined virtue dedicated to the education of Rinzaish College students. After my graduation I remained at the college for an additional year to study the Taoist thought of Lao zi and Zhuang zi under Prof. Teranishi. Rinzaish College also held a Zen retreat (sesshin) every semester. Everyone would repair to Enpuku-­ji Monastery in Yawata, south of Kyoto, and practice zazen for one week. These sesshins remain among my most pleasant memories of my time at the college. Know Shame Even though I always had a quite profound devotion to Christianity, I always had great difficulty with the concept of prayer. Words of prayer are something I have never been able to utter. If I force myself to speak them the words immediately turn 17 beyond all concepts and becoming no more than a idol formed of ideas. Little wonder is it that Christ warned his followers against praying in front of the crowds, pray in secret, alone with God. Moreover, it always seemed to me that in praying one needs no words, for does not God already know all things? After I began practicing Zen meditation (zazen) I came to regard this practice as the truest form of prayer. In zazen one settles oneself openly in front of the Absolute, totally forgets the ego, and enters a state of no-­mind where not a single thought stirs. One utterly surrenders oneself body and mind in the Absolute, so that self and Absolute are fully one. Could there possibly be any higher expression of prayer than this? In this clear, bright mind, pure as that of an infant, there is not a speck of sentimentality, but only a full immersion in the joyful union of the human and the divine. purity of the heart, God is present. One semester when the time for sesshin arrived my schoolmates and I took our sitting cushions and daily necessities and sequestered ourselves in the great Zen monastery of Enpuku-­ji to the south of Kyoto. Enpuku-­ji has a huge meditation hall, but with fifty or sixty people sitting it was filled to capacity. That particular sesshin the classmate sitting directly across the aisle from me was a profoundly accomplished mediator. Prior to entering Rinzaish College he had spent several years practicing zazen at Shfuku-­ji Monastery in Hakata, Kyushu. over at him and see him sitting as solidly as ever. I aroused a great fighting spirit, and sat with the determination to do every bit as well as him. By the fourth or fifth day I reached the point where I forgot body and mind, with no sense of sitting as I sat and no sense of standing as I stood. It was truly a stillness in which human and divine were one. On the sixth day I was returning from sanzen with the roshi when I happened to see the bright yellow leaves of the ginkgo tree in front of the main hall. At that moment my mind suddenly opened, and I was world of absolute reality manifested before me. I rushed back to the sanzen room and immediately passed my koan, as well as several other problems presented to me by the master. The Gate of the Celestial Rock Cave suddenly opened and the divine act of creation unfolded in all its infinity. Everything is new. Everything is beautiful. Everything is true. Everything is shining. And everything is Self. I was in a state of 18 it my hands were waving and my feet were da52 The cosmos and I are one. The world and I are one. Humanity and I are one. With the full intuition of this, how could one not be overcome with joy? I fully ty saw that in them there was no exaggeration and no deceit. I realized that this nondual love toward humanity and the world is the ultimate truth of human nature. The bodhicitta expressed all those years ago when I vowed to aspiration to seek the Way had not been mistaken. The Zen master leading the sesshin at Enpuku-­ji was Kzuki Tessh Roshi, who at the time was president of Rinzaish College and later became chief abbot of Myshin-­ji. The classmate whose sitting had so impressed and motivated me was Shirzu Keizan, who went on to become the master at Heirin-­ji monastery near Tokyo. His presence made me realize how important good companions are if one hopes to attain the W ay. Even today I feel a great sense of gratitude towards him. Many people think that students are not in a situation that allows them to awaken to their true nature, or that people in lay life are unable to experience enlightenment, but this way of thinking is simply not true. There is a Japanese o the fact that anything is possible if one is desperate enough. With sufficient motivation, anyone can attain enlightenment. One day on Shinkygoku Street I ran into a priest I knew named Murakami Dokutan, who had been a fellow student at T y University. He had subsequently become priest of Jisai-­in, an important subtemple of the large Zen temple complex Tenry-­ji, located in Arashiyama on the western outskirts of Kyoto. He invited me to come for a visit, so one day I made my way to Arashiyama and called on him. W e talked at length and one subject led to another, until we came up with the idea to start a Sunday school at his temple. This was the start of a deep connection with Tenry-­ji, where I ended up living for the next twenty years and which I regard as my second home. After some time I was introduced to Seki Seisetsu Roshi, who had just assumed duties as the new chief abbot of Tenry-­ji. The moment I met him I knew that I had finally met the true teacher whom I had been seeking for so many years, a teacher with whom I could entrust my life. When I graduated from Rinzaishu College I entered Tenryu-­ji Monastery as an unsui and served the master till his death on October 2, 1945, following him about like a shadow and received his benevolent instruction. As I look back on the fifty years that have passed since I left my village in the mountains at the age of fourteen I remember with a deep sense of gratitude Seisetsu Roshi and all of the wonderful and I can only reflect with shame on how much I still have left to accomplish.
- [Gagaku (Music of the Imperial Court, Kyoto)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/gagaku-music) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection Performed for over 1200 years, Gagaku has been carefully preserved and handed down to present day as music of the Japanese Imperial Court. Characterised by long, slow songs and dance-like movements, it is the oldest of the Japanese traditional performing arts, with deep roots in Japanese prehistoric
- [What is <em>Wabi-Sabi</em>?](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/what-is-wabi-sabi) - Robyn Griggs Lawrence Wabi-sabi is the Japanese art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature, of accepting the natural cycle of growth, decay, and death. It’s simple, slow, and uncluttered—and it reveres authenticity above all… It reminds us that we are all but transient beings on this planet—that our bodies as well as
- [Jodo Shu and Shin Shu](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/jodo-shu-and-shin-shu) - Harold Stewart The Divine Name confers its own initiation since, without self-conscious striving for virtue on our part, it allows us to draw wisdom and compassion from Amida’s limitless store. But men, especially in this twentieth century, are so driven by the lust for power, so infatuated with violence, that they no longer have any
- [Two Indian Saints](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/two-indian-saints) - Donald Macleod Matheson In this brief article, the author draws the similar destinies of Kabir and Guru Nanak, whose paths developed upon similar harmonic doctrines of Hindu and Islamic origin. Click here to view the PDF Or click here to download a special eBook and tablet formatted PDF First published in Studies in Comparative Religion,
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- [<em>Al-Hikam</em> (Aphorisms)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/al-hikam-aphorisms) - 1 One of the signs of relying on one’s own deeds is the loss of hope when a downfall occurs. 2 Your desire for isolation, even though God has put you in the world to gain a living, is a hidden passion. And your desire to gain a living in the world, even though God has put you in isolation is a comedown from lofty aspiration. 3 Antecedent intentions (saw?biq al-himam) cannot pierce the walls of predestined Decrees. 4 Rest yourself from self-direction, for what Someone Else has carried out on your behalf you must not yourself undertake to do it. 5 Your striving for what has already been guaranteed to you, and your remissness in what is demanded of you are signs of the blurring of your intellect. 6 If in spite of intense supplication, there is delay in the timing of the Gift, let that not be the cause for your despairing. For He has guaranteed you a response in what He chooses for you, not in what you choose for yourself, and at the time He desires, not the time you desire. 7 If what was promised does not occur, even though the time for its occurrence had been fixed, then that must not make you doubt the promise. Otherwise your intellect will be obscured and the light of your innermost heart extinguished. 8 If He opens a door for you, thereby making Himself known, pay no need if your deeds do not measure up to this. For, in truth, He has not opened it for you but out of a desire to make Himself known to you. Do you not know that He is the one who presented the knowledge of Himself to you, whereas you are the one who presented Him with deeds? What a difference between what He brings to you and what you present to Him! 9 Actions differ because the inspirations of the states of being differ. 10 Actions are lifeless forms, but the presence of an inner reality of sincerity (sirr al-ikhl??) within them is what endows them with life-giving Spirit. 11 Bury your existence in the earth of obscurity, for whatever sprouts forth, without having first been buried, flowers imperfectly. 12 Nothing benefits the heart more than a spiritual retreat wherein it enters the domain of meditation (mayd?n fikra). 13 How can the heart be illumined while the forms of creatures are reflected in its mirror? Or how can it journey to God while shackled by its passions? Or how can it desire to enter the Presence of God while it has not yet purified itself of the stain of forgetfulness? Or how can it understand the subtle points of mysteries while it has not yet repented of its offences? 14 The Cosmos is all darkness. It is illumined only by the manifestation of God in it. Whoever sees the Cosmos and does not contemplate Him in it or by it or before it or after it is in need of light and is veiled from the sun of gnosis by the clouds of created things. 15 That which shows you the existence of His Omnipotence Is that He veiled you from Himself By what has no existence alongside of Him. 16 How can it be conceived that something veils Him, since He is the One who manifests everything? How can it be conceived that something veils Him since He is the one who is manifest through everything? How can it be conceived that something veils Him, since He is the One who is manifest in everything? How can it be conceived that something veils Him, since He is the Manifest to everything? How can it be conceived that something veils Him, since He was the Manifest before the existence of anything? How can it be conceived that something veils Him, since He is more manifest than anything? How can it be conceived that something veils Him, since He is the One alongside of whom there is nothing? How can it be conceived that something veils Him, since He is nearer to you than anything else? How can it be conceived that something veils Him, since, were it not for Him, the existence of everything would not have been manifest? It is a marvel how Being has manifested in nonbeing, and how the contingent has been established alongside of Him who possesses the attribute of Eternity! 17 He who wishes that there appear, at a given moment, other than what God has manifested in it, has not left ignorance behind at all! 18 Your postponement of deeds till the time when you are free is one of the frivolities of the ego. 19 Do not request Him to get you out of a state so as to make use of you in a different one; for, were He to desire so, He could make use of you as you are, without taking you out! 20 Hardly does the intention of the initiate want to stop at what has been revealed to him, than the voices of Reality call out to him: “That which you are looking for is still ahead of you.” And hardly to the exterior aspects of created beings display their charms, than their inner realities call out to him: “We are only a trial, so disbelieve not.” 21 Your requesting Him is suspecting Him. Your seeking Him is due to your absence from Him. Your seeking someone else is because of your immodesty toward Him. Your requesting someone else is on account of your distance from Him. 22 Not a breath do you expire but a Decree of Destiny makes it go forth. 23 Do not look forward to being free of alterities,1 for that is indeed what cuts you off from vigilant attention to Him in that very state He has assigned to you. 24 So long as you are in the world, be not surprised at the existence of sorrows. For, truly, it manifests nothing but what is in keeping with its character or its inevitable nature. 25 No search pursued with the help of your Lord remains at a standstill, but any search pursued by yourself will not be fruitful. 26 Among the signs of success at the end is the turning to God at the beginning. 27 He who is illumined at the beginning is illumined at the end. 28 Whatever is deposited in the invisible world of innermost hearts is manifested in the visible world of phenomena. 29 What a difference between one who proceeds from God in his argumentation and one who proceeds inferentially to Him! He who has Him as his starting-point knows the Real as It is, and proves any matter by reference to the Being of its Origin. But inferential argumentation comes from the absence of union with Him. Otherwise, when was it that he became absent that one has to proceed inferentially to Him? Or when was it that He became distant that created things themselves will unite us to Him? 30 Those who are united with Him: “Let him who has abundance spent out of his abundance.” Those who are voyaging toward Him: “And whoever has his means of subsistence straitened....” 31 Those who are voyaging to Him are guided by the lights of their orientation, whereas those who are united to Him have the lights of face-to-face confrontation. The former belong to their lights, whereas the lights belong to the latter, for they belong to God and to nothing apart from Him. “Say: Allah! Then leave them prattling in their vain talk.” 32 Your being on the lookout for the vices hidden within you is better than your being on the lookout for the invisible realities veiled from you. 33 The Real is not veiled from you. Rather, it is you who are veiled from seeing It; for, were anything to veil It, then that which veils It would cover It. But if there were a covering to It, then that would be a limitation to Its Being: Every limitation to anything has power over it. “And He is the Omnipotent, above His servants.” 34 Among the attributes of your human nature, draw away from every one that is incompatible with your servanthood, so that you may be responsive to the call of God and near His Presence. 35 The source of every disobedience, indifference, and passion is self-satisfaction. The source of every obedience, vigilance, and virtue is dissatisfaction with one’s self. It is better for you to keep company with an ignorant man dissatisfied with himself than to keep company with a learned man satisfied with himself. For what knowledge is there in a self-satisfied scholar? And what ignorance is there in an unlearned man dissatisfied with himself? 36 The ray of light of the intellect makes you witness His nearness to you. The eye of the intellect makes you witness your nonbeing as due to His Being. The Truth of the intellect makes you witness His Being, not your nonbeing, nor your being. 37 “God was, and there was nothing with Him, and He is now as He was.” 38 Let not the intention of your aspiration shift to what is other than He, for one’s hopes cannot outstrip the Generous. 39 Appeal to no one but Him to relieve you of a pressing need that He Himself has brought upon you. For how can someone else remove what He has imposed? And how can he who is unable to free himself of a pressing need free someone else of one? 40 If you have not improved your thinking of Him because of His ineffable nature, improve it because of His treatment of you. For has He accustomed you to anything but what is good? And has He conferred upon you anything but His favours? 41 How astonishing is he who flees from what is inescapable and searches for what is evanescent! “For surely it is not the eyes that are blind, but blind are the hearts which are in the chests.” 42 Travel not from creature to creature, otherwise you will be like a donkey at the mill: Roundabout he turns, his goal the same as his departure. Rather, go from creatures to the Creator: “And that the final end is unto thy Lord.” Consider the Prophet’s words (God bless him and grant him peace!): “Therefore, he whose flight is for God and His Messenger, then his flight is for God and His Messenger; and he whose flight is for worldly gain or marriage with a woman then his flight is for that which he flees to.” So understand his words (upon him peace!) and ponder this matter, if you can. And peace on you! 43 Do not keep company with anyone whose state does not inspire you and whose speech does not lead you to God. 44 You might be in a bad state; then, associating with one who is in a worse state, you see virtue in yourself. 45 No deed arising from a renouncing heart is small, and no deed arising from an avaricious heart is fruitful. 46 Good works are the result of good states. Good states arise from the stations wherein abide those who have spiritual realisation. 47 Do not abandon the Invocation because you do not feel the Presence of God therein. For your forgetfulness of the Invocation of Him is worse than your forgetfulness in the Invocation of Him. Perhaps He will take you from an Invocation with forgetfulness to one with vigilance, and from one with vigilance to one with the Presence of God, and from one with the Presence of God to one wherein everything but the Invoked is absent. “And that is not difficult for God.” 48 A sign of the heart’s death is the absence of sadness over the acts of obedience you have neglected and the abandonment of regret over the mistakes you have made. 49 Let no sin reach such proportions in your eyes that it cuts you off from having a good opinion of God for, indeed, whoever knows his Lord considers his sin as paltry next to His generosity. 50 There is no minor sin when His justice confronts you; and there is no major sin when His grace confronts you. 51 No deed is more fruitful for the heart than the one you are not aware of and which is deemed paltry by you. 52 He only made an inspiration come upon you so that you would go to him. 53 He made an inspiration come upon you so as to get you out of the grip of alterities and free you from bondage to created things. 54 He made an inspiration come upon you so as to take you out of the prison of your existence into the unlimited space of your contemplation. 55 Lights are the riding-mounts of hearts and of their innermost centres. 56 Light is the army of the heart, just as darkness is the army of the soul. So when God wishes to come to the help of His servant, He furnishes him with armies of lights and cuts off from him the reinforcements of darkness and alterities. 57 Insight (kashf) belongs to Light, discernment (?ukm) to the intellect (ba??ra), and both progression and retrogression belong to the heart. 58 Let not obedience make you joyous because it comes from you; but rather, be joyous over it because it comes from God to you. “Say: In the grace of God and in His mercy, in that they should rejoice. It is better than that which they hoard.” 59 He prevents those who are voyaging to Him from witnessing their deeds and those who are united with Him from contemplating their states. He does that for the voyagers because they have not realised sincerity toward God in those works; and He does that for those united with Him because He makes them absent from contemplating those states by contemplating Him. 60 Were it not for the seeds of ambitious desire, the branches of disgrace would not be lofty. 61 Nothing leads you so much like suspicion (wahm). 62 In your despairing, you are a free man; but in your coveting, you are a slave. 63 Whoever does not draw near to God as a result of the caresses of love is shackled to Him with the chains of misfortune. 64 Whoever is not thankful for graces runs the risk of losing them; and whoever is thankful, fetters them with their own cords. 65 Be fearful lest the existence of His generosity toward you and the persistence of your bad behaviour toward Him not lead you step by step to ruin. “We shall lead them to ruin step by step from whence they know not.” 66 It is ignorance on the part of the novice to act improperly, and then, his punishment having been delayed, to say, “If this had been improper conduct, He would have shut off help and imposed exile.” Help could be withdrawn from him without his being aware of it, if only by blocking its increase. And it could be that you are made to abide at a distance without your knowing it, if only by His leaving you to do as you like. 67 If you see a servant whom God has made to abide in the recitation of litanies (awr?d) and prolonged His help therein, do not disdain what his Lord has given him on the score that you do not detect the signs of gnostics on him nor the splendour of God’s lovers. For had there been no inspiration, there would have been no litany (wird). 68 God makes some people remain in the service of Him, and He singles out others to love Him. “All do we aid—these as well as those—out of the bounty of thy Lord, and the bounty of thy Lord is not limited.” 69 It is rare that divine inspirations come except suddenly, and this, so that they be protected from servants’ claiming them by virtue of the existence of receptivity on their part. 70 Infer the presence of ignorance in anyone whom you see answering all that he is asked or giving expression to all that he witnesses or mentioning all that he knows. 71 He made the Hereafter an abode to reward his believing servants only because this world cannot contain what He wishes to bestow upon them and because He deemed their worth too high to reward them in a world without permanence. 72 Whoever finds the fruit of his deeds coming quickly has proof of the fact of acceptance. 73 If you want to know your standing with Him, look at the state He has put you in now. 74 When He gives you obedience, making you unaware of it because of Him, then know that He has showered you liberally with His graces both inwardly and outwardly 75 The best that you can seek from Him is that which He seeks from you. 76 One of the signs of delusion is sadness over the loss of obedience coupled with an absence of resolve to bring it back to life. 77 The gnostic is not one who, when making a symbolic allusion, finds God nearer to himself than his symbolic allusion. Rather, the gnostic is the one who, because of his self-extinction in His Being and self-absorption in contemplating Him, has no symbolic allusion. 78 Hope goes hand in hand with deeds; otherwise, it is just wishful thinking. 79 That which the gnostics seek from God is sincerity in servanthood and performance of the rights of Lordship. 80 He expanded you so as not to keep you in contraction; He contracted you so as not to keep you in expansion; and He took you out of both so that you not belong to anything apart from Him. 81 It is more dreadful for gnostics to be expanded than to be contracted, for only a few can stay within the limits of proper conduct in expansion. 82 Through the existence of joy the soul gets its share in expansion but there is no share for the soul in contraction 83 Sometimes He gives while depriving you, and sometimes He deprives you in giving. 84 When he opens up your understanding of deprivation, deprivation becomes the same as giving. 85 Outwardly, creatures are an illusion; but, inwardly, they are an admonition. Thus, the soul looks at the illusory exterior while the heart looks at the admonitory interior. 86 If you want a glory that does not vanish, then do not glory in a glory that vanishes. 87 The real journey is when the world’s dimensions are rolled away from you so that you see the Hereafter closer to you than yourself. 88 A gift from man is deprivation; but deprivation from God is beneficence. 89 Our Lord is far above the servant dealing with Him in cash, and His repaying him in credit. 90 It is reward enough for worship that He has accepted you as worthy of it 91 Reward enough for workers is what He disclosed unto their hearts in His worship, and that which He shows them of His kindliness. 92 Whoever worships Him for something they hope from Him, or obeys Him to keep chastisement from coming to themselves, has not given His attributes their due. 93 When He gives to you He shows you His kindness and when He denies you He is showing you irresistible power. So in both He is disclosing Himself to you, and drawing nigh with His loving kindness unto you. 94 Deprivation hurts you only because of your incomprehension of God in it. 95 Sometimes He opens the door of obedience for you, but not the door of acceptance; or sometimes He condemns you to sin, and it turns out to be a cause for union with God. 96 A disobedience that bequeaths humiliation and extreme need is better than an obedience that bequeaths self-infatuation and pride. 97 There are two graces that no being can do without and that are necessary for every creature: the grace of existence, and the grace of sustenance. 98 He bestowed His grace upon you, first, through giving you existence, and, second, through uninterrupted sustenance. 99 Your indigence belongs to you essentially, for accidents do not abolish essential indigence: The trials that arrive in this world are but reminders to you of what you ignore of indigence. 100 Your best moment is the one wherein you witness your actual indigence and, through it, reach the reality of your lowliness. 101 Whenever He alienates you from His creatures, realise that He wants to open for you the door of intimacy with Him. 102 Whenever He releases your tongue to ask, know that He wants to give to you. 103 The duress of the gnostic never departs, and he finds no rest in anything but God. 104 He has illumined outward appearances with the lights of His created vestiges; And illumined inmost hearts with the lights of His attributes. This is why the lights of created vestiges set at night, but the lights of hearts and inmost souls never set. And why it has been said: “The daytime sun goes down at night, But the sun of gnostic hearts never goes down.” 105 Let the pain of tribulation be lightened for you by knowing that it is He Most Glorious who is making trial of you; For Him from whom you are faced with the blows of fate is He who has accustomed you to His choosing well. 106 Whoever thinks His loving kindness is ever separated from His ordaining fate, does so out of shortsightedness. 107 It is not to be feared that the paths will confuse you, but only that whims will defeat you. 108 Glorious beyond ken is He who has veiled the secret of electhood in the appearance of humanness, and who is manifest through the mightiness of Lordship in the very showing of one’s slavehood. 109 Take not your Lord to task that what you seek is slow in coming; but take yourself to task that your manners are slow in coming. 110 Whenever He makes you obedient outwardly to His command and bestows you surrender inwardly to His irresistible power, He has shown you largesse beyond thanking. 111 Not everyone truly of the elect has yet been freed of shortcomings. 112 Only the ignorant man scorns the recitation of litany. Inspiration is to be found in the Hereafter, while the litany vanishes with the vanishing of this world; but it its more fitting to be occupied with something for which there is no substitute. The litany is what He seeks from you; the inspiration is what you seek from Him. What comparison is there between what He seeks from you and what you seek from Him? 113 The arrival of sustenance is in accordance with receptivity, while the raying-out of lights is in accordance with the purity of the innermost being. 114 When the forgetful man gets up in the morning, he reflects on what he is going to do, whereas the intelligent man sees what God is doing with him. 115 The devotees and ascetics are alienated from everything only because of their absence from God in everything. Had they contemplated Him in everything, they would not have been alienated from anything. 116 He commanded you in this world to reflect upon His creations; but in the Hereafter He will reveal to you the perfection of His Essence. 117 When He knew that you would not renounce Him, He made you contemplate that which issues from Him. 118 Since God knows the occurrence of weariness on your part, He has varied the acts of obedience for you; and since He knows of the occurrence of impulsiveness in you, He has limited them to specific times, so that your concern be with the performance of ritual prayer, not with the existence of the ritual prayer Not everyone who prays performs well. 119 Ritual prayer is a purification for hearts and an opening-up of the door of the invisible domains. 120 Ritual prayer is the place of intimate conversations and a mine of reciprocal acts of purity wherein the regions of the innermost being are expanded and the rising gleams of light shine forth. He knows of the existence of weakness in you, so He made the number of ritual prayers small; and He knew of your need of His grace, so He multiplied their fruitful results. 121 When you seek recompense for a deed, the reality of sincerity in it is demanded of you in return. As for the insincere, the feeling of security from chastisement suffices him. 122 Do not seek recompense for a deed whose doer was not you. It suffices you as recompense for the deed that He accepts it. 123 When He wants to show His grace to you, He creates states in you and attributes them to you. 124 Where He to make you go back to yourself, there would be no end to the reasons for blaming you; and were He to manifest His beneficence toward you, there would be no end to the reasons for praising you. 125 Cling to the attributes of His Lordship and realise the attributes of your servanthood! 126 He has prohibited you from claiming for yourself, among the qualities of created beings, that which does not belong to you; so would He permit you to lay claim to His Attribute, He who is the Lord of the Universe? 127 How can the laws of nature be ruptured for you so that miracles result, while you, for your part, have yet to rupture your bad habits? 128 The point at issue is not the fact of searching; rather, the point at issue is that you be provisioned with virtuous conduct. 129 Nothing pleads on your behalf like extreme need, nor does anything speed gifts to you quicker than lowliness and want. 130 If you were to be united with Him only after the extinction of your vices and the effacement of your pretensions, you would never be united with Him! Instead, when He wants to unite you to Himself, He covers your attribute with His Attribute and hides your quality with His Quality. And thus He unites you to Himself by virtue of what comes from Him to you, not by virtue of what goes from you to Him. 131 Were it not for the kindliness of His veiling, no deed would be worthy of acceptance. 132 You are more in need of His forbearance when you obey Him than you are when you disobey Him. 133 Veiling is of two kinds: veiling of disobedience, and veiling in it. Common people seek God’s veiling in disobedience out of the fear of falling in rank among mankind. The elect seek the veiling of disobedience out of the fear of falling from the sight of God, the True King. 134 Whoever honours you honours only the beauty of His veil in you. Therefore, praise is to Him who veiled you, not to the one who honoured and thanked you. 135 No one is a friend of yours except the one who, while knowing your defects is your companion, and that is only your generous Master. The best one to have as a friend is He who does not seek you out for the sake of something coming from you to Him. 136 Were the light of certitude to shine, you would see the Hereafter so near that you could not move toward it, and you would see that the eclipse of extinction had come over the beauties of the world. 137 It is not the existence of any being alongside of Him that veils you from God, for nothing is alongside of Him. Rather, what veils you from Him is the illusion of a being alongside of Him. 138 Had it not been for His manifestation in created beings, eyesight would not have perceived them. Had His Qualities been manifested, His created beings would have disappeared. 139 He manifests everything because He is the Interior, and He conceals the existence of everything because He is the Exterior. 140 He has permitted you to reflect on what is in created beings, but He has not allowed you to stop at the selfsame creatures. “Say: Behold what is in the heavens and the earth.” Thus, with His words, “Behold what is in the heaven.” He has opened up the door of instruction for you. But He did not say, “Behold the heavens.” so as not to lead you to the mere existence of bodies. 141 The Universe is permanent through His making it permanent, and it is annihilated by the Unity of His Essence. 142 People praise you for what they suppose is in you; but you must blame your soul for what you know is in it. 143 When the believer is praised, he is ashamed before God that he should be lauded for an attribute he does not see in himself. 144 The most ignorant of all people is the one who abandons the certitude he has for an opinion people have. 145 When He lets praise of you burst forth, and you are not worthy of it, praise Him for what He is worthy of. 146 When ascetics are praised, they are contracted, for they witness the praise as coming from mankind; but when gnostics are praised, they are expanded, for they witness the praise as coming from the True King. 147 If when given something, the giving expands you, and if when deprived of something, the deprivation contracts you, then take that as proof of your immaturity and the insincerity of your servanthood. 148 When a sin is committed by you do not let it make you despair of attaining uprightness with your Lord, for that one may the last ever destined for you to commit. 149 When you want Him to open you the door of hope, behold what is from Him to you. And if you want Him to open you the door of fear, behold what is from you to Him. 150 He often benefits you in the night of distress, what you have not benefited in the dawning of the daytime of elation: You know not which of them is nearer in benefit to you. 151 The horizons whence illuminations ascend are hearts and souls. 152 A light is reposited in hearts that is maintained by the light coming from the treasuries of the unseen. 153 There is a light by which He shows you His effects, and a light by which He shows you His Attributes. 154 Hearts sometimes halt with lights, just as selves are veiled by the opacity of things besides Him. 155 He has veiled the lights of inward souls with the coarseness of outward appearances out of reverence for them; lest they be made low and common by being divulged, or be called on aloud by the tongue of fame. 156 Glory be to Him Who does not guide to His friends except whom He wills. And He does not make any one reach His friends except he whom He wishes to make reach Him. 157 Perhaps, He let you see the unseen metaphysical world but veiled you from seeing the secrets of His servants. 158 Whoever sees the secrets of the servants and does not try to imitate divine mercy, his seeing such is a trial for him and a reason for misfortune to befall him. 159 The portion of the lower self in acts of disobedience is plain and known while its portion in acts of worship is hidden and secret. And treating a hidden [disease] is difficult. 160 Perhaps showing off in good works has entered upon you from where people do not see you. 161 Your wanting people to know your specialness is a proof for your lack of truthfulness in your slavehood. 162 Vanish from sight the eyes of people on you with the eye of God on you. And be absent from their coming towards you by seeing God approaching you. 163 Whoever knows the Truth witnesses Him in everything. Whoever is annihilated in Him is absent from everything. And whoever loves Him does not prefer anything over Him. 164 The Truth is only veiled from you due to His being extremely close. 165 He is only veiled [from you] due to His being too obvious and He is hidden from physical sight due to the tremendous light [of His Entity]. 166 Do not suppose your supplication will cause Him to give lest your understanding suffer. Rather, supplicate to Him to show your slavehood and to fulfil the rights of His lordship. 167 How can your later supplication be a cause for His predestined giving? 168 A pre-eternal command is high above needing an external cause. 169 His special concern for you is not due to anything you have done. Where were you when His special concern and care took charge of you? There was no sincerity in actions in His pre-eternity nor the presence of spiritual states. At that time, there was only mere benevolence and great gifts 170 He knew that His slaves would want to know whom His special concern is for. So He said, “He chooses for His mercy whom He wills” [Qur’an 2:105]. But He knew if He left them at that they would leave performing actions depending only on the preeternal command. So He said, “Indeed the mercy of God is closer to those who act excellently.” [Qur’an 7:56] 171 On His volition depends everything and His volition depends on nothing. 172 Sometimes manners dictate for them to leave supplication relying on His pre-decided division and due to them being busy with His remembrance. 173 Only he who can forget is reminded and only he who can neglect is told to be attentive. 174 Times of need are the celebration days of the disciple. 175 Perhaps, you gain benefits in times of need which you do not gain in fasting and prayer. 176 Having [hard pressed] needs is the domain for divine gifts. 177 If you want divine gifts, rectify your feeling of need. “Charity is only for the poor”. [Qur’an 9:60] 178 Become realised in your attributes and He will strengthen you with His: Realise your humility and He will strengthen you with His pride. Realise your incapability and He will strengthen you with His ability. Realise your weakness and He will strengthen you with His power. 179 Perhaps a person who has not obtained constant rectitude [in beliefs, actions, and states] may be given miracles. 180 The sign that the Truth has established you in a state is that it is always present and you are able to reap its fruits. 181 Whoever instructs gaining strength from his good deeds is silenced by bad deeds. Whoever instructs gaining strength from God’s goodness is not silenced by misdeeds. 182 The spiritual lights of the wise men travel faster than their words. Wherever the light falls, there understanding is reached. 183 Every statement spoken has a covering describing the heart of the one uttering. 184 Whoever has permission to instruct, his explanations are understood by the ears of people and his allusions appear to them lofty. 185 Perhaps spoken higher realities appear with a loss of light if you do not have permission to express them. 186 Their explanations are from sudden overflowing states or for guiding a disciple. The former happens to the beginners and the later is for the well-established and realised. 187 Spiritual instruction is nourishment for the listeners. And you will not get except that which you [are ready] to imbibe. 188 Sometimes the beginner describes a station of which he only has had a small taste and sometimes the advanced describes it after having in it realisation. And only the one with insight can distinguish. 189 The traveler should not speak about his spiritual experiences since that will decrease their effect on his heart and detract from his truthfulness with His Lord in them. 190 Do not stretch your hand to take something from people unless you see that the Giver through them is your Master. And in such a state, take what is in agreement with [external] knowledge. 191 The knower of God often is shy from asking his Master to relieve His need sufficing himself with His will. So, why would he not be shy from asking His creation for his needs. 192 When you are confused about two matters, follow the one harder for the lower self. For only the rightful duty seems hard for it. 193 Among the signs of following one’s desires is speeding towards mand?b acts of worship while being lazy about w?jib acts of worship. 194 He tied down w?jib acts to specific times so that you would not be deprived [of their reward] from procrastination. And He expanded your free time so that some choice [in performing actions] would remain for you. 195 He knew that [most of ]His slaves are not self-motivated in seeking Him; so, He obligated for them obedience to Him. He pushed them towards Him with the chains of obligation. Your Lord is amused by a people who are pushed to Paradise in chains. 196 He has obligated you to serve Him but in doing so He has only obligated you to enter His Paradise. 197 Whoever finds it impossible that God will save Him from his lusts and take him out of his heedlessness has declared divine power impotent. “And God is able over all things.” [Qur’an 18:45] 198 Perhaps He engulfed you in darkness [after being in light] so that you recognise the tremendous blessing He has given you. 199 Whoever does not recognise blessings in their presence is reminded of them in their absence. 200 Do not let showers of blessings stun you away from being thankful for them as that will lower your rank. 201 Lust engrained in the heart is a disease hard to cure. 202 Lusts are not driven from the heart except by terrifying fear or restless longing. 203 Just like He does not like an action done for others along with Him, He does not like a heart with others in it along with Him. The insincere action, He does not accept. The insincere heart, He does not approach. 204 Some light is granted permission to reach and some light is granted permission to enter. 205 Sometimes spiritual light descends but finds the heart filled with images of physical things and thus goes back to where it came. 206 Empty your heart of others and He will fill it with divine knowledges and secrets. 207 Do not find slow His giving but find slow your approaching [Him]. 208 Duties assigned to specific times can be made up for when missed but the rights of the moments of time cannot be made up for if missed. In every moment, God has on you a new right and important matter. How will you discharge a previous right when you are busy discharging God’s current right? 209 What has passed of your life cannot be replaced and what you have used well cannot be priced. 210 You do not love something except that you become its slave and He does not love that you be a slave to other than Him. 211 Your obedience does not benefit Him and your disobedience does not harm Him. He has only ordered you to do this and prohibited you from doing that for your own gain. 212 His might is not increased by him who approaches and His might is not decreased by him who turns away. 213 You reach God by reaching knowledge of Him; otherwise, our Lord is high above that something be connected to Him or He be connected to something. 214 Your closeness to Him is by your seeing His closeness to you. Otherwise, where are you that you would be close to Him. 215 Higher realities dawn upon you at once and after your have received them, they are explained: When We recite, follow the recitation. Then, We will explain [the meaning]. [Qur’an 75:18-19] 216 When divine spiritual experiences come over you, they destroy your habits: Indeed when kings enter cities, they ruin them. [Qur’an 27:34] 217 Spiritual experiences come from the presence of the Subjugator. For this reason, they do not collide with anything except they knock it out: Rather, we hurl the truth at falsehood; so, it knocks it out until falsehood vanishes. [Qur’an 21:18] 218 How can the Truth veil Himself with something when He is apparent in that thing and He is [also independently] present and existent. 219 Do not despair of the acceptance of an act which you perform without feeling His presence. Many a time He accepts an act whose fruit you do not taste now. 220 Do not give purity value to a spiritual experience whose fruit you do not yet know. The benefit from rain clouds is not the rain but the fruits [which grow thereafter]. 221 Do not wish that a spiritual experience had remained [with you] after it has already spread its lights and placed its secrets. You have in God independence from everything but nothing can make you free of need from Him. 222 Your wanting something (other than Him) to remain [when it is departing] is a proof that you are not present with Him. And your feeling sad for losing other than Him is a proof that you have not reached Him. 223 Pleasure even if manifest in many forms is only through viewing His closeness. Pain even if manifest in many forms is only through being veiled from Him. The cause for pain is the presence of the veil. The perfecting of pleasure is by viewing His noble Countenance. 224 What the hearts find of sadness and depression is from their being denied the vision [of Him]. 225 From the perfecting of His blessing on you is that He give you that which suffices and prevents you from that which will cause you to transgress. 226 Let the things that make you happy be fewer and the things that make you sad will be fewer. 227 If you wish not to be abandoned, do not seek protection from things that do not last. 228 If the beginning entices you, the ending repulses you. If the external invites you, the internal bars you. 229 He has only made the world a place of others and a mine for troubles so that you would not love it. 230 He knew that you would not accept mere advice; so, He made you taste its [bitter] taste to ease your separation from it. 231 Useful knowledge is that whose light rays spread in the chest and tear away the veil from the heart. 232 The best knowledge is that which is accompanied by godfearingness. 233 If knowledge is accompanied by godfearingness, it is for your favour; else, it is to your detriment. 234 When you are pained by people turning away from you or directing blame towards you, suffice yourself with God’s knowledge of you. If you are not satisfied with His knowing of you, then your not being satisfied with His knowing is a greater misfortune than people hurting you. 235 He only made injury flow from their hands onto you so that you would not find rest in them. He wants to push you away from everything so that nothing busies you away from Him. 236 When you know that the devil does not forget about you, do not forget about Him in Whose Hand is your forelock. 237 He only made the devil an enemy so that he would drive you towards Him. And He made your lower self move you [to do bad] so that your approaching and repenting to Him would never cease. 238 Whoever asserts that he is humble is in reality arrogant — as humbleness is a high state. And if you assert for yourself a high state, you are arrogant. 239 The humble person does not see himself above what he does but sees himself below what he does. 240 Real humbleness issues forth from witnessing His Tremendousness and lofty attributes. 241 You cannot leave [your] attributes without seeing [His] attributes. 242 The believer is busied by the praise of God from being regardful of himself. And he is busied by the rights of God from remembering his selfish shares. 243 The true lover is not he who hopes for compensation or seeks his own aim from his beloved. Rather, the lover spends himself on his beloved. The lover is not he who expects his beloved to spend on him. 244 If it were not for the battlefields of the lower selves, there would be no travel for the travellers on the Path since there is no distance between you and Him that your journey would shorten and there is no separation between you and Him that your reaching Him would eliminate. 245 He placed you in the middle realm between His physical world and metaphysical one to inform you of the loftiness of your rank among His creatures. You are a gem enclosed by the shells of created forms. 246 The cosmos is large in respect to your body but is not large in respect to your soul. 247 He who lives in the physical world locked out of the unseen world is imprisoned by his surroundings and encircled by the frame of his body. 248 You are with created things as long as you do not witness the Creator. When you witness Him, created things are with you. 249 It is not necessary that specialness entails one has no rough human characteristics. Specialness is like the light of the sun filling the horizon, whereas the horizon has no light in itself. Sometimes He takes away the trait of specialness from you and makes you return to your rough human limits. Thus, the light of day is not from you and does not belong to you; rather, it is merely being put over you. 250 His actions point to His names. His names point to His attributes. His attributes point to His Entity since it is impossible for an attribute to be existent all by itself. Subjects of divine attraction have His Entity revealed to them. Then, He makes them see His attributes. Then, He makes them return to deep understanding of His names. Then, He makes them see His actions. Those traveling the Path under a teacher experience these things in the reverse order. The place where the second group ends up is where the first group started. And the place where the second group starts is where the first group ends. But, each experiences the stages slightly differently. So, perhaps the two groups may meet on the Path, these going up and those going down. 251 The lights of the heart and innermost beings are only fully perceived in the unseen metaphysical world similar to how the light of the sky is only seen in the physical world. 252 Finding fruits of one’s worship in this life is a glad tiding of the reward in the next life. 253 How can you ask for a reward for the action He has bestowed on you? How can you request reward for the truthfulness He has given you? 254 For some, their spiritual lights precede their remembrances. For others, their remembrances precede their spiritual lights. For others yet, their remembrances and spiritual lights occur together. Still others have no spiritual lights nor any remembrances—and we seek refuge with God from that. 255 Some people perform dhikr to gain an illumined heart. Other people gain an illumined heart and as result perform dhikr. For others, dhikr and illumination are simultaneous; this last group has dhikr which guides and lights which are followed. 256 True dhikr on the outside is only from the vision of God’s Entity and contemplation on the inside. 257 He made you witness before He asked you give witness. Thus externally, one speaks of His divinity and in one’s heart and innermost being, one realises His all-encompassing oneness. 258 He has given you three gifts: (1) He has let you remember Him; if it were not for His bounty, you would not be worthy to engage in His remembrance, (2) He made you mentioned along with Him as He has affirmed your relation to Him, and (3) He made you remembered by Him and thus He has perfected His blessing on you. 259 Sometimes a long life is fruitless. And sometimes a short life is extremely fruitful. 260 Whoever is blessed in his age, he is able to reap much from the blessing of God in a very short time. So much so, that one cannot explain [the immensity] nor even allude to it. 261 A sign of abandonment is that you become free from things that busy but still do not turn towards Him, and that your barriers become fewer but still do not travel to Him. 262 Contemplation is the journey of the heart through other than God. 263 Contemplation is the lamp of the heart. When it goes away, there is no light for it. 264 Contemplation is of two types: (1) contemplation of belief and faith and (2) contemplation of witnessing and seeing. The first is for those who are apt to learn lessons [from what they see] and the second is for those that experience the vision [of God] and have insight.
- [Common Word: A Cambridge Conversation, 2013](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/common-word-cambridge-2013) - With Rowan Williams, T.J. Winter (Abdal Hakim Murad) and David Ford These shared reflections, with questions from the audience, followed the premiere of the Common Word interfaith initiative documentary, directed by Mustafa Gouverneur. This event was hosted by The Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme, The Centre for Islamic Studies and the Matheson Trust. * LOW VOLUME RECORDING:
- [Reflections on Tradition and Modernity ](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/reflections-on-tradition-and-modernity) - Reflections on Tradition and Modernity by His Holiness The Dalai Lama I grew up in a country largely cut off from the realities of the twentieth century. Today, I travel a great deal and am fortunate to be meeting new people continuously. Besides, people from all walks of life also come to see me. And whomever I meet, I am constantly reminded of our basic sameness as human beings. Indeed, the more I see of the world, the clearer it becomes that no matter what our situation, whether we are rich or poor, educated or not, of one race, gender, religion or another, we all desire to be happy and rid of suffering. Our whole life, and how we choose to live it, can be seen as our answer to the great question that confronts us all: “How am I to be happy?” We are sustained in this great quest for happiness, it seems to me, by hope. We know, even if we do not admit it, that there can be no guaran- tee of a better, happier life than the one we are leading today. As an old Tibetan proverb puts it, “The next life or tomorrow—we can never be certain which will come first.” But we hope to go on living. We hope that through this or that action we can bring about happiness. Everything we do, not only as individuals but also at the level of society, can be seen in terms of this fundamental aspiration. Everywhere, in countries both rich and poor, by all means imagina- ble, people are striving to improve their lives. Yet strangely, my impres- sion is that those living in the materially developed countries, for all their industry, are in some ways less satisfied, are less happy, and to some extent suffer more than those living in the least developed coun- tries. Indeed, if we compare the rich with the poor, it often seems that those with less are often less anxious. As for the rich, while a few know SACRED WEB 5 11 how to use their wealth intelligently—that is to say, not in luxurious living but by sharing it with the needy—many do not. They are so caught up with the idea of acquiring still more that they make no room for anything else in their lives. As a result, they are constantly plagued by mental and emotional suffering—even though outwardly they may ap- pear to be leading entirely successful and comfortable lives. This is sug- gested by the disturbing prevalence among the populations of the mate- rially developed countries of anxiety, discontent, frustration, uncertainty, and depression. This paradox whereby inner suffering is so often found amid material wealth is readily apparent throughout much of the modern world. Clearly, material development itself has a role to play. But we can also cite the increasing urbanization of modern society, where high concentrations of people live in close proximity to one another. Whereas formerly, farm- ers would call in all their family members to help with the harvest, today they simply telephone a contractor. We find modern living organized so that it demands the least possible direct dependence on others. There has arisen a sense that my future is not dependent on my neighbour but rather on my job or, at most, my employer. This in turn encourages us to suppose that because others are not important for my happiness, their happiness is not important to me. This may sound like a very gloomy assessment. But unless we acknowledge the extent and character of our problems, we will not be able even to begin to deal with them. Clearly, a major reason for modern society’s devotion to material progress is the very success of science and technology. Now the wonderful thing about these forms of human endeavour is that they bring immediate satis- faction. Unfortunately, this devotion encourages us to suppose that the keys to happiness are material well being on the one hand and the power con- ferred by knowledge on the other. But the fact is, knowledge alone cannot provide the happiness that springs from inner development. Indeed, though our very detailed and specific knowledge of external phenomena are an immense achievement, the urge to reduce, to narrow down in pursuit of it, far from bringing us happiness, can actually be dangerous. It can cause us to lose touch with the wider reality of human experience and, in particular, our dependence on others. When we rely too much on the external achievements of science, in- fluence of religion declines, and there is mounting confusion with re- 12 SACRED WEB 5 spect to the problem of how best we are to conduct ourselves in life. In the past, religion and ethics were closely intertwined. Now, many peo- ple, believing that science has disproved religion, make the further as- sumption that morality itself must be a matter of individual preference. But we are apt to overlook science’s clear limitations. In replacing reli- gion as the final source of knowledge in popular estimation, science begins to look a bit like another religion itself. Should we, therefore, abandon scientific inquiry on the grounds that it has failed us? Certainly not. Nor do I mean to suggest that the goal of prosperity for all is invalid. Because of our nature, bodily and physical experience play a dominant role in our lives. The achievements of science and technology clearly reflect our desire to attain a better, more comfortable existence. This is very good. Who could fail to applaud many of the advances of modern medicine? At the same time, I think it is genuinely true that members of certain traditional, rural communities do enjoy greater harmony and tran- quillity than those settled in our modern cities. For example, in the Himalayan regions of northern India, it remains the custom for locals not to lock their houses when they go out. It is expected that a visitor who finds the house empty would go in and help himself or herself to a meal while waiting for the family to return. The same was true in Tibet in former times. However, we must also be careful not to idealize old ways of life. The high level of co-operation we find in undeveloped rural communities may be based more on necessity than on goodwill. People recognize it as an alternative to greater hardship. They may simply not realize or imagine that any other way of life is possible. If they did, very likely they would embrace it eagerly. The challenge we face is therefore to find some means of enjoying the same degree of harmony and tranquillity as those more traditional communities while benefitting fully from the material developments of the world as we find it at the dawn of a new millennium. To say otherwise is to imply that these communities should not even try to improve their standard of living. To suppose that merely by aban- doning material progress we could overcome all our problems would be shortsighted. That would be to ignore their underlying causes. Be- sides, there is still much in the modern world to be optimistic about. There are countless people in the most developed countries who are SACRED WEB 5 13 active in their concern for others. There is a growing appreciation of fundamental human rights all over the world. This represents a very positive development in my view. The way in which the international community generally responds to natural disasters with immediate aid is also a wonderful feature of the modern world. Increasing recognition that we cannot forever continue to mistreat our natural environment without facing serious consequences is likewise a cause for hope. Moreo- ver, I believe that, thanks largely to modern communications, people are probably more accepting of diversity now. And standards of literacy and education throughout the world are in general higher than ever be- fore. Such positive developments I take to be an indication of what we humans are capable of. Unlike the sufferings of sickness, old age, and death, few of the prob- lems that beset our modern societies are by nature inevitable. Nor are they due to any lack of knowledge. When we think carefully, we see that they are all ethical problems. They each reflect our understanding of what is right and wrong, of what is positive and what is negative, of what is appropriate and what is inappropriate. Our problems, both those we experience externally—such as wars, crime, and violence—and those we experience internally—our emotional and psychological sufferings— cannot be solved until we address our underlying neglect of the inner dimension. That is why the great movements of the last hundred years and more— democracy, liberalism, socialism—have all failed to deliver the univer- sal benefits they were supposed to provide, despite many wonderful ideas. A transformation is called for, certainly. But not a political, an economic, or even a technical revolution. We have had enough experi- ence of these during the past century to know that a purely external approach will not suffice. What I propose is a spiritual transformation. I believe there are indeed some universal ethical principles that could help everyone to achieve the happiness we all aspire to. That we do not need to turn to any formal religion to be concerned with those qualities of the human spirit—such as love and compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, a sense of responsibility, a sense of harmony— which bring happiness to both self and others. There is thus no reason why the individual should not develop them, even to a high degree, without recourse to any religious or metaphysical belief system. This is 14 SACRED WEB 5 why I sometimes say that religion is something we can perhaps do with- out, but what we cannot do without are these basic spiritual qualities. In the past, families and small communities could exist more or less independently of one another. If they took into account their neighbours’ well being, so much the better. Yet they could survive quite well without this kind of perspective. Such is no longer the case. Today’s reality is so complex and, on the material level at least, so clearly interconnected that a different outlook is needed. Modern economics is a case in point. A stock market crash on one side of the globe can have a direct effect on the economies of countries on the other. Similarly, our technological achievements are now such that our activities have an unambiguous effect on the natural environment. And the very size of our population means that we cannot any longer afford to ignore others’ interests. Indeed, we find that these are often so intertwined that serving our own interest benefits others, even though this may not be our explicit intention. For example, when two families share a single water source, ensuring that it is not polluted benefits both. In view of this, I am convinced that it is essential that we cultivate a sense of what I call universal responsibility. What is entailed, is a reorientation of our heart and mind away from self and toward others. To develop a sense of universal responsibility is to develop an attitude of mind whereby, when we see an opportunity to benefit others, we will take it in preference to merely looking after our own narrow interests. An important benefit of developing such a sense of universal responsi- bility is that it helps us become sensitive to all others—not just those closest to us. We come to see the need to care especially for those mem- bers of the human family who suffer most. We recognize the need to avoid causing divisiveness among our fellow human beings. And we become aware of the overwhelming importance of contentment. Therefore, I would like to make a call for a radical reorientation away from our habitual preoccupation with self toward the wider community of beings with whom we are connected, and for conduct which recog- nizes others’ interests alongside our own. If we really want the next mil- lennium to be happier, more peaceful and more harmonious for hu- mankind we will have to make the effort to make it so. SACRED WEB 5 15
- [Some Metaphysical Principles Pertaining to Nature](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/some-metaphysical-principles) - ?Some Metaphysical Principles Pertaining to Nature We have so far often mentioned metaphysics. It is now time to define what we mean by this all important form of knowledge, whose disappearance is most directly responsible for our modern predicament. Metaphysics, which in fact is one and should be named metaphysic in the singular, is the science of the Real, of the origin and end of things, of the Absolute and, in its light, the ·relative. It is a science as strict and exact as mathematics and with the same clarity and certitude, but one which can only be attained through intellectual intuition and not simply through ratiocination. It thus differs from philosophy as it is usually understood.1 Rather, it is a theoria of reality whose realization means sanctity and spiritual perfection, and therefore can only be achieved within the cadre of a revealed tradition. Metaphysical intuition can occur anywhere-for the 'spirit bloweth where it listeth'-but the effective realization of metaphysical truth and its application to human life can only be achieved within a revealed tradition which gives efficacy to certain symbols aQd rites upon which metaphysics must rely for its realization. This supreme science of the Real, which in a certain light is the same as gnosis, is the only science that can distinguish between the Absolute and the relative, appearance and reality. It is only in its light that man can distinguish between levels of reality and states ofbeing and be able to see each thing in its place in the total scheme of things. Moreover, this science exists, as the esoteric dimension, within every orthodox and integral tradition and is united with a spiritual method derived totally from the sources of the tradition in question. In the traditions of the East, metaphysics has been continuously alive to this day, and despite differences of foundation there is a unity of doctrine which justifies the use of the term 'Oriental Metaphysics? although metaphysics knows no Orient or Occident. In the West there has also been true metaphysics of the highest order, among the Greeks in the Pythagorean-Platonic writings, and especially in Plotinus. In all these cases metaphysics is the doctrinal exposition that was the fruit of a living spiritual way. Likewise in Christianity one finds metaphysics in the writings of some of the early founders of Christian theology like Clement and Origen, Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzen, in Erigena, Dante and Eckhart and again in Jacob Bohme. Among Orthodox writers there is an even more open and complete metaphysical exposition than that which is found among Latin authors. But even the official theology of the Latin church, especially the Augustinian school, contains metaphysics which, however, is much more hidden and indirect. In Western philosophy, however, since Aristotle the unfortunate practice of considering metaphysics as a branch of philosophy came into being so that with the appearance of philosophical doubt metaphysics has also been discredited. In this domain, the rationalism of later Greek philosophy fortified the tendency within official Christian theology to emphasize will and love rather than intelligence and sapiential knowledge. These two factors combined to make of metaphysics and gnosis a peripheral aspect of the intellectual life ofWestern man, especially since the end of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. What is usually called metaphysics in post-medieval philosophy is, for the most part, nothing but an extension of rationalistic philosophy and at best a pale reflection of true metaphysics. The so-called metaphysics that philosophers like Heidegger have criticized and consider as having come to an end is not the metaphysical doctrine we have in mind. Metaphysics, tied to a philosophy that is at once perennial and universal, knows no beginning or end is the heart of the philosophia perennis to which Leibnitz referred. In as much as the loss of metaphysical knowledge is responsible for the loss of harmony between man and nature and of the role of the sciences of nature in the total scheme of knowledge, and by the fact that this knowledge has been nearly forgotten in the West while it has continued to survive in the traditions of the East, it is to these Oriental traditions that one must turn in order to rediscover the metaphysical significance of nature and to revive the metaphysical tradition within Christianity. If the East is learning by compulsion and necessity the Western techniques of domination over nature, it is from Oriental metaphysics that one must learn how to prevent this domination from becoming sheer self-annihilation. Turning first to the Far East we see in the Chinese tradition, especially in Taoism and also in Neo-Confucianism, a devotion to nature and a comprehension of its metaphysical significance that is of the greatest importance. This same reverential attitude toward nature, together with a strong sense of symbolism and an awareness of the lucidity of the cosmos and its transparency before metaphysical realities, is to be found in Japan. Shintoism has strongly fortified this attitude. That is why in the art of the Far East, especially in the Taoist and Zen traditions, paintings of natural scenes are veritable icons. They do not just evoke a sentimental pleasure in the onlooker but convey grace, and are a means of communion with transcendental reality. In Taoism there is always the awareness of the presence of the transcendent dimension symbolized by the void so dominant in landscape paintings. But this void is not non-being in the negative sense, but the Non-Being which transcends even Being and is dark only because of an excess of light. It is like the divine darkness to which Dionysius the Areopagite refers, or the wilderness of Godhead (die wusste Gottheit) of Meister Eckhart. That is why this Non-Being or Void is also the principle of Being, and through Being the principle of all things. So we read in the sacred text of Taoism, the Tao Te-Ching: 83 ?Man anJ Nature 'All things under Heaven are products of Being, but Being itself is the product of Not-Being.'3 In this simple assertion is contained the principle of all metaphysics, in pointing to the hierarchic structure of reality and the dependence of all that is relative upon the Absolute and the Infinite, symbolized by the Void or Non-Being that is unbound and limitless. Likewise Chuang-Tzu affirms the same principle somewhat more elaborately when he writes: 'In the Grand Beginning (of all things) there was riothing in all the vacancy of space; there was nothing that could be named. It was in this state that there arose the first existence;-the first existence, but still without bodily shape. From this things could then be produced (receiving) what we call their proper character. That which had no bodily shape was divided; and then without intermission there was what we call the process of conferring. (The two processes) continuing in operation, things were produced. As things were completed, there were produced the distinguishing lines of each, which we call the bodily shape. That shape was the body preserving in it the spirit, and each had its peculiar manifestations, which we call its Nature. When the Nature has been cultivated, it returns to its proper character; and when that has been fully reached, there is the same condition as at the beginning.'4 In as much as Heaven, in the metaphysical sense, and in its characteristic Chinese usage, comes from the Origin and Earth, again in its metaphysical significance, from Heaven, man must live in this world with a full awareness of the hierarchy. For as the Tao-Te Ching asserts: 'The ways of men are conditioned by those of earth, the ways of earth by those of heaven, the ways of heaven by those of the Tao, and the Tao comes into being by itself.'5 Heaven is thus a reflection of the Supreme Principle and the Earth the reflection of heaven. The Earth of Taoism is not profane nature that stands as gravity opposed to grace, but it is an image of a divine prototype whose contemplation leads upward toward that reality for which 'heaven' is the traditional expression. For this reason also the world can be known, in a metaphysical and not empirical sense, through its Cause and Principle. 'The World has a First Cause, which may be regarded as the Mother of the World. When one has found the Mother, one can know the Child. Knowing the Child and still keeping the Mother, to the end of his days he shall suffer no harm.'6 That science is safe and without harm which realizes the manifestation without losing sight of the Principle. It is of cardinal importance that the Tao is both the Principle, the way to attain the Principle and also the order of things. It is in fact the order of nature7 if we remember all that Taoism means by nature. Tao, the Principle that is also the order and harmony of all things, is everywhere present, in everything that is great or small. 'The Tao does not exhaust itself in what is greatest, nor is it ever absent from what is least; and therefore it is to be found complete and diffused in all things.'8 To live in peace and harmony with nature or the Earth, one must live in harmony with Heaven, and in order to attain this end one must live according to the Tao and in conformity with it, the Tao which pervades all things and also transcends all things. 9 Nature, as the direct effect of the Tao and its laws, stands as opposed to the trivialities of human artefacts and the artificiality with which man surrounds himself. For as Chuang-Tzu says, 'what is of Nature is internal. What is of man is external ... That oxen and horses should have four feet is what is of Nature. That a halter should be put on a horse's head, or a string through an ox's nose, is what is ofman.'10 That is why the aim ofthe spiritual man is to contemplate nature and become one with it, to become 'natural'. This is not intended in a pantheistic or naturalistic sense, but in a metaphysical sense, so that to become natural means to abide fully by the Tao which is at once both transcendent and the principle of nature. The aim of the sage is to be in harmony with nature for through this harmony comes harmony with men and this harmony is itself the reflection of harmony with heaven. Chuang Tzu writes, 'Anyone who sees clearly the excellence of all nature may be called God's Trunk or God's Stock, because he is in harmony with nature. Anyone who brings the world into accord is in harmony with his fellow men and happy with men. Whoever is in harmony with nature is happy with nature.'11 To be happy with nature means precisely to accept its norms and its rhythms rather than to seek to dominate and overcome it. Nature should not be judged according to human utility nor earthly man made the measure of all things. There is no anthropomorphism connected with man's relation with nature.U Man should accept and follow the nature of things and not seek to disturb nature by artificial means.13 Perfect action is to act without acting, without self-interest and attachment, or, in other words, according to nature which acts freely and without greed, lust or other ulterior motives. There is in fact in Taoism an opposition to the application o f the sciences o f nature for the purely material welfare of man seen in the well-known story recorded in the works of Chuang-Tzu: 'Hwang-Ti had been on the throne for nineteen years, and his ordinances were in operation all through the kingdom, when he heard that Kwang Khang-Tze [a Taoist sage] was living on the summit of Khung-Thung, and went to see him. "I have heard," he said, "that you, Sir, are well acquainted with the perfect Tao. I venture to ask you what is the essential thing in it. I wish to take the subtlest influences of heaven and earth, and assist with them the (growth of the) five cereals for the (b~tter) nourishment of the people. I also wish to direct the (operation of the) Yin and Yang, so as to secure the comfort of all living beings. How shall I proceed to accomplish those objects?" Kwang Khang-Tze replied, "What you wish to ask about is the original substance of all things; what you wish to have the direction ofis that substance as it was shattered and divided. According to your government of the world, the vapours of the clouds, before they were collected, would descend in rain; the herbs and trees would shed their leaves before they become yellow; and the light of the sun and moon would hasten to extinction. Your mind is that of a flatterer with his plausible words;-it is not fit that I should tell you the perfect Tao."'14 It must be remembered that this same Chinese civilization in which such a contemplative view of nature was cultivated, and where there was even opposition to the application o f the sciences of nature, developed physics, mathematics, astronomy and natural history and furthermore has been known throughout history for its technological prowess and genius. It must, moreover, be remembered that most of the early alchemists, geologists and pharmacologists in China were Taoists;1~ and that the polarization of Heaven and Earth and the religious significance of nature persisted as long as the Chinese tradition remained strong. The metaphysical significance of nature as expounded in Taoism, and also Buddhism, while even contributing to the development of sciences of nature, remained as a balance which preserved the hierarchy of knowledge and prevented nature from becoming profane. The Chinese even developed an astronomical system, the Hsii.an yeh, which like post-Cop~rnican astronomy was based on an unlimited conception ofspace and time and was even used by proponents of the Copernican system in Europe against Ptolemaic astronomy. But in China this 'open cosmos' was again~wedded to a metaphysical explanation and never allowed to destroy the harmony between man and nature that is so central to the Far Eastern traditions. In Japan, likewise, we find the Taoist and also Buddhist conceptions of nature coming from China integrated with the local Shinto religion in which again, like all branches of the Shamanic tradition, there is a particular emphasis upon the significance of nature in a cultic sense.16 Among a people with remarkable artistic sensitivity there developed the most intimate contact with nature, from rock gardens and landscape paintings to flower arrangements, all based on the knowledge of cosmic correspondences, sacred geography, the symbolism of directions, forms and colours. Spiritual methods became closely allied to the inward contemplation of nature and intimacy with its rhythms and forms. The avid quest after things Japanese in the West in recent years is in many cases the sign of a hidden nostalgia to find peace with nature again and to escape the ugliness of the ambiance created by modern technology. In their special devotion to nature as a means of grace and spiritual sustenance, the traditions of the Far East in their metaphysics, science and art have a cardinal message for the modern world in which the encounter of man and nature is almost always on the basis of war and rarely of the peace which is so avidly sought after and so rarely found. When we turn to the Hindu tradition, there also we find an elaborate metaphysical doctrine concerning nature along with the development of many sciences in the bosom of Hinduism, some of which in fact influenced Western science through Islam. When we think about the Hindu tradition, our attention usually turns to the Vedantic doctrine of Atman and maya, the world being considered not as absolute reality but as a veil that hides the Supreme Self. A simplistic interpretation of such a view, especially as prevalent among modern pseudo-Vedantins, would conclude that the world being maya, usually translated as illusion, it matters little whether one lives in virgin nature or the ugliest urban environment, whether one surrounds oneself with sacred art or the worst trash produced by the machine. But this view is itself the worst possible delusion. It is maya pure and simple. What Hinduism asserts, like all Oriental doctrines, is the need to gain deliverance from the cosmos which is maya. But maya is not only illusion, which is its negative aspect, but also the divine play or artP It veils the Supreme Self, the Absolute Reality, but also reveals and displays it. From the point of view of Atman or Brahman, the Universe is unreal; only the Absolute itself is Real in the absolute sense. For one living in maya the relative reality in which he finds himself is at least as real as his own empirical self, and can moreover, be an aid in his gaining deliverance. Although the cosmos is a prison for the sage it is also possible to transcend this prison through a knowledge of its structure and even with its aid. That is why Hinduism as an integral tradition has developed elaborate cosmological and natural sciences and even spiritual techniques tied intimately to the use of the energy within nature. Yet, every science, physical, mathematical and alchemical, as well as the properly religious and spiritual ones, are connected to the total matrix both of Hinduism and in certain cases Buddhism and to the metaphysical principles dominating the whole tradition.18 Among the six darshanas or intellectual schools of Hinduism, none is as analytical and attached to the corporeal world as the Vaisesika. This school is concerned with the physical world and holds a thoroughly atomistic view, beginning with the five elements or bhutas from which bodies are formed. It seems on the surface a system most akin to the atomistic and mechanistic physics that developed in the West in late Antiquity and again in the seventeenth century and which was usually anti-religious in its sentiment.19 But in Hinduism, as in Buddhism, there developed an atomism combined with a spiritual view of the Universe. The Vaisesika system is based on the knowledge of the six categories or padiirthas which are: substance, attribute or quality, action, generality, individuality and inherence. Substance itself is nine kinds: earth, water, fire, air, ether, time, space, mind and spirit. Knowledge of the physical world, or ultimately these six categories, is correct knowledge (tattvajiiafma), a knowledge that can only be attained through inner purity and with the help of dharma or grace, for it must be remembered that in the Nyaya-Vaise~ika system above the six padiirthas stands Isvara, the Personal Deity, who is the cause of the world. A system as analytic and as closely concerned with natural things as the Vai.Sefilca, has as its end the deliverance of the soul from the atomistic world to which it is attracted by false knowledge.20 In fact at the beginning of one of the main treatises of this school, the Padarthadharmasangraha, it is said, 'A treatise that deals with the properties of things can never lead to the highest bliss; as words cannot accomplish anything besides the denoting of the vernal meanings'. To which objection the answer is given; 'A knowledge of the true nature of the six categories—substance, quality, action, generality, individuality and inherence-through their similarities and dissimilarities-is the means of accomplishing the highest bliss'.21 Knowledge of the external world is ultimately knowledge of oneself and even an analytical cosmological and natural science is not divorced from man's entelechy in the highest sense, namely deliverance from all limitation. This is not anthropomorphism at all. On the contrary it is the only form of knowledge through which man can escape the limitations ofhis own ego. Concerning the traditional founder of the Vaisefilca system, KaQiida, it has been said; 'He [Kai)iida] had accomplished the knowledge of the principles (tattvas), dispassion and lordliness. He thought within himself that the knowledge of the principles of the six padarthas (predicables), by means of their resemblances and differences, is the only royal road to the attainment of self-realization, and that that would be easily accomplished by the disciples through the dharma (merit or worth) of renunciation.m Thus the knowledge of nature is inextricably bound to moral and spiritual laws and the purity of the seeker after this knowledge. It seems as if Hinduism like so many other traditions had felt intuitively that the only safe way to penetrate the mysteries of nature and to cultivate physics, in the universal sense of this term, is to become saintly and to seek the saintly life. I Another of the darshanas, the Sa.,lchya, which contains one of the most elaborate cosmologies and natural philosophies in any tradition, likewise begins with the problem of the threefold pain present in the soul and the means to remove this pain, as is clearly asserted at the beginning of the Saqz/chya Karikii.23 The three kinds of pain, which are the natural and intrinsic such as diseases, the natural and extrinsic such as any pain caused by an external source and finally divine or supernatural pain caused by spiritual factors, can only be overcome by an analytical knowledge of the three principles of this school, namely, the prime substance or nature (Prakriti), manifested matter that is in a state of flux (vyakti) and finally the Spirit that neither begets nor is begotten (Purusa). The Saf{lkhya system seeks to remove the pain and misery of the soul through discriminative knowledge, Siif{lkhya itself meaning etymologically discrimination.24 It begins with Prakriti, the maternal prime substance of the Universe or nature in its vastest sense from which through the action of the three cosmic tendencies or gu!}as, namely satwa, rajas and tamas, or goodness, passion and obscurity or the upward, expansive and downward tendencies, the whole cosmic domain is brought into being. There are twenty-five tattvas or principles whose knowledge forms the basis of the Saf{lkhya system. There is first of all the four-fold division of things into the productive which is Prakriti, that which produces and is produced such as the intellect or Buddhi, that which is only produced such as the senses and the elements and finally that which neither produces nor is produced, that is, Purufa, the Universal Spirit which stands above and distinct from Prakriti and all its products.25 Furthermore, there is the more detailed division into the tattvas. Through the action of the gWJas which are present at all levels ofcosmic reality, first the Buddhi or the intellect is generated and from BuJdhi the principle of Egoism or Ahankara. From Ahanlcara there proceeds in turn the five subtle elements (tanmatra) which are the principles of the gross, corporeal elements. Also from Ahankara there come into being the eleven senses consisting of the five organs of sense, the five organs of action and the receptive and discriminative faculty (manas). From the subtle elements are produced the gross elements (mahabuta). Above this whole domain stands Purusa and the object of all sciences of nature is precisely for the soul to disentangle itself from the sense perceptions with which by mistake it identifies itself through the action of manas and ahanlcara. The Universe itself which comes into being from the bosom of Prakriti or Nature is formed in such a way as to enable man to contemplate it in the metaphysical sense and thereby also achieve from it its separation or catharsis.26 Moreover, once the spirit gains knowledge of nature, nature itself aids in this separation and withdraws from the scene. For as we read in the Saf{lkhya- Karilca: 'As a dancer having exhibited herself on the stage, ceases to dance, so does nature (Prakriti) cease (to produce) when she has made herself manifest to the soul.m Thus in the Samlchya system as in the Vaisesika the knowledge of nature leads to the catharsis of the soul and its deliverance. Moreover, Nature itself is an aid in this process of realization and assists that spirit which is armed with discriminative knowledge. This theme of relying upon nature in the task of spiritual realization is carried to its full conclusion ih the practices connected with Tantra Yoga. In Tantrism the Salcti or feminine principle becomes the incarnation of all force and power in the Universe, and through the use of this very power, as if riding upon the waves of the sea, the Yogi seeks to pass beyond nature and the ocean of cosmic manifestation. In Tantrism there is an elaborate correspondence between man and the cosmos, the spinal column itself being called the Meru of the human body.18 In fact, in the Tantric way or sa.dhana, the body and flesh of man and the living cosmos are the most fundamental elements.19 The Universe is the 'body of the Lord'30 and by dying and burying himself in its bosom, in the arms of nature as the Divine Mother, the Yogi finds his deliverance. The death and resurrection of the Yogi is very much like the salve et coagula of medieval Christian alchemists and in fact Tantrism became connected to alchemy in India and presents do
- [The Alchemy of Traditional Foods](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/alchemy-of-food) - The Alchemy of Traditional Foods by Rodney Blackhirst And wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face shine, and bread that strengtheneth man?s heart... Psalm 104:15 One of the symptoms of the modern malaise, and one of the consequences of the loss of integral wisdom, is the confusion that abounds among people regarding food, diet and nutrition. It is generally recognized that modern, industrial foods no longer nourish man as foods in the past but traditional understandings of the proper sustenance for human beings have, in all but a few parts of the world, disappeared. Modern, industrial foods, processed and prepackaged, are increasingly the norm. It was calculated several years ago that a new McDonald?s restaurant opened somewhere on the Earth every seventeen hours of every day of the year, and the rate is probably faster today. Against this, there is a general hankering for more healthy foods and dietary habits, but this is a response to concerns developed out of the methods and findings of profane science, not out of an acknowledgement of a lost legacy of traditional understandings. Similarly, many people are turning to vegetarianism and more humane diets, but this is out of a squeamish horror for new “factory” methods of meat production, not out of an appreciation of the degree to which modern meat production violates and shuns traditional notions of sacrifice and respect for the slaughtered creature. Many are dabbling with exotic diets and even more are falling into various fads. The scientists one day report that wheat grass cures cancer; the next day that it causes it. More generally, people have lost the traditional contacts with the past communicated through family recipes and food lore and the institution of the common table and, increasingly, even the knowledge and skill to prepare sustaining meals from simple ingredients. This is all a measure of alienation and of modern man?s rupture from the guiding patterns of tradition. Cooking and Cosmology In a traditional order the preparation and understanding of food is a cosmological art and science. It is kept within its own proper dimensions and provided with a sacred context by some manner of revelation. In the Judeo-Christian world the Book of Genesis provides man with the right to enjoy the produce of the earth—though he must labour for it— and both the Jewish and Christian religions derived from the Biblical revelations are subsequently concerned, as a matter of doctrine, with the sanctity of food. In traditional cultures everywhere the preparation and eating of food is heavily ritualized and subject to divine regulation. In the modern order, in contrast, food is simply a matter of utility, fashion and sensual indulgence. The practice of giving thanks to the Creator before a meal persists among marginalized groups of religionists but on the whole modern man gives not a thought to where his food came from and has not an inkling of its relevance to his spiritual as well as physical well-being. The Semitic avoidance of pork seems a silly superstition and the dietary The Matheson Trust strictures of Lent seem ridiculous inconveniences. More comprehensively, modern man has no idea that there was once in the past, and is still in some corners of the Earth, a science of nutrition derived from a sacred cosmology. The strictures and taboos of religions set boundaries; within those boundaries, in traditional cultures, flourish cosmological arts and sciences based upon a sacred understanding of nature. The modern health food movement is correct to point out the short-comings of modern man?s divorce from nature, but his divorce from the sacred was its prelude. The health food movement is a profane reaction to the obvious inadequacies of the modern diet; it thinks in terms of chemical constituents and vitamins. In the traditional mind “nature” is, more importantly, Creation—foods are evidence of God?s mercy and bounty, and the natural order reflects a sacred design with an exact relation to the human being. Typically, the body of man is seen as a microcosm of the greater cosmos, with both permeated with an identical order that is itself of divine origin. When modern man sees a traditional Chinese meal being prepared he may think no more than “Yum! I love stir-fry!” The health food enthusiast may take stock of the meal?s protein content, minerals and enzymes and feel satisfied, in a sentimental way, that it is full of “natural” ingredients. But a traditional man sees the bowl of the heavens in the smooth, black concave form of the wok, and he sees the grains of rice as stars and the vegetables—parsnips and carrots cut as half-moons or hexagrams—as representatives of the planets. He sees the stirring and agitation of the ingredients as mimicry of the swirling courses of the heavenly bodies and the whole act of cooking as a cosmological process in miniature. It is an act that participates in the processes of a divine and intelligent creation. Traditional approaches to foods place them within a wider cosmological context. Categories of Food In contrast to the approach of profane chemistry with its carbohydrates, anti-oxidants and the like, traditional approaches understand the virtues and vices of particular foods in terms of cosmological categories such as the yin and yang of the Chinese. Some foodstuffs are classified as yin and some as yang and the balance of a diet is determined by avoiding too much of one or the other or by countering foods that are strongly yin with others that are strongly yang. The traditional European equivalent to this was the system of four humors inherited from ancient Greek sources. Some foods were regarded as hot, others as cold, some as dry and others as moist, and their nutritional value was assessed in terms of their action upon corresponding hot, cold, dry and moist humors and organs of the body. The scientistic mind dismisses these systems as fumbling attempts to uncover the secret order of nature revealed at last by the chemists and geneticists. In fact, these systems were aspects of a profound sacred science transmitting the wisdom of an ancient contemplation of nature rooted in metaphysical principles. Something of the four humor system still exists in the Muslim world where foods are described as either hot (garmi) or cold (sardi), with four possible degrees of each, with foods acting upon either the blood, the phlegm, the bile or the black bile of the body. The classifications are not made on the basis of crude chemical analysis but refer rather to essences (akhlat). The heat and the cold are not measures of calories or energy with which the modern physical sciences are concerned but are cosmic polarities inherent in all things of creation. Sometimes the shape, colour, habit of growth or other factors are crucial in determining the value of the food. Thus, for instance, plump, short-grained rice tends to be a hot (garmi) food, but the longer grained varieties are cooler. Sometimes these determinations arise directly from the recommendations of the Traditions of the Prophet Muhammad, many collections of which are particularly rich in food-lore. In one hadith, the Prophet is reported as having said, “The main cause of disease is eating one meal on top of another.” Apart from the obvious good sense of this saying, the Muslim tradition has taken these words to refer to the mysteries of digestion which depend upon the hot and cold essences. In particular, there must be an appropriate amount of heat for the body to accomplish all of the transformations of digestion; otherwise the body grows cold and the transformations cease. Modern processed foods and the mainstays of the modern Western diet—refined sugar, refined flour, beef, dairy products, potato starch—are cold foods; typically the modern Western diet yields only enough heat (garmi) to accomplish the crudest physical transformations while the more subtle but vital qualities of the food remains undigested and pass through the body. Consequently, people living on such a diet seek out stimulants and turn to modern medicines which are all hot (garmi) in their effect. Eastern traditions such as Ayruvedic or Taoist medicine make the same analysis in terms of their own categories. The Muslim tradition finds its authority in the Islamic revelation, and uses terminology and concepts that are meaningful within Islamic civilization, but the principles are universal. Garmi and sardi are essentially the same principles as yin and yang, and the Eastern traditions too understand nutrition as an alchemy of digestion requiring a balance of these universal forces. Traditional Cooking Methods One of the characteristics of traditional methods of cooking is the tendency to employ a small measure of heat for long periods of time. This is particularly the case with grains which were often simmered for days before being consumed. This was not only to soften the grain—a shorter period of cooking would achieve that—but also to make it more digestible and sustaining and to effect profound changes in the substance of the grain. The modern, scientific approach to these matters reports the loss of vitamins and chemical nutrients in long cooking and recommends raw or lightly cooked foods. The pace of modern life also tends to promote quick and simple meals, zipped open and popped into a microwave oven. But in China, India, Japan, the Middle East and in medieval Europe meals were often cooked for long, not short, periods and special qualities were said to have been imparted to foods prepared in these ways. Time was considered an essential factor in nutrition. This is still recognized in the case of foods like cheese and wine, which mature over time, but it is no longer recognized as important to the preparation of grain and vegetable foods. Traditional methods, found throughout the world, typically take a whole grain such as wheat berries, cover in water or broth, add a little salt, and seal in a heavy pot cooked over a very low heat overnight or for several days. Other ingredients may be added at particular stages of the cooking. Jewish cuisine knows several dishes cooked for seven days, including the proverbial Chicken Soup where a whole bird, head to feet, is boiled slowly for seven days until it is reduced to a gelatinous liquid. This is indeed a type of domestic alchemy. It recalls the long, slow cooking methods employed in the transmutations of the alchemist. This is the dimension of which modern science knows nothing. Traditional long cooking methods seek to transmute food, not just warm it through. A similar intention lies behind the Chinese practice of pickling eggs for extraordinary lengths of time, sometimes hundreds of years. The egg is not just pickled, but transformed into a new substance. These methods of food preparation are calculated to manipulate garmi or sardi, yin or yang, and to transform the essence of foodstuffs, not only their crude constituents. Balance The diets of so-called primitive peoples, hunter/gatherers, is characterized by diversity. Neolithic remains preserved in peat-bogs reveal that people then ate a fantastic array of seeds, roots, tubers, grubs, insects, flowers and herbs, as well as fish and meat, all in small quantities. No foodstuff predominated. The advent of civilizations, however, brought the domestication of cereal grains which were used as staples. The diversity of the primitive diet became the array of accompaniments— sauces, dips, salads—to the bed of grain, rice, wheat, barley or maize, that formed the foundation of the meal. The inherent balance of the diverse primitive diet was maintained by devising methods of concentrating and enhancing foods. (The Jewish Chicken Soup, for instance, distills a foraging bird with a naturally diverse diet down to its essence.) Typically, meat consumption was irregular and connected with religious observances; a legume accompanied the grain as a staple source of protein. Rice and the soybean were the nutritional foundations of Chinese civilization, like wheat and the chick pea in the Middle East and rice and dhal or lentils in India. The modern, industrial Western diet, however, deviates from this norm significantly. Meat—devoid of all religious associations and prepared without responsibility to the creature or its Creator— has become the focus of the meal, accompanied by a narrow selection of vegetables and, very often, no grains whatsoever. The side dishes have become the main event. The “balanced” meal described by modern nutrition experts is balanced in terms of crude chemistry but not in terms of the equilibrium crafted by the grain-based diets of the great, traditional civilizations. The Potato The single most disruptive historical event bringing Western diets out of step with traditional diets was the introduction of the potato from the New World. Its introduction coincided with the era of skepticism and materialism and the revolt against tradition. On a practical level, this member of the nightshade family, poisonous in every part except its tuber, became established as a grain substitute, and from that time forth the European diet deviated from the traditional grain-based diet. In some countries princes legislated to ban the traditional grain crops such as rye—disrupting century-old patterns of agricultural life—and to make the growing of the potato compulsory because, as a tuber, growing below the surface of the soil, it was a crop relatively immune to the destruction of invading armies. In some parts there was widespread resistance to the introduction of the potato and suspicion about its value as a food. Modern science reports on its starch and vitamin content, but the traditional mind is more concerned with the fact that, unlike the sunloving (vertical-growing) cereals, the potato grows by division (horizontally) in the darkness of the soil and, in fact, hates the sun so much it starts producing toxins in its skin on exposure to light. Photosynthesis is a toxic process in the potato; in contrast to the grains it replaced it is a plant of the darkness. Bread Nothing illustrates the decline of the Western diet from traditional norms more dramatically than the recent history of bread. The white, fluffy stuff found on modern tables, alleged to be “bread”, bears no resemblance to what was known as bread in traditional times, the “staff of life”. Modern bread is a highly processed product that, if it contains any goodness at all, has had it added in the form of synthetic vitamins and reconstitutions of the very substances destroyed during processing. The history of the decline of bread, however, has largely to do with rising agents and leavens. Traditional breads were either sourdough risen or unleavened. They were heavy and chewy and nutty in flavour and deeply sustaining. In the 19th century, German chemists isolated strains of active yeasts and the era of industrial bread, produced with a uniform rising agent, began. The sourdough was a very local foodstuff. A batter is exposed to the air and to whatever yeasts are in the region and allowed to turn sour. This is then folded into the dough and left to rise after kneading. In this way people developed a very specific acquaintance with the microflora of their district, as the scientists would explain it. Industrial or „German? yeasts were produced in laboratories under controlled conditions; the yeasts were pure monocultures and allowed a uniform end-product that was lighter than any bread made from the comparatively haphazard sourdough method. Further refining of the flour allowed an even lighter bread until it became more of a confection than a bread in any proper sense. Very soon, the taste and texture of traditional breads was forgotten altogether. In more recent times this process has gone even further so that now chemical rising agents have replaced the German yeasts, ostensibly because they do the same job more cheaply and more quickly and because, increasingly, people are intolerant to the industrial strains of yeast. The sacred status of and the mysteries associated with bread in various traditions need not be recounted in detail here. We need only point out what an extraordinary spectacle it is that the decline of bread sketched above could have occurred in a civilization that in ancient times knew the cult of Demeter and the mysteries of Eleusis and, for the last 2000 years, has had the Christian Eucharist, a meal of bread, as its central and most solemn ritual. Drinks A number of other things also deserve to be mentioned as symptomatic of the way dietary changes in the modern West parallel its deviation from tradition in general. Modernity is thirsty; both metaphorically, for a wisdom it no longer even suspects exists, and literally for a diet awash with drinks. Other than the proliferation of McDonald?s restaurants, the global reach of Coca Cola promotion is another emblem of the spread of non-traditional, industrial foods. Traditional diets include far fewer liquids than the typical modern, Western diet. This is largely because traditional diets are grain based and a large portion of the necessary daily liquids is consumed through the liquid absorbed through boiled or steamed grains. There are far fewer liquids and far more salts in meat, however, so the modern meat-based diet requires supplementary liquids, usually in the form of sugared drinks and soda waters or plentiful cups of tea and coffee. In traditional cultures, such as that of Japan, drinks come in small cups and are infrequent. The notion that drinking large quantities of liquid is a healthy practice is non- traditional. Traditional understandings think of the human digestive system, as indicated above, as like the athenor of the alchemist; popular opinion in the modern West holds it to be a type of drainage system that needs to be flushed out regularly. The subtle transmutations achieved by traditional cooking methods are designed to duplicate and advance the processes of human digestion. (In many languages the same word is used for cooking and to describe the processes of digestion.) Many traditional foods, such as soybean foods like the Japanese miso, or dairy foods such as yoghurt, or brassica foods such as sauerkraut, are predigested ferments specially adapted by traditional methods for human digestion. Their benefits, and all but the crudest processes of digestion, are lost in a diet with a high liquid intake. Alcoholic beverages, wine and beer, were once foods, means of preserving juice and grains, again by means of live yeasts and fermentation. Their decline and denaturing is evident from the fact that these drinks today require artificial preservatives to keep them, a task originally and properly belonging to the alcohol itself. Salt Related to the high liquid intake of the modern diet is a profoundly disturbed relationship between man and his most intimate contact with the mineral realm, salt. Salt is the traditional, universal condiment of mankind, essential for his survival and for his enjoyment of flavour, yet in modern nutritional reckonings it is problematical and associated with various modern diseases. This has to do, again, with the refining of the modern table salt and its corruption with free-flowing agents and, again, preservatives (as if salt, like alcohol, was not a preservative itself), and to do with the high consumption of meat and animal-grade salts in the modern diet. Traditional cultures understand better the proper, even sacred, role of salt in the life of man and use it appropriately as a catalyst to enhance the flavour of food rather than to mask its tastelessness, which is the role of salt in industrial, processed foods. Salt is a bond of human community. When Semitic food restrictions forbid the drinking of blood they are, just as much, insisting upon a social order that ensures the proper distribution of mineral or sea salt. According to the hadith, the Prophet Muhammad began and finished every meal with a pinch of salt and praised it as a blessed thing. It is a symbol of purity and wisdom. Without the catalyst of salt the transmutations of traditional cooking methods are without effect. Conclusion Interest in Eastern spirituality among dissatisfied Westerners is often accompanied by the discovery of a different and more traditional type of cuisine. This is a very immediate way in which they can experience something of the traditional order for which they long. The traditional culinary wisdom of the Chinese and Japanese no longer prevails in China and Japan, but it is far more intact than traditional ways in the West. With the necessary adjustments it is still possible to reconstruct many traditional methods and recipes from their current corruptions. This is also true of Middle Eastern cuisine. It has been corrupted with cane sugar (a cold—sardi—form of sweetness, sweeteners normally being hot foods), with stimulants (coffee), nightshades (tomatoes, aubergines) and, as in Islamic culture generally, affluent urban living has led to the over-consumption of meat, but it is still possible to discern the outlines of the traditional diet, based on cereal grains (cous cous, burghul) and legumes (fava beans, chick peas). In rural areas it is still possible to find people cooking rich, grain- based stews using long, slow traditional cooking methods. These are the same areas where traditional craftsmen can still be found crafting their wares and where sacred patterns, derived from revelation, inform every aspect of life. They will tell you in these parts that the fast of Ramadan is not only to remind the faithful of what it is like to be hungry—a sociological and sentimental explanation—but that it has mysterious effects upon the liver and the humors, and they will recommend traditional Ramadan dishes that cleanse the organs of the body and bring visions to the soul. There can be no doubt that modernity brings with it a diet that is not only a product of profane understandings but that makes men profane beings, insensitive to the spiritual and isolated from the living forces of the cosmos. There is more at stake in the foods we eat than refilling our inner test-tubes on a regular basis or of avoiding carcinogens and other hazards, and there is more to food in a sacred culture than simply saying “Grace” with meals. Industrial foods are fodder for automatons, soulless food for the soulless. This is not just a matter of health, but of a relation to the macrocosm, our place as creatures in creation. References Chisti, Shaykh Hakim Moinuddin: The Book of Sufi Healing, Inner Traditions International, NY, 1985. Hauschka R. (Spock M. & Richards M. trans.): Nutrition, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1983. Kamal Dr. Hassan: Encyclopedia of Islamic Medicine, General Egyptian Book Organisation, Cairo, 1975. Roden C.: A New Book of Middle Eastern Food, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1985. Siddiqi, Abdul Hamid (trans.): Shahih Muslim, vols. 1-4. Ashraf Press, Lahore, 1976, 1978. Storl W.: Culture & Horticulture, Biodyanamic Literature, Wyoming, 1979. Visser M.: Much Depends Upon Dinner, Penguin, London, 1986.
- [Above And Below: Correspondence In Astrology](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/above-and-below) - Above And Below: Correspondence In Astrology by Rodney Blackhirst That which is above is like that which is below, and that which is below is like that which is above, to accomplish the miracles of one thing. Hermes Trismegistus Above and Below By virtue of the Hermetic principle „As above, so below,? all things in the sub-lunary realm correspond, as we say, with the celestial order of the heavens. This is the first article of astrology. But this is not a conclusive and self-sufficient correspondence, for the simple reason that the celestial order is itself, like the things of the sub-lunary realm, created and is not, therefore, either a cause or an end of terrestrial manifestation. Whether the „above? of the stars acts as a secondary cause to events on earth „below? is another matter, chiefly of concern to practitioners of the lower forms of the astrological arts, but, more importantly, all things whatsoever, whether terrestrial or celestial, have their cause and end beyond themselves in the Uncreated, and the axiom refers to this as much as to any causal connection between Earth and Sky. The celestial order, that is to say, consists of contingencies as much as the sub-lunary order, so that the correspondence between the two orders does not have its beginning in either of them and any notion that the stars “influence” events on earth can only be part of the story. Although the Hermetic axiom frames a cosmology—Hermeticism taking the historical form of a cosmology able to naturalize itself in several traditional orders, pagan, Christian and Muslim—there is an above that is beyond both Earth and Sky and to which both Earth and Sky are therefore below. Beyond the cosmological correspondence between Earth and Sky the axiom refers to a metaphysical truth, namely the correspondence between the Uncreated Principle and all its manifestations, or between the Divine and the mortal, the Uncreate and the created, the Unmanifest and the manifest. The Divine is the above and the created—including the celestial order—is the below. It is this correspondence that generates the others. Simply put, God?s creations reveal God, and it is only for that reason that one contingent order, by way of participation with God?s relationship to His creations, can correspond to another, bearing in mind, of course, that, from the “higher” point of view, God?s creations are not God Himself and that God is in no way changed or effected by His manifestations which are only, as Plato put it, the best possible likenesses of Him. This is to say that, while an effect has a necessary relation of correspondence to its Cause, it cannot itself be its Cause. The correspondence between the celestial and the sub-lunary realms, therefore, only comes about because the two realms share a common order, and this is because they share a common Source, a single Creator Who transcends them both. The symbol of this relation in man?s visible universe is the relation between the darkness beyond the stars and all visible things. The darkness beyond is above vis a vis the entire visible realm below. The darkness, in this case, represents the Unmanifest and the visible the manifest. This is a simple way of explaining how it is that modern astrologers have forgotten the metaphysical basis of their science; they only see the stars and have no regard for the eternal ground of darkness against which the stars appear. It is in relation to that eternal darkness that the ancient Greek cosmologists said that Hades—the underworld—“extends from the milky way downwards,” since what is under is obviously relative to what one takes as being over. There is, in any case like this, a principle of ratio and proportion involved, and to lose sight of it is to fall into metaphysical confusion and to start supposing that the stars have, in themselves, some miraculous power over the mundane realm. The same comments must be made concerning man when taken as a microcosm. The Hermetic doctrine is applicable in that instance too, although the more exact metaphor to be employed in that case is „As without, so within?. Man encapsulates the universe as microcosm to macrocosm, but this can only be so because there is a common point beyond both realms at which that duality is resolved. One corresponds to the other because they have the same Cause, the same Creator, Who is above His creation below. The Whole and its Parts Another important point that needs to be clarified in regards to this is the relationship between the whole and its parts. It is precisely because God is uneffected by His creations, and by the act of creating them, and so is therefore eternally unmoved and undiminished, that He reveals Himself in both the totality of His manifestations and in every particular manifestation, in the whole and in the least of its parts. This is why, as Blake put it, there is a world to be seen in a wildflower and a heaven in a grain of sand. The particularities of the cosmos are only particulars from the human, which is to say the contingent, point of view. From the transcendent view-point the distinction between universal and particular disappears just as do such distinctions as subject and object. God is One, and if the universe appears to be many, it is not so when considered from the perspective of God?s Unity, which is indivisible. God is fully Immanent in His creation and the whole of His Being infuses the least part of it. This is in no way a “pantheistic” doctrine, because its obverse is equally true, namely that God is utterly remote from His creation and cannot be found in either the cosmos as a whole or in any of its parts; rather, it is simply to state that God is Omnipresent, which is an entirely orthodox teaching, the heresy of pantheism, as is the nature of heresies, affording this teaching an exclusive truth without proper regard for the paradoxes that are inherent in the human point of view. To conceive of God as Immanent without, at the same time, conceiving of Him as Transcendent is, in fact, to fail to recognize the human viewpoint for what it is and thus rob God of His total Otherness and Incomparability. Likenesses and Identification To speak of correspondences is nevertheless not only to speak of likenesses but also, at some level, identification. As God is above, so is His creation below. Plato expressed this by describing the two in terms of divine paradigm and mortal copy, idea and artifact.1 But for God in His Unmanifest aspect, of course, there is no “above” and”below”; no relativisms whatsoever. The only Reality the cosmos can enjoy is His. This is the sense in which the whole created realm is maya, illusion, for it is Nothing in relation to God?s All; yet, to restate the same paradox as before in another way, it is also the sense in which the whole created realm is „Every-thing? in relation to God?s „No-thing,? since the fact that we cannot see God, or touch God, and that He is not obvious to us, but an invisible, incorporeal Being—the fact over which the atheist stumbles—is a necessary quality of God?s Creation too. The consequence of this for the doctrine of correspondences is that, finally, all things correspond to all other things, all is in sympathy, just as all the points on the circumference of a circle are, while distinct from one another from one point of view, finally interchangeable with each other because each is nothing more than a “projection” of the one point at the center. In theory, then, all particular manifestations are interchangeable with all others, all points of Multiplicity are identical to all other points, and in this way they resolve themselves into Unity. We can only say once more into Unity, metaphorically. It is only for convenience?s sake—because we must speak as creatures—that we speak of sequential events, cause and effect, when speaking of the Divine and it is only for convenience?s sake—a purely human convenience—that we differentiate various modes of God?s Being, Manifest and Unmanifest, Immanent and Transcendent. The Nature of Correspondence Given that astrology is a wisdom that addresses a cosmic order of symbolism that is especially adequate as a manifest revelation of the Uncreated—although in theory, following from what has just been said, it is, strictly speaking, no more or less adequate than any other in itself, the adequacy referring only to the human predicament—the astrologer must be constantly aware of these doctrines and their implications. In particular, inasmuch as the astrological art involves discerning correspondences, the very nature of correspondence and its metaphysical basis must be kept in mind lest correspondences are only half-discerned, as it were, which is the road by which a sacred science such as astrology readily degenerates into a superstition and a sham.2 To half discern correspondences is like noticing that two points on the circumference of a circle are akin as points, without also noticing that this is true of all such points and without paying any regard to the point at the center of the circle by virtue of which all circumference points are akin, or, to extend the illustration, it is like noticing that two radii of a circle point in a similar direction without also noticing that this is true of all radii and that the similarity exists only by virtue of the fact that all radii converge in a common center where similarity becomes identity. To use a simple example, it is one thing to note a correspondence between the Sun in the celestial order and a particular manifestation in the sub-lunary order such as, say, a sunflower, but it is another to realize what it is that these two things ultimately have in common and, as well, to realize that, theoretically at least, all manifestations in the sublunary order have a correspondence with the Sun, as with all the other planets. It is never finally enough to ask of what planetary nature is such and such a thing, as if the things of the world could be neatly compartmentalized into seven planetary boxes; similarity points to identity; the real correspondence between the Sun and a sunflower lies in the Being of God and not in the things, qua things; as things, rather, they manifest only difference, which is the difference inherent in manifestation—Multiplicity—itself. This fact explains the experience of all astrologers at a particular point in their development; there comes a time when similarities appear, often in lightning-fast sequences of associations, everywhere, and the astrologer is overwhelmed by a profusion of correspondences that are so broadly interconnected and widely interchangeable that nothing intelligent can be said of them at all; all is confusion. The astrologer may note, for example, that while the correspondence between the Sun and a sunflower is immediately obvious, on further consideration the sunflower, as seen in its yellow petals, its upright „dignity? and so on, partakes of the nature and has the qualities of the planet Jupiter. While these qualities appear to be distinct, he may then note certain things about the flower that could justify describing it as Mercurial, and then as Saturnine or Martial or Venusian or even Lunar. Referring to the sphere of the fixed stars and the twelve zodiacal signs is no better, for sufficient contemplation will eventually reveal that the sunflower “belongs” to and has the qualities of them all.3 This experience is only to be expected. After observing astrological correspondences for some time, the astrologer suddenly comes under the sway, as it were, of a centrifugal attraction towards Unity and Identity. Suddenly, all he sees are similarities that together lead into an interconnectedness that is very quickly beyond being encompassed with the ordinary operations of the mind. This is not an unusual or a profound experience in most cases; rather, it presents itself as a maze in which the mind may become well and truly lost, a period of confusion in which, since everything corresponds with everything else, there is no point in observing correspondences at all. Since the things of Multiplicity are indefinite in number—the cosmic indefinitude being an “image” (to continue with Platonic terminology) of the Infinity of God—this is the experience out of which arises various syncretic „occultisms? that are characterized by a hopelessly confused interconnectedness. On the other hand, it is out of this experience, which is at once a dissolution and a crystallization of possibilities—the solve et coagula of the alchemists—that there arises the opportunity for a true synthesis, which is none other than the experience of the One. It becomes all-important, in fact, to pursue all correspondences to Unity, because it is only by knowledge of the One that the reality of a correspondence can be judged. The Unitive Experience This brings us to the Unitive experience that is, properly considered, the ultimate aim of the contemplation of the symbolism of astrology and the experience that confers upon astrology its sacred status. In a world in which all things finally correspond to each other, without reference to that through which they correspond it is impossible to establish any criterion of truth; on its own and to the everyday consciousness of man the world is an abyss of relativisms that have a semblance of an order that is ungraspable. Einstein was right when he quipped that “the universe is not only queerer than we think, but queerer than we can think” provided we understand by his words that it is merely human thought for which this is the case.4 The Unitive experience—when the sameness that gives correspondences their verisimilitude is realized not in particular cases but in itself, when the world is seen in a wildflower and heaven seen in a grain of sand- necessarily employs a supra-human „faculty,? an intuition. The ratiocincative mind cannot grasp the One since the created cannot encompass its Almighty Creator. Only God (Immanent) can know God (Transcendent). Intuition, on the other hand, is defined as the uncreated faculty that perceives the Uncreate. It is the intuition that perceives the Immanent „now? and „here? in (and simultaneously „beyond?) the realm of time and space. The more fully developed this intuition, the more able is the astrologer to discern true correspondences.5 In the case of the sunflower, to continue with that example, it is the ratiocinative mind that is finally led to the conclusion that the flower?s qualities are indicative of all astrological symbols interchangeably. It is the intuition— “intuition” because it involves a sudden leap out of the confines of time and space -that is capable of synthesizing this profusion of interconnectedness into Unity, revealing the true uniqueness of the flower, which is its image of the “Uniqueness of the Unique.” Being uncreated itself, however, it should be stressed that it may be misleading to describe this intuition as a “faculty”; it does not involve in any way any exertion of the human will; rather it is entirely receptive and in order to “develop” it one must submit oneself to the Divine Will and place onself as a mirror, so to speak, under the rays of Divine Illumination. It is, that is to say, an inspiration, and it is finally inspiration upon which astrology depends, even in the art?s baser prognostic forms. Axial Symbolism The Hermetic axiom quoted at the outset, it will be noticed, explains itself in terms of a vertical symbolism. This, in view of the above comments, deserves some final consideration. If we were to extend it to a symbolism with two coordinates instead of only one, that is, the symbolism of the cross, every „below? is then a horizontal set at right angles to the vertical axis and which the vertical axis intersects. If the „above? is the Creator and the „below? the spateo-temporal cosmos, the horizontal axis of the cross symbolizes the indefinite extension of the cosmos. Considered without any reference to the vertical axis that actually defines it, this „horizontal world? is an endless labyrinth. Man?s spiritual realization depends not upon fumbling around in this labyrinth, but in transcending it, which entails movement upon the vertical axis up. In terms of the horizontal, the point at which the two axes intersect is a center, and developing the intuitive faculty is, considered in terms of this type of representation, a return to that center where, simultaneously, the Holy Spirit descends and the soul of man soars heavenward. It is at that central point, which is, of course, immanent to every point in space and every moment in time, that the full implications of „As above, so below? will be revealed. This type of axial representation is, furthermore, part of the formal symbolism of astrology since these two axes are what the horizon and the meridian represent respectively in the geocentric universe.6 An astrologer “reads” a chart of the heavens in these axial terms.7 The final truth revealed in any chart of the heavens, such charts encapsulating as they do a here and a now (or then), is not to be discovered, however, in either axis but rather in the point at which they meet. Just as the darkness beyond the stars is finally the most profound of the celestial symbols, so the most profound of astrology?s formal symbols is the point at the center of a chart of the sky. There, in natal astrology, is the true mystery of Personhood to be contemplated. It is the Uniqueness of the Unique and Uncreated point at the center of the chart, and not the other configurations of symbols that merely point to it, that the true astrologer “divines.” Standing contemplating the open heavens rather than a chart, this point is within the astrologer himself and to “divine”it in that case is to “Know thyself!” which, as the ancient mysteries taught, is finally to say to God, acknowledging the ultimate paradox of the human state, “Thou art!” ________ 1 See especially Plato?s Timaeus. The Timaeus, by the way, is the true fountainhead of integral Western astrological thought. The world-view of the Locrian described in this work is profoundly astrological. In the Middle Ages this constituted a sacred cosmology; the Timaeus of Plato was the physica, the Book of Genesis the littera. 2 This is clearly the condition of this sacred science in our own time; its modern practice is devoid of solid metaphysical foundations. Jungian psychology and the theory of “synchronicity” have played a conspicuous role in deflecting more serious students of astrology from traditional sources and the metaphysical truth to which their “language” of astrological symbols refers. 3 Zodiacal and planetary correspondences are inherently interchangeable according to the astrological formulae: 3 x 4 = 12 and 3 + 4 = 7. 4 These days it is necessary to add here that this view of the limitations of the human has nothing in common with so-called “Trans-humanism,” a recent cult of science that regards it to be man?s duty and destiny to transcend his biology by the means of machines. They would seek to transcend human intelligence with “machine intelligence,” specifically breaching the man-machine “barrier.” This newly-emerging creed of high-tech scientism is, in fact, the antithesis—a Promethean parody—of the doctrine being outlined here. “Machine intelligence” can only ever amount to the disproportionate exaggeration of some feature or features of human intelligence; it is quite impossible to “transcend” the human condition by such derivative means. Transcendence, rather, lies in participating in a supra-human intelligence from which we are derivative. The distinction is a simple one. Trans-humanism, especially when it boasts that “we can now transcend the human condition as the religions of the world have always dreamed” and such like, engages in systematically violating this distinction. 5 In terms of Plato?s cosmology this amounts to the art of discerning the Similar and the Different. 6 The modern manner of drawing a chart of the heavens is symbolically incorrect. The modern chart is round; the traditional chart was square, emphasizing this rectilinear symbolism. The square, that is, expresses the geocentric viewpoint. The round chart implies a heavenly, not geocentric, perspective. 7 The modern manner of reading a chart of the heavens in these axial terms is at odds with that known to the ancients. Modern Western astrology—largely the reinvention of Theosophists of the nineteenth century—places an undue emphasis on the horizon, the Ascendant/Descendant axis. In ancient astrology it was the “Midheaven” axis that was regarded as most significant and the key to interpretation. The Ascendant, to give a brief account of the traditional symbolism represents the external aspects of the native, the Midheaven the inner. The modern astrologers are baffled by this high regard for the Midheaven in ancient sources since, to their mind, it only represents the “career” of the native. In fact, this is a profanation of the traditional notion of “vocation.” The Midheaven signifies vocation which is, in a traditional order, synonymous with “spiritual path.” The so-called “Equal House System” of drawing a chart—by far the most common method used in modern times—expressly violates the axial symbolism described here. The widespread adoption of the “Equal House System”—in which the cusp of the tenth House may or may not coincide with the Midheaven—is, with the exception of the introduction of the extra-Saturnian bodies, responsible for eroding even a residual understanding of astrology?s most basic symbols among its modern practitioners. Ancient methods, in contrast, were all so-called “Quadrant” systems that begin with the cross of horizon/meridian.
- [Ajahn Chah Speaks (Video)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/ajahn-chah-speaks) - Venerable Ajahn Chah (1918–1992) When one doesn’t understand death, life is very confusing. With thanks to Dhamma Talks and Amaravati Monastery.
- [A Sermon on the Glorious Name of Jesus Christ](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/st-bernardin-name-of-jesus) - Saint Bernadine of Siena …just as water gushing forth from a fountain forms at first a gentle and narrow stream that murmurs softly and sweetly, but later grows into a broad and deep river, so also the Name of Jesus seems at first to be a small sound, a phrase easily spoken, but is at
- [The Uplifting of Sparks in Later Jewish Mysticism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/jacobs-uplifting-of-sparks) - Although for convenience’s sake we shall refer, in this essay, to light as a kabbalistic symbol for the divine, it should be noted that, for the kabbalists themselves, light and the other symbols they use are really more than symbols. They are not mere pointers to the reality; in a sense they are the reality itself. For the kabbalists, light, for example, really exists on high as a spiritual object. It is that entity which is the true source of physical light. Again, for them, the Hebrew language is not simply a convention. The Hebrew letters are the material form assumed by the sacred alphabet on high. God really did say: ‘Let there be light’ (Gen. 1:3) by combining those spiritual forces represented by the letters alef, vav and resh to form the spiritual word for light, or. Echoes of the Platonic ‘idea’ are heard in all this. Edwyn Bevan has shown how ubiquitous is the light symbol in the religions of humanity: from the earliest times, light has impressed humans as most closely associated with our thoughts of the divine.1 Among the reasons for the emergence and persistence of the light symbol to represent the divine are that light dispels darkness and so is a symbol for knowledge, for admission into the mysteries, for the sudden realization of the truth, as in the expression ‘a flash of illumination’. In the darkness something hostile may be lurking. There is danger to life there, making us welcome the safety and security afforded by light. The enemy uses the darkness to pursue his nefarious ends so that light becomes synonymous with the good, darkness with evil. Again, the brilliance of light, its shining quality, is extremely attractive, exercising a powerful fascination in itself, quite apart from its usefulness. Still another property of light, which has made it serve as a symbol in Neoplatonic thought (especially relevant to the world, containing evil, falsehood, multiplicity, and imperfection), can have emerged from the perfect and infinite Godhead. The Lurianic kabbalah is concerned not only with the sefirotic processes but also with that which preceded them—at least, at the stage when the sefirot begin their emergence as differentiated entities from out of the recesses of Ein Sof. The first step in the process is one of contraction or withdrawal—tzimtzum. In order to make room, as it were, for the sefirot, Ein Sof ‘withdrew from Himself to Himsel?’ to leave an ‘empty space’: the primordial space into which, eventually, space and time as we know them emerged. The tzimtzum was bound to be incomplete; otherwise its purpose would have been defeated. Nothing can come into being in the absence of God’s power. The ‘empty space’ is thought of as a circle with Ein Sof surrounding it on all sides in equal measure. So as to prevent a ‘space’ empty of Ein Sof entirely, a ‘thin line’ of Ein Sof ’s light permeates the ‘circle’ but does not traverse it completely. Moreover, a residue of the light of Ein Sof remains even after the withdrawal. This aspect of Ein Sof remaining in the empty space forms the body of Adam Kadmon (Primordial *Originally published in Arthur Green, ed., Jewish Spirituality from the Sixteenth-Century Revival to the Present (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 99–126. 1Edwyn Bevan, Symbolism and Belief (London: Collins, 1962), 110–33. 1 ? Man), now no longer understood, as in the Zoharic scheme, as a synonym for the sefirotic realm but as a stage prior to the emergence of the sefirot, though embracing them in its fullness as unrealized and undifferentiated entities. After the emergence of Adam Kadmon, the sefirot had to be constituted as separate and distinct entities, each with its own function, though infused with the light from Ein Sof. For this to take place two aspects of each sefirah had to be emanated. First, there was required the emanation of the ‘vessel’ of each sefirah, and, second, this had to be filled with light; the combination of vessel and light constituted a complete sefirah with its own separate identity. The process is envisioned in terms of lights flashing from Adam Kadmon and then recoiling. The light first beams downward and then returns, leaving behind a residue from which the vessel is formed. After the formation of the vessel in this way, a second light is beamed from Adam Kadmon and returns, leaving behind a second residue to form the light which fills the vessel, thus completing the formation of the sefirah. These lights stream from the ears, nostrils, mouth, and eyes of Adam Kadmon. Lights streamed from the ears, nose, and mouth of Adam Kadmon and then returned, but this was no more than a preparatory stage at which vessels and lights are united, the ground being made ready for the constitution of vessels and lights of separate sefirot. When, after this, lights stream from the eyes of Adam Kadmon, they strike the residue of the earlier lights that have emerged, the impact removing some of the light so as to form a vessel. The vessels are now ready to receive further streams of light from the eyes of Adam Kadmon so that the lights filling the vessels will produce the sefirot as separate and distinct entities. Now the nearer the sefirot are to Adam Kadmon, the more powerful are their vessels since the lights forming these do not have to travel over such a vast distance as the lights that form the vessels of the lower sefirot; light becomes fainter as it is distanced from its source. Thus, since the sefirot emerge in a descending order from higher to lower, the vessels of the three higher sefirot are stronger than those of the lower sefirot, great strength being required if the vessels are not to be overcome by the impact of the tremendous power of the lights which stream from the eyes. The basic idea behind all this is that there is tension in the whole creative process. Too much of the divine love and power is as ineffective in producing that which is other than God, as it were, as too little. The lights streaming downward cannot achieve the total effect all at once. First there has to be the flash and the recoil to allow the vessels to be fortified in a gradual process. The divine Other can only emerge from concealment in a kind of trial and error, ‘reaching and yet not reaching’ in the language of the kabbalah. When the lights from the eyes of Adam Kadmon streamed forth toward the vessels only the vessels of the three higher sefirot were sufficiently strong to endure the impact. The vessels of the seven lower sefirot, weaker than the others, could not endure the light streaming into them and they were shattered. This is the stage known as the ‘breaking of the vessels’ (shevirat hakelim). Again we have the theme of the control of the divine love in the creative process. Genesis [36:31–9], which tells of the death of the Edomite kings before there reigned a king over the children of Israel, is given a mystical interpretation. The kings who died are the seven lower sefirot, compelled to pass away before sovereignty could emerge. Rabbinic ideas about God creating worlds and destroying them before he finally created this world are similarly laid under tribute to the kabbalistic doctrine. The worlds are those of the sefirot, which had to be destroyed before there could emerge the proper balance. When the vessels were shattered—or, in the other metaphor, when the kings died—the lights returned to their source; but not all the lights returned. Sparks of the lights remained, adhering to the broken shards in order to keep them in being. Furthermore, even the higher sefirot, though they suffered no breakage, fell from their higher place to a lower one. Thus, at this stage everything was in disarray. The higher sefirot were in the wrong place, as it were; and, as for the lower sefirot, all that remained of them were their broken vessels with the sparks attached to them. The whole sefirotic realm needed to be reconstituted. This process of reconstitution is called tikun, brought by means of lights streaming from the forehead of Adam Kadmon. For the sefirot to be prevented from suffering the fate that had previously befallen them, it was necessary for them to be ordered as partzufim, meaning configurations. A partzuf is a particular combination of all ten sefirot. The point here is that while single sefirot on their own are incapable of endurance because the vessels become too weak to contain their lights, when the sefirot come together in a partzuf they fortify one another. The lights from the forehead of Adam Kadmon meet the broken vessels and the sparks which vivify them and also meet the fallen higher sefirot. Under the impact of these lights the partzufim are constituted. But after the reconstitution, things are not exactly as they were before. There is no complete restoration; the partzufim require further assistance before there can again be complete harmony on high. This task of providing the tikun for the partzufim is the responsibility of Israel. There are five partzufim (1) Arikh Anpin (Long Face, i.e. long-suffering); (2) Aba (Father); (3) Ima (Mother); (4) Ze’ir Anpin (Small Face, i.e. impatient); (5) Nukva (Female). Each one of these contains all ten sefirot but represents in particular one of the sefirot, around which the other nine are configured. For instance, Arikh Anpin represents the Keter aspect of the sefirot, in which, as yet, there is no separation of Mercy and Judgment but all is love, whereas Ze’ir Anpin represents the Tiferet aspect, where Mercy and judgment are separate but harmonized. This is the meaning of Arikh Anpin as Long-suffering and Ze’ir Anpin as Impatient or less whole and complete. It must further be noted that the six sefirot from Hesed to Yesod are grouped around Tiferet so that the partzuf Ze’ir Anpin, while containing all ten sefirot (as do all the partzufim), stresses the aspect of Tiferet and the other five. In the total correspondence with the sefirot, Arikh Anpin corresponds to Keter; Aba to Hokhmah; Ima to Binah; Ze’ir Anpin to Tiferet (and the other Eve); and Nukva to Malkhut. There are worlds without number, but, in the main, the Lurianic kabbalah, relying on stray references in the later Zohar literature, speaks of four worlds, one beneath the other, each of which comes into being by means of the sefirotic processes and each of which contains all five partzufim since it is through the partzufim that the divine, sustaining energy is conveyed to all. In descending order, the four worlds are (1) Atzilut (World of Emanation), the realm of the sefirot proper; (2) Beri’ah (World of Creation), the realm of the heavenly throne; (3) Yetzirah (World of Creation), the realm of the angelic hosts; (4) Asiyah (World of Action), the realm from which the finite universe emerges and the finite universe itself. Adam Kadmon is also called a realm or a world, so that there are five worlds, each corresponding to one of the partzufim. Although the five partzufim are in all the worlds, each corresponds to one of the worlds. All creative activity is by means of the special divine name, the tetragrammaton, the four letters of which are yud, heh, vav, heh. These letters correspond to the sefirot thus: yod represents Hokhmah; the first heh, Binah; vav, Tiferet and the other five (the numerical value of vav is six); and the last heh, Malkhut. Keter is too elevated to be represented by a letter but is denoted by the tittle of the yod. There is a further elaboration of the tetragrammaton as the creative power in the universe. The four letters of this name can be spelled out in full in four different ways, as has been outlined in the preceding essay, resulting in the 72, 63, 45, and 52 letter names of God. These four combinations are given the following names: (1) aV (ayin=70; bet=2; =72; (2) SaG (samekh=60; gimel=3; =63); (3) MaH (mem=40; heh=5; =45); (4) BeN (bet=2; nun=50; =52). All four are found in all worlds but they are especially apportioned each to the four worlds in descending order. Moreover, each of them is itself divided into the four so that it is possible to speak of the SaG of aV; the MaH of aV; the BeN of aV and so forth. Similarly, each of the sefirot can be divided into ten so that there is the Hesed of Gevurah; the Hesed of Hesed; the Gevurah of Hesed, and so forth. Again, since each partzuf contains all ten sefirot and all five partzufim, it is possible to speak of the Ze’ir Anpin of Aba; the Aba of Nukva; the Keter of Binah; the Binah of Hokhmah, and so forth. All is relevant to the human task since these complex associations correspond to this or that human act by means of which one can ‘put right’, perform the tikun, for this or the other category on high. Before we proceed to consider the doctrine of the holy sparks it will be helpful to set it all out in diagrammatic form. ? ??The further extremely complex relationships, such as the division into the letters of the Torah, the vowel points, the crowns of the letters, and the musical notes, are part of the whole system, but to examine these in detail would demand a whole volume and would take us beyond the scope of this enquiry. For our purpose it is sufficient to sketch the main outlines only. The Holy Sparks As we have seen, the sparks adhering to the broken vessels helped in the reconstitution of the sefirot into partzufim and the formation of the world of Atzilut, the sefirotic realm. But there was an overspill of these sparks from the world of Atzilut; thus was the world of Beri’ah constituted. The overspill from this world resulted in the emergence of the world of Yetzirah, and, in turn, from this world there was an overspill that brought about the world of Asiyah. The idea here is that fewer sparks are required for the formation of the worlds as they descend; less energy is needed to keep lower worlds in existence, so that as the sparks flash out those which are redundant insofar as that world is concerned spill over to create the next lower world. There is a further overspill from the world of Asiyah and it is this which nourishes the kelipot or demonic forces. In this way the effect of the breaking of the vessels results in holy sparks being imprisoned among the kelipot. It is the human task to reclaim these sparks for the holy and by so doing perform the necessary tikun, assisting the fallen worlds to be restored to their former harmonious state. The reclaiming of the sparks from the kelipot is achieved by rejecting evil, that is, by obeying the negative precepts of the Torah. So far as the highest kelipah realm, the ambiguously holy/unholy world of nogah is concerned, the sparks therein are reclaimed by directing aright the natural drives of the body and so bringing this kelipah into the realm of the holy. Furthermore, in a very elaborate scheme, every detail of the precepts of the Torah is directed towards this or that aspect of the partzufim. Every evil deed not only keeps the holy sparks imprisoned among the kelipot but also sends baneful impulses on high to disturb further the harmony among the sefirot. Conversely, every good deed sends beneficent impulses on high to promote harmony among the sefirot and reclaim the holy sparks. In kabbalistic exegesis, the creation narrative in the first chapter of Genesis does not refer to the emergence of this world but to the emanation of the sefirot and, in the Lurianic school, to the whole process as described. The verse (Gen. 1:2) states that the spirit of God (Elohim) hovered over the face of the waters. In the rabbinic midrash, the name Elohim denotes judgment, sternness, severity. The reference is said by the Lurianic kabbalah to be the breaking of the vessels, the restriction of the divine light, and hence the emergence of severity and judgment, albeit for the sake of God’s love, so that creatures might come into being to benefit from his goodness and share it forever. The spirit of judgment, then, hovered over the waters, that is, the lights were too powerful and the vessels too weak for the process to be completed. The word for ‘hover’ is merahefet. If the first and last letters are detached from this word and placed together they form the word met, ‘death’, referring to the death of the ‘kings’. When these two letters have been removed from the word, we are left with the letters resh, peh, het (resh=200; peh=80; het=8) with the numerical value of 288. The number of holy sparks to be rescued is consequently said to be 288. The significance of this number becomes clearer when it is recalled that the highest of the four divine names, the name ‘aV has the numerical value of 72. Four times 72 (four because there are four divine names—‘aV and the other three—and four letters in the tetragrammaton) is 288. In the extremely bold sexual symbolism that the kabbalists favour, the unification or harmonization among the sefirot is described as zivug (copulation). First there takes place the zivug of Aba and Ima and then of Ze’ir and Nukva (Tiferet, the male principle; and Malkhut, the female principle, personified as the Shekhinah). The male principle, Tiferet, is given the rabbinic name for God: “The Holy One, blessed be He” (kudsha berikh hu in Aramaic). For zivug to take place, both male and female orgasm are required; the male orgasm is described as ‘male waters’; the female orgasm as ‘female waters’. The male waters are attained through the flow of grace and power from above, from the higher sefirot, but (here is the most startling aspect of the whole doctrine) the female waters are provided by humans who send on high the reclaimed holy sparks. The holy sparks provide the female waters so that the sacred marriage can take place. (Again and again the kabbalists issue the sternest warnings against taking this in any physical or corporeal way, but solely as descriptions of complex relationships between spiritual entities in the sefirotic realm). At first it was intended for the tikun and the reclaiming of the holy sparks to be performed by Adam, whose great soul embraced all the souls of humanity. If Adam had obeyed God the tikun would have been completed and harmony restored throughout all creation. But, as a result of Adam’s disobedience, there was a second cosmic fall, repeating, as it were, the original breaking of the vessels. Adam’s soul became fragmented, each of his descendants having a mere spark of Adam’s mighty soul. Thus the Lurianic school thinks of two kinds of sparks. The first are those which fell when the vessels were shattered. The second are the sparks of Adam’s soul. It is not only the sparks in creation that require reclamation, but, in addition, every soul has to assist in its own tikun, that is, in the perfection of that particular spark of Adam’s soul. A vast cosmic drama is being played but with the human being in the central role. Each individual has to engage the dual task of restoring his or her own holy spark, an inheritance from the first father of the human race, and one has to reclaim the holy sparks in creation, both of which are achieved by keeping the precepts of the Torah. (Occasionally it is hinted that the process applies to all the descendants of Adam—not only to Jews—but this is infrequent. The kabbalistic doctrines are addressed primarily to Jews, to whom the Torah has been given, every detail of which corresponds to some aspect on high.) The bare performance of the precepts is not sufficient, however, for the rescuing of the sparks and the achievement of the tikun. The mystical adept must be thoroughly familiar with all the details of the sefirotic map, so that when he carries out the precepts he has the required kavanot (intentions), by which his mind is directed to the particular detail his act puts right. For instance, each festival in the Jewish calendar has its own particular tikun, its special promotion of harmony among the partzufim. As an observant Jew, the mystic will naturally keep the festivals in the way the law demands. But of him much more is required. He must be fully conscious at every stage of his observances of that which his efforts put right on high. The spiritual exercises of the kabbalists are, consequently, in the nature of prolonged meditations on the complex relationships among the sefirot and the partzufim. Some opponents of the kabbalah based part of their objection on this very point, arguing that the kabbalist becomes so absorbed in the kavanot that he has no time to think of God! There is a mystical formula, incorporated into the prayer books in the seventeenth century, whereby the kabbalist directs his heart to the tikun before he carries out any of the precepts. In its fuller form this declaration reads: ‘I perform this for the sake of the unification of the Holy One, blessed be He, and His Shekhinah, to unite the name yud, heh with vav, heh, by means of that Hidden and Concealed One, in the name of all Israel.’ The letters yud, heh, the first two letters of the tetragrammaton, represent, respectively, Hokhmah and Binah (with Keter represented by the tittle of the yud). The performance of the precepts brings about the unification of Tiferet and Malkhut (corresponding to the partzufim Ze’ir Anpin and Nukva), represented by the letters vav, heh, the third and fourth letters of the tetragrammaton. This produces the further unification of the higher and lower sefirot and thus the unification of yud, heh, with vav, heh. It is all brought about by the power of Ein Sof (Hidden and Concealed). And it is performed in the name of all Israel, each individual being only a spark of Adam’s soul. In many versions of the formula there is the addition: ‘And I perform it in love and fear’, representing the love of God, corresponding to Hesed, and the fear of God, corresponding to Gevurah. One who approaches God in love and fear brings into play on high the divine Hesed and Gevurah, united and harmonized in Tiferet. The Lurianic kabbalah also has a strong messianic thrust. The doctrine runs that although Adam had sinned and by so doing prevented the restoration of the sparks, his descendants were given a second chance when the Torah was given to Israel. By their willing acceptance of the demands of the Torah, the Israelites were set to put right the whole realm of the sefirot, restoring the harmony Adam had failed to achieve. The sentence of death, decreed on Adam, was annulled and they were destined to become immortal. But these privileges were forfeited at the time of the worship of the golden calf. The catastrophic breach was repeated and all was in disarray again. The process of reclaiming the sparks now had to be a gradual one; only to be completed in the far-off messianic age. The risk of a third catastrophic failure could only have been avoided by a step-by-step restoration rather than an immediate storming of the heavens. But soon after the Expulsion from Spain, the Lurianic kabbalists seemed to have felt that redemption could no longer be allowed to tarry. Their aim was to hasten the process. They developed the theory that in the age in which they flourished the store of souls from Adam had almost been exhausted. The great ones of the past possessed souls from the head of Adam, with a progressive degeneration then setting in, and the souls of the sixteenth century were seen as deriving from the heels of Adam. Moreover, most of the sparks in creation had already been reclaimed. All that was needed for the Messiah to come was for the few remaining souls with sparks from Adam to rescue the correspondingly few sparks in creation. A final effort of great power was seen to be required in order to rescue the few remaining sparks from the kelipot. The members of the Lurianic school were ascetics, seeking, by holy living, self-denial, prayer, and the practice of the kavanot, to complete the task of berur (selection), the total rescue of all the holy sparks and their complete separation from the domain of the kelipot. The whole process, from beginning to end, is seen by the Lurianic school as one of exile and redemption. The first act of tzimtzum, the withdrawal, betokened a kind of exile, with the filling of the ‘empty space’ a partial restoration. This process was repeated when the vessels were shattered and then reconstituted in the form of partzufim, in Adam’s sin and the giving of the Torah, in the worship of the golden calf and the task of restoring the fallen sparks. It is small wonder, then, that the exile of the Shekhinah and her redemption occupy such a prominent place in the Lurianic scheme. New rituals were introduced by the Lurianists with the express purpose of hastening the redemption, of restoring the Shekhinah to her spouse. There are two aspects of the Shekhinah in Lurianic thought, two partzufim (each of the five partzufim is further divided into two, making a total of ten) known as Rahel and Leah (the biblical stories represent, chiefly, for the kabbalists, the relationships on high, though, of course, the historicity of the matriarchs and the other biblical personages is not denied). The mystic rises at midnight to recite various scriptural verses and prayers intended to restore the Shekhinah from her exile. The passages are arranged in two parts: somber tikun Leah and the tikun Rahel, in which the note of consolation is sounded more emphatically. The custom of rising at midnight to mourn for the exile of the Shekhinah, like other Lurianic rituals, was later adopted by many devout Jews who made no claim to being mystics or kabbalists. On the eve of the new moon, the ritual of the Minor Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur Katan) was introduced for the same reason. In the kabbalah, Tiferet is symbolized by the sun and Malkhut, the Shekhinah, by the moon; the waxing and waning of the moon represents the exile of the Shekhinah and her eventual return from exile. Since the reunification of the Shekhinah with her spouse depends on the reclaiming of the holy sparks, the eve of the new moon festival is made into a day of repentance and confession of sin in preparation for the new effort required in order to bring on the hoped-for event. This practice, too, was later adopted in many Jewish communities. Another liturgical innovation by the kabbalists is the prayer recited before the performance of the precept of counting the Omer (Lev. 23:15–16). There are seven weeks from the second day of Passover to the festival of Pentecost, the traditional anniversary of the giving of the Torah. The tikun of which the kabbalists speak involves chiefly the restoration of the seven lower sefirot. Only these were shattered; the three higher sefirot only fell from their place. Each sefirah contains all the others, so that, as we have noted, one can speak of Hesed of Hesed, Gevurah of Hesed, and so forth. To each day of the Omer period one of the forty-nine combinations is allotted, beginning with Hesed of Hesed on the first day and ending with Malkhut of Malkhut on the last day. Every sin brings in its wake a pegam (flaw) in one of these combinations, but through carrying out the precept the flaw is removed and the tikun process assisted. When all forty-nine days have been counted and all seven sefirot in their forty-nine combinations have been restored, the Torah can be received in purity. The mystical prayer recited each day before the counting reads: ‘Sovereign of the Universe! Thou didst command us through Moses Thy servant to count the Omer in order to purify us from our kelipot and our contaminations. As Thou hast written in Thy Torah: “And from the day on which you bring the sheaf (omer) of wave offering—the day after the sabbath—you shall count off seven weeks. They must be complete: you must count until the day after the seventh week—fifty days” (Lev. 23:15–16), so that the souls of Thy people Israel will be cleansed from their filth. Therefore, may it be Thy will, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, that, in the merit of the counting of the Omer which I have this day counted, there should be a restoration of that which I have flawed in the sefirah (adding whichever of the forty-nine combinations is appropriate for that day). And may I be purified and sanctified in the holiness which comes from on high. Amen, Selah.’2 The idea of the purification as extending even to the sefirotic realm in this connection is based on the Zoharic notion that the counting of seven times seven here represents the counting by the Shekhinah of her days of impurity just as a menstruant must count seven days before she can be with her husband (Lev. 15:28). Ritual purity has been raised to the level of profound mystery. Especially through prayer, with the mind on the special kavanot, each soul can rescue the holy sparks and assist in the tikun process. This is not understood as the same tikun performed repeatedly. Each day has its own tikun. Each prayer is a new tikun. No two prayers, even if they have the identical words, achieve the same result. For example, the disciples of Hayyim Vital describe the tikun performed through the early morning prayer and ablutions (Peri Etz Hayyim, Sha’ar ha-Tefillah, chap. 4). We must first note that, strictly speaking, the world of Atzilut is unaffected by the kelipot and requires no tikun. The lowest of the four worlds, Asiyah, is given over entirely to the kelipot, and it is here that the rescue operation is required. But, through the rescue of the holy sparks in Asiyah, the other two worlds, Beri’ah and Yetzirah, are also put right. It is, in fact, in these that the actual tikun is achieved. However, as we have seen, each of the worlds contains all four, so that there is the aspect Asiyah of Atzilut, where the tikun is required. The kabbalist writes: ‘This is the meaning of prayer and its mystery. Man must rise up early in the morning, relieve himself, and wash his hands. He must put right the four worlds by means of his deeds and his words. He performs the tikun by deed when he relieves himself. The act corresponds to the World of Action (Asiyah) so when he evacuates his bowels he should have the intention (kavanah) of cleansing the World of Action from the kelipot, namely, the Asiyah of Asiyah. After this he should have the intention of putting right Asiyah of Yetzirah. This is achieved when he puts on the small garment with the fringes attached... After this, when he puts on the tefilin, he should have the intention of putting right the Asiyah of Atzilut... And then, when he dons the large tallit and wraps himself around with it, there is the overall and surrounding tikun. Thus far the tikun performed by deed. And now the tikun performed by word of mouth. When he recites the order of the sacrifices there is achieved the tikun of Yetzirah of Asiyah. When he recites the songs of praise there is achieved the tikun of Yetzirah of Yetzirah. This is followed by Kaddish, Barekhu, and the Shema. These correspond to the Beri’ah of Beri’ah, and when the Shema is recited there should be the intention of performing the complete unification.’ The above is a very small example of how the process operates. The purpose of the Peri Etz Hayyim is to put all the kabbalistic doctrines to work by showing the particular intentions required when the rituals are carried out, demonstrating how each detail has its special correspondence in the supernal realms. By means of the whole range of Jewish observances the various tikunim are achieved; each observance, each individual, and each hour and day makes its own contribution to the complete tikun through the rescue of the holy sparks from the kelipot until the great cosmic drama reaches its finale. The Lurianic kabbalah won adherents in many parts of the Jewish world, especially in Italy, Turkey, Germany, and Poland. The Lurianic kavanot were practised by individual kabbalists in isolation, but small groups of mekhavenim (those who practised the kavanot) were also to be found, such as the group in the famed kloiz in the Galician town of Brody. A circle of mekhavenim was formed by Gedaliah Hayyon, in Jerusalem, in the year 1737. In Bet El, as the conventicle was known, prayer with the Lurianic kavanot was engaged in until the present century. Hayyon was succeeded in the leadership of the circle by his son-in-law, Shalom Shar’abi (1720–1777), a renowned Yemenite kabbalist. Shar’abi produced a prayer book, Nehar Shalom (Salonika, 1806), containing all the kavanot. The elitist nature of Bet El has been described by Ariel Bension, the son of one of its members: ‘The center consisted of a small group of the intellectual elite, whose mystic joy lay in the heart of the silence which enveloped them in its seven veils for centuries. Living in a retirement that screened it off from the vulgar gaze of the public, the group pursued its upward course, striking the synthesis between conviction and action. It was a community agreed to live in unity and sanctity. Of those who sought to enter its portals it demanded the attainments of the scholar and the self-abnegation of the ascetic. Thus it missed the masses... In Beth-El joy was attained by no artificial means, but by silent meditation, by introspection in an atmosphere in which music, blending with men’s thoughts, induced a forgetfulness of externals. Each man’s eyes were turned inwards. Seeking to mine the wealth of his own soul he found there the wealth of the universe. Amazed at his own discovery of the hidden treasure the mystic pursues his course upwards until he attains the ecstasy that brings him to the mystery of creation, where sits joy enthroned. In a silence in which alone the soul may meet its God, destroyed worlds are reconstructed and restored to their pristine perfection. And this is the aim of the kavanot—the meditations on the mystic meaning of certain prayers with the intention to bring restoration. In a song which follows the meaningful word, continuing and deepening its meaning—even as a pause in the rendition of a symphony is but the continuation of the music—this wordless song attains that which cannot be reached through the medium of words. And the word of prayer, arising at a given moment from the throats of all Israel, attains its highest form in the silence of Beth-El, imaged in song by the Master seated on his divan and surrounded by silent, thought-inspired mystics.’ The following brief statement of the berurim (the selections) in prayer by Shalom Shar’abi, the second and most famous leader at Bet El, is typical of the practice of the kavanot at this centre. ‘All this applies to the weekdays. But, afterwards, on the Sabbath, as a result of the prayers, those berurim that have been refined and put right on the weekday now emerge once again in order to be refined and put right though the supernal partzufim more than could have been achieved during the weekday, each prayer proportionally, until the Afternoon Prayer (of the Sabbath). Then Ze’ir Anpin ascends to the place of Arikh Anpin and then all the berurim ascend to become combined and put right by means of the aV of the aV and the aV of the SaG of Adam Kadmon.’ Prior to this statement, Shar’abi had observed that the weekday prayers have the effect of refining (performing the berurim) the various stages in the divine process but only as a beginning. On the Sabbath these find their more complete refinements as they ascend even higher. We have seen that the four names, aV, SaG, MaH, and BeN, are present in all four worlds and they are present, too, in the world of Adam Kadmon. Thus, on Sabbath afternoon the prayers complete the refinement process begun on the weekday and continued on the Sabbath, until toward the end of the Sabbath the berurim extend even to the highest of the high, to the aV of the aV of Adam Kadmon. All this the mystic is required to have in mind before he begins to recite the prayer. During the prayer itself, various other complex associations in the realm of the partzufim are required to be in the mind, and these are provided by Shar’abi. The Sabbatian Heresy The movement founded by the false messiah Sabbatai Sevi (1626–1676) and his prophet Nathan of Gaza, despite its antinomian departure from Jewish tradition, managed to win over to its redemptive fervour a large proportion of Jews of diverse social classes in many lands. Historians have been puzzled by the astonishing successes of Sabbatianism; but, however the special factors that led up to the new messianic enthusiasm are to be understood, there is no doubt that the movement’s theology is based on the Lurianic kabbalah, with the doctrine of the holy sparks occupying a prominent place—though the doctrine was completely recast in order to justify the messianic revolution. Nathan of Gaza encouraged Sabbatai Sevi to believe that he was the long-awaited Messiah, maintaining that with the advent of Sabbatai, the tikun had received its fulfilment, all the holy sparks having been successfully reclaimed. A new era had been inaugurated. Even the practices of the Torah were no longer required in their traditional form. Their purpose had been the rescue of the holy sparks, and that task had been accomplished, rendering them superfluous. What had hitherto been sinful was now permitted, even mandatory, as a joyous celebration hailing the completion of Israel’s mission. Sabbatai carried out certain acts, sternly forbidden in the Jewish sources, such as the eating of tallow, a food unpalatable in itself but precisely for that reason an instance of sin not for self-gratification but for its own sake. Sabbatai recited over the tallow the benediction: ‘Blessed art Thou, who hath permitted that which has hitherto been forbidden.’ In the new theology, the soul of the Messiah now occupied a prominent place in the whole cosmic scheme; that soul had been present in a mysterious way even at the time when the vessels were shattered. In the traditional Lurianic system, all the emphasis is on the age of the Messiah, when the tikun will have reached its fulfilment, not on the person of the Messiah (though, as Orthodox Jews, the Lurianic kabbalists obviously did believe in a personal Messiah). When the stormy career of Sabbatai Sevi ended in his conversion to Islam, the hopes of all but his most faithful devotees were dashed. These were obliged to develop an even more radical theology in order to justify his apostasy. With the coming of the Messiah in the person of Sabbatai Sevi, it was argued, all the holy sparks dispersed for the children of Israel to reclaim had already been rescued. In this sense it was indeed true that the mission had been successfully completed. But there still remained holy sparks among the Gentiles, and these awaited their rescue. In order to achieve this final restoration it was necessary for the Messiah to descend into the domain of the kelipot, here represented by Islam, to elevate the holy sparks still imprisoned there. Long after Sabbatai’s death, his still-faithful followers became enamoured of this intoxicating idea of the holy sin, adopting it as a rule for all believers, not only as a task to be undertaken by the Messiah alone. These later Sabbatians outwardly kept all the observances of the Torah but secretly endeavored to rescue by the performance of illegal acts the holy sparks imprisoned among the kelipot. This involved a complete reversal of the Lurianic kabbalah. In the Lurianic scheme it is never permitted to attempt to rescue the holy sparks through sinful acts. On the contrary, refraining from sin was one of the ways in which the sparks were to be rescued and the restoration completed. Hasidism Hasidism, the movement inaugurated in eastern Europe by Israel Ba’al Shem Tov (ca. 1700–1760) and his disciples, claimed to be ‘a new way of serving God’. The hasidic writings are in the conventional Hebrew and Aramaic of traditional Judaism, so that the novelty of the teaching can only be discerned by reading between the lines and by observing how the older vocabulary has been adapted to express ideas that had never been intended. In these texts there is to be found a subtle blending of the old and the new, resulting if not in a completely original doctrine, at least in marked new emphases. Hasidism utilizes the concept of the holy sparks to a far greater degree than the Lurianic kabbalists themselves. But although on the surface nothing has changed, in effect the whole concept has undergone a radical transformation. Close examination of how the doctrine fares in Hasidism reveals several significant points of departure. The extent of the Sabbatian influence is still debated by scholars but it cannot be denied that Hasidism, like Sabbatianism, used the teachings regarding the holy sparks in order to advance its own theological position. The mitnaggedim, the rabbis, and communal leaders who opposed Hasidism, recognized this; although they believed that Luria’s idea came to him by divine inspiration, they still declared Hasidism to be heretical and its adherents sectarians. First, it has to be appreciated that while some hasidic masters did engage in severe denial and mortification of the flesh, their ascetic mode of life belonged to their background as Lurianic kabbalists or to individual temperament. It was only incidental to the hasidic way of life, which stressed the idea of avodah begashmiyut, ‘divine worship through the use of material things’. This involved a positive embrace of things of this world as means towards the greater service of God. The hasidic ideal and the asceticism of a few of the masters were in flat contradiction. Students of religious psychology are able to quote many examples of such contradictions existing side by side in the religious mind. In the essential hasidic doctrine, God is to be worshipped not only by the study of the Torah, prayer, and the observance of the precepts but also, and particularly, by engaging in worldly pursuits with God in mind. Little is made in the Lurianic kabbalah of the holy sparks residing in food and drink and in other worldly things except when the discussion has to do with their rescue through the performance of the precepts—eating and drinking as sacred acts on the festivals, for example, or eating unleavened bread on Passover. Otherwise, abstinence and holy living are the way in which the sparks are rescued. In Hasidism, on the other hand, the holy sparks clamour to be rescued by the Hasid fully engaged in the world. When attending to his material needs for the sake of God, the Hasid is carrying out acts of divine worship. For him to lead an ascetic life is to shirk his duty of rescuing the holy sparks. Traditional Judaism also knows of eating for the sake of heaven, that bodily appetites should be satisfied not out of hedonistic motives but in order to keep the body strong and healthy for the service of God. In Hasidism, worldly pursuit in the spirit of holiness is not simply a means to the noblest of ends; it is an end in itself. ‘For the sake of heaven’ means, in Hasidism, that the true motivation must be to carry out the heavenly task laid upon humanity—that of rescuing the holy sparks. Various theories have been advanced to account for the hasidic transformation. It is likely that the Sabbatian notion of the holy sin, though never adopted in its stark form by Hasidism, paved the way, at least, for the spiritually adventuresome idea of finding the holy in the depths of the material. It is also highly likely that the early hasidic masters, witnessing a lack in the spiritual life of the masses, for whom asceticism could have no appeal, wished to encourage a far greater participation in the religious life on the part of the ordinary Jews. Another factor, no doubt, was the harsh economic reality for the Jews in eastern Europe. Of what use was it to preach that the world was to be lost for the soul to be gained to people who had so little of the world to lose in any event? The lesson needed was that God is very near to all and near to these people in their travail, that the world is shot through with divinity. Downtrodden simple Jews needed to hear that they, too, could draw near to God, even if removed from the niceties of rabbinic learning, by perceiving the divine vitality in all things. The description of Hasidism as ‘mysticism for the masses’ certainly contains some truth. Second, the Lurianic kabbalists were elitists; they alone knew the secret method of reclaiming the holy sparks. Yet anyone with the necessary qualifications was allowed to join the mystic circle in order to participate in the tremendous cosmic engagement. Hasidism was, on the contrary, egalitarian. It was open to every Jew to become a Hasid, no matter how humble his origin and attainments. (The very word Hasid, meaning in the rabbinic and medieval literature ‘saint’ now denoted a follower of a spiritual guide and mentor who numbered quite ordinary Jews as well as the learned and saintly among his followers.) But what Hasidism gave with one hand it took away with the other. All the Hasidim were treated as equals but their lives now revolved around the zaddik, the holy man, the guru-like figure, the righteous leader whose commands must be obeyed even by the Almighty himself. In some versions of Hasidism it is the zaddik alone who can attempt the perilous task of reclaiming the holy sparks residing in the material. But more generally the Hasid, too, is encouraged to embark on the great adventure, yet he can only hope to succeed because he is aided by the zaddik, to whom he owes allegiance and whose mystical aura embraces his followers to elevate their souls.5 Third, as Gershom Scholem has shown, in Hasidism each individual, or at least each zaddik, has his own unique sparks to reclaim.6 There is nothing of this in Luria. True, in the Lurianic scheme each individual is called upon to elevate his own spark of Adam’s soul. In this respect, each individual has his own task to perform even according to Luria. But the sparks found in creation as a result of the breaking of the vessels are in no way peculiar to each individual. All must engage in the task, each in accordance with his soul-root. In Hasidism the two sets of sparks—those belonging to Adam’s soul and those residing in the material universe—are intimately connected. The task of the individual is to rescue those sparks in creation that belong to him, having an affinity with his soul-root. There are sparks in creation waiting for him to rescue them because they are his and he alone can perform that particular task. The development of the doctrine in this way is perhaps due to the renewed hasidic emphasis on the individual as unique. It is because of this that we find many a hasidic tale of a master being propelled by a force beyond his control to journey to distant places for no other purpose than to carry out there some task, otherwise neutral or insignificant, that would have the effect of rescuing the holy sparks held there captive by the kelipot—these sparks awaiting the coming of the one rescuer whose soul-root is close to them in the divine scheme. The princess enslaved in the ogre’s castle will consent to be rescued by the knight in shining armour to whom she had plighted her troth. A few examples must now be given of how the doctrine of the holy sparks is treated by the hasidic masters. The doctrine appears frequently in the first hasidic work to be published, Toledot Ya’akov Yosef, by Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye (d. ca. 1784). In one passage Jacob Joseph speaks of two kinds of intentions when eating.7 The simple intention is to gain strength for God’s service. The higher and more difficult intention is for the purpose of elevating the holy sparks in the food. God has given us the desire for food and drink as an inducement to elevate the holy sparks. This is the spiritual aspect of eating and drinking, concealed by the physical pleasure, just as an honest woman whose face is veiled may be mistaken for a harlot. The zaddik sees through to the reality. His thoughts are not on the pleasure he obtains, only on the holy sparks to be rescued. The grandson of the Ba’al Shem Tov, Barukh of Medzhibozh (1757–1810), is said to have gone even further in his enthusiasm for the idea of reclaiming the holy sparks through engagement in the world. In the work containing Barukh’s teachings, Bozina di-Nehora, there is a remarkable homily on the following text:8 ‘If a man has two wives, the one beloved, the other hated, and they have borne him children, both the beloved and the hated... he may not make the son of the beloved the firstborn before the son of the hated, who is the firstborn; but he shall acknowledge the firstborn, the son of the hated, by giving him a double portion’ (Deut. 21:15–17). The beloved wife represents the service of the one who worships God by studying the Torah and prayer. This is beloved to those who observe it since that is, indeed, how the majority understand worship. Not so the worship engaged in by the zaddik when he engages in worldly things for the purpose of reclaiming the holy sparks. People find it very strange that such an activity should be termed divine worship, failing to see that while the zaddik eats, drinks, and engages in commerce no differently from other men, his intentions are quite different. This aspect is represented by the ‘hated wife’. It is the child of the hated wife, however, who is to receive the double portion that is the right of the firstborn. The result of this type of worship, its ‘child’, is twice as valuable in God’s eyes and must have priority, though repellent to men. Barukh himself conducted a splendid ‘court’ with magnificent furniture, tapestries, and even a court jester. His many opponents were not slow to criticize him for departing from the simple life of his grandfather. Evidently he sought to justify his opulent life-style on the grounds that it was all for the purpose of reclaiming the holy sparks. Perhaps in overcompensation, Barukh roundly declares that the Torah holds this way to be greatly superior to that of study and prayer. Such an extreme view does not appear to have been shared by the majority of the masters, and it is certainly a far cry from the original idea of reclaiming the sparks as found in Luria. The novelty of his approach is acknowledged by Barukh himself when he describes this way of worship as ‘hated’. It should be noted that Baruch speaks of the zaddik, evidently holding that the ordinary Hasid is incapable of having God in mind when following worldly pursuits. According to legend, another hasidic master, Abraham Joshua Heschel of Apt (d. 1825) was almost obsessed with the idea of reclaiming the holy sparks inherent in food. He is said to have eaten colossal meals whenever he could, with his mind on God as he ate, in order to rescue more and more sparks. In his work Ohev Yisra’el, the Apter examines the tradition that ‘inverted nuns’ (i.e. the Hebrew letter nun) are to be inserted in the Torah scroll before and after the small section: “And it came to pass, when the Ark set forward...” (Num. 10:35–6). The traditional explanation of this phenomenon is that the nuns are like our inverted commas and are intended to show that this passage is out of place, that it does not belong here. The Apter, very anachronistically to be sure, but obviously with an eye on the hasidic practices of his day, remarks that the section refers to the stages of the Israelites’ journeys through diverse places in the wilderness. These journeys were necessary in order to rescue, by means of the holy Ark which went with the people and the holiness of Moses and their own holiness, all the holy sparks residing in those unclean places. The letter nun has the numerical value of 50, pointing to the 50 gates of Understanding (Binah). The rabbis (Nedarim 38a) speak of 50 gates of understanding (binah), 49 of which were open to Moses. Even the great leader was unable to pass through the fiftieth gate. In the kabbalah, this is made to refer to the sefirah of Binah, the mother of the seven lower sefirot, which has 49 gates (seven times seven). On their holy journeys, aided by the holiness of the Ark and Moses, the people were able to draw down from on high even the illuminations from the fiftieth gate so as to rescue the holy sparks imprisoned in those places among the corresponding fifty gates of impurity. When the sparks, who had imagined that their cause was lost and that they were doomed forever to remain in captivity, saw the great illumination reaching down to them from all 50 gates on high, they sprang out to meet them and so could be elevated to their source by the holy people. This is the mystery of the inverted nuns and, indeed, this small section is out of place since the true home of the holy sparks was not among the kelipot. It is interesting to compare the Apter’s homily with the Sabbatian idea of the descent of the Messiah into the realm of impurity in order to reclaim the sparks residing there. Possibly in conscious reaction to the Sabbatian doctrine, in the Apter’s homily it is the nun, representing the sacred realm on high, that descends (is inverted). Moses and his people, on the contrary, do not descend and only elevate the sparks after their release from imprisonment through the descent of the celestial powers. The hasidic emphasis on the need to rescue the holy sparks through engagement in the world naturally presented its own temptations. It became all too easy for worldly men to indulge their appetites and ambitions under the guise of sanctity. The apparently worldly zaddik may not have been worldly at all, because his intention is solely for the rescue of the sparks, but who was to know whether, in fact, his motives were pure? Even among the hasidic masters themselves there is a realization of how open to abuse the doctrine is. Ze’ev Wolf of Zhitomer (d. 1800), in his book Or Hame’ir, for example, is extremely critical of the zaddikim of his day who journey periodically to elicit contributions from their followers for their own upkeep. Ze’ev Wolf is opposed to the practice, refusing to believe that these much- travelled zaddikim only journey from place to place for the purpose of reclaiming the holy sparks. After all, he says, beggars too are decreed by fate to go from house to house to solicit donations. Only the holiest of men can be sure that their need for travel is induced by God so that they might rescue the holy sparks. Such journeys may, in reality, be nothing more subtle than the desire to be supported by others without having to work for a living. It may be only the decreed fate of the abject beggar. According to Ze’ev Wolf, discernment is imperative. Not every urge is to be seen as the call of the holy sparks to be delivered. Before responding to the urge, the zaddik must be sufficiently confident in his spiritual power to elevate the sparks. He must know with certainty that when he sets out to rescue the sparks he will succeed in his task because he really is a holy man. Lacking such confidence, he can easily fall prey to self-delusion. Instead of rescuing the sparks, he himself will become enslaved by the kelipot. In a number of passages in hasidic writings it is suggested that the taste of food and drink is the spiritual aspect of that food and drink, the holy spark that sustains it. At the end of the work Noam Elimelekh by the early hasidic master Elimelekh of Lizensk (1717–1787), there occurs this passage: ‘Before washing the hands preceding a meal, recite the penitential prayer of the Ari (Luria) of blessed memory. After eating the piece of bread over which grace before meals has been recited, say: “For the sake of the unification of the Holy One, blessed be He, and His Shekhinah. I do not eat, God forbid, to give enjoyment to my body but only that it be strong to worship God. Let not any sin, transgression, evil thought, or bodily pleasure prevent the unification by means of the holy sparks in this food and drink.” Whenever one eats and drinks, he should have in mind that the taste he experiences when he swallows the food and imbibes the drink is the inward part of the holy sparks which reside in that food and drink; and that, through chewing with the teeth and digesting with the stomach, the inward part of the food becomes refined so that it does not become a surplus wherewith the outside ones are fed. His soul will then benefit from the inward part of the food, the residue becoming waste matter to be expelled for the outside ones. He should also have in mind that as soon as he will feel a need to evacuate his bowels he will not, God forbid, keep the waste inside his body to contaminate his mind and render his soul abominable by keeping the excrement and urine inside his body for a single moment. And, as he eats, he should depict to himself the letters of the word ma’akhal (food) in their ‘Assyrian’ (square Hebrew) form, and should have in mind that numerically they total 91, the numerical value of the Tetragrammaton and Adonay.’ The meaning of this last statement is that the tetragrammaton represents Tiferet while the name Adonay represents Malkhut. The word ma’akhal, equal in its numerical value to that of Tiferet and Malkhut, suggests the idea that by eating in a spirit of consecration the unification is brought about of these two sefirot through the rescue of the holy sparks. From the earliest period, the Hasidim were very fond of tobacco. The complaint that the Hasidim waste their time in smoking is reiterated in the polemics of the mitnaggedim, collected by Mordecai Wilensky in his Hasidim Umitnaggedim. The main reason for this addiction to the weed, claim the Hasidim, is also because of the need to elevate the holy sparks. The argument runs that tobacco was unknown in Luria’s day because the time had not yet come for the very subtle sparks in tobacco to be released by smoking. But now that almost all the coarser sparks had received their restoration, tobacco was sent by God so that the hasidic masters should elevate these ‘new’ and subtle sparks! A similar defense of tobacco is found in the work Otzar Hahayyim by Yitzhak Eisik of Komarno (1806–1874). This author informs us, in the name of his father-in- law that one of the Ba’al ShemTov’s disciples thought ill of a colleague who stooped to retrieve his pipe, which had fallen to the ground during his prayers. On reflection, however, he came to appreciate that there are subtle souls which can only find their tikun through the most ethereal of substances. This is the ‘sweet savor unto the Lord’ mentioned in Scripture in connection with the sacrificial system. Also found in hasidic sources is the idea that smoking corresponds to the incense in Temple times, having the same effect of elevating the holy sparks. Another aspect of the sparks from Adam’s soul was seized on by the hasidic writers. This was the idea that the souls of his descendants were present in Adam’s soul in families or groups, each with its own soul-root. Since Adam’s sin, when the souls were scattered, Adam’s descendants each receive their souls in this pattern of roots. Furthermore, a soul not yet perfected while in one body has to return to another body in order to perform the tikun it requires. The doctrine of gilgul (transmigration of souls) features prominently in the Lurianic kabbalah. The return to earth may be in the form of an animal or a bird, but more often it is in the form of another human being. There are many descriptions among the kabbalists of this or that scholar or saint having the soul of an earlier, perhaps biblical, spiritual hero. Sometimes it is not necessary for the soul of a saint to return to inhabit another body entirely. He may find his tikun by only partial residence in a body that already has its soul. This is known as ibur, impregnation. This means that the soul of the departed is impregnated into another soul, the latter still in the body, for mutual assistance in performing the tikun each of them needs. All these ideas were accepted implicitly by the hasidic masters. Hasidic legend tells of certain masters having the souls of saints who lived long ago and with whom they share the same soul-root. It was also believed that there are sparks of souls waiting to be restored in various kinds of food, especially in fish, which is why the zaddikim made a point of eating fish on the Sabbath. This notion is probably behind the tale referred to above of the disciple of the Ba’al Shem Tov and his pipe. It is as if the souls of the greatest of saints can only bear to return to earth if they are allowed to reside in tobacco, that is, in the refined form of rising smoke, so that when the zaddik smokes his pipe he elevates the soul of the departed and it finds its tikun. This is the reason, too, for the many tales of disciples going from master to master without finding spiritual rest until they discover a master with the same soul-root as themselves. It is also the reason why a zaddik is able to assist his followers. The zaddik knows of his follower’s previous existences on earth and so is able to advise him on the special tikun he requires in his present existence. In one other important respect the development of the holy sparks doctrine in Hasidism differs from the Lurianic kabbalah. In Lurianic thought the mystical adept must not only have in mind the rescue of the sparks but also—indeed, primarily—the precise tikun he achieves by that rescue. When, for example, he carries out a particular precept, his mind must be on the details of the complex relationships he intends to achieve among the sefirot and the partzufim. These are the Lurianic kavanot, referred to earlier. For a reason to be noted shortly, Hasidism urges the mystic to leave the kavanot aside, dwelling only on the intention to rescue the holy sparks. This is certainly the attitude adopted by the majority of the hasidic masters, though some of the masters, as expert kabbalists, still practised the kavanot. They did so, however, as kabbalists, not as Hasidim. The Chabad movement in Hasidism also had a way of its own in the matter of contemplation. In a sense, Chabad is a separate system rather than a movement within Hasidism. Why did the hasidic masters virtually abandon the Lurianic kavanot, even though they believed implicitly that Luria was the recipient of divine inspiration? The answer is to be found in the hasidic idea of devekut, attachment to God. Devekut means that the mind of the Hasid must always be on God, even though such an ideal is extremely difficult to attain. The mitnaggedim rejected the devekut ideal, considering it to be undesirable, since, if the mind is to be on God when studying the Torah, for instance, the texts will never be mastered, requiring as they do sustained and undivided attention. If the Hasid has his mind on God when studying, say, the intricate talmudic discussions about property rights, he is, to be sure, engaging in a devotional exercise, but he is not really studying at all. There is much tension here even among the Hasidim, many of whom were talmudists of distinction, and who evidently limited the devekut ideal to the period before and after study. During their studies, they admitted, the mind must be concentrated not on God but on the subject studied. For the same reason that devekut found a rival in Torah study, it found a hindrance in the practice of the kavanot. How could the mind of the mystic be on God alone when it had to be absorbed in the details of the sefirotic scheme? Of course these details were themselves part of the divine processes, and thought of them was really thought of God. Yet the very fact that there is a system worked out in rich detail with a host of complex symbols tended to create a dichotomy between simply having God in mind and concentrating on the arcane symbolism. Thus, the hasidic emphasis on devekut tended to make the doctrine of the kavanot something of an embarrassment. It was impossible to deny the truth of the sefirotic picture, and yet to dwell on it was to frustrate the devekut imperative. The usual way out adopted by the Hasidim was to postulate that in the later generations, unlike in the time of the great Lurianists, it was no longer possible to reconcile the kavanot with the devekut ideal. Men of these inferior generations have their work cut out in achieving devekut without having to cope with the distraction of the kavanot. To concentrate on reclaiming the holy sparks for the sake of God was enough, it was argued, and the various tikunim were achieved automatically as a result of such concentration. There was no longer any need, nor was it desirable, to have the kavanot in mind. Among those spiritually weaker generations God allows, as it were, the processes to continue and the perfections to be achieved without conscious devotion to the actual details. Some of the hasidic masters even discouraged the study of the kabbalah precisely because devekut is an exercise of pure devotion, not a matter of studying difficult texts. This is why there are so few references in the hasidic texts to such topics as the combinations of the divine names and the associations among the sefirot and partzufim. The Lurianic kavanot are explicitly rejected by the chief disciple of Elimelekh of Lizensk, Kalonymos Kalman Epstein of Cracow (d. 1823), in his work Ma’or Vashemesh, a work studied extensively by the Hasidim and hence as authoritative as can be in a li
- [Enlightenment for Ordinary People](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/kaneko-for-ordinary-people) - Daiei Kaneko Translation by Rev. Kodo Umezu and Jerry Bolick The life that we call reality and to which we are clinging is like rootless trees and grasses, afloat in a moving stream. Life, where are you going? It is, indeed, the Nembutsu that reveals the right direction for the lost life. Click here to
- [A Tree in the Forest: A Collection of Similes ](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/tree-in-the-forest) - A Tree in a Forest A Tree in a Forest A Collection of Ajahn Chah's Similes A Tree in A Forest Offer the gift of Dhamma to others as freely as it has been offered to you. Following the wish of Ajahn Chah that his Dhamma teachings not be sold in any way or form, this book is published for free distribution only. © Copyright Dhamma Garden 1994 First Printing 1994 All rights reserved. Any reproduction, in whole or part, in any form, for sale, profit or gain, is prohibited. However, copies of this book, or permission to reprint for free distribution, may be obtained upon notification from: Yuan Kuang Publishing House No. 11, Lane 888, Sect. 1, San Ter Road Chungli, Taiwan, R.O.C. Printed in Taiwan, Republic of China ISBN 957-8895-05-0 A???? C??? People have asked about my practice. How do I prepare my mind for meditation? ?ere is nothing special. I just keep it where it always is. ?ey ask, “?en are you an arahant?” Do I know? I am like a tree in a forest, full of leaves, blossoms and fruit. Birds come to eat and nest, and animals seek rest in its shade. Yet the tree does not know itself. It follows its own nature. It is as it is. Ajahn Chah Ajahn Chah was born in 1918 in a village located in the north-eastern part of ?ailand. He became a novice at a young age and received higher ordination at the age of twenty. He followed the austere Forest Tradition for years, living in forests and begging for almsfood as he wandered about on mendicant pilgrimage. He practised meditation under a number of masters, among whom was Ajahn Mun, a highly respected and accomplished medita- tion teacher of the time. Ajahn Mun had an indelible influence on Ajahn Chah, giving his meditation practice the direction and clarity that it lacked. Ajahn Chah later became an accomplished meditation teacher in his own right, sharing his realization of the Dhamma with those who sought it. ?e essence of his teaching was rather simple: be mindful, don’t hang on to anything, let go and surrender to the way things are. Ajahn Chah passed away in peace after a long bout of illness on January 16, 1992, at his home monastery, Wat Pah Pong, in Ubon Ratchatani. For more information on books on Ajahn Chah write to: Wat Pah Nanachat, Bahn Bung Wai, Warinchamrab, Ubol Rajathani, ?ailand. Editor’s Note Due to popular demand, we have decided to separate the English and Mandarin parts of the original bilingual publications of A Tree in a Forest, Vols. I & II, and publish them under separate covers. Each new language edition has been divided into two parts: Part I consists of the 75 similes that appeared in the first volume of A Tree in a Forest, and Part II consists of the 108 similes that appeared in the second volume. v Foreword ?e teachings of Ajahn Chah were originally made available to the English-speaking public by the efforts of his Western disciples who were able to translate from ?ai or Lao, the languages that Ajahn Chah taught in. Although for some time now these English publica- tions have been circulating in Chinese-speaking communities, partic- ularly in Singapore and Malaysia, and more recently in Taiwan, they have remained accessible only to those with an adequate knowledge of the English language. ?ese readers, inspired by Ajahn Chah’s teach- ings, have often expressed regret that those among their compatriots with little or no knowledge at all of English shouldn’t have the chance to benefit from the wisdom of Ajahn Chah’s words. For this reason, a joyfully willing and dedicated group made up of members from both the Buddhist monastic community and laity, decided to translate the works of Ajahn Chah. ?ey come from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia, and all are blessed with the facility to work in both the English and Chinese languages. Also, and more importantly, they all have adequate experience and understanding of the Dhamma coupled with the “feel” and genuine appreciation of Ajahn Chah’s teachings. It is a credit to their goodness and sincere wish to spread the Dhamma in whatever way they can, that this work is now in your hands. We would like to acknowledge gratitude to all who took part in any aspect of the production of this book, be it designing, proofread- ing, copying, contributing toward the cost of its printing, and so on. May the Light of the Triple Gem continue to shine in their hearts and give them the peace and happiness they deserve. You will note that no one’s name has been mentioned and none given any special credit. ?is is just a way of following Ajahn Chah’s teaching of “not trying to be anything: not an arahant, not a bodhi- satta, nothing...” not even a translator. A ???????? vi Translators’ Note It is said that if a person should find a bright star, he has no right to put it into his pocket and keep the light all to himself, but should bring it out and let it shine for the good of everyone. For this reason, we are pleased that we have been able to take part in translating Ajahn Chah’s teachings into Chinese so that others, as well, may benefit from the light of wisdom that shines from his Dhamma talks. Translating the works of Ajahn Chah has not been an entirely easy task. ?ere ran the risk of using an over-literal approach which could sometimes end up sounding clumsy, or using a freer approach which although would read more smoothly, could turn out to be less accurate. ?ere was too the risk of sounding too academic which is not at all the style of Ajahn Chah. He himself read very little. In fact, when once asked which books of Buddhism he would recommend people to read, he replied, “Only one.” He then proceeded to point to his heart. So, each of us has had to compromise in different ways, but not in a way that has sacrificed the clear simplicity of Ajahn Chah’s talks nor their profound meaning. If the Dhamma “star” of Ajahn Chah has lost some of its original luster in the translation process, we hum- bly apologise. Yet we cannot help but feel that it is better to have a star out in the open to shine on everyone than for it to be shining, be it ever so brightly, in somebody’s pocket. In the end, there is never a best or last translation of anyone’s works, only different styles. As long as the essential meaning of what is being translated is captured and conveyed effectively, that is what matters. To you holding this book in your hands, even if it be only a mere glimmer of light that you catch from that “star” of Dhamma which shone so brightly from Ajahn Chah’s heart, and that glimmer of light should bring direction and inspiration into your life, we will feel that we have accomplished our task. T?? ??????????? vii Introduction Ajahn Chah reminded us that the Buddha himself could only point out the way and could not do the practice for us, be- cause, the truth is something that cannot be put into words or given away. “All the teachings,” Ajahn Chah taught, “are merely similes and comparisons, means to help the mind see the truth. If we establish the Buddha within our mind, then we see everything, we contemplate everything, as no different from ourselves.” Many of the similes that Ajahn Chah himself used to teach came out of his vast experience of living in the forest. His practice was simply to watch, all the while being totally open and aware of everything that was happening both inside and outside himself. He would say that his practice was nothing special. He was, in his own words, like a tree in a forest. “A tree is as it is,” he’d say. And Ajahn Chah was as he was. But out of such “nothing specialness” came a profound understanding of himself and the world. Ajahn Chah used to say, “?e Dhamma is revealing it- self in every moment, but only when the mind is quiet can we understand what it is saying, for the Dhamma teaches without words.” Ajahn Chah had this uncanny ability to take that wordless Dhamma and convey its truth to his listeners in the form of a simile that was fresh, easy to follow, sometimes humorous, sometimes poetic, but always striking a place in the heart where it would jar or inspire the most: “We are like mag- gots; life is like a falling leaf; our mind is like rain water.” viii ?e teachings of Ajahn Chah teem with similes and com- parisons like these. We thought it would be a good idea to col- lect them all in the form of a book as a source of inspiration for those who may want some respite from the “heat of the world” and seek some rest in the cool and abundant shade of “a tree in the forest.” (?ese similes have been gleaned from the following publications: Bodhinyana, A Taste of Freedom, Our Real Home, Samadhibhavana, Living Dhamma, Food for the Heart, A Still Forest Pool, and from a recently published book entitled Vener- able Father, A Life With Ajahn Chah, that was written by Paul Breiter.) In the olden days, they taught that we should gradually, ca-a-arefully gather in the net, feel our way with it, with- out losing it. ?is is how we practise. F???????? S????? A???? C??? ix C??????? page A???? C??? ................................................................................. v E?????’? N??? ............................................................................. v F??????? ................................................................................... vi T??????????’ N??? .............................................................. vii I??????????? ........................................................................ viii P??? I 1 A?????? W??????? ....................................................... 17 2 B????? P??? ...................................................................... 17 3 B???? M?? ......................................................................... 18 4 B????? ?? M??????? .................................................... 18 5 C???? P?????? ................................................................ 19 6 C???? ................................................................................... 20 7 C?????? 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M?????? ........................................... 102 xiv 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 P???? ?? C??? ............................................................. 103 P??????? F???? T???? ........................................... 103 P???????? I???????? ............................................... 104 P??????? P?? ............................................................... 104 R????? T???? ............................................................... 105 R??-H?? C??? ? B??? ........................................... 106 R??????? M????? ..................................................... 106 R????? ? S?????? ..................................................... 107 R??? .................................................................................. 107 S??? ? S??? .................................................................. 107 S???????? .................................................................... 108 S??????? ......................................................................... 108 S??????? ?? Y??? F??? .......................................... 109 S??????? H???? ....................................................... 110 S???? ............................................................................... 110 S???? D?????? ........................................................... 110 S???? M???? .............................................................. 111 S???? P?????? ............................................................ 111 T??? R??????? .......................................................... 111 T???? ? B???? ............................................................ 112 T?????? ? M???????? ........................................... 112 T?????? W???? N?? ................................................ 113 T??? .................................................................................. 113 T????G??????O??????...................................113 V????? .............................................................................. 114 V??? ................................................................................... 114 V?????? .......................................................................... 115 W???? ?? ?? U?? ...................................................... 115 W????-B?????? .......................................................... 116 W??? ? O?????? ..................................................... 116 W????? L?? ................................................................ 117 W???? R??? ............................................................... 117 xv Part I We have to talk about the Dhamma like this, using similes, because the Dhamma has no form. Is it square or is it round? You can’t say. ?e only way to talk about it is through similes like these. A???? C??? A?????? W??????? When we have no real home, we’re like an aimless wanderer out on the road, going this way for a while and then that way, stopping for a while and then setting off again. Until we return to our real home, whatever we do we feel ill-at-ease, just like somebody who’s left his village to go on a journey. Only when he gets home again can he really relax and be at ease. Nowhere in the world is any real peace to be found. ?at’s the nature of the world. Look within yourself and find it there instead. When we think of the Buddha and how truly he spoke, we feel how worthy he is of reverence and respect. Whenever we see the truth of some thing, we see his teachings, even if we’ve never actually practised Dhamma. But even if we have knowledge of the teaching, have studied and practised them, but still have not seen their truth, then we’re still homeless like the aimless wanderer. B????? P??? When you see things in the world like banana peels that have no great value for you, then you’re free to walk in the world without being moved, without being bothered, without being hurt in any way by all of the various kinds of things that come and pass away, whether pleasant or unpleasant. ?is is the path that leads you to freedom. 17 B???? M?? Both the body and mind are constantly arising and ceasing, conditions are in a state of constant turmoil. ?e reason we can’t see this in line with the truth is because we keep believ- ing the untrue. It’s like being guided by a blind man. How can we travel with him in safety? A blind man will only lead us into forests and thickets. How could he lead us to safety when he can’t see? In the same way, our mind is deluded by condi- tions, creating suffering in the search for happiness, creating difficulty in the search for ease. Such a mind can have only difficulty and suffering. Really we want to get rid of suffering and difficulty, but instead we create those very things. All we can do is complain. We create bad causes, and the reasons we do so is because we don’t know the truth of appearances and conditions and try to cling to them. B????? ?? M??????? We can compare practice to a bottle of medicine a doctor leaves for his patient. On the bottle are written detailed instructions on how to take the medicine, but no matter how many hun- dred times the patient may read the directions, he is bound to die if that is all he does. He will gain no benefit from the medi- cine. And before he dies, he may complain bitterly that the doctor wasn’t any good, that the medicine didn’t cure him. He 18 will think that the doctor was a fake or that the medicine was worthless, yet he had only spent his time examining the bottle and reading the instructions. He hadn’t followed the advice of the doctor and taken the medicine. However, if the patient had actually followed the doctor’s advice and taken the medicine regularly as prescribed, he would have recovered. Doctors prescribe medicine to eliminate diseases from the body. ?e Teachings of the Buddha are prescribed to cure diseases of the mind and to bring it back to its natural healthy state. So the Buddha can be considered to be a doctor who pre- scribes cures for the illnesses of the mind which are found in each one of us without exception. When you see these illnesses of the mind, does it not make sense to look to the Dhamma as support, as medicine to cure your illnesses? C???? P?????? When we have contemplated the nature of the heart many times, then we will come to understand that this heart is just as it is and can’t be otherwise. We will know that the heart’s ways are just as they are. ?at’s its nature. If we see this clearly, then we can detach from thoughts and feelings. And we don’t have to add on anything more if we constantly tell ourselves that “that’s just the way it is.” When the heart truly understands, it lets go of everything. ?inking and feeling will still be there, but that very thinking and feeling will be deprived of power. 19 It’s like at first being annoyed by a child who likes to play in ways that annoy us so much that we scold or spank him. But later we understand that it’s natural for a child to play and act like that, so we leave him alone. We let go and our troubles are over. Why are they over? Because we now accept the natural ways of children. Our outlook has changed and we now accept the true nature of things. We let go and our heart becomes more peaceful. We now have right understanding. C???? Mental activity is like a deadly poisonous cobra. If we don’t interfere with a cobra, it simply goes its own way. Even though it may be extremely poisonous, we are not affected by it. We don’t go near it or take hold of it, and so it doesn’t bite us. ?e cobra does what is natural for a cobra to do. ?at’s the way it is. If you are clever, you’ll leave it alone. Likewise, you let be that which is not good — you let it be according to its own nature. You also let be that which is good. Don’t grab onto liking and disliking, just as you wouldn’t interfere with the cobra. One who is clever will have this kind of attitude towards the various moods that arise in his mind. When goodness arises, we let it be good. We understand its nature. In the same way, we let be the not-good. We let it be according to its nature. We don’t take hold of it because we don’t want anything. We don’t want evil. We don’t want good. We don’t want heaviness 20 nor lightness, happiness nor suffering. When our wanting is at an end, peace is firmly established. C?????? S????? Desire is a defilement, but we must first have desire in order to start practising the Way. Suppose you went to buy coco- nuts at the market and while carrying them back someone asked: “Why did you buy those coconuts?” “I bought them to eat.” “Are you going to eat the shells too?” “Of course not!” “I don’t believe you. If you’re not going to eat the shells, then why did you buy them?” Well, what do you say? How are you going to answer that question? We practise with desire to begin with. If we didn’t have desire, we wouldn’t practise. Contemplating in this way can give rise to wisdom, you know. For example, those coconuts: Are you going to eat the shells as well? Of course not. ?en why do you take them? ?ey’re useful for wrapping up the coco- nuts in. If after eating the coconuts, you throw the shells away, there is no problem. Our practice is like this. We’re not going to eat the shells, but it’s not yet time to throw them away. We keep them first, just like we do with desire. ?is is how the practice is. If some- 21 body wants to accuse us of eating coconut shells, that’s their business. We know what we’re doing. C?????? At first, we train the body and speech to be free of unwhole- someness which is virtue. Some people think that to have virtue you must memorize Pali phrases and chant all day and all night, but really all you have to do is make your body and speech blameless, and that’s virtue. It’s not so difficult to un- derstand. It’s just like cooking food — put in a little bit of this and a little bit of that till it’s just right and it’s delicious. And once it is delicious, you don’t have to add anything else to it. ?e right ingredients have already been added. In the same way, taking care that our actions and speech are proper will give us delicious virtue — virtue that is just right. C???? M?? Suppose one morning, you’re walking to work and a man yells insults at you. As soon as you hear his insults, your mind changes from its usual state. You don’t feel so good. You feel angry and hurt. You want to get even! A few days later, another man comes to your house and tells you, “Hey, that man who abused you the other day, he’s crazy! Has been for years! He abuses everybody like that. No- body takes notice of anything he says.” As soon as you hear this, 22 you are suddenly relieved. ?at anger and hurt that you’ve pent up within you all these days melt away completely. Why? Be- cause now you know the truth. Before, you didn’t. You thought that man was normal, so you were angry at him and that caused you to suffer. As soon as you found out the truth, however, eve- rything changed: “Oh, he’s mad! ?at explains everything!” When you understand this, you feel fine because you know for yourself. Having known, then you can let go. If you don’t know the truth, you cling right there. When you thought that the man who abused you was normal, you could have killed him. But when you found out the truth, that he’s mad, you felt much better. ?is is knowledge of the truth. Someone who sees the Dhamma has a similar experience. When attachment, aversion and delusion disappear, they disap- pear in the same way. As long as we don’t know these things, we think, “What can I do? I have so much greed and aver- sion.” ?is is not clear knowledge. It’s just the same as when we thought the madman was sane. When we finally see that he was mad all along, we’re relieved of worry. No one could show you this. Only when the mind sees for itself, can it uproot and relinquish attachment. C?? ?? W???? Many of those who come to see me have a high standing in the community. Among them are merchants, college graduates, teachers, and government officials. ?eir minds are filled with 23 opinions about things. ?ey are too clever to listen to others. It is like a cup of water. If a cup is filled with stale, dirty water, it is useless. Only after the old water is thrown out can the cup become useful. You must empty your minds of opinions, then you will see. Our practice goes beyond cleverness and stupidity. If you think that you are clever, wealthy, important, or an ex- pert in Buddhism, you cover up the truth of non-self. All you will see is self — I and mine. But Buddhism is letting go of self. ?ose who are too clever will never learn. ?ey must first get rid of their cleverness, first empty their “cup.” D?? ?e training in concentration is practice to make the mind firm and steady. ?is brings about peacefulness of mind. Usu- ally our minds are moving and restless, hard to control. ?e mind follows sense distractions wildly, just like water flowing this way and that. Men, though, know how to control water so that it is of greater use to mankind. Men are clever. ?ey know how to dam water, make large reservoirs and canals — all of this merely to channel water and make it more useable, so that it doesn’t run wild and eventually settle down into a few low spots, its usefulness wasted. So, too, the mind which is dammed and controlled, trained constantly, will be of immeasurable benefit. ?e Buddha himself taught, “?e mind that has been controlled brings true happiness, so train your minds well for the highest 24 benefits.” Similarly, the animals we see around us — elephants, horses, buffalos, and so on — must be trained before they can be useful for work. Only after they have been trained is their strength of benefit to us. In the same way, the mind that has been trained will bring many times the blessings of that of an untrained mind. ?e Buddha and his Noble Disciples all started out in the same way as us — with untrained minds. But, afterwards, look how they became the subjects of reverence for us all. And see how much benefit we can gain from their teachings. Indeed see what benefits have come to the entire world from these men who had gone through the training of the mind to reach the freedom beyond. ?e mind controlled and trained is better equipped to help us in all professions, in all situations. ?e disciplined mind will keep our lives balanced, make work easier, and develop and nurture reason to govern our actions. In the end our happiness will increase accordingly as we follow the proper mind training. D??? H??? Most people just want to perform good deeds to make merit, but they don’t want to give up wrongdoing. It’s just that “the hole is too deep. Suppose there was a hole and there was something at the bottom of it. Now anyone who put his hand into the hole and didn’t reach the bottom would say the hole was too deep. If a 25 hundred or a thousand people put their hands down that hole, they’d all say the hole was too deep. No one would say that his arm was too short! We have to come back to ourselves. We have to take a step back and look at ourselves. Don’t blame the hole for being too deep. Turn around and look at your own arm. If you can see this, then you will make progress on the spiritual path and will find happiness. D???? C?????? It is only natural that when we put on dirty clothes and our bodies are dirty that our minds, too, will feel uncomfortable and depressed. However, if we keep our bodies clean and wear clean, neat clothes, it makes our minds light and cheerful. So, too, when morality is not kept, our bodily actions and speech are dirty, and this is a cause for making the mind unhappy, distressed, and heavy. We are separated from right practice and this prevents us from penetrating into the essence of the Dhamma in our minds. ?e wholesome bodily actions and speech themselves depend on the mind properly trained, since mind orders body and speech. ?erefore, we must con- tinue to practice by training our minds. D??????? G???? How can you find right understanding? I can answer you sim- ply by using this glass of water I am holding. It appears to us as 26 clean and useful, something to drink from and keep for a long time. Right understanding is to see this as broken glass, as if it has already been shattered. Sooner or later, it will be shattered. If you keep this understanding while you are using it — that all it is — is a combination of elements which come together in this form and then break apart — then no matter what happens to the glass, you will have no problem. Similarly, the body is like the glass. It is also going to break apart and die. You have to understand that. Yet when you do, it doesn’t mean you should go and kill yourself, just as you shouldn’t take the glass and break it or throw it away. ?e glass is something to use until it falls apart in its own natural way. Similarly, the body is a vehi- cle to use until it goes its own way. Your task is to see what the natural way of things is. ?is understanding can make you free in all the changing circumstances of the entire world. D???? Anyone attached to the senses is like a drunk whose liver is not yet destroyed. He doesn’t know when he has had enough. He continues to indulge and drink carelessly. He’s caught and later suffers illness and pain. D??? Your practice is like raising a duck. Your duty is to feed it and give it water. If it grows fast or slow is the duck’s business, not 27 yours. Let it go and just do your own work. Your business is to practise. If it’s fast or slow, just know it. Don’t try to force it. ?is kind of practice has a good foundation. E???? S???? People want to go to nibbana but when you tell them that there is nothing there, they begin to have second thoughts. But there’s nothing there, nothing at all! Look at the roof and floor here. ?ink of the roof as a “becoming” and the floor as a “becoming” too. You can stand on the roof and you can stand on the floor, but in the empty space between the roof and the floor there is no place to stand. Where there is no becoming, that’s where there’s emptiness, and to put it bluntly, we say that nibbana is this emptiness. People hear this and they back up a bit. ?ey don’t want to go. ?ey’re afraid that they won’t see their children or relatives. ?at’s why whenever we bless the laity by saying, “May you have long life, beauty, happiness and strength,” they be- come very happy. But if you start talking about letting go and emptiness they don’t want to hear about it. But have you ever seen a very old person with a beautiful complexion or a lot of strength or a lot of happiness? No! But we say, “Long life, beauty, happiness and strength,” and they are all pleased. ?ey’re attached to becoming, to the cycle of birth and death. ?ey prefer to stand on the roof or on the floor. Few are they who dare to stand in the empty space between. 28 F????? If you want to find Dhamma, it has nothing to do with the for- ests or the mountains or the caves. It’s only in the heart. It has its own language of experience. ?ere is a great difference be- tween concepts and direct experience. With a glass of hot water, whoever puts his finger into it will have the same experience — hot — which can be called by many words in different lan- guages. Similarly, whoever looks deeply into the heart will have the same experience, no matter what his nationality, culture, or language may be. If in your heart you come to that taste of truth, of Dhamma, then you become like one big family — like mother and father, sisters and brothers — because you’ve tasted that essence of the heart which is the same for all. F????????? Our defilements are like fertilizer for our practice. It’s the same as taking filthy stuff like chicken manure and buffalo dung to fertilize our fruit trees, so that the fruit will be sweet and abundant. In suffering, there is happiness; in confusion there is calm. F??? Nothing happens immediately, so in the beginning we can’t see any results from our practice. ?is is like the example that I have often given you of the man who tries to make fire by rub- 29 bing two sticks together. He says, “?ey say there’s fire here!” He then begins rubbing energetically. He’s very impetuous. He rubs on and on, but his impatience doesn’t end. He wants to have that fire, but the fire just doesn’t come, so he gets discour- aged and stops to rest for a while. He starts again, but by then the initial heat he had has disappeared, so the going is slow. He just doesn’t keep at it long enough. He rubs and rubs until he is tired and then stops altogether. Not only is he tired, but he becomes more and more discouraged. “?ere’s no fire here!” he finally decides and gives up completely. Actually he was doing the work, but there wasn’t enough heat to start the fire. ?e fire was there all the time, but he didn’t carry on to the end. Until we are able to reach peace, the mind will continue as before. For this reason the teacher says, “Just keep on doing it. Keep on with the practice!” Maybe we think, “If I don’t, yet understand, how can I do it?” Until we are able to practise properly, wisdom won’t arise. So we say just keep on with it. If we practise without stopping, we’ll begin to think about what we are doing, and consider our practice. F??? We don’t want desire, but if there is no desire why practise? We must have desire to practise. Wanting and not-wanting are both defilements, both are problems, delusions, lacking wis- dom. Buddha had desire too. It’s there all the time, only a con- dition of the mind. ?ose with wisdom, however, have desire 30 but no attachment. Our desires are like catching a big fish in a net — we must wait until the fish loses strength and then we can catch it easily. But all the time we keep on watching it so that it doesn’t escape. F??? ??? F??? If you attach to the senses, you’re the same as a fish caught on a hook. When the fisherman comes, struggle all you want, but you can’t get loose. Actually you’re not caught like a fish, but more like a frog. A frog gulps down the whole hook right to its guts. A fish just gets it caught in its mouth. F??? T??? If you see clearly the harm and the benefit of something, you won’t have to wait for others to tell you about it. Consider the story of the fisherman who finds something in his fish trap. He knows something is in there. He can hear it flopping about inside. ?inking it’s a fish, he reaches his hand into the trap, only to find a different kind of animal. He can’t see it, so he’s not sure what it is. It could be an eel, but it could also be a snake. If he throws it away, he may regret it. It could be an eel, something nice for dinner. On the other hand, if he keeps on holding onto it and it turns out to be a snake, it may bite him. He’s just not sure. But his desire is so strong that he holds on, just in case it’s an eel. ?e minute he brings it out and sees that 31 it’s a snake, however, he doesn’t hesitate to fling it away from him. He doesn’t have to wait for someone to call out, “Hey, it’s a snake! Let go!” ?e sight of the snake tells him what to do more clearly than words could do. Why? Because he sees the danger — snakes can bite and make you very sick or kill you. Who has to tell him about that? In the same way, if we practise until we see things as they are, we won’t meddle with things that are harmful. F???????? Our practice of contemplation will lead us to understanding. Let us take the example of a fisherman pulling in his net with a big fish in it. How do you think he feels about pulling it in? If he’s afraid that the fish will escape, he’ll rush and start to strug- gle with the net, grabbing and tugging at it. Before he knows it, the big fish has escaped. ?e fisherman was trying too hard. In the olden days, they taught that we should do it grad- ually, carefully gathering it in without losing it. ?is is how it is in our practice. We gradually feel our way with it, carefully gathering it in without losing it. Sometimes it happens that we don’t feel like doing it. Maybe we don’t want to look, or maybe we don’t want to know, but we keep on with it. We continue feeling for it. ?is is the practice. If we feel like doing it, we do it. If we don’t feel like doing it, we do it just the same. We just keep on doing it. If we are enthusiastic about our practice, the power of our faith will give energy to what we are doing. But at this 32 stage, we are still without wisdom. Even though we are very energetic, we will not derive much benefit from our practice. We may continue with it for a long time and a feeling will arise that we are not going to find the Way. We may feel that we cannot find peace, or that we are not sufficiently equipped to do the practice. Or maybe we feel that this Way just isn’t pos- sible any more. So we give up! At this point, we must be very, very careful. We must use patience and endurance. It’s just like pulling in the big fish — we gradually feel our way with it, we carefully pull it in. ?e struggle won’t be too difficult, so we continue to pull it in without stopping. Eventually, after some time, the fish becomes tired and stops fighting and we’re able to catch it eas- ily. Usually this is how it happens. We practise gradually and carefully gathering it together. It’s in this manner that we do our contemplation. F????????? In Buddhism we are endlessly hearing about letting go and about not clinging to anything. What does this mean? It means to hold but not to cling. Take this flashlight, for example. We wonder: “What is this?” So we pick it up: “Oh, it’s a flashlight.” ?en we put it down again. We hold things in this way. If we didn’t hold anything at all, what could we do? We couldn’t do walking med- itation or anything else, so we must hold things first. It’s wanting, yes, that’s true, but later on it leads to perfection. 33 It is like coming here. First you had to want to come here. If you didn’t want to do so, you wouldn’t be here today. We do things because of wanting, but when wanting arises, we don’t cling to it, just like we didn’t cling to that flashlight — “What’s this?” We pick it up. “Oh, it’s a flashlight.” We then put it down again. ?is is what “holding but not clinging” means. We know and then we let go. We don’t foolishly cling to things, but we “hold” them with wisdom and then let them go. Good or bad, we let them all go. F?????? It is wrong view to go on thinking that we are the sankharas or that we are happiness and unhappiness. Seeing like this is not full, clear knowledge of the true nature of things. ?e truth is that we can’t force things to follow our desires. ?ey follow the way of Nature. A simple comparison is this: Suppose you go and sit in the middle of a freeway with the cars and trucks speeding down toward you. You can’t get angry at the cars, shouting, “Don’t drive over here! Don’t drive over here!” It’s a freeway. You can’t tell them that. So what can you do? You get off the road. ?e road is the place where cars run. If you don’t want the cars to be there, you suffer. It’s the same with sankharas. We say they disturb us, like when we sit in meditation and hear a sound. We think, “Oh, that sound’s bothering me!” If we understand that the sound 34 bothers us, then we suffer accordingly. If we investigate a lit- tle deeper, we will see that it’s we who go out and disturb the sound. ?e sound is simply sound. If we understand it in this way, then there’s nothing more to it. We leave it be. We see that the sound is one thing and we are another. ?is is real know- ledge of the truth. You see both sides, so you have peace. If you see only one side there is suffering. Once you see both sides, then you follow the Middle Way. ?is is the right practice of the mind. ?is is what we call straightening out our under- standing. In the same way, the nature of all sankharas is imperma- nence and death, but we want to grab them. We carry them about and covet them. We want them to be true. We want to find truth within the things that aren’t true. Whenever some- one sees like this and clings to the sankharas as being himself, he suffers. ?e Buddha told us to contemplate this. F??? ?e more you neglect the practice, the more you neglect going to the monastery to listen to the Teachings, the more your mind will sink down into a bog, like a frog going into a hole. Some- one comes along with a hook and the frog’s days are over. He doesn’t have a chance. All he can do is stretch out his neck and be caught. So watch out you don’t back yourself up into a hole. Someone may just come along with hook and pull you up. 35 At home, being pestered by your children and grandchil- dren, and possessions, you are even worse off than the frog! You don’t know how to detach from these things. When old age, sickness and death come along, what will you do? ?is is the hook that’s going to catch you. Which way will you turn? F???? T??? Sometimes, when a fruit tree is in bloom, a breeze stirs and sends blossoms falling to the ground. Some buds remain and grow into small green fruit. A wind blows and some of them fall too. Still others may become fruit nearly ripe, or some even fully ripe, before they fall. And so it is with people. Like flowers and fruit in the wind, they, too, fall in different stages of life. Some people die while still in the womb, others within only a few days after birth. Some people live for a few years, then die, never having reached maturity. Men and women die in their youth. Still others reach a ripe old age before they die. When reflecting upon people, consider the nature of fruit in the wind — both are uncertain. Our minds are also similar. A mental impression arises, draws and blows at the mind, then the mind falls — just like the fruit. ?e Buddha understood this uncertain nature of things. He observed the phenomenon of fruit in the wind and reflected 36 upon the monks and novices who were his disciples. He found that they, too, were essentially of the same nature — uncertain! How could it be otherwise? ?is is just the way of all things. G?????? P?? If your mind becomes quiet and concentrated, it is an impor- tant tool to use. But if you’re sitting just to get concentrated so you can feel happy and pleasant, then you’re wasting your time. ?e practice is to sit and let your mind become still and concentrated, and then to use that to examine the nature of the mind and body, to see more clearly. Otherwise, if you make the mind simply quiet, then for that time it’s peaceful and there is no defilement. But this is like taking a stone and covering up a smelly garbage pit. When you take the stone away, it’s still full of smelly garbage. You must use your concentration, not to temporarily bliss out, but to accurately examine the nature of the mind and body. ?is is what actu- ally frees you. G??? We should investigate the body within the body. Whatever’s in the body, go ahead and look at it. If we just see the outside, it’s 37 not clear. We see hair, nails, and so on and they are just pretty things which entice us. So the Buddha taught us to look at the inside of the body, to see the body within the body. What is in the body? Look closely and see! We will see many things inside that will surprise us, because even though they are within us, we’ve never seen them. Wherever we go, we carry them with us, but we still don’t know them at all. It’s as if we visit some relatives at their house and they give us a gift. We take it and put it in our bag and then leave without opening it to see what is inside. When at last we open it we find it is full of poisonous snakes! Our body is like that. If we just see the shell of it, we say it’s fine and beautiful. We forget ourselves. We forget imper- manence, unsatisfactoriness and not-self. If we look within this body, it’s really repulsive. ?ere’s nothing beautiful in it. If we look according to reality, without trying to sugar things over, we’ll see that it’s really sad and wearisome. Dispassion will then arise. ?is feeling of disinterest is not that we feel aversion for the world. It’s simply our mind clearing up, our mind letting go. We see all things as not being substantial or dependable. However we want them to be, they just go their own way, re- gardless. ?ings which are unstable are unstable. ?ings which are not beautiful are not beautiful. So the Buddha said that when we experience sights, sounds, tastes, smells, bodily feelings or mental states, we should release them. Whether it’s happiness or unhappiness, it’s all the same. So let them go! 38 G???? You must contemplate in order to find peace. What people usu- ally mean whenever they say peace is only the calming down of the mind and not the calming down of the defilements. ?e defilements are simply being temporarily subdued, just like grass being covered by a stone. If you take the stone away, the grass will grow back again in a short time. ?e grass hadn’t re- ally died, it was just being suppressed. It’s the same when sitting in meditation. ?e mind is calm, but the defilements are not really calm. ?erefore samadhi is not a sure thing. To find real peace you must develop wisdom. Samadhi is one kind of peace, like the stone covering the grass. ?is is only a temporary peace. ?e peace of wisdom is like putting the stone down and just leaving it there. In this way the grass can’t possibly grow back again. ?is is real peace, the calming of the defilements, the sure peace which results from wisdom. H??? ?ose who study theory and those who practise meditation misunderstand each other. Usually those who emphasize study say things like, “Monks who only practise meditation just fol- low their own opinions. ?ey have no basis in their teaching.” Actually, in one sense, these two ways of study and prac- tice are exactly the same thing. We can understand better if we 39 think of it like the front and back of our hand. If we put our hand out, it seems like the back of the hand has disappeared. Actually the back of our hand hasn’t disappeared anywhere. It’s just hidden underneath. When we turn our hand over, the same thing happens to the palm of the hand. It doesn’t go any- where. It’s merely hidden underneath. We should keep this in mind when we consider prac- tice. If we think that it has “disappeared,” we’ll go off to study, hoping to get results. But it doesn’t matter how much you study about Dhamma, you’ll never understand because you won’t know in accordance with the Truth. If we do un- derstand the real nature of Dhamma, then we begin to let go. ?is is surrendering, removing attachment, not clinging any more, or if there is still clinging, it becomes less and less. ?ere is this kind of difference between the two ways of study and practice. H??? At times it may seem to some of you that I contradict myself when I teach, but the way I teach is very simple. It is as if I see someone coming down a road he doesn’t know well but on which I have travelled on many times before. I look up and see him about to fall into a hole on the right-hand side of the road, so I call out to him to go left. Likewise, if I see someone else about to fall into a hole on the left, I call out to him to go right. ?e instructions are different, but I teach them to travel in the 40 same direction on the same road. I teach them to let go of both extremes and come back to the center where they will arrive at the true Dhamma. H???? All my disciples are like my children. I have only loving-kindness and their welfare in mind. If I appear to make you suffer, it is for your own good. I know some of you are well-educated and very knowledgeable. People with little education and worldly knowledge can practise easily. But people with a lot of know- ledge is like someone who has a very large house to clean. ?ey have a lot to do. But when the house has been cleaned, they will have a big comfortable living space. Be patient. Patience and endurance are essential to our practice. H???????? Don’t be like a housewife washing the dishes with a scowl on her face. She’s so intent on cleaning the dishes that she doesn’t realize her own mind is dirty! Have you ever seen this? She only sees the dishes. She’s looking too far away from herself, isn’t she? Some of you have probably experienced this, I’d say. ?is is where you have to look. People concentrate on cleaning the dishes, but they let their minds go dirty. ?is is not good. ?ey’re forgetting themselves. 41 J????? ?e Buddha once saw a jackal, a wild dog, run out of the forest where he was staying. It stood still for a while, then it ran into the underbrush, and then out again. ?en it ran into a tree hollow, then out again. ?en it went into a cave, only to run out again. One minute it stood, the next it ran, then it lay down, then it jumped up. ?e jackal had the mange. When it stood, the mange would eat into its skin, so it would run. Running, it was still un- comfortable, so it would stop. Standing, it was still uncomfort- able, so it would lie down. ?en it would jump up again, running to the underbrush, the tree hollow, never staying still. ?e Buddha said, “Monks, did you see that jackal this afternoon? Standing, it suffered. Running, it suffered. Sitting, it suffered. Lying down, it suffered. It blamed standing for its discomfort. It blamed sitting. It blamed running and lying down. It blamed the tree, the underbrush, and the cave. In fact, the problem was with none of those things. ?e problem was with his mange.” We are just the same as that jackal. Our discontent is due to wrong view. Because we don’t exercise sense restraint, we blame our suffering on externals. Whether we live in ?ailand, America or England, we aren’t satisfied. Why not? Because we still have wrong view. Just that! So wherever we go, we aren’t content. But just as that jackal would be content wherever it went as soon as its mange was cured, so would we be content wherever we went once we rid ourselves of wrong view. 42 K???? A knife has a blade, a spine and a handle. Can you lift up only the blade? Can you lift up only the spine of the blade, or only the handle? ?e handle, the spine and the blade are all parts of the same knife. When you pick up the knife, all three parts come up at the same time. In the same way, if you pick up that which is good, the bad must follow. People search for goodness and try to throw away evil, but they don’t study that which is neither good nor evil. If you don’t study this, then you won’t have real under- standing. If you pick up goodness, badness follows. If you pick up happiness, suffering follows. Train the mind until it is above good and evil. ?at’s when the practice is finished. K??? We contemplate happiness and unhappiness as uncertain and impermanent and understand that all the various feelings are not lasting and not to be clung to. We see things in this way because there is wisdom. We understand that things are this way according to their own nature. If we have this kind of understanding, it’s like taking hold of one strand of a rope which makes a knot. If we pull it in the right direction, the knot will loosen and begin to untan- gle. It’ll no longer be so tight and tense. ?is is similar to understanding that things don’t always have to be the way they’ve always been. Before, we felt that 43 things always had to be a certain way and, in so doing, we pulled the knot tighter and tighter. ?is tightness is suffering. Living that way is very tense. So we loosen the knot a little and relax. Why do we loosen it? Because it’s tight! If we don’t cling to it, then we can loosen it. It’s not a condition that must always be that way. We use the teaching of impermanence as our basis. We see that both happiness and unhappiness are not permanent. We see them as not dependable. ?ere is absolutely nothing that’s permanent. With this kind of understanding, we gradu- ally stop believing in the various moods and feelings which come up in the mind. Wrong understanding will decrease to the same degree that we stop believing in it. ?is is what is meant by undoing the knot. It continues to become looser. At- tachment will be gradually uprooted. L???? If you just listen to the Dhamma teachings but don’t practise, you’re like a ladle in a soup pot. It’s in the soup pot every day, but it doesn’t know the taste of the soup. You must reflect and meditate. L??? Right now we are sitting in a peaceful forest. Here, if there’s no wind, a leaf remains still. When a wind blows, it flaps and flutters. 44 ?e mind is similar to that leaf. When it contacts a men- tal impression, it, too, flaps and flutters according to the nature of that mental impression. And the less we know of Dhamma, the more the mind will continually pursue mental impressions. Feeling happy, it succumbs to happiness. Feeling suffering, it succumbs to suffering. It’s in a constant flap. L?????? R??? Most of us just talk about practice without having really done it. ?is is like the man whose roof is leaking on one side so that he sleeps on the other side of the house. When the sunshine comes in on that side, he rolls over to the other side, all the time think- ing, “When will I ever get a decent house like everyone else?” If the whole roof leaks, then he just gets up and leaves. ?is is not the way to do things, but that’s how most people are. L????? Just know what is happening in your mind not happy or sad about it, not attached. If you suffer, see it, know it, and be empty. It’s like a letter — you have to open it before you can know what’s in it. L?? If we cut a log of wood and throw it into a river, it floats down- stream. If that log doesn’t rot or get stuck on one of the banks of 45 the river, it will finally reach the ocean. Likewise the mind that practises the Middle Way and doesn’t attach to either extreme of sensual indulgence or self-mortification will inevitably attain true peace. ?e log in our analogy represents the mind. ?e banks of the river represent, on one side, love, and on the other, hate. Or you can say that one bank is happiness and the other unhappi- nes
- [The Critique of Modernism: Scientism, Evolutionism, Psychologism and Humanism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/critique-of-modernism) - The Critique of Modernism scientism, evolutionism, psychologism and humanism Harry Oldmeadow Published in religioperennis.org, 2005 There can be no triumph over error through the sacrifice of any of the rights of truth St Iranaeusi That which is lacking in the present world is a profound knowledge of the nature of things; the fundamental truths are always there, but they do not impose themselves because they cannot impose themselves on those unwilling to listen Frithjof Schuonii Our ignorance of the few things that matter is as prodigious as our knowledge of trivialities Gai Eatoniii ...if you ever really enter into this other world... you may never again be contented with what you have been accustomed to think of as "progress" and "civilisation" Ananda Coomaraswamyiv Modernism: this term we may loosely define as the prevalent assumptions, values and attitudes of a world-view fashioned by the most pervasive intellectual and moral influences of recent European history, an outlook in conformity with the Zeitgeist of the times. One might classify the constituents of modernism under any number of different schema. Lord Northbourne typifies modernism as "anti-traditional, progressive, humanist, rationalist, materialist, The Matheson Trust experimental, individualist, egalitarian, free-thinking and intensely sentimental".v S.H. Nasr gathers these tendencies together under four general marks of modern thought: anthropomorphism (and by extension, secularism); evolutionist progressivism; the absence of any sense of the sacred; an unrelieved ignorance of metaphysical principles.vi "Modernism" then, is a portmanteau word.vii We shall, in this part of our inquiry, uncover some of the significances it carries and examine these from a traditionalist point of view. For the traditionalists modernism is nothing less than a spiritual disease which continues to spread like a plague across the globe, decimating traditional cultures wherever they are still to be found. Although its historical origins are European, modernism is now tied to no specific area or civilisation. Its symptoms can be detected in a wide assortment of inter-related "mind sets" and "-isms", sometimes involved in cooperative co-existence, sometimes engaged in apparent antagonisms but always united by the same underlying principles. Scientism, rationalism, relativism, materialism, positivism, empiricism, psychologism, individualism, humanism, existentialism: these are some of the prime follies of modernist thought. The pedigree of this family of ideas can be traced back through a series of intellectual and cultural upheavals in European history and to certain vulnerabilities in Christian civilisation which left it exposed to the subversions of a profane science.viii The Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment were all incubators of ideas and values which first ravaged Christendom and then spread throughout the world like so many bacilli. Behind the somewhat bizarre array of ideologies which have proliferated in the last few centuries the traditionalists discern a growing and persistent ignorance concerning ultimate realities and an indifference, if not always an overt hostility, to the eternal verities conveyed by tradition. In books like The Reign of Quantity and The Crisis of the Modern World René Guénon detailed an unsparing critique of the philosophical foundations of modernism. Coomaraswamy's work, be it on art or on philosophy and metaphysics, repeatedly reminds us of the chasm which separates normal civilisations from the absurdities and anomalies of our own times. In most of Schuon's work the explication of metaphysic and the penetration of religious forms remains his central purpose; censures of modernism, tangential to this purpose, tend to be launched through a series of asides. In three works, Light on the Ancient Worlds, Logic and Transcendence and To Have a Center, and in several essays, Schuon has dealt more explicitly and in magisterial fashion with some of the pretensions of the modernist weltanschauung.ix His work as a whole represents an unyielding resistance to modernism and an even more damaging critique than that found in Guénon's frontal assaults. The scope of the present work precludes any comprehensive rehearsal here of the traditionalist critique of modernism, on either the principial or the phenomenal level. We have already encountered some of the specific elements in the traditionalist indictment, and a good deal more can be inferred from the explanation of traditionalist principles rehearsed earlier. Rather than striving for any kind of inclusive treatment we shall isolate a few strands in the skein of modernism and scrutinise them from a traditionalist viewpoint. After some introductory remarks about scientism and its false claims to "objectivity" we shall turn to three The Matheson Trust especially insidious manifestations of modernism: evolutionism, psychologism and humanism. We shall spend a good deal of time on the first of these as this is one of the most destructive and typical of modern illusions. However, even here a few well-aimed shafts will have to suffice to indicate the lines along which a full-scale devaluation of evolutionism might be mounted. In the next chapter the comparison of traditionalism with various contemporary counterfeit forms of spirituality and a discussion of some divergent views of the perennial philosophy will give the traditionalist critique of modernism more weight and specificity. It has become increasingly clear, to some thinkers at least, that modern European science is not simply a disinterested and, as it were, a detached and "objective" mode of inquiry into the material world; it is an aggregate of disciplines anchored in a bed of very specific and culture- bound assumptions about the nature of reality and about the proper means whereby it might be explored, explained and controlled. It is, in fact, impossible to separate the methodologies of modern science from their ideological base.This base we can signal by the term "scientism". Perhaps the central plank in the scientistic platform is the assumption that modern science contains within itself the necessary and sufficient means for any inquiry into the material world and that it can and should be an autonomous and self-validating pursuit answerable to nothing outside itself. Science and scientism are, if still distinct at all, certainly not separable in the modern context. This is an important preliminary point in protecting any debate about modern science from the rather transparent tactics used by some of its apologists. The scientistic ideology does not hold the intellectual field unchallenged but few would dispute that it is the key to post-medieval European thought. Bacon, Galileo, Copernicus, Descartes, Newton, Locke, Voltaire, Darwin, Freud, Einstein - these are some of the luminaries of modernist thought, each making a seminal contribution to the triumph of scientism. Modern science is flanked on one side by philosophical empiricism which provides its intellectual rationale, and by technology and industry on the other, a field for its applications.x It is rational, analytical and empirical in its procedures, materialistic and quantitative in its object, and utilitarian in application. By its very nature modern science is thus unable to apprehend or accommodate any realities of a suprasensorial order. Science becomes scientism when it refuses to acknowledge the limits of its competence, denies the authority of any sources which lie outside its ambit, and lays claim, at least in principle, to a comprehensive validity as if it could explain no matter what, and "as if it were not contradictory to lay claim to totality on an empirical basis".xi As to the much vaunted empiricism of modern science Schuon remarks, "there is no worse confession of intellectual impotence than to boast of a line of thought because of its attachment to experiment and disdain for principles and speculations".xii Schuon states the nub of the case against modern science directly: ...modern science is a totalitarian rationalism that eliminates both Revelation and Intellect, and at the same time a totalitarian materialism that ignores the metaphysical relativity - and therewith the impermanence - of matter and the world. It does not know that the supra-sensible, situated as it is beyond space and time, is the concrete principle of the world, and consequently that it is also at the origin of that contingent and changeable coagulation we call "matter". A science that is called "exact" The Matheson Trust is in fact an "intelligence without wisdom", just as post-scholastic philosophy is inversely a "wisdom without intelligence".xiii Critiques of scientism are much in vogue these days both from within the scientific community and from without. Scientists and others are increasingly becoming aware of the dangers of an ideology of science which is inadequate. The insecure philosophical foundations of modern science, its epistemological ambiguities, its inability to accommodate its own findings within the Cartesian-Newtonian frame, the consequences of a Faustian pursuit of knowledge and power, the diabolical applications of science in the military industry, the dehumanising reductionisms of the behavioural sciences - all of these have come under attack in recent times. Recent "discoveries" by physicists and the paradoxes of quantum theory throw conventional assumptions about time, space and matter into disarray: Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle cuts the ground from under the "objectivity" on which science has so much prided itself; mechanistic conceptions and indeed the very language of a materialist science, are found to be useless in the face of bewildering phenomena to which it has until now been blind.xiv Everywhere cracks are appearing in the scientific edifice. Social commentators have become more alert to the dangers of this rationalist-materialist totalitarianism and its attendant technology. We see that rationality has been allowed to become man's definition instead of his tool. We sense that the disfigurement of the environment mirrors our internal state, that the ecological crisis is, at root, a spiritual crisis which no amount of science and technology can, of itself, remedy.xv We know the truth of Victor Frankl's claim that, The true nihilism of today is reductionism... Contemporary nihilism no longer brandishes the word nothingness; today nihilism is camouflaged as nothing-but-ness. Human phenomena are thus turned into mere epiphenomena.xvi We are awakening to the consequences of a science which is answerable to nothing but itself.Mary Shelley's nightmare vision in Frankenstein becomes a paradigm for our times. Commentators like Huston Smith, Theodore Roszak, E.F. Schumacher, R.D. Laing, Michael Polanyi, Jacob Needleman, Mircea Eliade and Bryan Appleyard awaken us to the provincialism of modern science and to the dangers of "Single Vision".xvii The traditionalist critique subsumes many of the criticisms of modern science and scientism made by figures such as the ones just mentioned. What marks the traditionalist position off from other animadversions of science is that the traditionalists do not appeal to some kind of vague humanism nor do they entertain a vision of a "reformed" science. Their impeachment of modern science is authorised by a set of clearly articulated metaphysical principles and by the truths and values enshrined in religious traditions. Much of the traditionalist repudiation of modern science is predicated on the distinction we have already met in Guénon's work. We can recall it through Whitall Perry's words: Traditional learning is basically qualitative and synthetic, concerned with essences, principles and realities behind phenomena; its fruits are integration, composition and unity. Profane academic learning - whether in the arts or sciences - is quantitative and analytical by tendency, concerned with appearances, forces and material properties; its nature is to criticize and to decompose; it works by fragmentation.xviii The Matheson Trust Furthermore, traditional learning proceeds within a larger framework, that of religious values and of cosmological and metaphysical principles derived from Revelation and gnosis. Modern science, by contrast, asserts a Promethean autonomy and scorns all other avenues of knowledge. This is the crux of the problem. Here we shall address two issues: the cleavage between religion and science; and the epistemological limits of a materialistic science. It is nowadays a commonplace that many of the ills of our time stem from the rift between "faith" and "science" but few people have suggested any convincing means of reconciling the two.Certainly the effusions and anxious compromises of the liberal theologians and "demythologizers" are of no help, marking little more than a thinly-disguised and often self- deceiving capitulation of religion to science. As Schuon remarks, ...the tragic impasse reached by the modern mind results from the fact that most men are incapable of grasping the compatibility between the symbolic expressions of tradition and the material discoveries established by modern science.xix This is a vital point. It is important to understand that the disapprobations of the traditionalists do not fall on the findings of science as such - they are not obscurantists - but on the absence of such principles as would situate these discoveries in a context which could preserve the incomparably more important truths enshrined in tradition. A concrete example will give the point more weight: According to the observations of experimental science, the blue sky which stretches above us is not a world of bliss, but an optical illusion due to the refraction of light by the atmosphere and from this point of view it is obviously right to maintain that the home of the blessed does not lie up there. Nevertheless it would be a great mistake to assert that the association of ideas between the visible heavens and the celestial Paradise does not arise from the nature of things, but rather from ignorance and ingenuousness mixed with imagination and sentimentality; for the blue sky is a direct and therefore adequate symbol of the higher and supersensory degrees of Existence; it is indeed a distant reverberation of those degrees and it is necessarily so since it is truly a symbol consecrated by the Sacred Scriptures and by the unanimous intuition of peoples...The fact that the symbol itself may be no more than an optical illusion in no way impairs its precision or efficacy, for all appearances, including those of space and of the galaxies, are strictly speaking only illusions created by relativity.xx In the light of this kind of metaphysical understanding many of the apparent contradictions between "science" and "religion" simply evaporate. It is not necessary, to say the least, to throw religious beliefs on the scrapheap because they are "disproven" by modern science; nor is it necessary to gainsay such facts as modern science does uncover, provided always that what science presents as facts are so indeed and not merely precarious hypotheses. No one will deny that, from one point of view, the earth is not the centre of the solar system; this is no reason for jettisoning the more important truth which was carried by the geocentric picture of the universe.xxi (A heliocentric cosmology could also have been the vehicle for the same truth.xxii) Indeed, without the protective truths of traditional symbolisms such material discoveries as do issue from a profane science are likely to be more or less useless or positively destructive. Another example: it is preferable to believe that God created the world in six days and that heaven lies in the skies above the flat surface of the earth than it is to know precisely the distance from one nebula to another whilst forgetting the truth embodied in this symbolism, namely that all phenomena depend on a higher Reality which determines us and gives our human existence meaning and purpose.xxiii A materially inaccurate but symbolically rich view is always preferable to the reign of brute fact. Though modern science has doubtless revealed much material information that was previously unknown it has also supplanted a knowledge which infinitely outreaches it. We see the fruits of this tendency in the complacencies and condescensions of those scientists who like to suppose that we have "outgrown" the "superstitions" of our ancestors. Here is a random example from a prestigious contemporary scientist: I myself, like many scientists, believe that the soul is imaginary and that what we call our mind is simply a way of talking about the function of our brains... Once one has become adjusted to the ideas that we are here because we have evolved from simple chemical compounds by a process of natural selection, it is remarkable how many of the problems of the modern world take on a completely new light.xxiv Here indeed is an "intelligence without wisdom" or what Roszak calls a "well-informed foolishness". This kind of materialism is presently "the reigning orthodoxy among philosophers of the mind".xxv In falling under the tyranny of a fragmentary, materialistic and quantitative outlook modern science is irremediably limited by its epistemological base. The apparent "impersonality" and "objectivity" of modern science should not for a moment blind us to the fact that it is and must be anthropomorphic in its foundations. No matter how inhuman may be its depictions of both man and the universe it remains true that "...the criteria and instruments which determine this science are merely and purely human. It is the human reason and the human senses which determine modern science."xxvi Of the realities to which faith, Revelation and intellection give access modern science knows and can know absolutely nothing. As Schuon observes There is scarcely a more desperately vain or naïve illusion - far more naïve than is Aristotelian astronomy! - than to believe that modern science, in its vertiginous course towards the "infinitely small" and the "infinitely great", will end up by rejoining religious and metaphysical truths and doctrines.xxvii The ways in which the triumph of scientism has contributed to man's dehumanisation have been written about a good deal in recent years. It matters not a jot how quick contemporary scientists now are to disown discredited "facts" which stood between man and any true self- awareness - the mechanistic theories of the seventeenth century for instance - on the grounds that these were, after all, only provisional hypotheses which a more "humane" scientific vision can now abandon. The simple fact is that modern science cannot be "humanised" or "reformed" from within itself because it is built on premises which are both inadequate and inhuman, not to say immoral. (To suggest that there is a contradiction between the fact that science is purely anthropomorphic and that it is inhuman betokens a failure to understand the issue: it is inhuman precisely because it is exclusively anthropomorphic. The same can be said of all the philosophies of "humanism": by denying the transcendent dimension of man they betray him.) By now it should be clear enough why it is a dangerous prejudice to believe that a materialistic science is harmless enough if it be confined to its own domain - the material world. This realm does not exist in vacuo and to pretend that it does only breeds trouble, as the history of modern science so convincingly demonstrates. Titus Burckhardt, one of the most authoritative traditionalists in this field, exposes some of the issues involved here in writing ...modern science displays a certain number of fissures that are not only due to the fact that the world of phenomena is indefinite and that therefore no science could come to the end of it; those fissures derive especially from a systematic ignorance of all the noncorporeal dimensions of reality. They manifest themselves right down to the foundations of modern science, and in domains as seemingly "exact" as that of physics; they become gaping cracks when one turns to the disciplines connected with the study of the forms of life, not to mention psychology, where an empiricism that is relatively valid in the physical order encroaches strangely upon a foreign field. These fissures, which do not affect only the theoretical realm, are far from harmless; they represent, on the contrary, in their technical consequences, so many seeds of catastrophe.xxviii These fissures might be probed at some length. However, enough has been said to provide a framework within which we can examine two manifestations of the scientistic spirit, evolutionism and psychologism. Among the reasons why these two have been chosen are the fact that they each have a tenacious grip on the mentality of most Europeans and they have been especially malignant in their effects on the study of religion. Evolutionism is one of the most beguiling and most treacherous of scientistic ideologies. For the moment it may be defined as the concurrence of certain palaeontological and biological facts, assumptions and speculations wedded to a cluster of philosophical and socio-political ideas and values. Contemporary evolutionism is far more deep-seated than a mere lingering residue of the crude social Darwinism promulgated by Herbert Spencer and others. Many people are now sensitive to the pitfalls of extrapolating from the biological to the social plane although there are still a host of "naked ape" theories, supported by the pseudo-science of ethology, which fly in the face of any scientific prudence - the theories of Konrad Lorenz, Robert Ardrey and Desmond Morris are of this ilk.xxix No, the roots of the problem strike much deeper than this: the biological theory itself, one of the props of modern science, is riddled with contradictions, anomalies, absurdities and lacunae. Before turning to the traditionalist dissent a couple of preliminary points are in order. Evolutionism is under attack from several directions. Some critics take their stand on entirely the wrong ground and not all critiques carry the same authority although they do share the basic intuition that evolutionism is, in the words of one of its critics, "a hoax". We shall have to take care to maintain several crucial distinctions both between the biological hypothesis and the social ideology of evolutionism, and between well-attested scientific facts and the extravagant interpretations to which they have sometimes been turned. Michael Negus expresses the traditionalist viewpoint when issuing the following caution: There is a need to avoid two errors: the first is the error of rejecting adequately established scientific fact, eg. the age of the earth or the space-time dimensions of the universe. This is the trap into which the biblical fundamentalists fall. The second error is that of accepting pseudo-doctrines like evolutionary progress with all its implications and thereby subverting Tradition. This is the trap into which the followers of Teilhard de Chardin fall.xxx The balance, from a traditionalist perspective, lies in first of all acknowledging the supremacy of traditional doctrines over any profane science whatsoever but at the same time accepting, within appropriate limits, such facts as scientific inquiry has uncovered even though these often have no relevance to man's spiritual destiny.xxxi The denial of such facts only taints legitimate opposition to evolutionism with the suspicion of crankiness and obscurantism. It is crucial not to confuse the traditionalist position with a literalist fundamentalism which goes on insisting, in the face of incontrovertible evidence, that the earth is only a few thousand years old or that all life was created in a few days.xxxii No traditionalist wishes to evade or cover up scientific discoveries but only to separate fact from fiction and to situate the former in a framework which allows of an adequate interpretation. The traditionalists repudiate both the biological hypothesis and the social ideology of evolutionism. We shall take the biological theory first. Amongst the traditionalists, Titus Burckhardt, Martin Lings and Michael Negus have taken issue with the theory on purely scientific grounds. Such objections by no means exhaust the case but they are an important component of it. These traditionalists point to the growing body of literature by reputable scientists - palaeontologists, botanists, zoologists, geneticists and others - which throws many of the central tenets in the Darwinian hypothesis into very serious question. Scientific critiques of evolutionary theory by men like Douglas Dewar, Evan Shute, Guiseppi Sermonti, Roberto Fondi and L. Bournoure proceed through the premises and methodologies of modern science itself; the theory is being white-anted from within.xxxiii The debate hinges on some very complex biological and palaeontological evidence which cannot be reviewed here. Rather, we shall mention a few lines of approach taken by some of the scientific critics of the biological theory. We shall consider three aspects of the theory that have been assailed by traditionalists and scientists alike: the evolutionary conception of life's beginnings, the transformationist thesis of "mega-evolution" whereby one species evolves into another, and the notion of man's primate ancestry. We shall, for the moment, consider these matters from a material and logical point of view. The conception of life's beginnings and its subsequent development as presented by the evolutionists is quite illogical and defies all common sense. A contemporary psychiatrist has this to say: If we present, for the sake of argument, the theory of evolution in a most scientific formulation we have to say something like this: "At a certain moment of time the temperature of the earth was such that it became most favourable for the aggregation of carbon atoms and oxygen with the nitrogen- hydrogen combination, and that from random occurrences of large clusters of molecules occurred which were most favourably structured for the coming about of life, and from that point it went on through vast stretches of time, until through processes of natural selection a being finally occurred which is capable of choosing love over hate, and justice over injustice, of writing poetry like that of Dante, composing music like that of Mozart, and making drawings like those of Leonardo." Of course, such a view of cosmogenesis is crazy. And I do not mean crazy in the sense of slangy invective but rather in the technical meaning of psychotic. Indeed such a view has much in common with certain aspects of schizophrenic thinking.xxxiv Now, this passage itself is by no means beyond criticism but it does expose the fundamental illogic of the evolutionist conception. There is no empirical method of either verifying or falsifying the hypothesis outlined above: we are then, from a scientific point of view, thrown back onto the resources of logic and common sense. Can life emerge from inert matter? Can consciousness develop from non-consciousness? Can Shakespeare derive, in any amount of time, from a primeval algal slime? Can the effect be divorced from its cause? Wherein lies the cause of life? These are questions to which the evolutionist response will seem plausible only to those already indoctrinated into accepting the hypothesis as established fact - and this is only the beginning of the embarrassment to which evolutionism can be subjected. A keystone in the evolutionary theory is the notion that one species can, over time, be transformed into another. This process we shall call mega-evolution. The testimony of many reputable scientists on this subject calls for our attention. Martin Lings, drawing on the work of Evan Shute, points out that, The only evolution that has been scientifically attested is on a very small scale and within narrow limits. To conclude from this "micro-evolution", which no one contests, that there could be such a thing as "mega-evolution" - that for example, the class of birds could have evolved from the class of reptiles - is not merely conjecture but perverse conjecture... micro-evolution demonstrates the presence in nature of all sorts of unseen barriers that ensure the stability of the various classes and orders of animals and plants and that invariably cause transformation, when it has run its little course, to come to a dead-end.xxxv Jean Rostand, the French biologist: The world postulated by transformism is a fairy world, phantasmagoric, surrealistic. The chief point, to which one always returns, is that we have never been present at one authentic phenomenon of evolution...we keep the impression that nature today has nothing to offer that might be capable of reducing our embarrassment before the genuinely organic metamorphosis implied in the transformist thesis.xxxvi Evan Shute: Mega-evolution is really a philosophy dating from the days of biological ignorance; it was a philosophic synthesis built up in a biological kindergarten.xxxvii Lemoine and other European scientists have shown how the palaeontological record on which the evolutionists base their arguments in fact contradicts the transformist hypothesis.xxxviii The geological record shows, for example, the abrupt appearance of whole new species which flatly contradicts the conventional scenario of adaptation and natural selection. Not all evolutionists have been able to turn a blind eye to this evidence and so, rather than questioning the whole theory, have developed new hypotheses which are somehow assimilated into the Darwinian framework. Having scorned the idea of the Creator some evolutionists now find themselves endowing nature itself with powers of instantaneous creation - thus we have, for example, Schindewolf's theory of "explosive evolution" or Severtzoff and Zeuner's theory of "aramorphosis", or again the theory of "quanta of evolution" or "tachygenesis",xxxix or recent "neo-Darwinian" speculations about "organicistic revolutions".xl All of these theories involve what is, from an empirical viewpoint, so much hocus-pocus which is only concealed by the technical jargon which insulates these speculations from the inquiries of any lay person trying to follow the logic of the argument.xli The mega-evolution and transformist thesis is, of course, the platform for the idea that there is an essential continuity between man and the animals and that homo sapiens is a highly- evolved primate. This is open to question from any number of angles and we shall turn to some of these presently. For the moment we shall focus on one phenomenon only: man's ability to create an extraordinary number of artefacts. Now, according to the Darwinian theory of natural selection and adaptation this skill must evolve in response to environmental pressures; it represents an adaptation necessary for survival. In most species we find that an animal has only "evolved" the skills necessary to manufacture one artefact - say a nest in the case of a bird. (We will leave aside for now the awkward fact that where evidence is available it suggests that the species in question appeared with this skill ready-made: spiders, for example, were, as far as we can tell, always able to spin webs. There is not an iota of evidence to suggest that this "adaptation" "evolved" over a period of time.xlii) In the case of man we are asked to swallow the same explanation for the fact that he is capable of making not one or even half-dozen different artefacts but hundreds of thousands if not millions. Wherein is the explanation of this singularity? Howbeit that man alone can evolve these skills in what, from a geological point of view, must have been a minuscule period of time in man's prehistory? The radical disjunction between man's unprecedented cultural achievements and the theory of adaptation and natural selection is one that no evolutionist has been able to explain in terms which have the slightest plausibility. The debate about the "missing link" between man and the other primates now takes on the characteristics of farce. The spectacle of evolutionists falling over each other in their attempts to find this link shows no sign of ending. Nor is another vexing question any closer to solution:what precisely are the criteria which distinguish humans from apes?Why are scientists unable to answer these questions? In this context we might also note the words of an American palaeontologist: You can, with equal facility, model on the Neanderthaloid skull the features of a chimpanzee or the lineaments of a philosopher. These alleged restorations of ancient types of man have very little, if any, scientific value, and are likely only to mislead the public.xliii That there are certain similarities between men and apes no one will deny: what is at issue is the significance of these similarities. We return to this question when we come to a metaphysically-based critique of evolutionism. If the evolutionary hypothesis is far from being supported by the palaeontological and biological evidence why, it might reasonably be asked, has it survived for so long? Why does it still command the support of the overwhelming majority of scientists and of nearly everyone else? The answer is simple: evolutionism has taken on the status of a pseudo-religion with its own inviolable dogmas. This fact was remarked by the distinguished entomologist F.R.S. Thompson over half a century ago: The concept of organic Evolution is very highly prized by biologists, for many of whom it is an object of genuinely religious devotion, because they regard it as a supreme integrative principle. This is probably the reason why the severe methodological criticism employed in other departments of biology has not yet been brought to bear against evolutionary speculation.xliv Rather than discarding a hypothesis with which the facts do not conform the evolutionists go on endlessly modifying, qualifying and hedging their theories with ever more subtlety and ingenuity whilst all the time clinging to the basic premises on which the whole edifice of evolutionary theory rests. As Murray Eden observes, "Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory has been modified to the point that virtually every formulation of the principles of evolution is a tautology."xlv It may be that the tide is turning. Certainly evolutionary theory has been subjected to more rigorous and penetrating criticism in the last quarter of a century and increasing numbers of people, scientifically trained and otherwise, are no longer prepared to accept the evolutionary account of life. The traditionalists, as we have seen, have made some forays into the scientific debate about evolutionary theory. However, this is really only a side-show. The most fundamental grounds for a rejection of evolutionism are philosophical and metaphysical. The theory contradicts certain axiomatic principles; this fact alone robs it of any credibility. If it is in direct opposition to these principles then it could not be valid from any point of view, scientific or otherwise. The whole evolutionary conception rests on the metaphysically absurd notion that the greater can emerge from the lesser. Whitall Perry sums up the basic article of faith in evolutionism thus: "In the beginning was flesh...and the flesh was made Word."xlvi Schuon anathematizes this "dogma" in the severest possible terms: ...the evolutionary leap from matter to intelligence is the most arbitrary, the most inconceivable and the most foolish hypothesis possible, in comparison with which "simple faith" seems like a mathematical formula. He goes on to elaborate the support for such a claim from a metaphysical point of view: People accept transformist evolution as a useful and provisional postulate just as they are ready to accept no matter what on condition that they do not have to accept the primacy of Spirit. And yet, starting from this immediately tangible mystery which is subjectivity or intelligence, it is easy to understand that the origin of the Universe is not inert and unconscious matter, but a spiritual Substance which, from coagulation to coagulation and from segmentation to segmentation - and other projections, both manifesting and limiting - finally produces matter by causing it to emerge from a more subtle substance, but one that is already distant from principial Substance.xlvii We are not here concerned with alternative explanations of the origin of life and matter but this passage gives the clue. Furthermore, the cosmogonies in the different religious traditions do not contradict this account although they necessarily approach the problem from a more limited perspective.xlviii The evolutionist position involves either an unabashed materialism wherein life and consciousness are evolutes of matter or some kind of mental contortionism whereby an attempt is made to reconcile the irreconcilable. On cannot accept both the primacy of Spirit and the evolutionist hypothesis about life's beginnings. The notion of organic transformation, of mega-evolution, is from the outset quite incompatible with the doctrine of archetypes which finds one of its applications in the animal realm. Metaphysically, each species "...is an archetype, and if it is only manifested by the individuals belonging to it, it is nonetheless as real and indeed incomparably more real than they are."xlix Titus Burckhardt's discussion of the doctrine of archetypes as it applies to life forms concludes this way: ...it follows that a species in itself is an immutable "form"; it could not evolve and become transformed into another species, although it can include variants, all these being "projections" of a single essential form from which they will never become detached.l Darwinism postulates such variants to be "buds" of new species, a quite illegitimate assimilation and one that does nothing to hide either the gaps in the palaeontological "succession" of species or the fact that whole new species appeared abruptly. The facts which palaeontology has uncovered, in themselves indisputable, are amenable to a quite different interpretation, as Burckhardt demonstrates. All that palaeontology proves to us is that the various animal forms such as are shown by fossils preserved in successive layers of the earth made their appearance in a vaguely ascending order, going from relatively undifferentiated organisms - but not simple ones - to ever more complex forms, without this ascension representing, however, a univocal and continuous line. It seems to move in jumps; that is to say, whole categories of animals appear at once, without real predecessors. What means this order, then? Simply that on the material plane, the simple or relatively undifferentiated always precedes the complex and differentiated. All "matter" is like a mirror that reflects the activity of the essences by inverting it; that is why the seed comes before the tree, and the leaf bud before the flower, whereas in the principial order perfect "forms" pre-exist. The successive appearance of animal forms according to an ascending hierarchy therefore in no wise proves their continual and cumulative genesis.li All traditional teachings affirm that there is a radical discontinuity between humankind and other life forms. The fact that some oriental exotericisms understand this distinction in terms of karma rather than ontologically in no wise affects the principle itself. The privileged and axial position of man in the cosmos is completely ignored by evolutionism which would have it that man is a kind of superior ape. How can the similarities between man and the primates be explained without resort to evolutionary speculations? The anatomical similarities between men and apes are always explained tendentiously by evolutionists. However, if we start from the doctrine of archetypes and the multiple states of being, these physical correspondences appear in a completely different light. However paradoxical this may seem, the anatomical resemblance between man and the anthropoid apes is precisely explainable by the difference, not gradual but essential, separating man from all other animals. Since the anthropoid form is able to exist without that "central" element that characterises man - and that moreover is manifested anatomically by his vertical position, among other things - that form must exist; in other words there cannot but be found, at the purely animal level, a form that realises in its own way - that is to say, according to the laws of its own level - the very plan of the human anatomy. It is in this sense that the monkey is a prefiguration of man, not as an evolutionary phase, but in virtue of that law that decrees that at every level of existence analogous possibilities will be found.lii It is, of course, for this very reason that it is impossible to define the differences between the apes and man in purely physiological terms. Man's especial estate is not due to the fact "that he has two hands which he manipulates or that he can make planes that fly or calculating machines that perform difficult mathematical operations in a short time. These and other abilities are no more than accidental to his real nature".liii This real nature is something about which a materialistic science can tell us nothing. There are plenty of other puzzles concerning early man which embarrass evolutionary science. To think clearly about these matters involves balancing the modern scientific preoccupation with time, matter and change with traditional conceptions of space, Substance and Eternity. One then has a more comprehensive framework within which to work and all sorts of new possibilities present themselves. To give but one example: it is possible that the first humans in this particular terrestrial cycle left no solid traces, either because their bodies were not yet so materialised or because the spiritual state normal in those times, together with the cosmic and cyclic conditions then obtaining, made possible a resorption of the physical into the subtle body at the moment of death.liv One mentions this possibility only to indicate how these questions can be approached from many different angles and not only from those proposed by modern science. So deeply is evolutionism embedded in the modern consciousness that it is no easy matter to explore different modalities of thought on the questions with which evolutionary theory deals. Darwin's biological hypothesis became something of a Pandora's Box for 19th century social theory. His work was pillaged for new tools of social and historical analysis and for new categories of thought. The evolutionist schema and its methodology soon came to be applied to non-biological categories such as classes, races and nations, even religions. The original authors of what came to be known as "Social Darwinism" were E.B. Tylor and Herbert Spencer. The earliest formulation of their ideas actually preceded Darwin's Origin of the Species; in its earliest form social evolutionism was not an illegitimate offspring of Darwinism but an elder cousin who later exploited the family name. Indeed, it was Spencer rather than Darwin who coined the term "survival of the fittest", a slogan under which all manner of social, racial and imperial brutalities were to be justified. The ideology of Social Darwinism was to be harnessed to a wide range of purposes: the assertion of Anglo-Saxon racial and cultural superiority; the colonial exploitation of other countries and peoples; the justification, in pseudo-scientific terms, of a rapacious capitalism and of various policies of social and economic laissez-faire; the shoring up of various nationalist and racist ideologies, not only in Britain but in Europe and America as well. More than most theories, Darwinism lent itself to such stratagems of persuasion, enjoying not only the prestige and authority attached to science, but also the faculty of being readily translated into social terms. That this translation was rather free and loose was an added advantage, since it gave licence to a variety of social gospels.lv The story of the growth of Social Darwinism is a dismal one which need not be narrated here.lvi Rather we shall pinpoint a few social and political ideas which it has sponsored. The traditionalists have been concerned, in the main, with the effects of evolutionism on attitudes to religion, to the past, to tradition; in all these areas they find evolutionism's bequeathals to be malign. The enervating effects of both biological and social Darwinism on attitudes to the Christian faith are well-known. E.F. Schumacher echoes the traditionalist position in writing: Evolutionism is not a science; it is a science fiction, even a kind of hoax... that has imprisoned modern man in what looks like an irreconcilable conflict between "science" and "religion". It has destroyed all faiths that pull mankind upward and has substituted a faith the pulls mankind down... it is the most extreme product of the materialistic utilitarianism of the nineteenth century.lvii Through its connections with a false gospel of Progress, evolutionism has seeped into our way of looking at history and has subverted the whole idea of tradition. Although social Darwinism has been thoroughly discredited on a theoretical and scholarly level the average mentality is still very much under its sway. The idea of progress maintains a tenacious hold; it is, after all, one of the most comfortable of illusions. It is still not uncommon to find formulations such as this one from a very well-known and influential anthropological theorist: "Man has made objective progress in improving his society and...we in the West seem at this stage to have the best society in recorded history."lviii This is a staggering claim. It is a measure of the influence of the idea of progress, buttressed by evolutionism, that this kind of statement will be swallowed without demur by many people today. Nor did a popular television programme entitled The Ascent of Man, compered by Jacob Bronowski, raise many eyebrows. One could catalogue a more or less endless list of the tokens of evolutionist assumptions in almost every aspect of contemporary thought. The idea of progress and of evolution finds not a whit of support in any of the traditional doctrines concerning man and time in terms of any spiritual criteria - quite the contrary. All the traditional doctrines agree in this: From a strictly spiritual point of view, though not necessarily from other much more relative and therefore less important points of view, mankind is becoming more and more corrupted; the ideas of "evolution", of "progress" and of a single "civilisation" are in effect the most pernicious pseudo-dogmas. The intention impelling Schuon in such a passage is not merely critical but positive and affirmative, calling as it does for a rehabilitation of our attitudes to the past: We say not that evolution is non-existent but that it has a partial and most often quite external applicability; if there be evolution on one hand, there are degenerations on the other, and it is in any case radically false to suppose that our ancestors were intellectually, spiritually or morally our inferiors. To suppose this is the most childish of "optical delusions"; human weakness alters its style in the course of history, but not its nature.lix We are left, in Shakespeare's words, to "commit the oldest sins the newest kinds of ways".lx The ideal of Progress is by now looking very tawdry to those who see our present situation clear-eyed. Theodore Roszak accents the incongruity of the idea when considered against our present global circumstances: The Last Days were announced to St John by a voice like the sound of many waters. But the voice that comes in our day summoning us to play out the dark myth of the reckoning is our meager own, making casual conversation about the varieties of annihilation... the thermonuclear Armageddon, the death of the seas, the vanishing atmosphere, the massacre of the innocents, the universal famine to come...Such horrors should be the stuff of nightmare... They aren't. They are the news of the day... we have not stumbled into the arms of Gog and Magog; we have progressed there.lxi Evolutionist ideas not only distort our attitudes to the past but prepare the soil for sentimental Utopianisms of one sort and another. One might have thought that twentieth century history would have immunised us once and for all against the seductions of Utopianism but no, they still abound.lxii Utopian scenarios pre-date evolutionism but they received a new fillip when the theory of evolution was wedded to Enlightenment theories about the perfectibility of man and 19th century optimism about the inexorability of progress. The worldly Utopia - so often a grotesque parody of Augustine's "City of God" but now a "City of Man" - is dangled before the credulous in many guises: the classless society of the Marxist fantasy, the anarchist dream of the "free" society, the pseudo-spiritual effusions of the "cosmic consciousness" pundits, the quasi-theological aberrations of a Teilhard de Chardin. Each of these Utopianisms, by definition, is a form of profane humanism envisaging a human destiny which leaves no room for the transcendent, the divine, the sacred, the traditional - in a word, no room for God. As one representative of Russian Orthodoxy put it, "All the tragedy of man is in one word, 'godlessness'."lxiii It is a sign of the times that an anti-traditional, evolutionist Utopianism should find its way into domains where it should not for a moment have been countenanced. The work of Teilhard de Chardin is a conspicuous example of what results when one tries to reconcile the platitudes of evolutionist ideology with a traditional theology. The attempt is ingenious, even subtle if somewhat opaque, but the result is none the less dangerous for that. Kurt Almqvist has rightly pilloried it as a "...pseudo-metaphysical synthesis of neo-modernism, where evolutionist and pantheist materialism substitutes itself for religion by means of subversion and parody."lxiv That the Catholic hierarchy should, however uneasily, allow this to be passed off as "Catholic" thought in any sense whatsoever is in itself a sad commentary. Would that we could still confidently accede to G.K. Chesterton's remark that "the Church is the only thing that saves us from degrading slavery of becoming children of our times".lxv In this context we might also recall Coomaraswamy's question, "What becomes of the spiritual power, if she cannot or does not speak with authority, but takes part in a discussion with profane teachers as if on equal terms? It is not for the Church to argue, but to tell."lxvi Before leaving the subject of evolutionism let us remember these sobering words from Schuon: ...evolutionism - that most typical of all the products of the modern spirit - is no more than a kind of substitute: it is a compensation "on a plane surface" for the missing dimensions. Because one no longer admits...the supersensible dimensions... one seeks the solution to the cosmogonic problem on the sensory plane and one replaces true causes with imaginary ones which, in appearance at least, conform with the possibilities of the corporeal world... In doing this, one forgets what man is, and one forgets also that a purely physical science, when it reaches vast proportions, can only lead to catastrophe... lxvii Psychologism is another view of man built on the sands of a profane science, and as such, another symptom of modernism. Its intrusion into the religious realm has been attended by consequences no less disturbing than those coming in the train of evolutionism.As Coomaraswamy so neatly put it, "While nineteenth century materialism closed the mind of man to what is above him, twentieth century psychology opened it to what is below him."lxviii Psychologism, as Schuon notes, is both an end-point and a cause, being a "logical and fatal ramification and natural ally" of other profane and materialistic ideologies like evolutionism.lxix The Matheson Trust Psychologism can be described as the assumption that man's nature and behaviour are to be explained by psychological factors which can be laid bare by a scientific and empirical psychology. Before we proceed any further an extremely important distinction must be made between modern psychology and traditional pneumatologies with which it shares some superficial similarities. The latter derived from radically different principles, applied different therapies and pursued different ends. Just as it is misleading to talk about modern European philosophy and traditional metaphysic in the same breath and under the same terms, so too with modern psychology and traditional pneumatology. A good deal of confusion would be averted if people would resist such terms as "Buddhist psychology" or "Zen psychotherapy". It would also help clarify the issues at stake if many of the amateurish "experts" in this field would abandon the extraordinary notion that the techniques of Western psychology can lead to the "liberation" spoken of in the Eastern traditions.lxx This is to confuse two quite different planes of experience. Modern psychology can be censured against the backdrop of traditional doctrines in this fashion: Psycho-analysis doubly deserves to be called an imposture, firstly because it pretends to have discovered facts which have always been known... and secondly and chiefly because it attributes to itself functions that in reality are spiritual, and thus in practice puts itself in the place of religion.lxxi Psychology of the modern kind defines itself by its inability to distinguish between the psychic plane, the arena in which the more or less accidental subjectivities of the individual ego come into play in the depths of the subconscious, and the infinite realm of the spirit which, in terms of the human individual, is signalled by the capacity for the plenary experience and which is thus marked by an "inward" illimitation and transcendence. The muddling of the psychic realm of the subconscious with the mystical potentialities of the human soul and the infinite reaches of the Intellect has given birth to all manner of confusions. There is indeed a science which reveals the way in which the play of the psyche can communicate universal realities; this is one of the fields of traditional pneumatologies. But, and the proviso is crucial, such a science cannot flourish outside a properly-constituted metaphysic and cosmology. In this context the following passage from Burckhardt deserves the closest attention: The connection with the metaphysical order provides spiritual psychology with qualitative criteria such as are wholly lacking in profane psychology, which studies only the dynamic character of phenomena of the psyche and their proximate causes. When modern psychology makes pretensions to a sort of science of the hidden contents of the soul it is still for all that restricted to an individual perspective because it has no real means for distinguishing psychic forms which translate universal realities from forms which appear symbolical but are only vehicles for individual impulsions. Its "collective subconscious" has most assuredly nothing to do with the true source of symbols; at most it is a chaotic depository of psychic residues somewhat like the mud of the ocean bed which retains traces of past epochs.lxxii The confusion of the psychic and the spiritual, which in part stems from the artificial Cartesian dualism of "body" and "mind", was discussed by René Guénon at some length in The Reign of Quantity. The confusion, he said, The Matheson Trust appears in two contrary forms: in the first, the spiritual is brought down to the level of the psychic; in the second, the psychic is... mistaken for the spiritual; of this the most popular example is spiritualism...lxxiii The first form of the confusion thus licenses a degrading reductionism and relativism, often as impertinent as it is inadequate.The "sinister originality" of psychologism lies in its "determination to attribute every reflex and disposition of the soul to mean causes and to exclude spiritual factors."lxxiv This tendency is often partner of a relativism whereby everything becomes ...the fruit of a contingent elaboration: Revelation becomes poetry, the Religions are inventions, sages are "thinkers"... infallibility and inspiration do not exist, error becomes a quantitative and "interesting" contribution to "culture"... there is... a denial of every supernatural, or even suprasensory, cause, and by the same token of every principial truth.lxxv Like evolutionism, psychologism attempts to explain the greater in terms of the lesser and excludes all that goes beyond it own limits. In this sense, historicism, relativism and psychologism are all cut from the same cloth: The mentality of today seeks to reduce everything to categories connected with time; a work of art, a thought, a truth have no value in themselves and independently of any historical classification... everything is considered as an expression of a "period" and not as having possibly a timeless and intrinsic value; and this is entirely in conformity with modern relativism, and with a psychologism... that destroys essential values. In order to "situate" the doctrine of a scholastic, or even a Prophet, a "psycho-analysis" is prepared - it is needless to emphasize the monstrous impudence implicit in such an attitude - and with wholly mechanical and perfectly unreal logic the "influences" to which this doctrine has been subject are laid bare. There is no hesitation in attributing to saints... all kind of artificial and even fraudulent conduct; but it is obviously forgotten... to apply the same principle to oneself, and to explain one's own supposedly "objective" position by psychological considerations: sages are treated as being sick men and one takes oneself for a god... it is a case of expressing a maximum amount of absurdity with a maximum amount of subtlety.lxxvi As Schuon remarks elsewhere, relativism goes about reducing every element of absoluteness to a relativity while making a quite illogical exception in favour of this reduction itself.lxxvii Clearly these strictures do not apply with the same force to each and every attempt by scholars to detect and explain historical and psychological factors relating to particular religious phenomena. It is possible, for example, to take these kinds of considerations into account in a sympathetic and sensitive way without falling prey to a reductionist relativism. Nevertheless, Schuon's general point remains valid. It can hardly be denied that a kind of iconoclastic psychologism runs through a good deal of the scholarly literature on religion. In addition to the many schools, cliques, factions and splinter groups marching behind the various banners of Freud, Jung, Adler, Maslow, Skinner et. al., a new and militant psychologism is abroad in Academe - a "feminist psychology" bent on reducing religious manifestations to the camouflaged machinations of an oppressive patriarchy.lxxviii It is true that feminist scholarship has opened up some new vistas, articulated new questions, and uncovered much hitherto neglected material but much of the enterprise is disfigured by a wholesale sociological and psychologistic reductionism. The Matheson Trust A psychologism unrestrained by any values transcending those of a profane science can help to corrode religious forms by infiltrating the religious sphere itself. Schuon notes, by way of an example, the part psychologism has played in discrediting the cult of the Holy Virgin: ...only a barbarous mentality that wants to be "adult" at all costs and no longer believes in anything but the trivial could be embarrassed by this cult. The answer to the reproach of "gynecolatry" or the "Oedipus complex" is that, like every other psycho-analytic argument, it by-passes the problem; for the real question is not one of knowing what the psychological factors conditioning an attitude may be but, something very different, namely, what are its results.lxxix The practice of dragging spiritual realities down to the psychological plane can everywhere be seen when religion is reduced to some kind of psychological regimen. Some of the neo-yogic, meditation, "self-realisation" and "New Age" movements are of this kind. One of the most insidious and destructive illusions is the belief that depth- psychology... has the slightest connection with spiritual life, which these teachings persistently falsify by confusing inferior elements [psychic] with superior [spiritual]. We cannot be too wary of all these attempts to reduce the values vehicled by tradition to the level of phenomena supposed to be scientifically controllable. The spirit escapes the hold of profane science in an absolute fashion. Similarly, It is not the positive results of experimental science that one is out to deny... but the absurd claim of science to cover everything possible, the whole of truth, the whole of the real; the quasi-religious claim of totality moreover proves the falseness of the point of departure.lxxx Of course the traditionalists are not alone in unmasking "the misdeeds of psychoanalysis". Thomas Merton, for instance: Nothing is more repellent than a pseudo-scientific definition of the contemplative experience... he who attempts such a definition is tempted to proceed psychologically, and there is really no adequate "psychology" of contemplation...lxxxi Lama Govinda, more alert to this danger than some of his colleagues now in the West, warns of the "shallow-mindedness" of those who teach a kind of "pseudo-scientific spirituality".lxxxii Mircea Eliade makes a more general point in writing, Psychoanalysis justifies its importance by asserting that it forces you to look at and accept reality. But what sort of reality?A reality conditioned by the materialistic and scientific ideology of psychoanalysis, that is, a historical product: we see a thing in which certain scholars and thinkers of the nineteenth century believed. lxxxiii Psychologistic reductionism, has ramifications on both the practical and the theoretical level: on the one hand we have the notion that psychological techniques and therapies can take the place of authentic spiritual disciplines; on the other, the pretension that psychological science can "explain" religious phenomena. Both of these are related to the first form of the confusion of the psychic and the spiritual.lxxxiv Let us turn briefly to the obverse side, that of falsely elevating the psychic to the spiritual. There is a vast spiritual wasteland here which we cannot presently explore but Whitall Perry identifies some of its inhabitants in writing of those occultist, psychic, spiritualistic and "esoteric" groups who concern themselves with The Matheson Trust spirits, elementals, materialisations, etheric states, auric eggs, astral bodies, ids, ods and egos, ectoplasmic apparitions, wraiths and visions, subliminal consciousness and collective unconsciousness, doublings, disassociations, functional disintegrations, communications, obsessions and possessions, psychasthenia, animal magnetism, hypnoidal therapeutics, vibrations, thought-forces, mind-waves and radiations, clairvoyances and audiences and levitations, telepathic dreams, premonitions, death lights, trance writings, Rochester knockings, Buddhic bodies, and sundry other emergences and extravagances of hideous nomenclature...lxxxv all the while imagining that these are stuff of the spiritual life. Much of Guénon's work was directed to reasserting the proper distinctions between psychic phenomena and spiritual realities and to sounding a warning about the infernal forces to which the psychic occultists unwittingly expose themselves. As Schuon remarks, "...modern occultism is by and large no more than the study of extrasensory phenomena, one of the most hazardous pursuits by reason of its wholly empirical character and its lack of any doctrinal basis."lxxxvi Without the protective shield of traditional doctrines and disciplines, such as those which guarded the shamans, any incursions into these realms are fraught with perils of the gravest kind. In a traditional discipline the psychic can be reintegrated with the spiritual but without the necessary metaphysical framework and religious supports psychism becomes wholly infra-intellectual and anti-spiritual. The anti-traditional temper of modernism can also be gauged in one of its most typical off- spring, namely humanism. Humanism is not, of course, a single-head monster but an ideological hydra stalking the modern world seeking whom it may devour. The humanisms of such representative figures as say, Bertrand Russell, Julian Huxley and Jean-Paul Sartre, present different philosophical countenances, some more unattractive than others.lxxxvii However, we can isolate a defining characteristic in all these secularist humanisms be they atheistic or agnostic, "optimistic" or "pessimistic", Marxist or existentialist o
- [Tradition and the False Prophets of Modernism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/tradition-and-false-prophets) - Tradition and the False Prophets of Modernism Harry Oldmeadow While nineteenth century materialism closed the mind of man to what is above him, twentieth century psychology opened it to what is below him (René Guénon) That which is lacking in the present world is a profound knowledge of the nature of things; the fundamental truths are always there, but they do not impose themselves because they cannot impose themselves on those unwilling to listen (Frithjof Schuon) The loss of God is death, is desolation, hunger, separation. All the tragedy of man is in one word, ‘godlessness’ (Metropolitan Anthony of Sourzah) Published in in Sacred Web 18 (Vancouver), 2007 Introduction Permit me to begin with a personal reminiscence. Nearly thirty years ago, a decade after completing my undergraduate degree, I decided to return to university to pursue postgraduate studies. I wanted to write a thesis on the work of Frithjof Schuon, which had first struckme,lightning-like,throughthe anthology The Sword of Gnosis.i I was interviewed by the Chair of the Religious Studies Department at the university in question and was told, bluntly, that my plan to write a dissertation on the work of Schuon was unacceptable: such a subject did not fall within the Department’s frame of what constituted ‘serious scholarship’. I was advised to construct a new research proposal. I will not here rehearse the somewhat Kafkaesque story of how, through various stratagems, I finally persuaded the reluctant professor that I should be allowed to proceed with my original plan. Two years later I submitted my dissertation. I was asked to identify two possible examiners; well, I thought, I’d better grasp the nettle, and so nominated the two most distinguished academics in the field. My thesis was duly despatched and I spent an anxious couple of months waiting for their reports. Each examiner evidently took the view that mercy must sometimes prevail over justice; their reports were generous to a fault. The two examiners were Professors Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Huston Smith. I recount this episode for two reasons. Firstly, it provides me with the opportunity to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Professor Nasr and Professor Smith, and to say what a singular honour it is to share the same platform at this Conference. May I also say what a 1 pleasure it is to have the opportunity to meet face-to-face with some of the other principal exponents of the sophia perennis in the contemporary world. Secondly, it reminds us of the melancholy fact that the Wisdom of the Ages is very rarely welcomed in Academia. The contemporary Western intelligentsia, so-called, has been almost completely seduced by the anti-traditional forces of modernity, a theme which I want to elaborate in this brief address. Recall this passage from St Paul: Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. (Philippians 4:8) Many of the speakers at this Conference will no doubt be following this sage advice. But it has fallen to my lot to speak about less congenial matters — and sometimes this is necessary to clear away those ideas and habits of mind which obscure our view of ‘whatsoever things are true’. If some of my remarks seem intemperate my rejoinder is the same as Frithjof Schuon’s: ‘Some people may reproach us with lack of reticence, but we would ask what reticence is shown by philosophers who shamelessly slash at the wisdom of countless centuries?’ii Let us start with a recognition that there is indeed a fundamental crisis in the modern world and that its root causes are spiritual. The crisis itself can hardly be disputed. Some of the symptoms: ecological catastrophe, a material sign of the rupture between Heaven and Earth; a rampant materialism and consumerism, signifying a surrender to the illusion that man can live by bread alone; the genocidal extirpation of traditional cultures by the careering juggernauts of ‘modernisation’; political barbarities on an almost unimaginable scale; social discord, endemic violence and dislocations of unprecedented proportions; widespread alienation, ennui and a sense of spiritual sterility amidst the frenetic confusion and din of modern life; a religious landscape dominated by internecine and inter-religious strife and by the emergence of aggressive fundamentalisms in both East and West; the loss of any sense of the sacred, even among those who remain committed to religious forms, many of whom have retreated into a simplistic and credulous religious literalism or into a vacuous and ‘horizontal’ liberalism where ‘anything goes’. The Vishnu Purana is a Hindu text dating back nearly two millennia. From that work, here is a description of the degenerations which can be expected in the latter days of the Kali Yuga: Riches and piety will diminish daily, until the world will be completely corrupted. In those days it will be wealth that confers distinction, passion will be the sole reason for union between the sexes, lies will be the only method of success in business, and women will be the objects merely of sensual gratification. The earth will be valued only for its mineral treasures, dishonesty will be the universal means of subsistence, a simple ablution will be regarded as sufficient purification...The observances of castes, laws, and institutions will no longer be in force in the Dark Age, and the ceremonies prescribed by the Vedas will be neglected. Women will obey only their whims and will be infatuated with pleasure...men of all kinds will presumptuously regard themselves as equals of Brahmins...The Vaishyas will abandon agriculture and commerce and will earn their living by servitude or by the exercise of mechanical professions...The dominant caste will be that of the Shudras... iv. Is this not a painfully accurate picture of our present condition? Here is another diagnosis of the contemporary condition, written fifty years ago but even more appropriate today. It comes from the English writer Dorothy Sayers: 2 Futility; lack of a living faith; the drift into loose morality, greedy consumption, financial irresponsibility, and uncontrolled bad temper; a self-opinionated and obstinate individualism; violence, sterility, and lack of reverence for life and property... the exploitation of sex, the debasing of language... the commercialising of religion... mass hysteria and „spell-binding?, venality and string-pulling in public affairs...the fomenting of discord... the exploitation of the lowest and stupidest mass-emotions...v Little wonder, then, that when Mahatma Gandhi was asked what he thought about ‘Western Civilisation’, he replied, ‘I think it would be a good idea’. These ‘signs of the times’—and the inventory is by no means exhaustive—are plain enough to those with eyes to see. No amount of gilded rhetoric about ‘progress’, the ‘miracles of modern science and technology’, or the ‘triumphs of democracy’ (to mention just three shibboleths of modernity) can hide the fact that our age is tyrannized by an outlook inimical to our most fundamental needs, our deepest yearnings, our most noble aspirations. More problematic is the question of how we arrived at this state of affairs and in which direction we might turn for some remedy. In his luminous essay, ‘No Activity Without Truth’, Frithjof Schuon observes, That which is lacking in the present world is a profound knowledge of the nature of things; the fundamental truths are always there, but they do not impose themselves because they cannot impose themselves on those unwilling to listen.vi Those truths, so often derided in the modern world, can be found in Tradition—and by this term we mean something very different from the jaundiced senses it has accumulated in the modern mentality (‘the blind observance of inherited customs’, and the like). For want of a better word we might call the dominant worldview of the post-medieval West ‘modernism’vii. For present purposes the term comprises the prevalent assumptions, values and attitudes of a world-view fashioned by the most pervasive intellectual and moral influences of recent European history, an outlook in conformity with the Zeitgeist of the times. One might classify the constituents of modernism under any number of different schema. Lord Northbourne typifies modernism as ‘anti-traditional, progressive, humanist, rationalist, materialist, experimental, individualist, egalitarian, free-thinking and intensely sentimental’.viii Seyyed Hossein Nasr gathers these tendencies together under four general features of modern thought: anthropomorphism (and by extension, secularism); evolutionist progressivism; the absence of any sense of the sacred; an unrelieved ignorance of metaphysical principles.ix Modernism is a spiritual disease which continues to spread like a plague across the globe, destroying traditional cultures wherever they are still to be found. Although its historical origins are European, modernism is now tied to no specific area or civilisation. Its symptoms can be detected in a wide assortment of inter-related ‘mind sets’ and ‘-isms’, sometimes involved in cooperative co-existence, sometimes engaged in apparent antagonism, but always united by the same underlying assumptions. Scientism, rationalism, relativism, materialism, positivism, empiricism, evolutionism, psychologism, individualism, humanism, existentialism—these are some of the prime follies of modernist thought. The pedigree of this family of ideas can be traced back through a series of intellectual and cultural upheavals in European history and to certain vulnerabilities in Christendom which left it exposed to the subversions of a profane science. The Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and the so- called Enlightenment were all incubators of ideas and values which first ravaged Europe and then spread throughout the world like so many bacilli. Behind the bizarre array of ideologies which have proliferated in the last few centuries we can discern a growing and persistent ignorance concerning ultimate realities and an indifference, if not always an overt hostility, to the eternal verities conveyed by Tradition. Not without reason did William Blake characterize the modern worldview as ‘Single Vision’, a horizontal understanding of reality which strips 3 the ‘outer’ world of its mystery, its grandeur and its revelatory function, and denies our human vocation. As he so acutely remarked, ‘Man is either the ark of God or a phantom of the earth and the water.’x The contrast of tradition and modernity is likely to be most illuminating when it is informed by the following considerations: When the modern world is contrasted with traditional civilisations, it is not simply a question of seeking the good things and the bad things on one side or the other; good and evil are everywhere, so that it is essentially a question of knowing on which side the more important good and on which side the lesser evil is to be found. If someone says that such and such a good exists outside tradition, the answer is: no doubt, but one must choose the most important good, and it is necessarily represented by tradition; and if someone says that in tradition there exists such and such an evil, the answer is: no doubt, but one must choose the lesser evil, and again it is tradition that embodies it. It is illogical to prefer an evil which involves some benefits to a good which involves some evils.xi No one will deny that modernity has its compensations, though these are often of a quite different order from the loudly trumpeted ‘benefits’ of science and technology—some of which are indubitable but many of which issue in consequences far worse than the ills which they are apparently repairing. Furthermore, many so-called ‘advances’ must be seen as the poisoned fruits of a Faustian bargain which one day must come to its bitter conclusion. What indeed is a man profited if he gain the whole world but lose his own soul? On the other hand, one real advantage of living in these latter days is the ready access we have to the spiritual treasuries of the world's religious and mythological traditions, including esoteric teachings which have hitherto been veiled in secrecy. Let us turn our attention to just a few characteristic prejudices of modern thought and to those habits of mind which have robbed us of our birthright as the children of God. I will do so by referring briefly to four representatives of modern thought, each an accomplice in the development of the modern outlook. In the short time available I cannot, clearly, rehearse their theories in any detail. Moreover, I am less concerned with these figures as individual personalities than with those tendencies which they articulate and crystallize, and particularly with the way that they popularized certain key ideas and themes. As René Guénon has remarked, in the intellectual order modernity is rooted in a series of pseudo-mythologies which, in the end, amount to little more than negations, parodies and inversions of traditional understandings. My four representative figures will be altogether familiar to you: Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche. It is no accident that they all belong to the 19th century, the period in which the seeds of revolt against Tradition, sown in the late medieval period, produced their fullest, most seductive and most noxious blooms, at least on the mental plane; the full consequences of that rebellion lay in wait in the 20th century, surely the most blood-stained on record. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) Darwin’s hypothesis, foreshadowed in the work of many other contemporary scientists and social theorists alike and germinated in the sinister population theories of Malthus, is one of the most elegant, seductive and pernicious of all ‘pseudo-mythologies’. In a beguiling admixture of fact, imaginative speculation, circular argumentation and painstaking system- building Darwin seemed to produce an objective and scientific account of the development of species, to provide an account of how life-forms came to be as they are. At the heart of the Darwinian schema lies a preposterous inversion of traditional understandings. In the opening passage of St John’s Gospel, one of the most exalted and mystical of texts, we are told that ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God...and 4 the Word became flesh...’ (John I:1,14). Darwin proposes precisely the opposite, that ‘In the beginning was the Flesh (that is, matter), which became Word (consciousness, or Spirit)...’. Out of inert matter, through some quite unexplained process, emerged microscopic life forms and over a very very long period of time, through endless transformations and mutations and in accord with principles which Darwin claimed to have discovered, these became homo sapiens. In brief, the microscopic organisms from the prehistoric algal slime — organisms whose origins Darwin is utterly unable to explain — turn into Man. Or to put it even more tersely, the primeval amoeba turns into a St Francis, an Ibn ‘Arabi, a Lao Tze! Darwin’s whole thesis hinges on the proposition that one species can transform itself into another. Whatever partial insights Darwin’s work might yield this central theme is an absurdity which flies in the face of all traditional wisdom. To call man a ‘trousered ape’ betrays a profound misunderstanding of the human condition, and as E.F. Schumacher observed, one might as well call a dog ‘a barking plant or a running cabbage’.xii Darwinism was a ‘grand narrative’ perfectly suited to all the prejudices of the age — an account of the beginnings and the development of life which erased the Creator, now replaced by a clutch of more or less inexorable ‘laws’ which were amenable to objective explanation, an account, moreover, which looked to an inevitable advance. Darwin’s transformationist hypothesis not only came to dominate scientific thinking but was soon appropriated, in the form of Social Darwinism, to buttress all manner of malignant ideas about race, empire, ‘Progress’ and the development of civilisations. The pseudo-mythology of evolutionism lent itself to social ideologies in which the brutal imperatives of competition, self-interest, ‘survival’ and racial ‘hygiene’ were all valorized as ‘natural’.xiii Consider, if you can, the implications of a passage such as the following, from Darwin’s own The Descent of Man: At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes...will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.xiv Darwinism has become a kind of pseudo-religion, a fact which explains the zealotry with which many scientists remain wilfully blind to the mounting scientific evidence against the Darwinian scheme, especially in its absurd claim that one species can transform into another. There are many angles from which Darwinism might be exposed as fraudulent—scientific, logical, religious and metaphysical. We cannot here rehearse any kind of critique but it is perhaps worth noting that in many respects it is a pity that the fight against Darwinism has been carried out by fundamentalist creationists who are quite unable to meet Darwin on his own ground. Nonetheless, it should also be noted that however naïve and sometimes obscufatory such critics often are, their fundamental intuition is valid. Darwin and his epigones offer us a spectacular instance of the truth of René Guénon’s observation that when profane science leaves the domain of the mere observation of facts, and tries to get something out of an indefinite accumulation of separate details which is its sole immediate result, it retains as one of its chief characteristics the more or less laborious construction of purely hypothetical theories. These theories can necessarily never be more than hypothetical, for facts in themselves are always susceptible of diverse explanations and so never have been and never will be able to guarantee the truth of any theory...and besides, such theories are not really inspired by the results of experience to nearly the same extent as by certain preconceived ideas and by some of the predominant tendencies of modern thought.xv 5 The principle which needs always to be foregrounded in any discussion of modern science is to be found in the Vedantic insistence that ‘The world of maya [i.e., the time-space world which science investigates] is not inexplicable; it is only not self-explanatory.’xvi Sankara says that any attempt to understand the material world without knowledge of the Real is akin to an attempt to explain night and day without reference to the sun. In any case, a profane science can only ever tell us about auxiliary and mechanical causes; it can never get to the root of things, just as it must remain mute whenever we confront questions about meaning and value. As to modern science’s endless accumulation of empirical data we need only recall Gai Eaton’s remark that this is a matter of knowing more and more about less and less, and that ‘our ignorance of the few things that really matter is as prodigious as our knowledge of trivialities’.xvii Karl Marx (1818-1883) A year or two back a British newspaper conducted a poll in which readers were asked to nominate the most influential thinker of the last thousand years. The runaway winner was Karl Marx, the German philosopher, social theorist, Father of Communism (both as body of theory and as a revolutionary political movement), the grave-digger of capitalism and religion alike. He might also be described as the author of what Carlyle so properly called the ‘Dismal Science’ of economics. Marx needs no further introduction here; nor is there any point in providing an overview of his theory of dialectical materialism and its endlessly elaborated analyses of the forces of production and distribution in his magnum opus, Das Kapital, surely one of the most ponderous and impenetrable of works but a landmark in the emergence of that family of disciplines which herd together under the canopy of ‘the social sciences’. No, here I can do no more than allude to a few ideas which have become the stock-in-trade of the modern outlook. Let us begin with some well-known words from Friedrich Engel’s funeral oration: Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.xviii It was altogether appropriate that Engels should link the thought of Marx and Darwin. Indeed, Marx himself remarked, ‘Darwin’s book [On the Origin of Species, 1859] is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history’.xix Both could be said to be children of the so-called Enlightenment: both imagined themselves to be engaged in a more less scientific enterprise; each popularized a form of evolutionist thought, in the biological and social domains respectively; both detonated a depth-charge under the foundations of religious belief. Return for a moment to the passage from Engels. Notice the reduction of man to an economic and social animal, a being whose nature is entirely conditioned, indeed determined by material circumstances over which he has little control. Man’s spiritual dimension is thereby stripped away as no more than the residue of a now-obsolete religious conception which hitherto has alienated man from his true nature as a social being, fashioned by the material forces of history. We are all familiar with Marx’s characterisation of religion as ‘the 6 opium of the people’, a drug which deflects their attention from their real circumstances with its illusory promises of an afterlife and which anaesthetizes their political will. Here is a famous passage from Marx’s somewhat fragmentary but lethal writings on religion: Man, who looked for a superman in the fantastic reality of heaven and found nothing there but the reflexion of himself, will no longer be disposed to find but the semblance of himself, the non-human (Unmensch) where he seeks and must seek his true reality...Man makes religion, religion does not make man. In other words, religion is the self-consciousness and self-feeling of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again... The struggle against religion is therefore...the struggle against the other world, of which religion is the spiritual aroma. ...Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness...The criticism of religion disillusions man and makes him think and act and shape his reality like a man who has been disillusioned and has come to reason, so that he will revolve round himself and therefore round his true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves round man as long as he does not revolve round himself.xx Following Feuerbach and Marx, Engels asserted that ‘All religion, however, is nothing but the fantastic reflection in men's minds of those external forces which control their daily life, a reflection in which the terrestrial forces assume the form of supernatural forces.’xxi This threadbare idea has become the very calling card of the modern intellectual. Hand-in-hand with this repudiation of religion and all that it entails, is a secular humanism. In his doctoral thesis Marx had written, Philosophy makes no secret of it. Prometheus' confession „in a word, I detest all Gods?, is its own confession, its own slogan against all Gods in heaven and earth who do not recognize man's self- consciousness as the highest divinity.xxii Linked with this humanism, which finds antecedents in the thought of Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau, there is Marx’s Utopianism, a strain of thought which anticipates a world in which all the social iniquities and inequalities, all the class oppressions of the past, are devoured in revolutionary violence, ushering in an era in which a man might ‘hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening’ and philosophize at night.xxiii At this point in history I hardly need observe that Marx’s romantic and apocalyptic Utopianism fuelled abuses so many and so monstrous that we can hardly grasp their magnitude — a case of making a hell on earth, as the Russian novelist Dostoevsky so chillingly predicted in his own dark masterpiece, Notes from Underground (1864). The hallmarks of Marx’s thought, in brief: a corrosive and atheistic materialism, a Promethean humanism, and a sentimental and potentially murderous Utopianism, and all this dressed up in quasi-scientific garb. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) Sigmund Freud, the undisputed progenitor of modern psychology and psychiatry, remarked in a letter, ‘The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence.’xxiv From a traditional point of view, one need hardly do more than adduce this extraordinary claim to throw Freud’s theorizing out of court altogether. As we know, Freud himself harboured an animus towards religion which, in his own terms, could only be described as pathological. No one needs reminding that the relations between modern psychology and traditional religions have not always been friendly. Freud struck the key note in his insistence that, to state the matter as briefly as possible, religious beliefs were a thinly camouflaged prolongation of childhood traumas and pathologies. He identified ‘three powers which may dispute the basic position of science’: art, philosophy and religion, of 7 which, he said, ‘religion alone is to be taken seriously as an enemy’. Philosophy, he suggested, is basically harmless because, despite its ambitious pretensions, it ‘has no direct influence on the great mass of mankind: it is of interest to only a small number even of top- layer intellectuals and is scarcely intelligible to anyone else.’ Art ‘is almost always harmless and beneficent; it does not seek to be anything but an illusion’.xxv This leaves religion as ‘an immense power’ and an imposing obstacle to the scientific enlightenment of mankind, the project in which Freud understood himself to be engaged. The last contribution to the criticism of the religious Weltanschauung [he wrote], was effected by psychoanalysis, by showing how religion originated from the helplessness of children and by tracing its contents to the survival into maturity of the wishes and needs of childhood.xxvi Freud identified three fatal blows against what he called man’s ‘narcissism’, by which he meant the belief that man was made in the image of God: Copernican cosmology, Darwinian biology, and psychoanalytical psychology.xxvii We do not here have time to excavate the foundations of what Schuon has called the ‘psychological imposture’ and its usurpation of religious functions which lie well beyond its competence, but the drift of much of Freud’s thought can be signalled by a small sample of quotations, the sinister implications of which will be readily apparent to you. From New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis: [The Weltanschauung of science] asserts that there are no sources of knowledge of the universe other than the intellectual working-over of carefully scrutinized observations... and alongside of it no knowledge derived from revelation, intuition or divination.xxviii Many of his observations on religion are now all too well-known. Here are a few: [Religion is] a counterpart to the neurosis which individual civilized men have to go through in their passage from childhood to maturity.xxix I should like to insist... that the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art converge in the Oedipus complex.xxx [Religious ideas] are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind.xxxi And this, on the nature of the id, which Freud referred to as ‘the core of our being’: It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality... we call it a chaos, a cauldron of seething excitations...It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle....The id of course knows no judgements of value...the quantitative factor, which is intimately linked to the pleasure principle, dominates all its processes. Instinctual cathexes seeking discharge—that, in our view, is all there is in the id.xxxii Freud’s theories about the ‘psychogenesis’ of religion and his grotesque speculations about the early history of mankind, bear an unmistakably evolutionist cast. Here is a representative passage: While the different religions wrangle with one another as to which of them is in possession of the truth, our view is that the truth of religion may be left altogether on one side. Religion is an attempt to master the sensory world, in which we are situated by means of the wishful world, which we have developed within us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve this. Its doctrines bear the imprint of the times in which they arose, the ignorant times of the childhood of humanity.xxxiii As Guénon and others have noted, Freud’s agenda might well be summed up in one of his own favourite lines from Virgil, and one which he inscribed on the title page of his first major work: ‘If I cannot bend the gods, I will stir up hell.’xxxiv Guénon drew attention to some of the infernal influences unleashed by Freudian psychoanalysis, putting the matter most 8 succinctly when he observed that ‘While nineteenth century materialism closed the mind of man to what is above him, twentieth century psychology opened it to what is below him’xxxv —a theme taken up by Frithjof Schuon: What we term „psychological imposture? is the tendency to reduce everything to psychological factors and to call into question not only what is intellectual or spiritual—the first being related to truth and the second to life in and by truth—but also the human spirit as such, and thereby its capacity of adequation and, still more evidently, its inward illimitation and transcendence. The same belittling and truly subversive tendency rages in all the domains that „scientism? claims to embrace, but its most acute expression is beyond all doubt to be found in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is at once an end-point and a cause, as is always the case with profane ideologies, like materialism and evolutionism, of which it is really a logical and fatal ramification and a natural ally.xxxvi To put the matter slightly differently we might say that materialism, evolutionism and psychologism are not in fact three distinct theories but rather variants of that singular and eccentric world view which Guénon exposed in The Reign of Quantity (1945). Before leaving the subject of psychoanalysis we might also ponder the implications of the following passage from Titus Burckhardt, dealing with scientism in general and psychologism in particular: ...modern science displays a certain number of fissures that are not only due to the fact that the world of phenomena is indefinite and that therefore no science could come to the end of it; those fissures derive especially from a systematic ignorance of all the noncorporeal dimensions of reality. They manifest themselves right down to the foundations of modern science, and in domains as seemingly „exact? as that of physics; they become gaping cracks when one turns to the disciplines connected with the study of the forms of life, not to mention psychology, where an empiricism that is relatively valid in the physical order encroaches strangely upon a foreign field. These fissures, which do not affect only the theoretical realm, are far from harmless; they represent, on the contrary, in their technical consequences, so many seeds of catastrophe.xxxvii Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) While Darwin, Marx and Freud have long been recognized as three massively influential thinkers in whose work several characteristically modern ideas are given their most dramatic and potent expressions, it is now perhaps time to add the name of Friedrich Nietzsche to the roster of the false prophets of modernity. Nietzsche is a particularly problematic case, partly because his work is full of flashing insights of an almost entirely destructive kind. Here I can do no more than take brief note of his peculiar role in the development of modern thought. Nietzsche is best-known for his pronouncement of the ‘death of God’ by which he meant that the foundations of a religious worldview had now collapsed and that no self-respecting intellectual could any longer subscribe to a belief in God. Here he is thundering against all traditional and religious conceptions: The „Law?, the „will of God?, the „sacred book?, „inspiration?—all merely words for the conditions under which the priest comes to power, by which he maintains his power—these concepts are to be found at the basis of all priestly organizations, all priestly or priestly-philosophical power-structures. The „holy lie?- common to Confucius, the Law-Book of Manu, Mohammad, the Christian Church—: it is not lacking in Plato. „The truth exists?: this means, wherever it is heard, the priest is lying...xxxviii Nietzsche also lodged a time-bomb under the whole idea of objective Truth; his philosophical legacy has yielded its most acidic fruits, a century after his death, in the wholesale relativism of postmodernist theorizing as found in the work of such figures as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, to mention only two of the self-styled Parisian oracles, those ‘monks of negation’ whose work has exercised such a corrosive effect on the Academy over the last 9 three decades. Many of you will be familiar with other leitmotiv in Nietzsche’s work — his lacerating attacks on Christianity, and particularly its spiritual egalitarianism; the extolling of the Ubermensch, the ‘Over-man’, freed from the restraints of stifling bourgeois morality, exercising the ‘will to power’ in an heroic ‘self-overcoming’; his consignment of traditional philosophy, metaphysics and ethics to the dust-bin of human history. As Schuon has remarked of Nietzsche, a certain nobility of soul is evident in the work of this troubled genius, particularly in its poetic expressions, marked by ‘the passionate exteriorisation of an inward fire, but in a manner that is both deviated and demented’xxxix — the deviation evident in Nietzsche’s peculiar amalgam of Machiavelli, German romanticism and a pitiless Darwinism. What was lacking in this ‘volcanic genius’ was any real intellectual discernment which might have channelled his profound reaction against the mediocrity of the age in more profitable directions. Nietzsche is indeed a particularly strange case: whilst celebrating the ‘death of God’ he simultaneously understood some of its appalling consequences. Consider, for instance, this famous passage from The Gay Science: Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market-place and cried incessantly: „I am looking for God! I am looking for God!? — As many of those did not believe in God were standing there he excited considerable laughter... The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances. „Where has God gone?? he cried. „I shall tell you. We have killed him — you and I. We are all his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up and down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is more and more night not coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God?xl As one representative of the Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Anthony of Sourzah, put it: ‘The loss of God is death, is desolation, hunger, separation. All the tragedy of man is in one word,‘godlessness’.’xli Nietzscheunderstoodthisalltoowell—buthecouldn’thelphimself, seduced by his own delirious dream of the Dionysian Ubermensch. Some Common Characteristics Let me now quickly draw attention to some features shared by these four thinkers. These might serve as signposts to some of the most pervasive aspects of modern intellectual life: • A spurious ‘originality’: Each of these thinkers imagines that he has discovered a hitherto unknown secret, a key with which to unlock the mysteries of the human condition. For Darwin it is the evolutionist schema fuelled by adaptations to the environment, mutations and the ‘survival of the fittest’; for Marx, the dialectic of the material forces of history; for Freud the sexual drive with all its accompanying repressions, projections, complexes and neuroses; for Nietzsche, the ‘will to power’. There is an apparent novelty in the writings of each of these figures — hence their elevation to the pantheon of modern thought which treasures nothing so much as a mis-named ‘originality’. In reality, such apparently new insights as are to be found in the works of these thinkers often turn out to be a distortion of ideas which have been in circulation for centuries, even millennia. By way of an example one might adduce Freud’s unacknowledged debts to Kabbalah.xlii The theorisations of these false prophets often amount to little more than the negation, parodying or inversion of traditional doctrines half- understood, wrenched out of their spiritual framework and ‘flattened out’. 10 • Evolutionism, progressivism: Secondly, all four of these ‘prophets of modernity’ succumbed to evolutionist and progressivist ideologies which engendered a contempt for the past and for our ancestors, and indeed, for the very notion of tradition. Of course, the barbarities of the twentieth century, starting on the fields of Flanders, disenchanted some of the more intelligent apostles of Progress but it is truly remarkable to witness the tenacious grip this sentimental idea still has amongst the Western intelligentsia. Evolutionism and progressivism has also intruded into the domain of religion itself, evident in the thought of people such as Teilhard de Chardin, Vivekananda, and Aurobindo, to name only three. Not surprisingly, the consequences have been disastrous. • the idolatry of Reason: The modern mentality is rationalistic, materialistic, empiricist, historicist and humanistic — in the narrow sense of the word — and these characteristics too are all too evident in the work of our representative figures, three of whom were regular worshippers at the Temple of Reason (Nietzsche is the exception here). The adulation of Reason and of an empirical and materialistic science could only arise in a world in which the sacra scientia of the traditional worlds had been lost. To cleave to these much-vaunted modes of modern thought is simply to announce that one is entirely bereft of any metaphysical discernment, entrapped in the world of maya, that tissue of fugitive relativities which makes up the time-space world. As Frithjof Schuon has tersely remarked, ‘The rationalism of a frog living at the bottom of a well is to deny the existence of mountains; this is logic of a kind, perhaps, but it has nothing to do with reality.’xliii • the rejection of Tradition: To succumb to the idolatry of Reason is also, necessarily, to turn one’s back on the ever-present sources of traditional intellectuality and spirituality, which is to say doctrine and spiritual method — the epochal Revelations providentially directed towards various human collectivities, the traditions issuing from these Revelations, the Scriptures and commentaries of the doctors and sages of each tradition, the witness of the saints and mystics. All this is thrown out in favour of the prejudices of the day, largely fashioned by those pseudo-mythologies current at any particular moment. In the case of our four representatives of modernism we might well refer to the pseudo-mythologies of evolutionism, materialism, psychologism and relativism. • the denial of God: Each of these thinkers leaves God out of the frame. In the case of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, the disavowal is quite explicit whilst in Darwin it is a matter of ignoring the question, which amounts to more or less the same thing. These are godless thinkers who testify to the truth of Dostoevsky’s frightful premonition that ‘without God, everything is permitted’ — again, an insight shared by Nietzsche. The transcendent dimension of both the cosmos and the microcosmic human being is stripped away to leave us in an entirely horizontal world in which there is no longer any sense of our dignity, responsibility and freedom as the children of God. In such a world there is no longer any sense of the sacred from which we might take our spiritual bearings. Our souls cry out for bread but we are given stones. • the denial of Man: Finally, let us ask ourselves to what manner of self-understanding these pseudo-mythologies force-march us? In each case we are offered a meagre and charmless portrait of the human condition: man as biological organism, as a highly evolved ape whose essential function is to ensure the survival of the species, and whose behaviour is governed by the iron dictates of biological necessity; man as economic animal, fashioned by his material environment and by the impersonal forces of history; the human being as a puppet of the dark forces of the Id; man as a herd-creature, mediocre, cowardly, foolish and deluded, 11 redeemed only by the Ubermensch who dares to exercise the will to power. In the face of each of these degraded, reductionistic and bleak accounts of the human being, one can only ask, what could be expected of such a creature? — to which the inescapable answer is, not much! Is it not one of the most galling ironies of modernity that these much vaunted ideologies which, we are told ad nauseam, have emancipated us from ‘the shackles of ignorance and superstition’, have, in reality robbed us of all that is most precious in the human estate ‘hard to obtain’, by denying the Divine Spark which we all carry within? This, truly speaking, is a monstrous crime against God and thereby against humanity. In the light of our general theme at this conference let me now turn to a few very brief remarks about Tradition against which we are bound to judge the modern world. The World of Tradition St Augustine speaks of ‘wisdom uncreate, the same now that it ever was, the same to be forevermore’.xliv This timeless wisdom has carried many names: philosophia perennis, Lex Aeterna, Hagia Sophia, Din al-Haqq, Akalika Dhamma and Sanatana Dharma are among the better known. In itself this truth is formless and beyond all conceptualizations. Any attempt to define it is, to borrow a metaphor, like trying to catch the river in a net. This universal wisdom, in existence since the genesis of time and the spiritual patrimony of all humankind, can also be designated as the Primordial Tradition. René Guénon refers to ‘...the Tradition contained in the Sacred Books of all peoples, a Tradition which in reality is everywhere the same, in spite of all the diverse forms it assumes to adapt itself to each race and period...’.xlv In this sense tradition is synonymous with a perennial philosophy or wisdom which is eternal, universal and immutable. The Primordial Tradition or sophia perennis is of supra-human origin and is in no sense a product or evolute of human thought. It is the birth-right of humanity. All the great religious teachings, albeit in the differing vocabularies appropriate to the spiritual economy in question, affirm just such a principle. Recall Krishna's declaration, in the Bhagavad Gita, of the pre-existence of his message, proclaimed at the dawn of time. Bhagavad Gita IV:5.i). Likewise Christ, speaking in his cosmic function as incarnation of the Truth, states, ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, before Abraham was, I am’. (St John VIII.58) ‘Tradition’, then, in its most pristine sense is this primordial truth and as such takes on the status of a first cause, a cosmic datum, a principial reality woven into the very fabric of the universe and ingrained in the human spirit. ‘Tradition’ also has a secondary meaning, directly pertinent to our theme. Etymologically it simply means ‘that which is transmitted’. Here the term cannot be equated with a formless and immutable Truth but is, rather, that Truth as it finds formal expression, through the medium of a divine Revelation, in the myths, doctrines, rituals, symbols, and other manifestations of any religious culture. As Lord Northbourne has observed, ‘Tradition, in the rightful sense of the word, is the chain that joins civilisation to Revelation.’xlvi In this context ‘tradition’ becomes more or less synonymous with ‘religion’, always with the proviso that it is integral, orthodox religions of which we speak. Let us also not forget that When people talk about „civilisation? they generally attribute a qualitative meaning to the term, but really civilisation only represents a value provided it is supra-human in origin and implies for the civilised man a sense of the sacred... A sense of the sacred is fundamental for every civilisation because fundamental for man; the sacred—that which is immutable, inviolable, and so infinitely majestic—is in the very substance of our spirit and of our existence.xlvii 12 Traditional societies are grounded in an awareness of this reality. Society itself represents nothing of permanent or absolute value but only insofar as it provides a context for the sense of the sacred and the spiritual life which it implies. At radical odds with Tradition, in all of its senses, stands the world of modernity and the Promethean hubris which underpins it. What, essentially is the message of Tradition and the traditions for the modern world? Well, this is a very large question which might be answered in any number of ways. A Hindu swami summed up the essential message of his own tradition through four propositions: 1. God is; 2. God can be realized; 3. To realize God is the supreme goal of human existence; 4. God can be realized in many ways.xlviii Might it not be said, my friends, that this, in capsule form, is the message of all religious traditions? Staying Afloat in the Kali Yuga At a time when the forces of anti-Tradition sometimes seem overwhelming and when we feel unable to keep our hands to the plough, let us recall Frithjof Schuon’s reminder that no effort onbehalfoftheTruthiseverinvain.xlix Wemustdispelthefalsechargessometimeslevelled at traditionalists that they are dusty obscurantists ‘out of touch’ with the contemporary world, that they want to ‘wind back the clock’, that they are romantic reactionaries escaping into an idealized past. Let us never forget that the essential message of tradition is timeless and thus ever new, ever fresh, and always germane to both our immediate condition and to our ultimate destiny. As Schuon remarks, a ‘nostalgia for the past’ is, in itself, nothing; all that is meaningful is ‘a nostalgia for the sacred’ which ‘cannot be situated elsewhere than in the liberating 'now' of God’.l No doubt our crepuscular era is riddled with all manner of confusion but there are always saints and sages in our midst to whom we can turn for guidance. In recent times one might mention such figures as the Algerian Sufi master, Shaykh Ahmed Al Alawi, or Hindu sages such as Paramahamsa Ramakrishna, Ramana Maharshi and Ananda-mayi, or Native American visionaries such as Black Elk and Yellowtail, or the Christian monk, Henri Le Saux who became Swami Abhishiktananda, not to mention the many wise lamas and masters of the Far Eastern world, including such figures as His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh. Then, too, there is the abiding work and example of the great perennialists of the modern era: René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Titus Burckhardt, Frithjof Schuon, and Martin Lings, to mention only a few who have already gone to the further shore. Here are some words from Guénon we would do well to ponder: Those who might be tempted to give way to despair should realize that nothing accomplished in this order can ever be lost, that confusion, error and darkness can win the day only apparently and in a purely ephemeral way, that all partial and transitory disequilibrium must perforce' contribute towards the great equilibrium of the whole, and that nothing can ultimately prevail against the power of truth. Their device should be that used formerly by certain initiatory organizations of the West : Vincit Omnia Veritas.li In conclusion let me say what a privilege and a blessing it is to have the opportunity to participate in this gathering and to share with you that spiritual radiance that is inevitably — one may say providentially—generated whenever men and women of different faiths come together, in a spirit of good will, to open themselves to the workings of the Spirit. Let me conclude with some beautiful lines from Rumi to which I have returned many times on my own faltering journey: 13 Thank you, and Peace be with you! i ii iv v vi *** edited Jacob Needleman, Baltimore: Penguin, 1974. Come, come whoever you are, Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving, It doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times. Come, come yet again, come. Frithjof Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, Perennial Books, no date, reprint of 1961 John Murray edition, 20note. iii Some of the material under this heading, and later in this article under „The World of Tradition?, first appeared in Harry Oldmeadow (ed), The Betrayal of Tradition, Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2004, xi-xvi. The Vishnu Purana, quoted in William Stoddart, An Outline of Hinduism, Washington DC: Foundation for Traditional Studies, 1993, 75-76. These passages, in a different translation, can be found in The Vishnu Purana, Vol 2, tr. & ed. H.H. Wilson & Nag Sharan Singh, Delhi: Nag Publishers, 1980, 662-3, 866-867. Dorothy Sayers, Introductory Papers on Dante (1954), quoted in E.F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed, London: Jonathan Cape, 1977, 151-152. Frithjof Schuon, „No Activity Without Truth? in The Sword of Gnosis, 28 (a different translation of this article can be found in The Betrayal of Tradition, 3-14). vii The term should not here be confused with its more restricted meaning, referring to certain artistic and literary developments originating in late 19thC Europe. viii Lord Northbourne, Religion in the Modern World, London: J.M. Dent, 1963, 13. ix x xi See S.H. Nasr, „Reflections on Islam and Modern Thought?, The Islamic Quarterly 23:3, 1979, 119-131. Blake quoted in Kathleen Raine, „The Underlying Order: Nature and the Imagination? in Fragments of Infinity: Essays in Religion and Philosophy, ed. Arvind Sharma, Lindfield (Australia): Unity Press, 1991, 208. Frithjof Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, London: Perennial Books, 1966, 42. xii E.F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed, 31. xiii On the social effects of Darwinist ideas see Marilynne Robinson?s essay, „Darwinism?, in The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, New York: Picador, 2005, 28-75. xiv quoted in M. Robinson, „Darwinism?, 35 xv René Guénon, The Reign of Quantity & The Signs of the Times, Ghent, NY: Sophia Perennis et Universalis, 1995, 149. xvi See Harry Oldmeadow, „Sankara?s Doctrine of Maya?, Asian Philosophy 2:2, 19992, 131-146. xvii cited as an epigraph in Tomorrow 12:3, 1964, 191. xviii Frederick Engels, „Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx?, in Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Selected Works, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968, 435. xix Letter to Lasalle, 16 January 1861, quoted in Francis Wheen, Karl Marx, London: Fourth Estate, 1999, 364. xx Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right in Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, On Religion, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1957, 37-38 xxi Anti-Dühring, in Marx & Engels, On Religion, 131. xxii Preface to Marx?s doctoral thesis, quoted in David McLellan, Marx, Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1975, 26. xxiii from The German Ideology, quoted in Francis Wheen, Karl Marx, 96. xxiv Letter to Maria Bonaparte, from Letters of Sigmund Freud, quoted in Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, 29. xxv Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, London: Hogarth Press, 1974, 160-161. xxvi Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 167. xxvii Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, Vol 1, cited in Whitall Perry, „The Revolt Against Moses: A New Look at Psychoanalysis?, in Challenges to a Secular Society, Oakton, VA: Foundation for Traditional Studies, 1996, 17-38. xxviii New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 159. xxix New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 168. xxx Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950, 156. 14 xxxi xxxii xxxiii xxxiv xxxv xxxvi The Future of an Illusion (1927), in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol XX1, ed. James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 1964, 30. New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 74-75. New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 168. from Virgil, inscribed in Die Traumdeutung, noted in René Guénon, The Reign of Quantity, note 139, 355. For some commentary on Freud’s ideas about religion see Wolfgang Smith, Cosmos and Transcendence, 109, and Alister McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism, London: Rider, 2004, 66-77. from L’Erreur Spirite (1923), quoted in A.K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism, Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1996, 61. Guénon?s most devastating critique of psychologism is to be found in The Reign of Quantity (1945). Frithjof Schuon, „The Psychological Imposture?, in Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism, Bloomington: World Wisdom, 1986, 195. xxxvii xxxviii Titus Burckhardt, „Cosmology and Modern Science?, in The Sword of Gnosis, 131. from The Anti-Christ (1988), in Philip Novak (ed), The Vision of Nietzsche, Rockport: Element, 1996, 52. xxxix Frithjof Schuon, To Have a Center, Bloomington: World Wisdom, 1990, 15. xl from The Gay Science (1882) in A Nietzsche Reader, ed. R.J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977, 202-203. xli Metropolitan Anthony of Sourzah, God and Man, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1974, 68. xlii See Whitall Perry, „The Revolt Against Moses?, 17-38. xliii Frithjof Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, New York: Harper & Row, 1975, 42. xliv St Augustine, Confessions, IX.10. xlv René Guénon in La Gnose, 1909, quoted in Whitall Perry, A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom, London: Allen & Unwin, 1971, 20. xlvi Lord Northbourne, Religion in the Modern World, 34. xlvii Frithjof Schuon, Understanding Islam, London: Allen & Unwin, 1976, 33. xlviii Swami Prabhavananda, The Spiritual Heritage of India, Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1981, 354-355. xlix Frithjof Schuon, “No Activity Without Truth”, 39. l li Frithjof Schuon, „On the Margin of Liturgical Improvisations? in The Sword of Gnosis, 353. These are the concluding words of René Guénon?s Crisis of the Modern World (1927).
- [Frithjof Schuon on Esoterism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/schuon-on-esoterism) - The Heart of the Religio Perennis: Frithjof Schuon on Esotericism Harry Oldmeadow Published in Edward Crangle (ed), Esotericism and the Control of Knowledge, 2004, Sydney University. Exotericism consists in identifying transcendent realities with the dogmatic forms, and if need be, with the historical facts of a given Revelation, whereas esotericism refers in a more or less direct manner to these same realities. (Frithjof Schuon)1 If we can grasp the transcendent nature of the human being, we thereby grasp the nature of revelation, of religion, of tradition; we understand their possibility, their necessity, their truth. And in understanding religion, not only in a particular form or according to some verbal specification, but also in its formless essence, we understand the religions... the meaning of their plurality and diversity; this is the plane of gnosis, of the religio perennis, whereon the extrinsic antinomies of dogmas are explained and resolved. (Frithjof Schuon)2 Introduction Generally speaking, "esotericism" refers to a field of "spiritual" knowledge and practice which is secret, arcane, and initiatory; the term encompasses movements as diverse as hermeticism, alchemy, Rosicrucianism, theosophy, freemasonry, Eastern Tantras and various psycho-physical disciplines, Shamanism, Christian mysticism, Kabbala, and Sufism as well as a plethora of modern occult and para- psychological movements gathered around disparate charismatic figures—Aleister Crowley, Madame Blavatsky and G.I. Gurdjieff might be cited as representative figures. Today esotericism, ancient and modern, is a burgeoning field of academic study. Scholars from fields as diverse as religious studies, history, psychology and art history (to name only a few) are exploring a terrain which earlier remained largely the province of "occultists" of various mien. Witness the recent proliferation of ambitious but sober and rigorous scholarly studies and the appearance of academic journals such as Esoterica: The Journal of Esoteric Studies.3 Many modern movements which claim access to some kind of "esoteric" knowledge are in fact concerned only with the study and manipulation of psychic and extra-sensory phenomena and have no necessary connection with religion. A vast spiritual wasteland is populated by psychic, spiritualist and "esoteric" groups which concern themselves with auric eggs, astral bodies, ectoplasmic apparitions, vibrations, mind waves, death lights, Rochester knockings and, in Whitall Perry's words, "sundry other emergences and extravagances of hideous nomenclature...".4 This article is concerned neither with any particular esoteric movement nor with the modern efflorescence of "pseudo-esotericisms" but with the perspective of a group of thinkers who can be gathered together under the rubric of "traditionalism" and for whom esotericism comprises the heart of the great religious traditions of both East and West. In his essay "The Pertinence of Philosophy" Ananda Coomaraswamy suggested that 1 2 F. Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, New York, 1975, p. 144. F. Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, London, 1966, p. 142. 4 W. Perry, A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom, London, 1971, p. 437. 3 ...if we are to consider what may be the most urgent practical task to be resolved by the philosopher, we can only answer that this is... a See, for instance, W. J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: esotericism in the mirror of secular thought, Albany, 1998; A. Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism, Albany, 1994; Modern Esoteric Spirituality, ed. A. Faivre & J. Needleman, New York, 1995; Esoterica: The Journal of Esoteric Studies at www.esoteric.msu.edu. 2 control and revision of the principles of comparative religion, the true end of which science... should be to demonstrate the common metaphysical basis of all religions... 1 This statement adumbrates the agenda of the traditionalists. The traditionalist outlook was first publicly articulated by the French metaphysician, René Guénon.2 Since the time of Guénon's earliest writings, soon after the turn of the last century, a significant traditionalist "school" has emerged with Guénon, Coomaraswamy and Frithjof Schuon acknowledged within the group as its pre-eminent exponents. The traditionalists, by definition, are committed to the exposition of the philosophia perennis which lies at the heart of the diverse religions and behind the manifold forms of the world's different traditions. However, unlike some of those who have sought to popularize the "perennial philosophy"—Aldous Huxley, various neo-Hindus and some Aquarian "New Agers" amongst them—the traditionalists are also dedicated to the preservation and illumination of the traditional forms which give each religious heritage its raison d'être and guarantee its formal integrity and, by the same token, ensure its spiritual efficacy. This article focuses on the writings of Frithjof Schuon. After a brief introduction to his life and work we will turn to Schuon's understanding of esotericism and its relationship to religious exotericism. Attention will be drawn to the traditionalist perspective on both mystical experience and metaphysical science. Some consideration will also be given to the unprecedented exposure of traditional esoteric wisdom in the contemporary world. The Life and Work of Frithjof Schuon Frithjof Schuon was born of German parents in Basle in 1907.3 He was schooled in both French and German but left school at sixteen to work as a textile designer in Paris. From an early age he devoted himself to a study of philosophy, religion and metaphysics, reading the classical and modern works of European philosophy, and the sacred literatures of the East. Amongst the Western sources Plato and Eckhart left a profound impression while the Bhagavad Gita was his favourite Eastern reading.4 Even before moving to Paris Schuon came into contact with the writings of René Guénon "which served to confirm his own intellectual rejection of the modern civilisation while at the same time bringing into sharper focus his spontaneous understanding of metaphysical principles and their traditional applications."5 From his earliest years Schuon was also fascinated by sacred art, especially that of Japan and the Far East.6 After working for a time in Alsace, Schuon underwent military service before returning to his design work in Paris. There, in 1930, his interest in Islam led him to a close study of Arabic.7 Schuon's personal spiritual development is veiled in obscurity but it seems probable that it was in this period that he formally committed himself to Islam. In the 1930s Schuon several times visited North Africa, spending time in Algeria, Morocco and Egypt where he met Guénon, with whom he had been corresponding for some years. In many respects Schuon's work was to be an elaboration of principles first given public expression by Guénon. However, Schuon himself was a disciple of the Shaikh Ahmad Al 'Alawi, the Algerian Sufi sage and founder of the 'Alawi order.8 Schuon has written of the Shaikh: ...someone who represents in himself... the idea which for hundreds of years has been the life-blood of that civilisation [the Islamic]. To 4 Barbara Perry, op.cit., p. 2. 5 ibid. See also W. Perry, "The Revival of Interest in Tradition" in The Unanimous 1 2 Contemporary Indian Philosophy, ed. S. Radhakrishnan & J.H. Muirhead, London, 1952, pp. 158-159. Guénon's most significant writings include Man and His Becoming According to Vedanta (1925), The Crisis of the Modern World (1927), and The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times (1945). 3 For biographical information on Schuon see B. Perry, Frithjof Schuon, Metaphysician and Artist, Bloomington, 1981, and K.S. Oldmeadow, Traditionalism: Religion in the Light of the Perennial Philosophy, Colombo, 2000, Ch 4. 7 B.Perry, op.cit., p. 3. 8 See M. Lings, A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century, Berkeley, 1971, and M. Valsan: "Notes on the Shaikh al-'Alawi, 1869-1934", Studies in Comparative Religion, V:i, 1971. 6 Tradition, ed. R. Fernando, Colombo, 1991, pp. 14-16. In an unusual personal reference in one of his works Schuon tells us of a Buddha figure in an ethnographical museum. It was a traditional representation in gilded wood and flanked by two statues of the Bodhisattvas Seishi and Kwannon. The encounter with this "overwhelming embodiment of an infinite victory of the Spirit" Schuon sums up in the phrase "veni, vidi, victus sum". F. Schuon, In the Tracks of Buddhism, London, 1968, p. 121. 3 meet such a one is like coming face to face, in mid-twentieth century, with a medieval Saint or a Semitic Patriarch.1 Schuon himself was eventually to become the Shaikh of a tariqa based first in Switzerland and later in Indiana in the USA. India held a strong attraction for Schuon but a visit to the subcontinent was cut short by the outbreak of World War II which obliged him to return to Europe. Schuon served for some months in the French army before being captured by the Germans, subsequently escaping to Switzerland where he was briefly imprisoned before being granted asylum. He settled in Lausanne and, some years later, took out Swiss nationality.2 Schuon and his wife developed friendly contacts with visiting American Indians in Paris and Brussels in the 1950s. During their first visit to North America in 1959, the Schuons were officially adopted into the Red Cloud family of the Lakota tribe, that branch of the Sioux nation from which came the revered "medicine-man" Black Elk.3 As well as making visits to America Schuon travelled again in North Africa and the Middle East. Although living in reclusive circumstances in Switzerland Schuon maintained on-going friendships with representatives of all the great religious traditions. He spent his later years in America until his death in May, 1998. Schuon's published work forms an imposing corpus and covers a staggering range of religious and metaphysical subjects without any of the superficialities and simplifications which we normally expect from someone covering such a vast territory. His works on specific religious traditions have commanded respect from scholars and practitioners within the traditions in question. As well as publishing over twenty books he was a prolific contributor to journals such as Etudes Traditionnelles, Islamic Quarterly, Tomorrow, Studies in Comparative Religion and Sophia Perennis. All of his major works, written in French, have now been published in English.4 Schuon's writings are governed by an unchanging set of metaphysical principles. They exhibit nothing of a "development" or "evolution" but are, rather, re-statements of the same principles from different vantage points and brought to bear on divergent phenomena. His work is concerned with the re-affirmation of traditional metaphysical principles, with an explication of the esoteric dimensions of religion, with the penetration of mythological and religious forms, and with the critique of a modernism which is indifferent (or openly hostile) to the principles which inform all traditional wisdoms. His general position was defined in his first book to appear in English, The Transcendent Unity of Religions (1953), of which T.S. Eliot remarked, "I have met with no more impressive work on the comparative study of Oriental and Occidental religion."5 Multiple Revelations and the Principle of Orthodoxy Four leitmotifs run through Schuon's work on religion: the necessary diversity of Revelations and thus of religious forms; the principle of orthodoxy; the distinction between the exoteric and esoteric domains, and the relationship between these outer and inner dimensions of religion; and the transcendent unity of religions. Before focusing on Schuon's perspective on esotericism let us briefly consider the first two of these themes in his work. Schuon's view of religion turns on the axiomatic notion of multiple and diverse Revelations; the principle is a kind of linch-pin in his work. Schuon perceives humankind neither as a monolithic psychic entity nor as an amorphous agglomerate but as being divided into several distinct branches, each with its own peculiar traits, psychological and otherwise, which determine its receptivities to truth and shape its apprehensions of Reality. Needless to say there is no question here of any kind of racialism or ethnocentricism which attributes a superiority or inferiority to this or that ethnic collectivity. Nor, however, is there any sentimental prejudice in favour of the idea that the world's peoples are only "superficially" and "accidentally" different. "We observe the existence, on earth, of diverse races, whose differences are 'valid' since there are 1 2 3 4 F. Schuon, "Rahimahu Llah", Cahiers du Sud, Aug-Sept 1935, quoted in M. Lings: op.cit., p. 116. There is a moving portrait of the Shaikh by Schuon, facing page 160. B.Perry, op.cit., p. 3. For some account of the Schuons' personal experiences with the Plains Indians see F. Schuon, The Feathered Sun: Plains Indians in Art and Philosophy, Bloomington, 1990. Schuon's books in English translation are listed at the end of this article. 5 Cover of the revised edition of The Transcendent Unity of Religions, New York, 1975. 4 no 'false' as opposed to 'true' races."1 Each branch of humanity exhibits a psychic and spiritual homogeneity which may transcend barriers of geography and biology. An example: that shamanism should extend through parts of Northern Europe, Siberia, Mongolia, Tibet and the Red Indian areas betokens, in Schuon's view, a certain temperament shared by the peoples in question, one quite independent of physical similarities and leaving aside the question of migrations, "borrowings" and "influences".2 To the diverse human collectivities are addressed Revelations which are determined in their formal aspects by the needs and receptivities at hand. Thus, ...what determines the differences among forms of Truth is the difference among human receptacles. For thousands of years already humanity has been divided into several fundamentally different branches, which constitute so many complete humanities, more or less closed in on themselves; the existence of spiritual receptacles so different and so original demands differentiated refractions of the one Truth.3 In a sense the Revelations are communicated in different divine languages. Just as we should baulk at the idea of "true" and "false" languages, so we need to see the necessity and the validity of multiple Revelations.4 The principle of multiple Revelations is not accessible to all mentalities and its implications must remain anathema to the majority of believers. This is in the nature of things. Nevertheless, from a traditionalist viewpoint, anyone today wishing to understand religion as 1 F. Schuon, Gnosis: Divine Wisdom, Bedfont, 1959, p. 32. 2 F. Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, p. 72. such and the inter-relationships of the various traditions must have a firm purchase on this principle. As each religion proceeds from a Revelation, it is, in Seyyed Hossein Nasr's words, both ...the religion and a religion, the religion inasmuch as it contains within itself the Truth and the means of attaining the Truth, a religion since it emphasises a particular aspect of Truth in conformity with the spiritual and psychological needs of the humanity for whom it is destined.5 In other words each religion is sufficient unto itself and contains all that is necessary for man's sanctification and salvation. Nevertheless, it remains limited by definition. The recognition and reconciliation of these two apparently antagonistic principles is crucial to the traditionalist perspective. Schuon: A religion is a form, and so also a limit, which "contains" the Limitless, to speak in paradox; every form is fragmentary because of its necessary exclusion of other formal possibilities; the fact that these forms—when they are complete, that is to say when they are perfectly "themselves"—each in their own way represent totality does not prevent them from being fragmentary in respect of their particularisation and their reciprocal exclusion.6 Further, as Nasr reminds us, ...every religion possesses two elements which are its basis and its foundation: a doctrine which distinguishes between the Absolute and the relative, between the absolutely Real and the relatively real... and a method of concentrating upon the Real, of attaching oneself to the Absolute and living according to the Will of Heaven, in accordance with the purpose and meaning of human existence.7 Plainly this kind of definition is not acceptable to everyone. It is incompatible with many of the definitions which have been in vogue at 3 4 See F. Schuon, Gnosis: Divine Wisdom, London, 1979, p. 29. For a mapping of these branches and some account of their differences see Schuon's essay "The Meaning of Race" in Language of the Self, Madras, 1959, pp. 173-200. This essay should be read in conjunction with "Principle of Distinction in the Social Order" in the same volume. (These essays can also be found in F. Schuon, Castes and Races, London, 1982, the latter essay appearing under the title "The Meaning of Caste".) F. Schuon, Gnosis: Divine Wisdom, p. 30. The comparison of religions and languages is a common and long-standing one. For some examples see M. Müller, "Chips from a German Workshop" in Classical Approaches to the Study of Religion, ed. J. Waardenburg, The Hague, 1973, pp. 88-89; R. Zwi Werblowsky, "Universal Religion and Universalist Religion", International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, II:i, 1971, pp. 10-11. 5 6 7 See S. H. Nasr, Ideals and Realities of Islam, London, 1966, p. 15. See F. Schuon, Understanding Islam, London, 1976, p. 144. See also F. Schuon, Dimensions of Islam, London, 1969, p. 136. S.H. Nasr, Ideals and Realities of Islam, p. 15. 5 one time or another amongst scholars from several different academic disciplines. It is not our present purpose to debate the merits of various formulations about religion but simply to make the traditionalist position clear. It hardly needs be said that there is a yawning chasm between the traditionalist view and those rationalistic and reductionist models which diminish religion to a "cultural production" of merely human provenance. One criterion of religion derives from the principle of orthodoxy. Schuon articulates the principle thus: In order to be orthodox a religion must possess a mythological or doctrinal symbolism establishing the essential distinction between the Real and the illusory, or the Absolute and the relative... and must offer a way that serves both the perfection of concentration on the Real and also its continuity. In other words a religion is orthodox on condition that it offers a sufficient, if not always exhaustive, idea of the absolute and the relative, and therewith an idea of their reciprocal relationships...1 Elsewhere Schuon affirms that Traditional orthodoxy means being in accord with a doctrinal or ritual form, and also, and indeed above all, with the truth which resides in all revealed forms; thus the essence of every orthodoxy is intrinsic truth...2 In yet another passage he writes, philosophical origin and thus be charged with a sacramental or theurgic presence...3 The ramifications of these claims will become clearer as our discussion proceeds. What of the attitude of one orthodoxy to another? The key is in Schuon's reference to "formal elements which cannot apply literally outside their own perspective". From the exoteric vantage point of any particular tradition there can only be one orthodoxy, i.e., the one determining the outlook in question. Thus, for example, from a Hindu viewpoint Buddhism must appear as heterodox, the test of orthodoxy here being the acceptance of Vedic authority.4 The exclusivist or alternativist perspective belongs firmly in the domain of religious exotericism. However, as we shall see, the terrestrial conditions now prevailing dictate that we must turn to esotericism to see how the demands of religious orthodoxy can still be respected whilst also understanding the potentially destructive effects of a sterile literalism. Exotericism & Esoterism: Outer Forms & Inner Essence We can now turn to our main subject: the distinction, first made explicit by Guénon but fully elaborated by Schuon, between the exoteric and esoteric dimensions of any religious tradition. Generally we are accustomed to drawing sharp dividing lines between the religious 3 F. Schuon, Islam and the Perennial Philosophy, London, 1976, p. 14. (Italics mine.) See also commentary by L. Schaya in Traditional Modes of Contemplation and 1 2 For a religion to be considered intrinsically orthodox—an extrinsic orthodoxy hangs upon formal elements which cannot apply literally outside their own perspective—it must rest upon a fully adequate doctrine...then it must extol and actualise a spirituality that is equal to this doctrine and thereby include sanctity within its ambit both as concept and reality; this means it must be of Divine and not F. Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, p. 138. F. Schuon, Language of the Self, p. 1. 4 Action, ed. Y. Ibish & P.L. Wilson, Tehran, 1977, pp. 462ff. Here the Hindu viewpoint is both "right" and "wrong". This paradox is resolved in an illuminating passage from Schuon: "What makes the definition of orthodoxy rather troublesome is that it presents two principal modes, the one essential or intrinsic, and the other formal or extrinsic: the latter is being in accord with a revealed form, and the former the being in accord with the essential and universal truth, with or without being in accord with any particular form, so that the two modes sometimes stand opposed externally. To give an example, it can be said that Buddhism is extrinsically heterodox in relation to Hinduism, because it makes a departure from the basic forms of the latter, and at the same time intrinsically orthodox, because it is in accord with that universal truth from which both traditions proceed; on the other hand the Brahmo-Samaj, like every other variety of "progressive" neo-Hinduism, is doubly heterodox, first in relation to Hinduism itself and secondly in relation to truth unqualified...". F. Schuon, Language of the Self, p. 1. See also S.H. Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred, New York, 1981, pp. 78-80. 6 traditions. The differences here are, of course, palpably real and Schuon has no wish to blur the distinctions. Indeed, his vigorous defence of the principle of orthodoxy should preclude any misunderstanding on this point. However, this notwithstanding, Schuon draws another kind of dividing line which in some senses is much more fundamental: that between the exoteric and esoteric. In the exoteric domain, we see the separate, distinct religious traditions each cleaving to an ensemble of formal elements deriving from a Revelation. These formal elements include scriptures, dogmas, rituals and other spiritual practices. In the esoteric domain within the circumference, so to speak, of the formal exotericisms, the different traditions converge on the Truth (the Centre) through a variety of means—esoteric doctrines, initiations and spiritual disciplines, intellection, the plenary experience. The necessity and the formal integrity of the different traditions is in no way compromised under this view which fully respects the formal differences between the religions on the plane where such distinctions, even antagonisms, find their proper place. It is crucial to note that, under this view, it is only through the exoteric realm that the esoteric can be reached. At a time when it is sometimes suggested that the esoteric dimension can exist in vacuo or that it can be detached from the formal tradition in question, this is a point which needs some stressing.1 The universality of every great spiritual patrimony rests "on a foundation of divinely instituted formal elements".2 Furthermore, we cannot too often be reminded that "Truth does not deny forms from the outside but transcends them from within."3 In discriminating between the exoteric and the esoteric we are, in a sense, speaking of "form" and "spirit". Exotericism, or "religious externalism", rests on a necessary formalism: Exotericism never goes beyond the "letter". It puts its accent on the Law, not on any realisation, and so puts it on action and merit. It is essentially a "belief" in a "letter", or a dogma envisaged in its formal exclusiveness, and an obedience to a ritual and moral Law. And, further, exotericism never goes beyond the individual; it is centred on heaven rather than on God, and this amounts to saying that this difference has for it no meaning.4 It follows that exotericism must thereby embody certain inevitable and in a sense therapeutic limits or "errors" which from a fuller perspective can be seen in both their positive and negative aspects. Religion, in its formal aspect, is made up of what the Buddhists call upaya, "skillful means" which answer the necessities of the case, what Schuon calls "saving mirages" and "celestial stratagems".5 The limiting definitions of exoteric formalism are "comparable to descriptions of an object of which only the form and not the colours can be seen".6 Partial truths which might be inadequate in a sapiential perspective may be altogether proper on the formal exoteric plane: 1 2 This kind of assumption is evident in the pretensions of people who claim to be "Sufis" without being Muslims. See S.H. Nasr, Sufi Essays, London, 1972, p. 169, n11, and S.H. Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred, p. 77. However, it must also be conceded that, in exceptional circumstances, it is possible for an integral esoteric movement to develop more or less independently of a religious tradition: hermeticism and alchemy furnish two conspicuous examples. F. Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, p. 137. It is, of course, precisely because the formal elements of tradition are divinely instituted that the traditionalist must treat them with such respect. See S.H. Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred, pp. 293-294. 5 F. Schuon, Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism, Bloomington, 1986, p.185,n2. See also F. Schuon, The Transfiguration of Man, Bloomington, 1995, p. 8: "In religious esoterisms, efficacy at times takes the place of truth, and rightly so, given the nature of the men to whom they are addressed." 6 F. Schuon, Understanding Islam, p. 80. 3 F. Schuon, Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, London, 1967, p. 112. 4 The formal homogeneity of a religion requires not only truth but also errors—though these are only in form—just as the world requires evil and as Diversity implies the mystery of creation by virtue of its infinity. Absolute truths exist only in depth, not as a surface. The religions are "mythologies" which, as such, are founded on real aspects of the Divine and on sacred facts, and thus on realities but F. Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, 76. Huston Smith has offered a useful gloss on Schuon's elucidation of the exoteric-esoteric distinction in these terms: "For the exoteric God's personal mode is his only mode; for the esoteric this mode resides in one that is higher and ultimately modeless... For the exoteric the world is real in every sense; for the exoteric it has only a qualified reality... For the exoteric God is primarily loved; for the esoteric He is primarily known; though in the end the exoteric comes to know what he loves and the esoteric to love what he knows." Huston Smith in Introduction to F. Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, p. xxvi. See also F. Schuon, Understanding Islam, p. 110. 7 only on aspects. Now this limitation is at the same time inevitable and fully efficacious.1 In other words, the forms of religious exotericism constitute certain accommodations which are necessary to bring various truths within the purview of the average mentality. As such they are adequate to the collective needs in question. Just as there exists within each tradition an exoteric and an esoteric dimension so too there exist corresponding spiritual dispositions. It is in the nature of things that only a small minority will be blessed with the contemplative intelligence necessary to penetrate the formal aspects of religion. For the normal believer the exoteric domain is the only domain. The statements of a formal exotericism can thus be seen as partial truths, as intimations of Truth, as metaphors and symbols, as bridges to the formless Reality.2 Herein lies the point of Schuon's repeated affirmations of orthodoxy, such as this: "Orthodoxy includes and guarantees incalculable values which man could not possibly draw out of himself."3 But if "exotericism consists in identifying transcendent realities with dogmatic forms" then esotericism is concerned "in a more or less direct manner with these same realities".4 Esotericism is concerned with the apprehension of Reality as such, not Reality as understood in such and such a perspective and "under the veil of different religious formulations".5 While exotericism sees "essence" or "universal truth" as a function of particular forms, esotericism sees the forms as a function of "essence".6 To put it another way, exotericism particularises the universal, universal, esotericism universalises the particular: What characterises esoterism to the very extent that it is absolute, is that on contact with a dogmatic system, it universalises the symbol or religious concept on the one hand, and interiorizes it on the other; the particular or the limited is recognised as the manifestation of the principial and the transcendent, and this in its turn reveals itself as immanent.7 Mysticism, Metaphysics and Theology Mystical experience and metaphysical science constitute the subjective and objective poles of esotericism. Mysticism comprises three aspects: the mystical experience itself, the formulations about the nature of Reality which issue from such experiences, and the spiritual methodology which creates a climate, so to speak, in which mystical experiences might more readily and more fruitfully occur. In brief, mystical experience, mystical doctrine, and the mystical path. In the traditionalist lexicon mystical doctrine is nothing other than metaphysics, the formal articulation of that which is realised in the mystical state. In the words of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, "Metaphysics, which in fact is one and should be named metaphysic... is the science of the Real, of the origin and end of things, of the Absolute and in its light, the relative".8 Similarly, "metaphysical": "concerning universal realities considered objectively".9 Mysticism, as an experience, on the other hand, concerns "the same realities considered subjectively, that is, in relation to the contemplative soul, insofar as they enter into contact with it".10 Esotericism is "situated" on the plane of mystical experience, of intellection and realisation. As Guénon observed more than once, metaphysics cannot strictly be defined, for to define is to limit, while the domain of metaphysics is the Real and thus limitless. Consequently, metaphysics "is truly and 7 ibid. 8 S.H. Nasr, Man and Nature: the Spiritual Crisis of the Modern World, London, 1976, p. 81. 9 Frithjof Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, p. 204,n9. 10 ibid. Schuon is, of course, not unaware of the linguistic and connotative ambiguities surrounding the term "mysticism". See Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, p. 86fn. See also S.H. Nasr, Sufi Essays, p. 26,n5. For an extended traditionalist discussion see W. Stoddart, "Mysticism" in The Unanimous Tradition, pp. 89-95. 1 F. Schuon, Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, p. 70. A specific example of an exoteric dogma might help to reinforce some of the points under discussion. In discussing the Christian dogmas about heaven and hell, Schuon has this to say: "We are made for the Absolute, which embraces all things and from which none can escape; this truth is marvellously well presented in the monotheistic religions in the alternative between the two "eternities" beyond the grave... the alternative may be insufficient from the point of view of total Truth, but it is psychologically realistic and mystically efficacious; many lives have been squandered away and lost for the single reason that a belief in hell and in paradise is missing." Light on the Ancient Worlds, p. 22 2 F. Schuon, Understanding Islam, p. 110. 3 F. Schuon, Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, p. 113. See also F. Schuon, Islam and the Perennial Philosophy, p. 5. 4 F. Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, p. 144. See also F. Schuon, Esoterism as 5 6 Principle and as Way, London, 1981, p. 37. ibid., p. 19. ibid., p. 37. 8 absolutely unlimited and cannot be confined to any formula or any system".1 Its subject, in the words of John Tauler, is "that pure knowledge knowledge that knows no form or creaturely way".2 This should always be be kept in mind in any attempt at a "definition" which must needs be provisional and incomplete. Nasr explains the nature of traditional metaphysic and its relationship to religious exotericism this way: It is a science as strict and as exact as mathematics and with the same clarity and certitude, but one which can only be attained through intellectual intuition and not simply through ratiocination. It thus differs from philosophy as it is usually understood. Rather, it is a theoria of reality whose realisation means sanctity and spiritual perfection, and therefore can only be achieved within the cadre of a revealed tradition. Metaphysical intuition can occur everywhere—for the "spirit bloweth where it listeth"—but the effective realisation of metaphysical truth and its application to human life can only be achieved within a revealed tradition which gives efficacy to certain symbols and rites upon which metaphysics must rely for its realisation. This supreme science of the Real... is the only science that can distinguish between the Absolute and the relative, appearance and reality... Moreover, this science exists, as the esoteric dimension within every orthodox and integral tradition and is united with a spiritual method derived totally from the tradition in question.3 This view of metaphysics accords with the traditional but not with the modern conception of philosophy. It is attuned, for instance, to the ancient Greek understanding of philo-sophia, the love of wisdom as a practical concern. Metaphysics encompasses infinitely more than can be comprehended by the instruments and procedures of modern so-called philosophy. The cleavage between metaphysics and philosophy (as rational enquiry) only appears in modern times.4 The ultimate reality of metaphysics is the Supreme Identity in which all oppositions and dualities 1 4 are resolved, those of subject and object, knower and known, being and non-being; thus a Scriptural formulation such as "The things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God".5 As Coomaraswamy remarks, traditional philosophy, or metaphysics, provided the vision, and religion the way to its effective verification and actualisation in direct experience.6 Under the traditionalist view, a Divine Revelation is always the fountainhead of any orthodox religion while metaphysical insight derives from intellection—which is to say from the intuition of superphenomenal realities by the Intellect. Let us pause to clarify two crucial terms: intellection and gnosis. Recall Meister Eckhart's statement: "There is something in the soul which is uncreated and uncreatable...this is the Intellect".7 It is, in Schuon's words, "a receptive faculty and not a productive power: it does not 'create'; it receives and transmits. It is a mirror."8 The Intellect is an impersonal, unconditioned, unconditioned, receptive faculty, whence the objectivity of intellection. It is "that which participates in the divine Subject".9 Marco Pallis reminds us that the belief in this transcendent faculty, capable of a direct contact with Reality, is to be found in all traditions under various names.10 The Intellect gives access to gnosis, which "refers to supra- rational and thus purely intellective, knowledge of metacosmic realities."11 Its Sanskrit equivalent is jñana, knowledge in its fullest sense, what Eckhart calls "divine knowledge". The dichotomy between Revelation and intellection is more apparent than real, the former taking the place of intellection for the human collectivity in question. This is a principle not easily grasped but 5 1 Corinthians II.xi. The Absolute may be called God, the Godhead, nirguna Brahman, the Tao, and so on, according to the vocabulary at hand. See F. Schuon, R. Guénon: "Oriental Metaphysics" in The Sword of Gnosis, pp. 43-44. 2 Quoted in C.F. Kelley, Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge, New Haven, 1977, p. 4. 3 S.H. Nasr, Man and Nature, pp. 81-82. (Italics mine.) See also Coomaraswamy's 7 Quoted in M. Lings, A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century, p. 27. 8 F. Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, p. 21. 9 ibid., p. 88. 10 M. Pallis quoted in W. Perry, A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom, p. 733. 11 F. Schuon, Understanding Islam, p. 115. It must not be confused with the historical phenomenon of gnosticism, the Graeco-Oriental syncretism of latter classical times. See F. Schuon, To Have a Center, Bloominton, 1990, pp. 67-68, and Roots of the Human Condition, Bloomington, 1991, pp. 10-11. undated letter to "M" in Ananada Coomarasway: Selected Letters, ed. R. Coomaraswamy & A.Moore Jr, New Delhi, 1988, p. 10: "...traditional Metaphysics is as much a single and invariable science as mathematics." For a detailed discussion of the differences between metaphysics and modern philosophy see K.S. Oldmeadow, Traditionalism: Religion in the light of the Perennial Philosophy, Ch.8. 6 Light on the Ancient Worlds, pp. 96-9, n1 for a commentary on the use of "God". A.K. Coomaraswamy: "A Lecture on Comparative Religion" quoted in Roger Lipsey, Coomaraswamy: His Life and Work, Princeton, 1977, p. 275. Also see "Vedanta and Western Tradition" in A.K. Coomarasway, Coomaraswamy, Selected Papers 2: Metaphysics, Princeton, 1977, p. 6. 9 without it the apparent antagonisms of theology and metaphysics cannot be resolved. Schuon defines the relationship between Revelation and intellection in this way: ...in normal times we learn a priori of divine things through Revelation, which provides for us the symbols and the indispensable data, and we have access a posteriori to the truth of these things through Intellection, which reveals to us their essence beyond received formulations, but not opposing them... Revelation is an Intellection in the Macrocosm, while Intellection is a Revelation in the microcosm; the Avatara is the outward Intellect, and the Intellect is the inward Avatara.1 It might be said, then, that intellection appears in a more "subjective" mode, but only with this qualification: It is subjective because empirically it is within us. The term "subjective", as applied to the intellect, is as improper as the epithet "human"; in both cases the terms are used simply in order to define the way of approach.2 The traditionalists, always alert to the dangers of a reductionist psychologism, insist that the truth to which intellection gives access is beyond all spatio-temporal determinations. As Schuon points out, Biblical formulations such as "the Kingdom of Heaven is within you" certainly do not mean that Heaven, God or Truth are of a psychological order but simply that access to these realities is to be found through the centre of our being.3 Religion itself, flowing from the Divine, must carry principial or metaphysical knowledge but this will be veiled by the forms in question. For instance, The message of Christ, like that of the Bible, is not a priori a teaching of metaphysical science; it is above all a message of salvation, but one 1 F. Schuon, Esoterism as Principle and as Way, p. 10. See also S.H.Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred, pp. 148-149. 2 F. Schuon, Understanding Islam, p. 57,n2. 3 F. Schuon: "Keys to the Bible" in The Sword of Gnosis, pp. 356-358. that necessarily contains, in an indirect way and under cover of an appropriate symbolism, metaphysics in its entirety.4 The metaphysical emphasis varies from one tradition to another. Buddhism, for example, is primarily a spiritual therapy rather than a metaphysical system but one which of necessity requires a metaphysics while Hinduism is, in the first place, a metaphysics which implies, under the same necessity, a spiritual therapy.5 Doubtless there are those who will be quick to asseverate that Buddhism is indifferent to metaphysics, pointing to the Buddha's refusal to answer the indeterminate questions. The traditionalists would simply remind us of Nagarjuna's statement that the Buddha taught two levels of truth and that an understanding of the distinction, not possible without a metaphysical doctrine, is preconditional to a full understanding of the dharma.6 "There is no science of the soul," says Schuon, "without a metaphysical basis to it and without spiritual remedies at its disposal."7 The relationship of theology to metaphysics is that of exotericism to esotericism. Exotericism is "unable of itself to take cognisance of the relationships whereby, at one and the same time, it is justified in its claims and limited in its scope."8 Theological dogmatism is characterised by its insistence on elevating a particular point of view, or aspect of reality under a specific formal guise, to an absolute value with exclusive claims. As we have seen already, what characterises a metaphysical esotericism, on the other hand, is its discernment of the universal in the particular, of the essence in the form. This distinction can be hinged on the terms "belief" and "gnosis", or similarly, "faith" and "certitude". The difference between these, writes Schuon, is 4 ...comparable to the difference between a description of a mountain and direct vision of it; the second no more puts us on top of the mountain than the first but it does inform us about the properties of the mountain and the route to follow; let us not however forget that F. Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, p. 86. 5 F. Schuon, Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, p. 55. 6 ibid. 7 F. Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, p. 14. 8 F. Schuon, In the Tracks of Buddhism, p. 46. 10 the blind man who walks without stopping advances more quickly than a normal man who stops at each step.1 Elsewhere Schuon refers to the theologies as taking upon themselves the contradiction of being "sentimental metaphysics": ...being ignorant of the differentiation of things into aspects and standpoints they have therefore to operate on the basis of arbitrarily rigid data, the antinomies of which can only be solved by going beyond their artificial rigidity; their working has moreover a sentimental slant and this is described as "thinking piously".2 Such remarks should not be construed as an attack on the theological perspective but only as a caution about the limits of dogmatism and the dangers of a theological totalitarianism when it enters an arena where it is inadequate. As Marco Pallis so neatly puts it, What one always needs to remember is that traditional forms, including those bearing the now unpopular name of dogmas, are keys to unlock the gate of Unitive Truth; but they are also (since a key can close, as well as open a gate) possible obstacles to its profoundest knowledge...3 If gnosis as such is under consideration then the question of orthodoxy cannot arise, this being a principle which is only operative on the formal plane: If the purest esotericism includes the whole truth—and that is the very reason for its existence—the question of "orthodoxy" in the religious sense clearly cannot arise: direct knowledge of the mysteries could not be "Moslem" or "Christian" just as the sight of a mountain is the sight of a mountain and not something else.4 Nevertheless, the two realms, exoteric and esoteric, are continually meeting and interpenetrating, not only because there is such a thing as a 1 F. Schuon, Understanding Islam, p. 148. 2 F. Schuon, Islam and the Perennial Philosophy, p. 39. 3 "relative esotericism" but because "the underlying truth is one, and also because man is one".5 And, let it be repeated, even if esotericism transcends forms, it has need of doctrinal, ritual, moral and aesthetic supports on the path to realisation.6 In a felicitous metaphor Schuon compares the religions to the beads of rosary, gnosis being the cord on which they are strung. In other words, the religious orthodoxies, or more specifically theologies, are only able to fulfil their function when they remain attached to the principial knowledge which is preserved in the esoteric dimension of each tradition. Given the factors which have been mentioned it is not surprising that the exoteric elements in a religious tradition should be protected by authorities whose attitude to esoterism will be, at best, somewhat ambivalent, at worst openly hostile. In addressing itself to the defence of the credo and of the forms which appear as guarantors of truth the exoteric "resistance" to esotericism is entirely positive. The esoteric can see and respect this guardianship of the "incalculable values" of orthodoxy. On the other hand, ...the exoteric's assessment of the esoteric is likely to be less charitable, not because exoterics are less endowed with that virtue, but because a portion of the esoteric position being obscured from him, he cannot honour it without betraying the truth he does see.7 It is in this context that we should understand Ananda Coomaraswamy's remark, frequently made in his correspondence with "exoterics": "even if you are not on our side, we are on yours."8 But sometimes the exoteric defendants of orthodoxy overstep themselves and in doing so beget results that are both destructive and counter-productive, especially when a religious tradition is endangered by a preponderantly exoteric outlook: 5 M. Pallis, "Foreword" to W. Perry, A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom, p. 10. 4 F. Schuon, Understanding Islam, p. 139. See also F. Schuon, Sufism: Veil and Quintessence, Bloomington, 1981, p. 112. F. Schuon, Esoterism as Principle and as Way, p. 16. 6 ibid., p. 29. 7 Huston Smith, Introduction to F. Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, p. xv. 8 For one of many instances where Coomaraswamy uses this phrase see Letter to Joachim Wach, August 1947, Selected Letters, p. 13. 11 The exoteric viewpoint is, in fact, doomed to end by negating itself once it is no longer vivified by the presence within it of the esotericism of which it is both the outward radiation and the veil. So it is that religion, according to the measure in which it denies metaphysical and initiatory realities and becomes crystallized in literalistic dogmatism, inevitably engenders unbelief; the atrophy that overtakes dogmas when they are deprived of their internal dimension recoils upon them from outside, in the form of heretical and atheistic negations.1 How much of post-medieval Christian history bears witness to this truth!2 As to the theological ostracisms (or worse) that have befallen some of the mystics and metaphysicians seeking to preserve the esoteric dimension within their respective religious traditions, Schuon reminds us of Aesop's fable about the fox and the grapes, a story which "repeats itself in all sectors of human existence".3 Metaphysical Discernment and the Spiritual Life The hierarchic superiority of gnosis to all other forms of knowledge and of metaphysical doctrine to all other kinds of formulations should not be allowed to obscure the interdependent relationship of the esoteric and the exoteric, of the metaphysical domain and the rest of any religious tradition. Three general points need to be made in this context. They concern the ineffectiveness of intellection outside a traditional framework, the distinction between doctrinal understanding and realisation, and the relationship between metaphysical discernment and the spiritual life in general. revealed wisdom, but an exception, if it proves the rule, assuredly could not constitute the rule.4 In more normal cases Intellection has need of tradition, of a Revelation fixed in time and adapted to a society, if it is to be awakened in us and not go astray... the importance of orthodoxy, of tradition, of Revelation is that the means of realising the Absolute must come "objectively" from the Absolute; knowledge cannot spring up "subjectively" except within the framework of an "objective" divine formulation of Knowledge.5 Thus, although intellection can occur as "an isolated miracle" anywhere, it will have neither authority nor efficacy outside tradition.6 (In this context the case of Ramana Maharishi is not without interest, remembering how the Sage of Arunacala had to cast his own mystical insight into the moulds of classical Vedanta in order to be able to communicate it.7) The distinction between doctrinal understanding and even intellection itself on the one hand, and realisation on the other, is a crucial one. Contemplative intelligence and metaphysical insight, in themselves, do not save, "do not prevent Titans from falling".8 There must be a participation of the will in the intelligence, or as one scholar glossed Meister Eckhart, "The intellective center is not truly known without involving the volitive circumference."9 Here the will can be defined as "a prolongation or a complement of the intelligence"10 while intelligence itself refers to a contemplative receptivity rather than any mental cleverness, an intelligence which "differs as much from mental virtuosity as the soaring flight of an eagle differs from the play of a 1 2 3 8 F. Schuon, Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, p. 138. 9 C.F. Kelley: op.cit. (Kelley's book clearly owes a great deal to Schuon whose aphorisms are repeated almost word for word but nowhere in the book can we find any acknoweldegement of Schuon or any of the other traditionalists.) 10 F. Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, p. 136. See also Logic and Transcendence, p. 199. There are, writes Schuon, no metaphysical or cosmological reasons why, in exceptional cases, direct intellection should not arise in men who have no link at all with F. Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, p. 9. A spiritually alert minority has recently given much thought to the implications of this principle. The intuition and affirmation of its lessons was perhaps the most important aspect of the work of the late Thomas Merton. Merton's work has too often been seen as an enterprise in dialogue, which indeed it was, without any thought as to what end this was to be directed. The end Merton had in view was, of course, precisely the revivification of the contemplative and esoteric dimension within the Catholic tradition. F. Schuon, Islam and the Perennial Philosophy, p. 46. 4 5 F. Schuon, Understanding Islam, p. 130. 6 7 F. Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, p. 57. The best introductory account of the life of the sage is T.M.P. Mahadevan, Ramana Maharshi, The Sage of Arunacala, London, 1977. See also F. Schuon, Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, p. 122. F. Schuon, Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, p. 15. 12 monkey".1 Morality and the virtues, love, faith—these must be integrated with metaphysical insight if full realisation is to occur, which is to say there must be a merging of intellectual and volitive elements in a harmonized unity.2 The spiritual life, which can only be lived in conformity with a way provided by tradition, forms both a precondition and a complement to intellection. As Aquinas put it, "By their very nature the virtues do not necessarily form part of contemplation but they are an indispensable condition for it."3 Moreover, sanctity itself may or may not be accompanied by metaphysical discernment: one may be a saint but no metaphysician, as history repeatedly demonstrates. To expect, as a necessity, metaphysical wisdom of the saint is to confuse different modes of spiritual perfection. As Schuon reminds us, To say "man" is to say bhakta, and to say spirit is to say jñanin; human nature is so to speak woven of these two neighbouring but incommensurable dimensions. There is certainly a bhakti without jñana, but there is no jñana without bhakti.4 The perspectives of Ramanuja and Sankara might be cited by way of illustrative examples.5 If metaphysical discernment is to transform one's being then intellection alone is insufficient for "Human nature contains dark elements which no intellectual certainty could, ipso facto, eliminate."6 Here the role role of faith is of critical importance: A man may possess metaphysical certainty without possessing "faith"... But, if metaphysical certainty suffices on the doctrinal ground, it is far from being sufficient on the spiritual level where it 1 S.H. Nasr, Ideals and Realities of Islam, p. 21. 2 It should also be remembered that although the Intellect is "situated beyond sentiment, must be completed and enlivened by faith. Faith is nothing other than our whole being clinging to Truth, whether we have of truth a direct intuition or an indirect idea. It is an abuse of language to reduce "faith" to the level of "belief".7 In another context Schuon emphasises this point in even more unequivocal terms. The following passage is one of the most arresting in the whole Schuonian corpus, one made all the more so by the uncharacteristic personal reference: One can meditate or speculate indefinitely on transcendent truths and their applications (that is moreover what the author of this book does, but he has valid reasons for doing it, nor does he do it for himself). One can spend a whole lifetime speculating on the suprasensorial and the transcendent, but all that matters is "the leap into the void" which is the fixation of spirit and soul in an unthinkable dimension of the Real... this "leap into the void" we can call... "faith"...8 The Transcendent Unity of Religions Many thinkers have posited the "essential" unity of the religions and have attempted to reconcile formal religious antagonisms under an array of different philosophical and theological canopies—theosophy, "anonymous Christianity", "natural religion", "universal religion", and the "perennial philosophy" as espoused by the likes of Aldous Huxley and the redoubtable Swami Vivekananda. As Coomaraswamy has remarked, these aspirations to a universal religion amount to a kind of religious Esperanto — with about as much chance of success! We shall certainly not find in Schuon's work, nor in the writings of other traditionalists, any Procrustean attempt to find a unity on a plane where it does not exist nor an insipid and sentimental universalism which asserts a unity of no matter what elements as long as they lay some claim to being "religious" or "spiritual". To really understand the essential or transcendent unity of religions requires a proper recognition of the exoteric-esoteric relationship and a subordination (not an 3 4 5 imagination, memory and reason... it can at the same time enlighten and determine all of these since they are like its individualized ramifications, ordained as receptacles to receive the light from on high and to translate it according to their respective capacities." F. Schuon, The Transfiguration of Man, Bloomington, 1995, p. 25. Quoted in F. Schuon, Understanding Islam, p.133,n2. F. Schuon, Esoterism as Principle and as Way, p. 22. See F. Schuon, Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, pp. 103ff. For a European example of "bhakti without jñana" one might cite St Theresa of Lisieux — but the history of Christianity furnishes many examples. 6 F. Schuon, Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, p. 139. 7 8 ibid.,127. On the relationship of intellection and realisation see also S.H. Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred, pp. 310ff. F. Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, p. 202. 13 annihilation) of exoteric dogmatism to the metaphysical principles preserved by the mystical traditions. The principles which determine the transcendent unity of religions have now come into view. The supra-human origin of a religious tradition in a Revelation, an adequate doctrine concerning the Absolute and the relative, the saving power of the spiritual method, the esoteric convergence on the Unitive Truth—all these point to the inner unity of all integral traditions which are, in a sense, variations on one theme. However, there remain certain puzzling questions which might stand in the way of an understanding of the principial unity which the religio perennis discloses. One frequently comes across formulations such as the following: "It is sometimes asserted that all religions are equally true. But this would seem to be simply sloppy thinking, since the various religions1hold views of reality which are sharply different if not contradictory." This kind of either/or thinking, characteristic of much that nowadays passes for philosophy, is in the same vein as a dogmatism which reveals itself not only by its inability to conceive the inward or implicit illimitability of a symbol, but also by its inability to recognise, when faced with two apparently contradictory truths, the inward connection that they apparently affirm, a connection that makes of them complementary aspects of one and the same truth.2 It is precisely this kind of incapacity which must be overcome if the transcendent unity of the religions is to be understood. Let us rehearse some of the points made earlier through the following passage from Schuon: intrinsic compatibility or identity, which amounts to saying that each of the contradictory theses contains a truth and thereby an aspect of the whole truth and a way of access to this totality.3 Examples of "contradictory" truths which effectively express complementary aspects of a single reality can be found not only across the traditions but within them. One might instance, by way of illustration, the Biblical or Koranic affirmations regarding predestination and free will.4 From an esoteric viewpoint the exclusivist claims of one or another religion have no absolute validity. It is true that "the arguments of every intrinsically orthodox religion are absolutely convincing if one puts oneself in the intended setting".5 It is also true that the theological dogmatisms are entitled to a kind of "defensive reflex" which makes for claims to exclusivism. However, and this is crucial, The exoteric claim to the exclusive possession of a unique truth, or of Truth without epithet, is... an error purely and simply; in reality, every expressed truth necessarily assumes a form, that of its expression, and it is metaphysically impossible that any form should possess a unique value to the exclusion of other forms; for a form, by definition, cannot be unique and exclusive, that is to say it cannot 1 A religion is not limited by what it includes but by what it excludes; this exclusion cannot impair the religion's deepest contents—every religion is intrinsically a totality—but it takes its revenge all the more surely on the intermediary plane... the arena of theological speculations and fervours... extrinsic contradictions can hide an O. Thomas: "Introduction" to Attitudes to Other Religions, London, 1969, quoted by Huston Smith, Introduction to F. Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, p. xiii, n. The argument that the different religions cannot all be repositories of the truth because of their formal differences and antagonisms rests on a failure to understand this principle. The lesson to be drawn from the multiplicity of religious forms is quite different: The diversity of religions, far from proving the falseness of all the doctrines concerning the supernatural, shows on the contrary the supra-formal character of revelation and the formal character of 3 F. Schuon, Islam and the Perennial Philosophy, p. 46. 4 F. Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, p. 4. 5 F. Schuon, Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, p. 14. 6 F. Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, p. 17. 2 F. Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, p. 3. See also S.H. Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred, p. 281. be the only possible expression of what it expresses. 6 14 ordinary human understanding: the essence of revelation—or enlightenment—is one, but human nature requires diversity.1 In connection with this need for diversity, which is explained by the fact that humanity is divided into different branches, we might mention in passing Junyad's maxim that "...the color of the water is the color of the vessel containing it".2 Or, if a more abstract formulation be preferred, this from Aquinas: "...the thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower".3 In former times, just as man appeared as "man" and not as "yellow man" or "black man", and just as each language seemed to its practitioners to be language as such, so too each religion, for most believers, appeared as "religion" without further qualification. However, the inter- relationships of the religions today is an issue which has taken on a new urgency in the cyclical conditions in which we live. The imperative need for an esoteric resolution of the apparent incompatibilities of the different religious traditions is a matter of the utmost consequence—a resolution which can only be achieved by recourse to the principles articulated by Schuon and his fellow traditionalists. The main obstacle on this path is the tenacity with which many representatives of an exoteric viewpoint cling to a belief in the exclusive claims of their own tradition and to other "pious extravagances".4 As Schuon remarks, When one has experienced the usual pious sophistries of voluntaristic and moralistic doctrines, it becomes quite clear that gnosis is not a luxury, and that it alone can extricate us from the impasses of alternativism that is part and parcel of the confessional spirit.5 A Note on Esotericism and "Elitism" We are not here directly concerned with the "political" issues which arise from the so-called elitism of some esoteric movements. Nonetheless, given the general theme of the present volume it might be as well to devote a few words to the subject within the present context. Richard Bush, launches a criticism of Schuon's work that is both ideologically and morally motivated when he writes of Schuon's vision of the transcendent unity of religions: I am impressed neither by the unity envisaged nor with the possibilities for communication of it, and moreover, am deeply troubled because of the further division between an elite few... and the masses of human beings who cannot participate in the transcendent unity. A metaphysical dualism has been avoided at the cost of an epistemological and anthropological dualism, both of which are grounds for a subtle arrogance which is hardly becoming in those who desire religious unity.6 This is a veritable hornet's nest of misconceptions, most of which will here be left aside.7 However, a couple of points will not be out of order, order, especially in view of the fact that the charges of "arrogance" and "elitism" have been made by other commentators as well.8 Bush loses sight of several important facts in his references to "the elite few" and to "an epistemological and anthropological dualism". He refers here to Schuon's distinction between the exoteric and esoteric dimensions of religion and between the different spiritual types to whom they are addressed. Firstly, it is not a question of satisfying this or that sentimental prejudice (egalitarianism, "democracy", "open religion" or whatever) but of dealing with human actualities. To pretend, for example, that everyone is capable of the spiritual disciplines and the metaphysical discernment which the esoteric path demands is to fly in the face of palpable human realities. (There is, of course, that mean 1 2 3 5 F. Schuon: "No Activity Without Truth" in The Sword of Gnosis, p. 4. See also M. Pallis, A Buddhist Spectrum, p. 157. Quoted in A.K. Coomaraswamy: "Sri Ramakrishna and Religious Tolerance" in Selected Papers 2: Metaphysics, p. 37. R. Bush, "Frithjof Schuon's The Transcendent Unity of Religions; Con", Journal of the American Academy of Religion, XLIV: iv, 1976, pp. 716-717. ibid., p. 36. 4 The phrase is from Schuon's essay "Deficiencies in the World of Faith", Survey of Transcendent Unity of Religion and this article is easily available. See H. Smith: "Frithjof Schuon's The Transcendent Unity of Religions; Pro" in the same issue of JAAR, pp. 721-724. See also S.H. Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred, p. 319. 8 The charge is lurking, for example, in a remarkably shallow review of Schuon's Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts by R.C. Zaehner in The Journal of Theological Studies, VI, 1955, pp. 340-342. Metaphysics and Esoterism, p. 125. F. Schuon, To Have a Center, p. 70. (Italics mine.) 6 7 Huston Smith has devoted an article to answering Bush's criticisms of The 15 mentality which would then argue that esotericism therefore has no right to exist—the-dog-in-the-manger attitude masquerading as some kind of "egalitarianism".) Secondly, it should be emphasised that neither s
- [Conceptions of the Absolute in Mahayana Buddhism and the Pure Land Way](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/conceptions-of-the-absolute) - John Paraskevopoulos In a climate of increasing scepticism and reductionism, especially in certain Buddhist scholarly circles in the West, it is imperative that one does not lose sight of the fact that without such concepts as Dharmakaya, Suchness, Nirvana, Sunyata etc. being grounded in a true and existing reality which both transcends and suffuses all
- [Colorless Light and Pure Air: The Virgin in the Thought of Frithjof Schuon](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/colorless-light-and-pure-air) - Colorless Light and Pure Air: The Virgin in the Thought of Frithjof Schuon © 2007 James S. Cutsinger Published in Sophia: The Journal of Traditional Studies, 6:2 (Winter 2000); Reprinted in Maria: A Journal of Marian Studies, 3:1 (August 2002) and in Ye Shall Know the Truth: Christianity and the Perennial Philosophy, ed. Mateus Soares de Azevedo (Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom, 2005) _____________________________________________________________________________ The cause of what preceded her, the protectress of what came after her, and the patroness of things eternal. St Gregory Palamas It is now widely known that Frithjof Schuon, recognized throughout the second half of the twentieth century as one of the world’s most prolific and authoritative writers on religion and spirituality and as its most important expositor of the Sophia Perennis, was in his private life a Sufi master, the Shaykh ‘Îsâ Nûr al-Dîn Ahmad al-Shâdhilî al-‘Alawî al-Maryamî. It has also become public knowledge that the tarîqah or spiritual order which Schuon founded and guided, a branch of the Shâdhilîyyah lineage, is of a Marian provenance, a fact indicated by the last of his Islamic names. Known as the Tarîqah Maryamîyyah, this order has been blessed with the celestial patronage of the Virgin Mary, Sayyidatnâ Maryam in Islam—a patronage, Schuon has explained, which was bestowed freely by Heaven, and not by virtue of any initiative or intention of his own. “The coming of Sayyidatnâ Maryam did not depend upon my own will,” he writes, “but upon the will of Heaven; it was a totally unexpected and unimaginable gift.” This information will come as no great surprise to careful readers of Schuon’s books, especially those written after 1965 when he first experienced what he would refer to in later years as the Marian Grace. Those who are sensitive to such things will have noticed that there is something almost palpably feminine or shaktic about the substance of much of his work, a quality which can be sensed on occasion even in his very mode of expression. It is difficult to say in just what this consists. One commentator has suggested that his writing exhibits a “spherical quality” in the sense that the sphere contains the greatest volume for a given area, and I have elsewhere noted that Schuon’s words seem “connected somehow, as if organically, to the realities he describes.”2 The distinctive shape and texture of his style are of course something that must be discerned by each reader firsthand, and I hope in what follows to provide an opportunity for those who may still be unacquainted with Schuon to experience these qualities for themselves. But whatever one’s impressions with respect to the form of his writings, and however it may be best described, one soon discovers with respect to their matter that they contain numerous explicit references to the Blessed Virgin, with additional allusions and indications often tucked away into notes. In a recent review of the entire corpus, I could not find a single book containing no mention of the Virgin at all, and most of them seem replete with her presence. As is often the case with Schuon’s teaching on a given subject, however, these references are for the most part occasional in nature, and they are almost always rather brief; in fact, only two chapters in his published writings are specifically devoted to Marian topics.3 What this means is that one must read persistently and extensively in order to piece together the elements of a distinctively Schuonian Mariology. This has been my aim precisely in preparing this article. From the very beginning of my acquaintance with Schuon’s books, and later more profoundly when I had the privilege of meeting him and reading certain documents of a more personal kind, I have been deeply affected by the Virginal dimensions of his teaching, both doctrinal and methodic, and it has seemed to me for some time that I could perhaps perform a useful service for other like-minded readers and friends by endeavoring to follow the thread which connects a representative sampling of Marian quotations, gathered from a wide variety of his writings. It will be understood, I hope, that in no sense have I presumed to exhaust a topic so infinitely rich in implication and resonance, nor of course does space allow me to cite explicitly any but a small number of passages. What follow are hints, indirections, openings. Another, rather different, caveat should be inserted before I begin, and that is to say that this article is not meant for just anyone. It is certainly not intended for skeptics or cynics—for those who may come looking to argue about the very legitimacy of the spiritual life, or who may have more particular quibbles concerning the role of the Virgin or the temperament of those who are drawn to her. Attending to their complaints is a task for quite another occasion; all I can do here is to register my agreement with Schuon that whether one knows it or not, the Marian mysteries have “absolutely nothing to do with fairy tales, let alone with ‘depth psychology.’”4 If a critic objects that the following meditations are merely so much “romanticism” or “aestheticism” or “folklore,” I gladly respond in Schuon’s own words that 3 far from disclaiming any affinity with these things, we adopt them in the precise measure that they have a relationship either with tradition or with virgin nature, restoring to them in consequence their legitimate and, at the very least, innocent meanings. For “beauty is the splendor of the true”; and since it is possible to be capable of perceiving this without lacking “seriousness,” to say the least, we do not feel obliged to offer excuses for being particularly sensitive to this aspect of the Real.5 I must explain here at the outset as well that although I am myself a Christian, and by profession a Christian theologian, I am not in fact writing for Christians per se. Protestants in particular will be little helped by these comments; if this article were mainly for them, then yet another, though of course very different, set of explanations and defenses would be in order, defenses serving to justify, on scriptural grounds, the position and role of the Blessed Virgin in Schuon’s life and teaching, and the extraordinary degree of veneration which he exhibits towards her. As it happens there are several passages in the Bible which have proven to be especially important keys to his Mariology, and we shall examine them shortly. But he would be the first to admit that taken on their own, apart from the context provided by their use in the traditional liturgies and the expositions afforded in the orthodox commentaries, these texts provide no decisive support for his teaching.6 As for those Christians, on the other hand, who celebrate these liturgies and who rely on those commentaries—Christians in other words of the Apostolic communions, whether of the East or the West—they, too, are not really my primary audience, for such readers would also require, at least in most cases, something very different from what I intend to provide. It is certainly true that Roman Catholics and Orthodox understand much better than Protestants the decisive role of the Virgin in the Christian economy, and yet I know from experience that they are still often puzzled, if not scandalized, when they first learn about Schuon’s teachings on Mary. Even when they study his words with great care, many still come away unconvinced by the greater part of his doctrine, and I am under no illusions that my own merely supplemental remarks will be sufficient in addressing their fundamental objections. As we shall find, Schuon himself actually went to some lengths in helping Christians to understand the deeper significance of traditional Marian teachings, and in highlighting their consistency with his own expositions— whether one finds these teachings in the works of great saints, or in the liturgies and iconography 4 of the Church, or in such dogmatic titles of the Virgin as Theotokos or “Mother of God,” a title, promulgated by the third of the Ecumenical Councils, which my fellow Orthodox above all willingly acknowledge as essential to their faith.7 And yet he knew very well in so doing that the Church, in its efforts to formulate the truth in a way that will be intelligible to as many people as possible, “cannot recognize Mary’s Divine Reality without entering into insoluble contradictions—although it admits this Reality implicitly at least when, for example, it defines the Virgin as ‘Co-Redemptress,’ ‘Mother of God,’ ‘Spouse of the Holy Ghost.’”8 Here, as some of my readers will realize, we anticipate the very heart of my topic, and here of course, too, we can see very clearly, in just a single short phrase, one of the most important reasons that Schuon presents a problem for many traditional Christians. For in speaking so candidly of the Virgin’s Divinity, her “Divine Reality,” he has evidently, and very consciously, transgressed a certain traditional boundary. As my co-religionists know, it is a boundary long established by theologians, who, while insisting on the Divinity of Mary’s Son, “begotten by the Father before all ages” (Nicene Creed), have at the same time been loath, however exalted the words of the liturgical hymns that are sung in her praise, to think of His mother as sharing in this principial stature. Even though she is called “more honorable than the Cherubim and beyond compare more glorious than the Seraphim,”9 it has been the judgment of the Church that the Virgin even so is no more than a creature, and it is not surprising therefore if the Schuonian Mariology should be considered too “high”—too high in where it places Mary in relation to God—even as his Christology is often considered too “low” in what it says about the status of Jesus.10 It is not surprising, in other words, that even the most serious of Christian devotees of Our Lady should be offended by the claim that the Blessed Mother is herself of an avataric substance, a “Divine descent,” and thus like her Son an incarnation of God. And yet this is precisely Schuon’s fundamental perception of Mary, and the consistent teaching of all his books and unpublished writings. In seeking to understand this perception, it is clear that we shall be entering what Schuon admits is “an extremely subtle domain, in which definitions are always hazardous.” And yet, as he himself adds at once, “the nature of the problem leaves us no choice; there are things one can only express imperfectly, but which nevertheless cannot be passed over in silence.”11 The Virgin is clearly one of those things, one of those mysteries—perhaps indeed the most important of all—which the Church has for so long been so good at protecting that Christians seem 5 themselves nearly to have forgotten its deepest significance.12 I do not pretend to have understood it fully myself, but to the extent that I have an inkling at least, some intuition of the Virgin’s presence and message, I have Frithjof Schuon to thank, and it is in part as a way of expressing my gratitude that I have attempted to describe here the lineaments of his Mariology. As I have tried to emphasize, I do not intend to argue with those who have no use for these teachings, whether skeptical critics or Christian exoterists. But if with this small beginning I can somehow assist the esoterist, who is a priori open to the depth of this mystery, to see Mary more truly in her intrinsic reality, and to become in this way more fully conformed to her substance, then I shall consider myself profoundly satisfied. Christianity and the Bible The first level of the teaching which I propose to discuss takes the form of a spiritual or anagogical commentary on certain Marian passages in the Bible.13 Of course, as we have noted already, this is not to imply that the sacred texts offer proof of Schuon’s doctrine, or not at least in its fullness, and certainly not at the level of their literal meanings; but then neither can they be said to “prove” the Mariology of the Church, which goes well beyond what the Bible explicitly records regarding Mary. Indeed, when one considers the extraordinary prerogatives accorded her by the exoteric tradition, one realizes that “scripture treats the Virgin with a somewhat surprising parsimony.”14 And yet as Schuon points out, this can easily be explained by the fact that she “lived in effacement and refused to perform miracles; the almost complete silence of the Gospel in regard to her illustrates this effacement.” But it illustrates as well, he continues—however indirectly and allusively—something of the Virgin’s true greatness, for in their very reticence the scriptures provide us with a first and most important hint that “Maryam is identifiable with esoteric Truth (Haqîqah) inasmuch as she is a secret Revelation.”15 This identification of Mary with pure esoterism is one of the most important dimensions of the Schuonian doctrine, and we shall have occasion to return to it near the end of these reflections. For the moment it is worth noting, however, that many Christian authorities have rendered a similar interpretation, seeing in the relative silence of scripture a sign of the Virgin’s surpassing amplitude and dignity. Writing in the earliest years of the Church, St Ignatius of 6 Antioch, for example, describes Mary’s virginity and her giving birth to the Logos as “secrets crying to be told, but wrought in God’s silence,”16 and many centuries later St Louis Marie de Montfort could teach in a similar vein that “even though Mary was His faithful spouse, God the Holy Spirit willed that His apostles and evangelists should say very little about her, and then only as much as was necessary to make Jesus known.” Otherwise, the saint explains, “men as yet insufficiently instructed and enlightened concerning the person of her Son might wander from the truth by becoming too strongly attached to her,” an attachment owing to “the wondrous charms with which the Almighty had endowed even her outward appearance.”17 The understatement in scripture is thus by no means a sign of the Virgin’s unimportance or insignificance. One must admit that “the Gospel says nothing about the daily life of Mary,” but at the same time, says Schuon, it is surely obvious that “the life of a co-redeeming Mater Dei could 18 not in any event be ‘ordinary’ in the stupidly conventional sense of the word.” Although references to a variety of Biblical texts can be found in his work when he is speaking of Mary, Schuon returns again and again to four sets of verses in particular, three in the Old Testament and one in the New. The first of the Old Testament passages is Genesis 3:15, called by the Church Fathers the protoevangelium, or primordial Gospel, insofar as it prophesies, in its Christian interpretation, the coming of Christ. Speaking to the serpent in the Garden, God says, And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. In the immediate and literal context, the woman of course is Eve, who is tempted by the serpent, or Satan, and disobeys God. But at the same time it is obvious that the woman whose seed will eventually bruise, while being bruised by, the devil is Mary, and for this reason, beginning in the second Christian century, the Church has often taught that the wife of the first Adam and the mother of the Second Adam are spiritually linked to each other as antitypes. St Irenaeus of Lyons is representative in this respect: As Eve was seduced by the word of an angel to flee from God, having rebelled against the Word, so Mary by the word of an angel received the glad tidings that she would bear God by obeying His Word. The former was seduced to disobey God, but the latter was persuaded to obey God, so that the Virgin Mary might become the advocate of the virgin Eve. As the human race was subjected to death through a virgin, so was it saved by a Virgin.19 7 Schuon calls attention to the profound theological implications of this pairing many times in his writings. Noting, for example, that the two women are complementary opposites in the order of their relation with the corresponding masculine figures, he writes that “if Eve, issued from Adam, symbolizes the fall, the Holy Virgin, from whom Christ issued, symbolizes victory over the serpent.”20 Or again, highlighting yet another contrast, he stresses that Mary, “by her purity as also by her mercy, conquers the sin of the demiurgic Eve, the bringer forth of creatures and of passions; Eve, who brings forth, seduces, and attaches, is ‘eternally’ conquered by the Virgin, who purifies, pardons, and sets free.”21 At the level of these formulations, no exoterist should have cause for objection. But Schuon soon takes a further step, beyond the familiar typological coupling, when he undertakes to explain the metaphysical relationship between the two sides of the woman in terms of the Hindu conception of Mâyâ. In the Schuonian doctrine, as his readers know, Mâyâ is a dimension of the Divine Principle; rooted in God’s infinitude, it is what “causes” the Divinity to radiate outside of itself into Manifestation. Mâyâ is thus the principle of every theophany, and yet at the same time, since what is “outside” the Divinity is not really Divine, it is the principle of all obscurity and the cause of man’s forgetfulness. It is the reason that God is able to appear to man, but paradoxically it is also the reason that man does not see Him.22 Now according to Schuon, this ambivalent character of the Divine Relativity can be seen in two distinct aspects of the feminine, which are manifest in the persons of Eve and the Virgin: As the universal archetype of femininity, Mâyâ is both Eve and Mary: “psychic” and seductive woman and “pneumatic” and liberating woman; descendent or ascendant, alienating or reintegrating genius. Mâyâ projects souls in order to be able to free them, and projects evil in order to be able to overcome it; or again: on the one hand, She projects her veil in order to be able to manifest the potentialities of the Supreme Good; and, on the other, She veils good in order to be able to unveil it, and thus to manifest a further good: that of the prodigal son’s return, or of Deliverance.23 The last part of this passage is crucial, for it might otherwise be thought that the relationship between the two aspects of the woman is a merely reciprocal one. Schuon makes it very clear, however, that even though the sin of Eve—that is, the tendency of the cosmogonic projection to move in the direction of nothingness—“confers on Mâyâ an ambiguity,” this ambiguity “is quite 8 relative and, far from being symmetrical, cannot tarnish Mâyâ.” For “the glory of Mary totally effaces the sin of Eve, which is to say that with regard to the total extent of Existence and above all with regard to its Divine Summit, there is no longer any ambiguity, and evil is not.”24 After all, everything but the Supreme Principle is only a seeming; only God truly is, and thus “Eve is infinitely forgiven and victorious in Mary.”25 For centuries, Christians have turned to the Song of Songs, or Canticles, in celebrating the life of the Virgin, and like the fathers before him, Schuon refers to it, too. Two verses have been especially prominent in the traditional commentaries of such saints as Bernard of Clairvaux, and in the festal antiphons, stichera, and other propers for the Virgin’s Conception, her Nativity, her Entrance into the Temple, the Annunciation, and other Marian Feasts of the liturgical year: namely, Canticles 1:5, I am black, but beautiful; and Canticles 4:7, Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee. The figure who is speaking in the first of these passages, and who is addressed in the second—in both cases a woman—is variously interpreted in the Christian tradition, depending on the level of meaning emphasized, as standing allegorically either for the people of Israel, or for the Church, or for the human soul in a state of grace. But whichever of these meanings is stressed, it is agreed that the Blessed Virgin—whose soul is understood to be spotless, who is the Mother of the Church, and in whom culminate the promises of God to His people—is the supreme type of the figure in question, and hence that this sacred text is fundamentally a dialogue between God and His Virginal Bride. Again and again in his writings, Schuon returned to the first of these verses, Nigra sum sed formosa, helping to plumb the depths upon depths of its meaning. I would venture to say, in fact, that there may well have been no other passage in the Bible with which he was more endlessly fascinated, and this fascination can be seen in the evident delight with which he reveals its application to Mary.26 Recalling, for example, her cosmic role in relation to Mâyâ, he explains that the Virgin “manifests the universal Veil in its function of transmission; she is Veil because she is a form, but she is Essence by her content and consequently her message. She is both closed and open, inviolable and generous,” and it follows therefore, he continues, that “she is ‘black but beautiful’ because the Veil is both closed and transparent, or because, after having closed by virtue of inviolability, it opens by virtue of mercy.”27 Not only, however, is the Virgin “at first obscure and sacrificial, and then luminous and beatific”; she is also, and yet more profoundly, “luminous and beatific in the obscurity.” She is, Schuon adds in a typically powerful coda, 9 “divinely obscure—that is, unmanifest and infinite—in her very beauty.”28 Stressing on the other hand her mode of action, rather than her state of being, he indicates in another place that the Blessed Mother is like her Son in bringing a message of inwardness. But hers is an inwardness— that is, a blackness—which is more “welcoming” than rigorous, and it is in this sense that “one can attribute to her, as does the Song of Songs, the quality of being ‘black but beautiful’; she 29 does not tear us away from the outward world, but draws us gently towards the inward.” Of course the fact that the Virgin is gentle does not take anything away from her majesty or transcendent dignity. Although we are grateful for her beauty and mercy, we must not forget that like Christ she is “not of this world” (St John 18:36).30 She is black, Schuon writes, “because she transcends and thereby negates our all too human plane”; or again: “the black color of the beloved in the Song of Songs, and of many images of the Blessed Virgin, expresses not so much the very relative ambiguity of Existence as its ‘self-effacement.’”31 And yet this last symbolism is not exclusive either, for from still another point of view the Virgin’s color also serves to remind the esoterist of the end of his Path. Her darkness betokens the struggles of the spiritual battle, but also the cooling shade to be enjoyed by the victor. In this case, “black represents the secret and supra-formal character of gnosis.”32 Speaking, for example, of the “supreme spiritual state” which is the aim of the Christian hesychast, Schuon notes that the goal of “‘holy silence’ (hesychia)” is “symbolized by the black color given to certain Virgins,”33 and in this respect there is clearly a beauty within the blackness—even as there is a yang in the yin in the familiar emblem of the Far Eastern tradition. For even though “knowledge is exclusive and separative at the exterior,” it is “inclusive and unitive at the interior.” The final goal of the spiritual journey is thus like Mary herself: it “is virginal because the ego cannot violate it, and it is maternal because it welcomes, adopts, and reintegrates; it is Beauty and Goodness; it is at once Night and Wine.”34 In addition to the protoevangelium of Genesis and the Song of Songs, traditional Christians have always made considerable use of the Wisdom books of the Old Testament as inspired sources for their understanding of the Virgin. Two texts have been especially important, Proverbs 8:22-30 and the Wisdom of Solomon 7:22-30, both of which speak of a feminine being named Sophia or Wisdom, who is very clearly of a celestial, if not a principial, order. In Proverbs she says of herself that she was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. Even as God prepared the heavens, I was there: when He set a compass upon the face of the depth. Then I was by Him, as one brought up with Him: and I was daily His delight, 10 rejoicing always before Him. As for the book of Wisdom, it is said there of Sophia that she is the breath of the power of God, and a pure influence flowing from the glory of the Almighty. She is the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of His goodness. She can do all things: and remaining in herself, she maketh all things new. For she is more beautiful than the sun, and above all the order of stars: being compared with the light, she is found before it. These and other similar passages have for centuries been read by the Church in celebration of its Marian feasts, and they can be found incorporated in many Christian hymns and litanies in honor of the Virgin. Thus in the western Mass for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, it is said of Mary, as it was said of Sophia, that she “was begotten before all the worlds, set up from of old before the earth.” And in the Akathist Hymn of the Eastern Church, among a dazzling array of other titles, the Virgin is described as the Space of the Spaceless God, an epithet which reflects the fact that Wisdom alone compassed the circuit of Heaven (Ecclesiasticus 24:5).35 To my knowledge, Schuon never comments in detail on these particular sophianic prerogatives, nor does he single out any specific verse from these sacred texts, but he certainly affirms the essential connection between Wisdom and Mary, and in doing so it is evident that he is well aware of the long tradition of Christian meditation and devotion which is based on this relationship. He is also aware that the Church has often associated Divine Wisdom with the Logos, the Word which was incarnate in Christ, and for this reason he teaches, in many places, that this Logos must contain in some fashion a feminine dimension or aspect, which was personified or incarnate in Mary. Thus the Blessed Virgin personifies the pre-existential and existentiating Sophia: the Logos inasmuch as it “conceives” creatures, then “engenders” them, and finally “forms” or “embellishes” them; if Mary thus represents the unmanifested and silent Logos—nigra sum sed formosa—Jesus is the manifested and law-giving Logos.36 In 1 Kings, the Bible speaks of the great Throne of Solomon or Throne of Wisdom, and like many Christian authorities, it is common for Schuon to explain the Virgin’s relationship with the Logos by identifying her with this Throne. She herself, he insists—with St Bernard and others— is the Sedes Sapientiae, of which there was not the like made in any kingdom (1 Kings 10:20). “This is first of all because she is the Mother of Christ who, being the Word, is the ‘Wisdom of 11 God’; but it is also, quite obviously, because of her own nature, which results from her quality as ‘Spouse of the Holy Spirit’ and ‘Co-Redemptress.’” And since she is such a Throne, he continues—a “‘Throne quickened by the Almighty’ according to a Byzantine hymn—Mary is ipso facto identified with the Divine Sophia, as is attested by the Marian interpretation of some of the eulogies of Wisdom in the Bible. Mary could not have been the locus of the Incarnation did she not bear in her very nature the Wisdom to be incarnated.”37 Now it is important to pause for a moment with this formulation, because it anticipates certain ideas that I shall be commenting on more carefully later. As this passage indicates, Schuon’s teaching about the Divinity of Mary—based in this case on her identification with uncreated Wisdom—does not mean, despite what a superficial reading might lead one to assume, that he wished to deny her humanity, which was obviously essential in order that she might become a true locus for Christ’s Incarnation. On the contrary, it is only by fully respecting the fact that the Virgin was a genuine woman that it is possible to understand in what way she can at the same time be Sophia or the Logos incarnate. “The human femininity of the Blessed Virgin, and thus her subordination,” he writes, far from being opposed to Divinity, indicate “a real celestial superiority in a particular connection: femininity appears here—in view of the spiritual and cosmic supereminence of the personage—as the inverted reflection of pure essentiality,” and it is in this way precisely that “she is thus identified with Divine Femininity, or with the Wisdom ‘which was at the beginning.’”38 Elsewhere, speaking more particularly concerning her virtues, Schuon calls attention to the fact that “the Virgin, despite her supreme sanctity, remains woman and aspires to no other role; the humble soul is conscious of its own rank and effaces itself before what surpasses it. It is thus that the Materia Prima of the Universe”—that is, the underlying Substance of things, which the Schuonian perspective identifies with the immanent Wisdom of God—“remains on its own level and never seeks to appropriate to itself the transcendence of the Principle.”39 And yet here is the wonder, of course: that it is precisely in not desiring to emulate God that Mary shows herself to be so organically a part of Him, so fully Divine. According to St Louis Marie de Montfort, the Blessed Virgin made a practice of “hiding herself in the depths of nothingness during her whole life,” and as a result, says the saint, “Mary is entirely relative to 40 God. Indeed I would say that she is relative only to God.” St Louis, of course, does not intend simply to provoke our awe; he would have us strive to become ourselves conformed to this Virginal model, and so too would Schuon. He knows that 12 so great a mystery cannot but have profound implications for understanding our own nature as we proceed in the Path, and he is quick to help us see what they are: The Divine Mâyâ—Femininity in divinis—is not only that which projects and creates; it is also that which attracts and liberates. The Blessed Virgin as Sedes Sapientiae personifies this merciful Wisdom which descends towards us and which we too, whether we know it or not, bear in our very essence; and it is precisely by virtue of this potentiality or virtuality that Wisdom comes down upon us. The immanent seat of Wisdom is the heart of man.41 In turning to the New Testament, Christians have taken note of two important passages in the Apocalypse in their efforts to fathom the full significance of the Mother of God: Revelation 12:1, which speaks of a great wonder in Heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars; and Revelation 21:11, which describes the bride of the Lamb, shining with the very glory of God: and her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal. But more often they have turned to St Luke, where even at the literal level of meaning the Christian is offered two extremely important insights into the Virginal nature—first, in the narrative of the Annunciation: And the angel came in unto her and said, Hail, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women (Luke 1:28); and second, in the description of Mary’s meeting with St Elizabeth: And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost: and she spake out with a loud voice, and said, Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb (Luke 1:41-42). It is of course upon the inspired combination of these verses that the Ave Maria, or Angelic Salutation, of the western Rosary is based, and it is not surprising that Schuon, who was so keenly interested in the practice of methodic prayer in all traditions, frequently spoke of the Ave, nor that his Mariology was expressed in part in numerous comments on these Gospel verses. According to Schuon, two things are made clear in these sacred texts: on the one hand, that the Virgin is perfectly sinless, as the Old Testament had prophesied,42 and as the Catholic Church has dogmatically affirmed in its doctrine of the Immaculate Conception; and on the other hand, that she is in her own right a Divine incarnation. As to the first of these points, he notes that when Gabriel first addresses Mary, he says Ave gratia plena. “The angel did not say Ave Maria, because to him gratia plena is the name that he gives to the Virgin; this amounts to saying that Maria is synonymous with gratia plena.”43 It follows for the Schuonian, as it does for 13 the Church, that “the Virgin is holiness”; since she is utterly filled with God’s grace, there is no room in her for the presence of sin. She therefore possesses in her very nature “the entirety and quintessence of all the spiritual qualities or attitudes and of all the virtues which accompany or condition them.”44 Not surprisingly, Schuon links this personal, moral perfection of the Virgin’s human nature to the primordial harmony of pure Existence, and he does so in such a way as to encourage us to look to her as a model. “Maria is the purity, the beauty, the goodness, and the humility of the cosmic Substance,” and “the microcosmic reflection of this Substance is the soul 45 in a state of grace.” The Virgin’s blessing, therefore, “is on him who purifies his soul for God.” In underscoring these preliminary points, Schuon’s reflections on the Angelic Salutation are perfectly consistent with what is affirmed by the exoteric Christian tradition, at least in principle. But as I have already mentioned, he takes the additional step of insisting that the Virgin’s immaculate nature, as announced by the angel, is owing to her own Divinity. According to the Roman constitution Ineffabilis Deus, “The Blessed Virgin Mary, at the first instant of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace of the omnipotent God, was preserved free from all stain of original sin”—but only, it is added at once, “in consideration of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of mankind.”46 In this way the Catholic Church, well aware of the direction in which popular piety might otherwise develop—and in which it has developed in any case—has attempted to forestall the deflection of worship away from Jesus. But in the esoteric perspective, “whatever the self-imposed limitations that exoteric theology may have to assume here for reasons of expediency,”47 there is really no reason not to admit what this extraordinary prerogative of Mary in truth implies: On the one hand, the Gospel says of the Holy Virgin that she is ‘full of grace’ and that ‘the Lord is with thee,’ and that ‘henceforth all generations shall call me blessed’; on the other hand, Christ inherited from the Virgin his entire human nature, from the psychic as well as physical point of view, so that his sacramental body and blood are fundamentally those of the Virgin. Now a person who possesses such prerogatives—to the point of being called ‘Mother of God’— necessarily has an ‘avataric’ quality, expressed theologically by the idea of ‘Immaculate Conception.’ Thus the cult of Mary is not merely a matter of tradition; it clearly results from Scripture.48 14 When we recall that “Immaculate Conception” is the name which Mary gave herself in speaking with St Bernadette at Lourdes, it is understandable why, according to Schuon, the dogma must refer to “an intrinsic quality of the Virgin”: since it is a quality which by definition she possessed from the very start, from her conception, it obviously pertains to her nature, for it would be absurd to suppose that a “nature” might have existed in some other form before benefiting from an extrinsic addition. Therefore, he concludes, “Mary is ‘Divine’ not only through Jesus, but also, and a priori, by her receptivity proportionate to the Incarnation,” and this being so, we must admit that “the Logos ‘was incarnated’ in her already before the birth of Christ, which is indicated by the words gratia plena and Dominus tecum.”49 I might briefly note before leaving this subject that Schuon was perfectly aware of the divergence between the eastern and western churches on the question of Mary’s conception. Like Roman Catholics, the Orthodox teach that the Virgin was sinless, readily confessing her to be the Panagia or “All-Holy One,” and believing her to have been so from the very beginning. But in their understanding, the guilt of man’s “original sin” is not inherited: every newborn is innocent, and the dogma of the Immaculate Conception is therefore at best superfluous; at worst it runs the risk of diluting our admiration for the Virgin’s perfection, for if she were by nature and necessarily virtuous, one could not attribute to her the excellence of spiritual victory. As is so often the case, Schuon’s perspective not only sheds new light on the dispute, but has the effect of resolving it on a higher level: Was Mary a priori delivered from the capacity for sin, or was she sinless through the superabundance of her virtue? In other words, was she impeccable because of the absolute holiness of her nature, or was she holy as a result of the absolute impeccability of her intelligence and her will? Those who maintain the first thesis seek to avoid attributing to Mary an imperfection of substance; those of the second seek to avoid depriving her of the perfection of merit; but both sides seem to lose sight of the fact that at the degree of the Blessed Virgin the alternative loses all its meaning. The “immaculate conception”—attributed to Mary also by the Islamic tradition—admits of every meritorious attitude by its very nature, rather as a substance contains in synthesis all its possible accidents; and inversely, perfect impeccability—out of the question for the ordinary man—is ipso facto equivalent to the absence of “original sin.”50 15 Islam and the Koran Having been brought up as a Christian, and remaining his entire life an adamant defender of the Divinity of Christ and the other essential truths of this tradition, it was only natural for Schuon to formulate his understanding of the Blessed Virgin in terms of the Christian scriptures. But having decided as a young man to enter Islam—“without being converted,” of course, but “for reasons of esoteric and therefore spiritual expediency”51—and having fulfilled within this framework, for over sixty years, the function of a Sufi Shaykh, it was also very natural that his Mariology should rest in part on references to Sayyidatnâ Maryam which one finds in the Koran, as well as on certain traditions of the Prophet Muhammad. Christians are often surprised to discover that the sacred Book of Islam is sometimes even more explicit than the Bible in its praise of Mary, and that it too—as Schuon notes—teaches a doctrine of the immaculate conception. It is said, for example, that when the Virgin was born, her mother, the wife of ‘Imrân—known to Christians as St Anne—prayed to God on behalf of the child, I entrust her and her offspring to Thy protection from Satan the outcast (Sûrah 3:35, 36), and the fact that this prayer was answered is proven by the saying of the Prophet: “Satan toucheth every son of Adam the day his mother beareth him, save only Mary and her son.” Elsewhere, in a passage reminiscent of the words of Gabriel and St Elizabeth in the Gospel of Luke, blessed art thou among women, the Koran affirms of Mary that Allah hath chosen thee and made thee pure, and hath preferred thee above all the women of creation (Sûrah 3:42), a teaching which was confirmed, according to another hadîth, when the Prophet told his daughter Fâtimah, “Thou art the highest of the women of the people of Paradise, excepting only the Virgin Mary, daughter of ‘Imrân.” Furthermore, one entire sûrah bears the Virgin’s name, in which it is revealed—in confirmation of a Christian tradition found in the Book of St James, where we learn of Mary’s early years in the Temple—that even as a child she had withdrawn from her family to a place facing the East, and she placed a veil between her and her people (Sûrah 19:16-17). In another passage, the Koran teaches that Allah made the son of Mary and his mother a sign (Sûrah 23:50),52 and elsewhere again that when God citeth an example for those who believe, mention is made of Mary, the daughter of ‘Imrân, who kept chaste her womb, and We breathed 16 therein of Our Spirit. And she testified to the truth of the words of her Lord and His scriptures, and was of those who are absorbed in prayer (Sûrah 66:12). So great was the Prophet’s own respect for Mary that upon returning in conquest to Mecca, he ordered that all of the images in the Ka‘bah be destroyed, excepting only two icons: one of an old man, said to be Abraham, and another of the Virgin and Child, which he protected with his own hands. Schuon was deeply interested in the implications for Marian doctrine and method which can be discovered in two Koranic passages in particular. The first, the Verse of the Mihrâb or “Prayer-niche,” speaks of the Virgin’s presence in the Temple, where she had been brought as a child of three, and where she lived until her betrothal to Joseph—Zachariah, the husband of her cousin Elizabeth, being high priest in those years. Her Lord accepted her with full acceptance and vouchsafed to her a goodly growth; and made Zachariah her guardian. Whenever Zachariah went into the sanctuary [Mihrâb] where she was, he found that she had food. He said: O Mary! Whence cometh unto thee this food? She answered: It is from Allah. Verily Allah provideth sustenance beyond all reckoning for those whom He will (Sûrah 3:37).53 It is the belief of Islam, as it is of Christianity, that the Blessed Virgin was miraculously sustained during these years by celestial food which was regularly brought to her by the angels. According to the Orthodox Patriarch Photius, Mary “gave an example of an immaterial life on earth, having been nourished, so to speak, from the very swaddling clothes, on the virtues alone,”54 and the Schuonian Mariology is in perfect accord with this teaching: not only does her life in the Temple help to instruct us as to the Virgin’s own stature in the Divine economy; it provides the spiritual pilgrim with a powerfully attractive model of what his own state of life should be like. On the one hand, writes Schuon, since “the Mihrâb is equivalent to the Holy of Holies of the Temple,” it follows that “at the time of the presence of the Virgin in the Temple, she was the high priest,” and since esoterically “the Mihrâb is the heart,” she herself was “the Holy of Holies.”55 Recalling the East which she faced (Sûrah 19:16) as she performed her priestly function, Schuon adds, “It is noteworthy that the Virgin is Stella Matutina, an allusion to the East, which in our symbolism denotes fervor. Aside from this particular meaning, the East expresses the coming of light, and it is thus that the Christian tradition interprets the Marian title ‘Morning Star’; now fervor derives from light just as in principle light and heat go together.”56 On the other hand, Mary’s seclusion and piety become in turn an example for others; indeed “Maryam is the inner soul which invokes and which, by that fact, is withdrawn from the 17 world.”57 According to certain Koranic commentators on the phrase she placed a veil between her and her people (19:17), the sanctuary of the Temple was separated from the outer court by a series of veils, seven in number, which “become seven doors,” Schuon writes, “which Zachariah had to open with a key each time he visited Mary in the Temple.”58 What this veiling signifies for the spiritual traveler is that “the Holy Virgin represents the khalwah or spiritual retreat.” Combining this symbolic meaning of the Koranic passage with the text which we discussed from Canticles, Schuon continues, “‘I am black, but beautiful’: this verse likewise expresses the mystery of the khalwah; and it follows that if the khalwah is a priori obscure, it subsequently transforms itself into a golden light.”59 Thus, together with the Song of Songs, the Verse of the Mihrâb serves to show that what Sayyidatnâ Maryam asks of us is that we always remain in khalwah, in the midst of the world and of life; not so much in the khalwah which is obscure as in the one which is golden, which accompanies us everywhere like a protecting and blessed aura, as soon as we surrender ourselves to the Celestial Ray. In this state, man no longer feels any curiosity for the dissipating things of this world; he is no longer interested in things that are useless for him, and he is only concerned about remaining in the little golden garden of spiritual poverty. For Sayyidatnâ Maryam is like crystal, into which nothing senseless or impure penetrates; that is why the Koran says that she kept her virginity intact, meaning her heart.60 As for the food with which Mary was nourished during her time of retreat, Schuon teaches that what it refers to finally is God Himself, whose Names she invoked without ceasing. “Sayyidatnâ Maryam was nourished in the Temple (the Mihrâb) by celestial foods. Now for man to live, he has need of food and drink.” It therefore makes perfect sense, says Schuon, that the Christian and Muslim traditions should concur in believing that the Virgin was given fruit by the angels, for “fruits combine the two, the solid and the liquid; they nourish by their flesh and give drink by their juice.” The Christian will naturally think of the Bread and Wine of the Eucharist, themselves the very substance of God, but in this case Schuon chooses to emphasize the link with the sacrament of the Name and the method of Dhikr or Invocation. “One can say that the supreme Name is at once Food and Drink; it is the Divine Fruit which combines all the gifts which make us live. To say that the Holy Virgin received diverse fruits means that she lived by 61 Divine Names, according to the double relationship of Ambrosia and Nectar.” 18 Another important Koranic text which Schuon often comes back to is a passage in which Christians are reproached for their belief in a Divine trinity—not, however, the Trinity dogmatically proclaimed by the Church, but a trinity composed of Allah, Jesus, and Mary: They surely disbelieve who say: Lo! Allah is the third of three, when there is no God save the One God. The Messiah, son of Mary, was no other than a messenger, the like of whom had passed away before him, and his mother was a saintly woman (Sûrah 5:73, 75). The burden of these verses is of course to stress, in a way characteristic of the Muslim economy, that nothing may be associated with Allah, and that Jesus and His mother must therefore be regarded as no more than creatures. According to Schuon, what is being censored in this passage is thus a trinity resulting from “the deification of Jesus and Mary,” a trinity which is “indirectly attributed to the Christians by the Koran,” but which at the same time, contrary to what many exoterists of both traditions have assumed, “this Book nowhere identifies with the Trinity of Christian doctrine.”62 As Schuon sees it, however, there is nonetheless an important, underlying connection between these two trinities, which the revealed text helps the esoterist to discern, even while stressing “the exoteric incompatibility of Christian Trinitarianism with Islamic Unitarianism.”63 “The trinity which the Koran attributes to Christianity—the Father, the Son, and the Virgin—is altogether logical in its way,”64 writes Schuon, and he explains this logic on three distinct levels. First of all, by putting Mary in the “place” of the Holy Spirit in its formulation of the Trinity, the Islamic revelation was intended to take into account certain “heretical worshipers of the Virgin” who lived at the time of the Prophet, whose “very existence” serves to show “what the Christian dogmas would have become through an inevitable fault of adaptation had they come to be adopted by the Arabs, for whom they were not intended.”65 Second, the Koranic trinity “expresses a psychological situation de facto”66 by seeking to address “the Marianism which existed in practice” among orthodox Christians at the birth of Islam, and which, while being perfectly consistent with the Christian spiritual economy, “from the Islamic point of view constituted a partial usurpation of the worship due to God.”67 Finally, on yet a third level, which is the most important for our purposes here, Schuon joins ranks with the Sufi ‘Abd al-Karîm al- Jîlî in explaining the text esoterically, and this he does by insisting, in numerous places, that it makes perfect sense for the Blessed Virgin to be identified with the Holy Spirit, even as Jesus is with the Logos or Son, for “Mary incarnates either the Spirit considered in its feminine aspect or the feminine complement of the Spirit.”68 The Koranic text is completely “justified,” he writes, 19 “in the sense that the Holy Virgin is by her nature, and not by adoption, the human receptacle of the Holy Spirit (whence gratia plena and Dominus tecum); as ‘Immaculate Conception,’ she is a priori the vehicle of the Spirit and thereby personifies it.”69 By “bringing the Virgin Mary into the Christian Trinity,” the Islamic revelation thus provokes “an interpretation which is not theological in fact but is so by right and finds its support in the Scriptures”—an esoteric interpretation which is closely “linked to the feminization, in certain ancient texts, of the Divine Pneuma.”70 As surprising as this may be to some, a connection between Mary and the Holy Spirit is well established in a number of Christian sources. We do not, of course, find it at the level of dogma, and yet there are sufficient formulations to this effect, both in ancient texts and in the devotional and speculative writings of modern saints and theologians, to suggest that it can be entertained as a theologoumenon or pious opinion even in exoteric circles. A fragment from an early Coptic life of the Virgin is exemplary in this respect. Jesus said, “I will not leave you desolate; but if I go, I will send the Spirit, the Comforter, unto you in My place, after not many days, but when Pentecost cometh.” Up to this point, the ancient source is simply recapitulating the words of Christ in the Gospel (John 14:16-18). But the text then continues, showing those who are listening to Jesus precisely where they might discover that promised Spirit: “And behold, she who was My dwelling place, and I was her Son in the flesh and in the Godhead, even she the expression of whose image is like Mine according to flesh, behold she is with you now.”71 Depending on the language in which they were writing, it was more or less likely for ancient writers to emphasize this relationship. Schuon calls attention to the fact that “the Hebrew word Rûah, ‘Spirit,’ is feminine,”72 and so also, we may note, is the term for Spirit in Syriac, which explains why among certain Syrian fathers—the “Persian sage” Aphraates, for example— the Third Person of the Trinity is often described in distinctly feminine terms. As for more recent Christian writers, Schuon notes that “according to the blessed Fr Kolbe”—now canonized by the Catholic Church as St Maximilian Kolbe—“‘Immaculate Conception’ is one of the Names of the Holy Spirit.” It can be said, the saint adds, that “in espousing Mary, the Spirit was as if incarnated in her,” that she is “united with the Holy Spirit to the point of being able to present herself in his Name,” and that “the Immaculate One personifies the Mercy of God.”73 One must admit, of course, that Schuon often expressed himself on this point in words which such a Christian would never have chosen, and yet his teaching is 20 essentially the same. Making use of the Hindu term for the underlying cosmic potency which is informed by the Spirit, he explains that the Virgin “personifies the receptive or passive perfections of universal Substance; but she likewise incarnates—by virtue of the formless and occult nature of the Divine Prakriti—the ineffable essence of wisdom or spirituality, the both virginal and maternal materia prima of all formal coagulations of the Spirit.”74 As this last passage helps to show, the Schuonian doctrine often associates the Holy Spirit with the uncreated Wisdom of the Old Testament texts which were examined earlier, seeing in both an expression of the Divine femininity manifested in Mary on the human plane. In this respect the teaching is not unlike that of Vladimir Solovyov, Sergei Bulgakov, Paul Evdokimov, and other Eastern Orthodox writers who are associated with the Russian school of sophiology. Like the Catholic saint Fr Kolbe, these theologians also draw a close connection between the Holy Spirit and the Blessed Virgin, but they insist as well on an additional link with Sophia. On the one hand, according to Bulgakov, Wisdom is a name for what all three Persons of the Trinity share: she is “the silence and mystery of the Godhead.”75 But at the same time, in her very mystery and elusiveness, Sophia maintains a special intimacy with the Holy Spirit, which “bloweth where it listeth” (John 3:8), and it is through this same Spirit that the Divine Wisdom becomes embodied in Mary, who was herself—as we noted earlier—elusively hidden from the public gaze.76 The Spirit, says Bulgakov, “abides in the ever-virgin Mary as in a holy temple, while her personality seems to become transparent to Him and to provide Him with a human countenance.” Indeed Mary—who made herself as it were “entirely transparent”—“is, in personal form, the human likeness of the Holy Ghost.”77 Speaking in much the same way about the “Primordial Femininity” which “was there when God prepared the Heavens” (Proverbs 8:27), and bringing us back in so doing to the Book of Islam, Schuon points out that “the qualities of this Materia prima or this Prakriti are purity and transparence, and receptivity with regard to Heaven and intimate union with it,” and that Sayyidatnâ Maryam—who is the emptiness precisely in which the Spirit may move—is for this reason described in the Koran as “‘chosen and purified,’ ‘submissive,’ and ‘believing the Words of her Lord.’” The reader is then offered this image: The manifested Divine Spirit is in certain respects comparable to the reflected image of the sun on a lake. In this image there is a feminine or “horizontal” element, and this is the potential luminosity which is inherent in water, and the 21 perfect calm of a surface unruffled by any wind; and since these qualities permit the perfect reverberation of the “solar” body, they are already something of it. So it is that the Primordial Recipient is a providential projection . . . of the Divine Content.78 Now of course, none of this is in any way to suggest that the Blessed Virgin as a human woman is somehow herself to be equated with the Divine Spirit. I paused once before at a similar point in this exposition, and I should do so again lest we make a very serious mistake in our reading of Schuon. As I have elsewhere explained, not even Jesus is God in the much too simplistic sense with which this pious ellipsis is often interpreted by traditional Christians, for the Divine and human natures of Christ are not the same, and the Ecumenical Councils of the Church explicitly forbid their confusion.79 Precisely the same distinction is in order here. When Schuon tells us that Mary “is the personification of the Holy Spirit”80 or that “the Spirit ‘as creation’ is none other than the Virgin,”81 or again—speaking in terms of Sophia—that “the Virgin Mother personifies supraformal Wisdom,”82 he does not wish to imply that there is no difference between her human reality and the Divinity which she contains and makes present. Commenting on a verse which we have already cited from the sûrah “The Prohibition” (Sûrah 66:12), he takes note of the words We breathed into her of Our Spirit—words with which the Koran describes the Annunciation—and he observes that “the image of breath evokes both the intimacy and subtlety of the gift, its depth or infinitude, if one will,” in this way underscoring the avataric relation between the Virgin and God. At the same time, however, the preposition in the phrase of Our Spirit reminds us that “no Divine manifestation can involve the Divine Spirit in itself and in its intrinsic totality; otherwise the Spirit would henceforth be in the manifestation in question, and no longer in God.”83 In any case, to sum up these last observations: according to Schuon, the trinity which we find mentioned in the Koran, although it is not the same as the Trinity of the Christian creeds, nevertheless is not lacking in truth—quod absit—even from an exoteric Christian point of view, while for the esoterist, by calling attention to the Blessed Virgin’s “incarnational” relationship with the Holy Spirit, it has the effect of opening a door as it were onto her avataric substance and stature. From the point of view of exoteric Islam, of course, such an opening is altogether beside the point, to say the least, for it is in the nature of the Muslim spiritual economy to emphasize the Divine transcendence to the exclusion of every human theophany. And yet even here, Schuon 22 notes—even in terms of what the traditional Muslim may be prepared to allow for in his considerations of Mary—it is possible to follow the lead suggested by this same Koranic text in such a way as to glimpse something of the exceptional nature of the Virgin. It is true of course that the Muslim exoterist will never be persuaded to accept the idea of a Divine incarnation, but he will readily admit even so that the Spirit of God makes itself present in the messages which it brings and thus through the person of its messengers.84 Thus, where the Christian speaks in terms of a God-man, the Muslim will describe the greatest of men by saying that such a one is a prophet, and according to Schuon, this is precisely what can and must be said in Islamic terms about Mary. He directs our attention, on the one hand, to the similar positions which the Blessed Virgin and the Prophet of Islam occupy in the formal economies of the two traditions. “The function of the Prophet,” he writes, is “analogous and symbolically even identical to that of the Virgin Mary, who was likewise the ‘ground’ for the reception of the Word.” Mary, “fecundated by the Holy Ghost, is ‘Co-Redemptress’ and ‘Queen of Heaven,’” while the Prophet Muhammad, “inspired by the same Paracletic Spirit, is ‘Messenger of Mercy’ (Rasûl ar- Rahmah) and ‘Lord of the Two Existences’ (Sayyid al-Kawnayn), this world and the next.” In a memorable observation often borrowed by other traditionalist writers, Schuon points out that “the Virgin is ‘immaculate’ and, from the merely physical standpoint, ‘virgin,’ while the Prophet, like the Apostles, is ‘illiterate’ (ummî), that is to say, pure from the taint of human knowledge or knowledge humanly acquired.”85 These very suggestive correspondences might alone entitle us to describe the Blessed Mother as having the stature of Prophetess, but other reasons can be brought forward as well. For example, “Maryam is mentioned, together with other Messengers, in the sûrah ‘The Prophets’; furthermore,” Schuon adds—still speaking of the Koran—“her story is related with care and praise, which would be inconceivable for an ordinary saint (waliyah),”86 but which accords perfectly with what the Prophet himself said in describing her as the “Queen of the women saints in the Muslim paradise.”87 Surely “all this would prove,” says Schuon, “if proof were necessary, the supereminent rank of Maryam, that is to say her quality of Prophetess (Nabiyah).”88 We are not to forget, he admits—considering the matter with his usual thoroughness—that “according to a hadîth, no woman was ever a prophet.” But in this case, he asserts, “it is a question exclusively of law-giving prophecy.”89 In other words, the saying “refers, not to intrinsic dignity, but to 23 extrinsic function,”90 and hence “there is no reason for thinking, Islamically speaking, that the term ‘prophetess’ (nabiyah) could not fit the Virgin Maryam.”91 Gnosis and the Primordial Norm It is only natural, I have said, that Schuon sought to express his Marian doctrine in terms borrowed from the scriptures of the Abrahamic traditions and in light of their orthodox commentaries. He was after all a traditionalist, who always insisted that an operative spirituality must be grounded in one of the great revelations bestowed by Heaven, and as one who had lived in the two worlds of Christianity and Islam, his continual fascination with what the Bible and the Koran have to say about Mary is not unexpected. But he was at the same time a metaphysician and master of gnosis, whose message was that of pure esoterism, and it also makes perfect sense that his perception of the Virgin’s presence and meaning would not have been confined to those worlds.92 Unlike the exoteric authorities of a given religion, whose perspectives are determined by certain confessional loyalties—and in fact unlike even the masters of what he sometimes called “average Sufism”93—Schuon was utterly free in his fidelity to the “nature of things,” to the fitrah or primordial norm, and within the inward space of that freedom he realized that the Virgin’s intrinsic reality transcends the doctrinal boundaries of the traditions which honor her, manifesting something that is truly universal and Divine. It was for this reason that he called himself Maryamî, and it is in this light that one may understand the Marian character of the spiritual order he founded. It is indeed “our insistence upon the nature of things,” he writes, “that explains and justifies our connection with Sayyidatnâ Maryam; it is because our perspective is a priori metaphysical, esoteric, primordial, and universal that our Tarîqah has the right to be 94 named Tarîqah Maryamîyah, in perfect accordance with the teachings of Sufic tradition.” It is possible to glimpse at least something of the universal scope and plenitude of the Blessed Virgin by considering first the implications of a title accorded her in Islamic mysticism. As we have just noted, there is good reason—even on exoteric grounds—for calling Mary a Prophetess, but among certain Sufis a further “paracletic” step is sometimes taken in which she is referred to as the “Mother of Prophecy and of all the Prophets,” a phrase to which Schuon returns a number of times in his writings. What this formulation helps to make clear, he explains, is a 24 dimension of the Marian reality which might not otherwise have been discerned at the level of scriptural exegesis—namely, that “the message of the Blessed Virgin,” understood in its essence, “contains all the prophetic forms possible in their universal and primordial indifferentiation.”95 On the one hand, of course, her message has to do with her Son; theologians have pointed out that the only time she speaks publicly in the Gospel is on the occasion of the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee, when, referring to Jesus, she tells the servants, Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it (John 2:5).96 But in the Schuonian perspective, He—the Son—must be understood as applying not simply to “Jesus as founder of a religion,” but to the Divine Logos or Word, which was incarnate in Him, and hence not to “such and such a Rasûl, but the Rasûl as such.”97 As the Mother of that supra-temporal Word, Mary is thus the “matrix of all the sacred forms,” a truth expressed, “according to a symbolism common to Christianity and Islam,” when it is said that she “has suckled her children—the Prophets and sages—from the beginning and outside of time.” This implies, continues Schuon, that “the domain of Mary” pertains to “a level where these systems as such lose much of their importance, and where by way of compensation the essential elements they have in common are affirmed,” elements which, he adds—“whether they like it or not”—“give the systems all their value.”98 On an initial and most obvious level, this “Marian universality”99 can be seen in the fact that the Virgin serves as a providential link between the western or Semitic traditions. “Precisely because, in the world of the Semitic monotheists, Maryam is the only feminization of the Divine,” Schuon writes—“the only avataric Shakti of Vishnu, in Hindu terms”—“she had to appear in all three monotheistic religions at once.”100 For she was indeed “unique and incomparable both in Judaism, by her concrete personality as Prophetess—whether understood or not—and in Christianity, by her function as Co-Redemptress,” and she was therefore “ipso facto unique and incomparable in Islam and was ‘at home’ in it, like all the Semitic prophets up to and including Christ.”101 If one objects that a being of so great a stature, so important to the religious worlds in question, would surely have appeared at an earlier and more foundational moment and in a more incontrovertible form, manifesting herself among the anci
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- [Commander of the Faithful: The Life and Times of Emir Abd El-Kader  ](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/commander-of-the-faithful) - Chapter twenty-One The Emir’s Letter Before he left France, Abd el-Kader showered with letters of gratitude all those who had done him a good turn, however small. Two humble women won a particularly warm spot in the emir’s heart and in the hearts of all his entourage. Natalie and Saint-Maurice (Catholic nuns sometimes take the names of male saints) of the Dominican Sisters of Charity of Tours had been assigned to look after the women and children at the chateau, thanks to Bishop Dupuch. Their piety and wholehearted care for their charges created a bond that extended to all the Arabs. Abd el-Kader spoke for his community in an extravagant letter of appreciation to Sister Natalie, who had virtually lived among the Arabs at Amboise: “... A lady of deep piety, a shining mirror of goodness made from the purest mother of pearl, a marabout known for her noble feelings, this is our gracious, always patient and obliging Natalie. In her, we have seen only a deep attachment to her religion, a perfect intelligence, sense of discretion and breeding...” The emir’s sentiments were echoed in confessions of mutual admi- ration by the sisters: “Allowing for certain exceptions of a theological nature, there is no Christian virtue that Abd el-Kader does not practice to the highest degree,” Sister Natalie wrote in an internal communica- tion to her order. She even wrote that she would have been happy to have devoted the rest of her life serving the emir and his followers. Above all, Abd el-Kader was in the thrall of Louis-Napoleon. The prince-president’s generosity of spirit had, indeed, “conquered” him. He petitioned the mayor of Amboise to allow his Arabs to vote in the upcoming plebiscite that would confirm popular approval of Napoleon’s military coup of the previous year. Abd el-Kader offered the thought that they had earned a kind of French citizenship, a “right of soil.” The children they had given birth to in France, and the time spent were evidence enough. In a gesture of goodwill to his liberator, on November 21, 1852, fourteen male votes were cast for Louis-Napoleon’s imperial renewal in an urn specially provided for the Arabs of Amboise. President Louis The Emir’s Letter Napoleon would soon become Emperor Napoleon III. By a curious convergence of the stars, on that same date twenty years earlier, Abd el-Kader had been elected Commander of the Faithful on the Plain of Ghriss. Abd el-Kader was still Commander of the Faithful on December 21, 1852, as he set sail from Marseille for Turkey. To be sure, his official smala had shriveled to a remnant of family members and followers. Yet, its ranks had become more “catholic,” enlarged after his five years of stoic endurance not by adoring Muslims, but by admiring Frenchmen and women. His politess, generosity of spirit, broad-ranging intellect and sincerity in his devotions to the Almighty had seduced all but the most hard-core Arab-haters. Monarchists and republicans, believers and non-believers, the rich and the poor, nobles and commoners counted among his champions: Bishop Dupuch, the Duc d’Aumale, Madame de l’Aire, the wife of Major Boissonnet... Baron James Rothschild who had solicited the emir’s autograph at the Gare de Lyon railroad station en route to his final departure from Marseille, the private Escoffier who had asked to have the honor of guarding Abd el-Kader in Pau, General Daumas whom the emir called “the key to all murky situations and a slave to his promises...Ferdinand de Lesseps who had visited him in Pau and would later seek the emir’s moral support for the Suez Canal... Emile Ollivier, past republican prefect and future prime minister of Emperor Napoleon III. The Labrador, a private steamer that had belonged to the deceased Marquis de Saint Simon was put at the emir’s disposal to take him to Istanbul, accompanied by the devoted Boissonnet and his wife, who had insisted on helping him with the transfer of his family. From there, he would be taken to his new home in Bursa with an ample annual living allowance of 100,000 francs1 (the French consul in Turkey re- ceived a salary of 5000 fr). The sum was deemed by the emperor as 1 This allowance or “pension” was calculated as an annuity when General Randon was war minister under Louis Napoleon. It represented the compensation value over time of his vaste family domains that were expropriated by the French. The annuity was paid by the government to his heirs up until 1954. The amounts paid over time speak millions of the goodwill the emir had earned in France. 263 Commander of the Faithful appropriate for a man of Abd el-Kader’s stature and having such a large family. Between Louis-Napoleon and Abd el-Kader, a genuine mutual ad- miration developed. Yet, why Louis-Napoleon’s generosity, even affec- tion toward the emir? He was obviously not alone in his admiration. Perhaps he saw in the emir virtues for which he had a nostalgic attach- ment. Here was a man of a bygone era, chivalrous and generous, stoic in suffering, loyal to his benefactors, honorable toward his enemies, uncorrupted by commercialism and greed, yet also devoted to progress and improving the human condition, while never forgetting his debt to the Almighty. In his mixture of Realpolitik and romanticism, Louis- Napoleon may also have believed a grateful emir could still be useful to France and his pursuit of glory. But to pursue glory abroad, have prosperity at home and make im- provements for the working classes, Louis-Napoleon, now Emperor Napoleon III, had no sure compass to navigate the treacherous cross- currents of a society deeply divided, wrestling with the new forces of industrialization and demands from the masses for more inclusive government. His dream of restoring France to its position of former greatness converged with a recognition, as he wrote in one of his prison tracts, “that the rule of the classes is over, you can only govern with the masses.” This led him into a series of foreign-policy disasters, for he believed that the newly articulate masses thrived on national glory. There was only one compass for the emir: Islam. Not a narrow sec- tarian Islam, but an Islam writ large, the Islam of nature and of every living thing that submits to Divine Law. The emir’s Islam trusted in a God that is “greater.” Greater, that is, than whatever puny man or any of his religions, including Islam, can begin to imagine. “Each person worships and knows Him in certain ways and is ignorant of Him in others.” In other words, we are all wrong. Squaring the Oneness of God with the diversity of the ways His creatures worshipped Him was Abd el-Kader’s great preoccupation. One of his visitors in Paris had given him a reason to expand on his ideas that had already been incubating in Amboise. 2 The president of the Asian Society of Paris, Monsieur Reinard, had qualified as one of the few among the many seekers who had the privi- 264 The Emir’s Letter lege of meeting Abd el-Kader in Paris. On behalf of this international society of scholars and afficionados of the East, he asked the emir if he would write an autobiography. Three years later, he offered up some- thing unexpected — a window to his soul. It took the form of a philosophy lesson about man’s uniqueness among God’s creatures. In the Western literature it has become known as A Letter to the French, though in reality its audience was universal, as indicated by the original, cumbersome Arabic title: Brief Notes for Those with Understanding in Order to Draw Attention to Essential Questions. He begins modestly, sensing his limited credibility in the eyes of a French public predisposed to look down on Arabs. “First, realize that it is necessary for an intelligent person to reflect on the words that are spoken, not the person who says them. If the words are true, he will accept them whether he who says them is a known truth teller or a liar. One can extract gold from a lump of dirt. Medication from the venom of a snake...For an intelligent person, wisdom is like a lost sheep which is sought, and can be found anywhere and in any individual.” As to man’s uniqueness, he proposed in Platonic fashion that the “perfection” of anything in nature is realized when that thing — ani- mal, plant or mineral — fully expresses its particular distinguishing quality. A horse shares with a donkey the ability to carry heavy loads, but its true essence lies as a creature of grace and speed. A horse is truly a horse only when it gallops at full tilt. And wherein does the emir believe lies man’s distinguishing quality among God’s creation? Not in the need for food and the ability to reproduce, which he shares with plants. Nor in his mobility or pos- session of five senses, which he shares with animals. Only his love of knowledge and the pursuit of truth make man distinctively different from the rest of creation. Whereas animals are prisoners of their senses, man’s uniqueness and nobility come from a capacity to grasp a real- ity beyond the senses — to reach truths of mathematics, geometry, philosophy and the moral truths. The natural respect that even “the stupidest among the Turks or the crudest of the Arabs give to their savants and sheikhs,” the emir notes tartly, is further proof that “the search for knowledge is man’s distinction.” 265 Commander of the Faithful Abd el-Kader’s ultimate reference book is nature. And since nature is God’s handiwork, it is self-evident that in nature, properly observed, lies much wisdom. Knowledge, like nature, is also hierarchical. In the first rank is basic knowledge. This category includes knowl- edge for agriculture, construction, weaving and politics. Food, shelter and clothing are essential for human physical survival, but the practice of politics in the Greek sense — the art of living together — is equally vital. Man is a social animal. People need to cooperate to survive. Harmonious community life assures adequate resources, mutual aid and collective effort. He compares these needs to the roles played by the human heart, brain and liver. In second position is toolmaking knowledge, such as carding, loom making and metal working — arts needed to support the primary ac- tivities. These correspond to organs such as the stomach, arteries and veins, lungs that serve the brain, the heart and the liver. And finally, there is knowledge of the finishing arts — grinding, bread making or wool cleaning. Such knowledge corresponds to the teeth, eyelids and fingernails of the human body. Of the three categories of knowledge, the noblest activities are the basic ones. On their backs, society is built. And the greatest of these activities is politics. That Abd el-Kader uses human body parts to illustrate a hierarchy of knowledge needed to make life agreeable is not surprising. For him, society is a living organism knit together by structured relationships. If those relationships are good, the parts work together in harmony. If the relationships are bad, the parts war with each other, or stop function- ing. Updating the emir’s metaphor, perhaps politics is the hormonal system that regulates and balances relationships according to life’s circumstances. Politics, however, requires a “higher degree of perfection than all other forms of knowledge.” Why? Because it affects the way people live together. Political life should be governed not by the distortions of ambition and love of power, but by generosity and care — the hor- mones that build unity and closeness. In Abd el-Kader’s view, there is no knowledge more important than that needed for understanding the elements of collective life and guiding human behavior in a just and righteous way. 266 The Emir’s Letter Yet, politics itself is of two kinds: the politics of the throne, and the politics of religious scholars, or ulema. The former has power over the external aspects of people’s lives — taxes, military service, employment — but not over their inner life. The religious scholars have the ability to influence men’s interior lives, but they should refrain from the direct exercise of power, which can only corrupt. They do, however, have a duty to speak truth to power and to expose injustice. The expert, whatever his métier, influences the spirit of the per- son seeking his knowledge, according to the kind of knowledge be- ing taught — the purpose it serves and the rigor of its arguments. Comparing mathematics to astronomy Abd el-Kader elevates math- ematics, as he considers the methods of mathematics more rigorous. Comparing medicine with mathematics, he judges medicine the higher form of knowledge because the purpose of medicine is to save lives, even if its methods are less rigorous. Mathematics is a superior form of knowledge by the force of its reasoning, but Abd el-Kader gives greater importance to goals than to methods. Comparing medical knowledge with religious knowledge, he holds religious knowledge superior. Medical knowledge can achieve, at best, only temporary salvation of the body, while divine knowledge offers salvation for eternity. So let us now pause for a moment. Here Abd el-Kader’s reasoning joins that of other believers, but excludes the nonbelieving, materialis- tic modern man. The force of his argument assumes what modernists deny: a creator, revelation, an immortal soul and a Judgment Day. The believers among the children of Abraham differ on details of the story, but they accept the premise: our short sojourn on earth is but a prepa- ration for an eternal one. The only permanent, enduring reality is God. The One. The Universal Soul. The source from which all things flow, and to which they return. God’s presence is in all his creation, just as a writer’s pres- ence is in his writing, a chef ’s in his cooking, a parent’s presence in its child. Abd el-Kader recognizes that such knowledge is not shared by all believers; in fact, by very a few. Why? Because we are all spiritually sick, to a greater or lesser degree. Knowledge is effect, not cause. Its cause is aql. Man’s desire for knowl- edge proceeds from aql, just as light comes from the sun. What is this thing, aql, the French translate as ésprit? Whereas English distinguishes 267 Commander of the Faithful between mind and spirit, the French ésprit combines “spirit,” as in “Holy Spirit” or “team spirit”, and “mind,” which includes intelligence, reason and discernment. The richness of the human spirit varies, the emir reminds us, just as the availability of water in the earth. Water readily gushes forth in some places; in most, it must be dug for, and in others it is nonexistent. Like finding water, most of us have to dig to find our source within. Alas, some of us are dry holes. All men have the ability to acquire a certain degree of knowledge, but that “certain degree” depends on their inner, spiritual reservoir, which is a seedlike potential. Aql is important for moral reasons. It is one of the four virtues need- ed for achieving that distinctively human potential — moral improve- ment. Aql makes possible “distinguishing truth from error, promotes memory, good judgment, energy and a discerning eye in situations requiring finesse.” But moral perfection demands three other qualities: courage, self-control and just behavior. Just, or equitable behavior, is free from the emotions of anger, greed, envy and impatience. Courage, in the emir’s lexicon, is that quality of the spirit that either directs or restrains anger in order to do what is right — that is, moral courage. Courage carries with it companion qualities of generosity, endurance, firmness, compassion and the spirit of sacrifice. The fourth virtue needed for moral progress is self-control, a requirement to hold in check unruly passions that lead us astray. Which brings us back to justice, that essential glue for social harmony that requires self-control and courage. “Whoever possesses these four mothers of moral virtue deserves to be either a king, or an advisor to kings and men. Those who do not, yet call themselves servants of God, should be banished.” Wisdom and virtue are inseparable. It should be obvious to any healthy spirit, Abd el-Kader tells us, that the aql wasn’t given to man simply to gather rain water — which is to say, simply the fruits of practical knowledge. Mundane knowledge is constantly changing, or disappearing, as new knowledge is acquired. “Without question, the most worthy knowledge of all is of God the Highest and of the wisdom that is transparent in His creation.” Man gains this higher knowledge not through his senses, but through his spirit. The senses are stimulated only by what is presented to them. They are not “fecund.” They lead to believing that the earth is 268 The Emir’s Letter flat. “Without the spirit,” Abd el-Kader writes, “the senses can’t evalu- ate the future, assess risk and benefit, draw conclusions that lead to new knowledge or perceive final ends.” That is why spirit, or aql, is the noblest of man’s faculties. It is the part that can see what is invisible to the eye. It is the part that belongs to God. 2 Abd el-Kader left France deeply impressed by its “spirit of practical ap- plication.” Nonetheless, he believed the French savants fell short in the “spirit of speculation,” which, alone, permits attaining knowledge of God and the wisdom that lies within His creation. No doubt the emir’s opinion — not wholly accurate (Pasteur was a devout Catholic) — was influenced by the absence in France of a Muslim’s reflexive recognition of the Creator’s role in one’s accomplishments. To not openly acknowl- edge God is to be ungrateful, like not thanking someone for a gift. To not acknowledge God is to cut oneself off from Divine Wisdom. And wherein does that wisdom lie? In nature itself, to be sure, but in Divine Law, as transmitted across the ages by His prophets. The Torah, the Psalms, the Gospels and the Koran are all repositories of this prophetic knowledge. Only through a deep understanding of these rev- elations can men approach moral perfection and become truly healthy spirits. Like Rabbi Hillel,2 Abd el-Kader tells us to go forth and study the Word with an open heart. But this knowledge cannot be obtained by the human spirit alone. The knowledge of Divine Law possessed by the prophets can be acquired only through faith in their teachings, and by obeying them. Thus, obedience is the guardian of all the virtues. When the body is sick, we turn to doctors and their specialized knowledge. A person with an aching finger might apply an ointment directly on the finger until a doctor, someone with higher knowledge, points out that the ointment should go on the opposite shoulder. The patient might consider this nonsense at first. When the doctor explains the way nerves are distributed in the body, the intelligent patient ac- cepts the doctor’s recommendation. He obeys. 2 Hillel is thought by some to have been a teacher of Jesus. When asked by a pagan to explain Judaism, Hillel replied: “That which is harmful to you, don’t do to others. The rest is detail. Go forth and study.” 269 Commander of the Faithful The prophets also possess a deeper knowledge, though of a different kind. From Adam to Mohammed, these doctors of the spirit have a special gift that goes beyond mere intelligence and allows them to be vessels of Divine Wisdom. Call it a third eye. With it, they can perceive differently and see further. Like the gift of poetry, or music, it is not possessed by most people. The prophets are all equal in their capacity to mediate God’s wisdom. Each has a portion of the Divine Wisdom to transmit. Intellectual knowledge is food, but knowledge of Divine Law is the cure for sick spirits. Most people are satisfied with the food, unaware that they are even sick. The cures are found through following God’s ordinances. Some Divine Laws may be difficult to understand, like a doctor’s recommendation to put ointment on the shoulder opposite from the painful finger. This merely reflects the weakness of the spirit. A healthy spirit can grasp the reasons when they are explained. Abd el-Kader illustrates using the case of gold and silver. The Koran prohibits hording gold and silver without giving a por- tion to the poor. A sensible and just person might object. “I worked hard for my gold and I will do with it what I want. Why should I give some to the poor? I made this money myself.” These seemingly reasonable objections ignore a higher wisdom, says the emir. Gold and silver have no use in themselves. They don’t protect a person against the cold, they can’t be eaten. These metals were created by God to serve as a universal medium of exchange so people can easily acquire things that are useful without the cumbersome need to barter. Their purpose in life is to circulate from hand to hand. To hoard gold without giving a portion to the poor is unjust. “God didn’t create man to live naked and in poverty,” the indignant emir exclaims. It is the duty of the rich to help the poor. Those who ignore this rule will be punished, if not in this world, then in the next. Worse than hoarding is conspicuous consumption, which occurs when gold and silver are used frivolously for plates and cups. Such a misuse of God’s creation is like “employing a judge to work as a butcher.” To disrespect the distinctive quality of a thing or a person, is to degrade it, to render it “imperfect.” Platonically speaking, tableware has only one purpose — to contain food and drink. For this, many other less noble materials, such as clay or bronze, are available. 270 The Emir’s Letter Lending gold for a price is an offense, as well. It transforms a friendly act — helping someone in need — into a form of subjugation. Abd el-Kader ends his discourse on gold and silver by reminding his reader that generosity and mutual aid are the bonds that hold a society together. At the core of all religions are rules of behavior that promote neighborliness and friendship. True understanding of Divine Law leads to that conclusion. Nor is there any contradiction between knowledge of Divine Law, as revealed by the prophets, and intellectual knowledge acquired by man. “The prophets,” the emir writes, “were not sent to debate with philosophers or argue with scientists over whether the earth is a sphere or made up four of elements.” Science, however, should never be used to contradict the oneness of God. “Those who say such and such scien- tific knowledge contradicts religion or that religion is against such and such knowledge sin against religion.” Above all, the prophets remind us to be thankful and to glorify God as Creator of the universe. 2 Nor do the prophets contradict each other — not, at least, in the fun- damentals. They all have a common message: glorify God and show compassion for all his creatures. The laws preached by all the prophets concern respect for the soul, the mind, for property and for the rights of inheritance. Their differences concern the different ways for preserv- ing these laws. Abd el-Kader understood Divine Revelation as multilayered truth, deposited over time, like geological strata. “The laws dictated by the prophets vary according to the considerations which inspired them at the time. The interests and needs of men change over the ages, and all judgments are just only in terms of the circumstances of the people at the time they are promulgated. Religious law can change for the same reason a doctor may change his prescriptions.” Anyway, Abd el-Kader reminds his readers, God can do whatever God wants. He can establish or eliminate a law without justification. His wisdom alone determines the duration of the law and the time of its abrogation. “The Jews objected to Jesus for annulling their laws, but the teach- ings of Jesus say nothing about the legal code. He offered instead para- bles and exhortations. I come not to change the law, but to fulfill it. The response of the Christ to the Jews is the same as that of the Muslims 271 Commander of the Faithful to the Christians. The Prophet Mohammed said, in effect, ‘I have not come to annul the Gospels or the Law of Moses, but to make them more perfect. The Mosaic Law concerns the external behavior of men generally. The Gospels speak to the hearts of individuals.’ “The wisdom of Moses is based on action, and is concerned with obligations and proscriptions,” the emir recapitulates. “The wisdom of the Messiah is concerned with the spirit, inviting renunciation in order to attain higher truths. The wisdom of Mohammed unites both. The prophets only differ in the details of certain rules.” Reasoning like the good polygamist he was, Abd el-Kader proposes that “they are like men who have a common father, but each has a different mother.” 2 An arrow in the sky, one among many. So the emir modestly described the manuscript he sent to the president of the Asiatic Society. It landed well. On July 9, 1855, France’s main daily newspaper, Le Moniteur Universel, published a summary of the emir’s essay. It made a strong enough impression on the intellectuals of Paris that one of them, Gustave Dugat, an Arabist of distinction, thought this “arrow in the sky” deserved a full exposition. Three years later, Dugat explained why in his 1858 introduction to his translation of the full text (Le Livre d’Abd el-Kader) published by the Academy of Sciences. Contemporary “Arab philosophy” was little known in France. The work of Abd el-Kader bore clear traces of Greek thought and showed “the marks of a superior mind that knows how to think.” Even if the author’s ideas were sometimes deficient in details, Dugat praised the emir’s points of view as “always elevated and often original.” On the emir’s treatment of faith and reason, Dugat was astonished. “He speaks like a theologian at the Sorbonne and is in perfect com- munion with the Pope, when he says, ‘Faith is above reason; but, as they both come from God, there can be no conflict between them, only mutual support.’ “The emir reasons like us regarding revealed religion,” Dugat af- firmed, “prophecy is above reason, which by itself cannot comprehend the wisdom of the prophets.” Gustave Dugat’s effort to rescue from oblivion the moral philosophy of a man who had conquered the Parisian elite six years earlier would 272 The Emir’s Letter have touched the emir’s friend, Bishop Antoine-Adolphe Dupuch, if only he had been alive. In 1856, the debt-ridden Dupuch had died a pauper, a victim of man’s golden rule. His creditors virtually hounded him to death, while his friends kept him one step away from prison. Yet poverty, his friends said, did not bother Dupuch in the end. Like Abd el-Kader, he had detached himself from the things of this world. And like the emir, whose greatest difficulties in his struggle against French occupiers were with his own kind, so too Dupuch. Those who opposed most strenuously his calling in Algeria were not Arabs, but anticlerical Frenchmen who, illwilled, or wellmeaning but ignorant, feared that Jesus-loving ministers of God with their crucifixes and statues of the Virgin would offend Muslims. Prisoners of their own anticlerical prejudices, they did not know what the Duke of Rovigo (Commander of the Army of Africa in 1831–32,) had learned when he asked the mufti of Algiers if he could convert one of their mosques into a church. Rather than be insulted, the mufti acted elated: “May God be blessed, may Africa rejoice! The French can no longer be accused of not believing in God. Take whichever mosque suits you the best. The form of worship may change but not the Master, for the God of the Christians is also ours. We are only different in the way we address ourselves to Him.” In exile, the emir echoed the mufti’s thoughts differently. “Our God and the God of all the communities different from ours are in reality all one God...He reveals himself to Muslims as beyond all form, to Christians in the person of Jesus Christ and monks...he reveals himself even to pagans who worship objects. For no worshipper of something finite worships the thing for itself. What he worships through this ob- ject is the Epiphany of God.” At age forty-four, Abd el-Kader’s new life in exile seemed set on a course of study, teaching and pious meditation that would lead to a peaceful end in the Almighty’s embrace. Higher Wisdom had a different plan, however. Nature and great power politics were its instruments. 273
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He taught me the meaning of love and its reciprocity. He knew I loved him and I knew he loved me. My heart surged when I knew I would see him. I missed him terribly when he was away. I thought about him constantly. I enjoyed every moment I had with him. He was a kind of uberfather for me. He was my best friend. I felt safe knowing he was in the world. When he died, I was desolate, overcome with a sense of profound loss from which I have never fully recovered. As I came to know him I discovered that I was not the only one who had fallen in love with him. Once we were walking together on the streets of old Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, and someone approached us. He came up to Sayyid Omar and cried out in Arabic, “Ya Habib! (Habib is an honorific the people of Hadramaut in South Yemen – Hadaram – bestow upon their spiritual elders) I love you!” Then he asked, “Why do I love you, Habib?” Sayyid Omar lowered his eyes, smiling, and shook his head modestly. “A gift from my Lord,” he shrugged. I witnessed this kind of exchange many times. The great Sufi and Proof of Islam, Imam Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali wrote that one of the marks of honor bestowed upon the people who have attained knowledge on the path to God is that they are beloved of all creatures. Sayyid Omar elicited love wherever he went. When I first met him he was serving as ‘Ambassador Extraordinaire and Plenipotentiary’ from Comoros Islands, which, I think meant that he was the little island nation’s only ambassador. He travelled the world on behalf of Comoros and, through his charisma, managed to bring the country many millions of dollars in foreign aid, particularly from the Gulf countries, where he was especially beloved. Beneath his diplomatic cover he was one of the greatest living African educators and beneath his educational cover, he was a Sufi saint. While on one of his diplomatic missions, he came to learn of a young group of Sufi acolytes living in London and he came to pay us a visit. He was a force of nature and took our group by storm. He savored knowledge as if he was feasting at a table groaning with delicacies. Indeed, he often said that Sufism was about taste. “Without tasting the sweetness of dhikr and knowledge it is very difficult to continue on the Path.” There was no subject off limits. He laughed easily. His laughter was infectious, his sense of humor contagious. His knowledge of the path was encyclopedic. I had never heard anyone deliver classical Sufi doctrine in English with such clarity and depth of insight and with such boisterous good humor. The atmosphere was charged in his presence. He exuded an intense joy of life. He loved people. He came with his close companion Sayyid Hadi Al-Haddar. The two of them sat cross-legged on the floor with us and spoke of Sufi doctrine and practice. Sayyid Hadi, who was an ecstatic, solemnly announced to the group, “I congratulate myself for being among you.” Sayyid Omar balanced sobriety and intoxication, and combined his magnetism with a rich eloquence. He galvanized his listeners with insights, anecdotes and wisdom sayings. As he spoke his embroidered cap (kufia) would begin slipping farther and farther to the back of his head. Just before it fell off altogether Sayyid Omar would rescue it and slide it up back to the top of his smooth head and continue talking. When the time for prayer came I leapt at the chance to help him make his ritual ablutions. I filled a pitcher and poured water for him in my upstairs room. He invoked a blessing on me. While we were having tea after dinner Sayyid Omar addressed me. He asked me where I was from. I had been an actor in Hollywood before I entered the path. I had been in the theater since I was a small child. I thought that the only thing I wanted in life was to be a great performer. I left what looked to be a promising career, suddenly and, for my family and friends, dramatically. I joined a Sufi order and never looked back, or so I imagined. I told him I was from America. He asked me what state I was from. I answered that I was from California. He then grinned and burst out suddenly with, “So you left Hollywood and came here!” I turned beet red. He had nailed me. The whole assembly exploded into laughter. My friends all knew my past. I realized that I was carrying this mythology around with me about having been an actor in Hollywood and left it all for the Path. In one funny and embarrassing (for me at least) moment, he put that pretention to rest. This was the first time I had ever interacted with someone possessed of spiritual insight, or firasah, although I had always been fascinated by this capacity, which is a combination of innate ability enhanced by intense invocation. The Prophet Mohamed, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “Fear the insight (firasah) of the believer, for he sees with the Light of God.” On another occasion Sayyid Omar suddenly appeared at the zawiya. It was an afternoon. I was sitting with a friend of mine who had just returned from many months in Palestine under the tutelage of a Sufi shaykh who had put him under an incredibly intense regime of invocation that had left him in a highly strung state. He had returned to England and was at loose ends. There were only two of us alone in the minzah when Sayyid Omar appeared. He strode into the zawiya and, without pause or ceremony, sat directly in front of my friend, greeting him and asking his name. “Abdul Latif”, my friend replied. “Well Abdul Latif, I must warn you, you mustn’t try to go too fast.” Abdul Latif listened, nonplussed. Sayyid Omar continued, gravely but gently, “Because if you go too fast you might lose your balance.” Abdul Latif was speechless. He’d just received a rather alarming admonition from an exotic older gentleman he’d never laid eyes on. He stared back, dumbstruck. Sayyid Omar looked him in the eyes and said, “You know what I mean,” then casually added, “What do you do? Do you cook?” Stunned, my friend nodded, stammering, “Uh, yes, I…I cook at The Buttery at the John Slade Art School in East London.” This was Sayyid Omar’s way of letting him know that he wasn’t just whistling Dixie; that he could see into his heart. He then said again for emphasis, “Don’t try to go too fast. Take things slowly and you will be fine.” My friend took his advice and has kept on the path up to now, never losing his balance. I witnessed this kind of exchange numerous times and was fascinated by these flashes of insight he seemed suddenly and without warning to blurt out. When I mentioned this, he said innocently, “Do I really?” He explained that things just came to him suddenly and he was impelled to say something. It was intuitive rather than cognitive. He dismissed this faculty as of little importance. *** Sayyid Omar was the most eloquent living interpreter of classical Sufi doctrine in the English language and he was a tremendous conversationalist. Yet he never left a gathering without repeating the Prophet’s invocation: Subhanaka Allahumma wa bi Hamdika Wash-hadu an la ilaha illa anta astaghfiruka wa atoobu ilayk. (“Glory be to You O God, and Praise to You and I witness that there is no god but You. I ask your forgiveness and I turn to you.”) Of this invocation the Prophet, peace be upon him, said: “Whosoever is sitting in a company and indulges in much idle talk, but before rising says…, his talk shall be forgiven.” I found this to be one of his most impressive qualities. He never forgot that he was in the presence of God. For 30 years I have tried to follow his example, but I still find it a struggle to retain the awareness of God to remember this simple invocation after engaging in conversation. If he had a consistent message it was one of tolerance, for human frailty, for other beliefs, for weakness and wrong action in others. He once said, “You have to be very careful about defining someone as an unbeliever (kafir). A kafir is someone who has received the Message, understood it and then rejected it. Most non-Muslims have not received the Message, fewer still understand it. Even many Muslims haven’t received and understood the Message.” We were sitting together once and he said, “If you read the Qur’an with great care, you will understand that most people go to Paradise.” He gave everybody a way in. We once sent him to America on a speaking tour, which was very successful. After one of his talks, a young American woman came up to him and said, “I love what you said and I think I should become a Muslim but, you see, I’m a stripper.” Without missing a beat Sayyid Omar grinned and said, “Well, don’t let that stop you.” She said happily, “Yes, I’ll become a Muslim and then I know I’ll give it up.” He didn’t admonish her for what she was doing, but encouraged her to something better. He once said, “Westerners have the greatest capacity to accept and follow the Path in our time because they have no preconceptions, they understand the value of time and they use their intellect. The only thing they have going against them is that they have built up bad habits.” I found this to be true. While it was easy for me to comprehend and accept Sufi doctrine and practice the discipline (suluk), I felt weighed down by deeply ingrained impulses from my misspent youth. Habib Omar and I were travelling through the Gulf together. I was away from my wife and, after a time, started to be troubled by lust (shahwa). Over dinner one evening I asked him if, as a young man living in Europe, he was ever overcome by feelings of lust, hoping he would give me some advice as to how to deal with this distraction. He looked up and said without hesitation, “No.” His upbringing had protected him. Still, he had incredible empathy for ordinary people. A young Comorean working in Jeddah who knew Sayyid Omar told me that when he gave discourse in Moroni, all the cafés and bars would empty out and throngs of young people would flock to come to hear him speak. He was the spiritual equivalent of a rock star in East Africa. On another occasion, when he was in London, the Imam of the Regent’s Park Mosque called him in a panic. He said, “We have a serious problem and we need your help. We don’t know what to do! Can you come with us?” They took Sayyid Omar to Harley Street to the office of a physician. He was an older man, in his late fifties. Habib sat down with him and said, “How can I help you?” The physician said, “Over the years I have treated many Muslims and, through them, have come to love and respect Islam and I believe it is true and I believe I should become a Muslim.” Sayyid Omar said, “That is very good. So what’s the problem?” The Imam looked to Sayyid Omar as if to say, “Just wait until you hear this.” The physician responded, “Well, I know that a Muslim is expected to pray five times a day. But I am old and set in my ways and I am very busy with my practice. In all honesty I can’t guarantee that I will be able to keep to the five prayers.” Sayyid Omar said, “Go on.” The physician continued, “Also, I know that one is expected to fast the month of Ramadan. I simply can’t perform the fast.” The Imam looked to Sayyid Omar as if to say, “You see what I mean?” Sayyid Omar said, “Is there anything else?” The good doctor said, “Yes. For the last 30 years every evening I have a glass of sherry. I know this is frivolous and I know that Muslims are not permitted to drink but I honestly don’t think I can give up my glass of sherry in the evening. I’m sorry.” Sayyid Omar said, “Is there anything else?” The doctor said, “No, I think that’s about it. What do you advise?” Sayyid Omar said, “There are many Muslims who fail to perform the five prayers and who don’t fast the month of Ramadan and there are many Muslims who drink alcohol and there have been since the time of the Prophet Mohamed, peace and blessings be upon him. These are men and women who were born as Muslims, who believe in Islam and who are accepted as Muslims so my advice is to accept Islam and do the best that you can. You are welcome in Islam.” The good doctor became a Muslim. In Sufi literature, in the diwans of the saints, in circles of knowledge, there is much talk of very advanced spiritual states, of annihilation in God (fanafillah), of subsistence in God (baqabillah), of exalted stations (maqamat) and illuminations. I felt that much of this was lost on me. When I was young I never imagined that I could possibly attain these spiritual heights. So I asked Sayyid Omar why it was that we are encouraged to desire knowledge that seems to be out of reach for most people. He replied that God is so immensely generous that He gives His servants everything that they ask for, even if only at the moment of death. He would relate the saying of his shaykh regarding the acquisition of spiritual knowledge: “The later, the better.” THE NUBIAN BESIDE THE TOMB I landed in Cairo in the summer of 1976 and immediately tried to get a visa to Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Consulate General was, and as of this writing, still is located in Garden City in a huge, run-down complex of buildings. At the time, which was the early years of Saudi Arabia’s oil boom, the Embassy was besieged by thousands of visa applicants trying to get into the Kingdom for work or to perform the Hajj or Umrah. The heat was oppressive. Crowds surged at the entrance, pushing to get inside the compound. Egyptian police in ill-fitting white uniforms and black berets beat the seething mob back with belts. The heat, the smell of sweating humanity and fumes from the surrounding streets was suffocating. When I finally managed to get through the gates there were incredibly long lines out in the courtyard leading to windows where visa applicants were meant to leave their documents. I was stuck in an interminable queue, which never seemed to get shorter because of new applicants continually cutting in line. Rather than risk an altercation, I had to resign myself to wait patiently at the back of a long, glacially slow line. Patience is not a virtue I have in large supply but I was stuck without an option. I decided that the only way to make the best of a bad situation was to use the time performing invocation (dhikru’llah) and decided to repeat a long form of the Prayer on the Prophet (Al-Salat ‘ala an-Nabi) 1,000 times. I stood in line for about three hours, sweat streaming down my face, trying not to breathe in the nauseating vapors, damping down my annoyance when yet another queue jumper pushed into the line in front of me, reciting the prayer on the Prophet over and over and over again. By the time I reached the front of the line, I’d repeated the dhikr 990 times and, needless to say, my frustrations and annoyances had gradually been displaced by the repetition of this calming invocation. I deposited my papers at the window and gratefully escaped the Saudi Consulate compound, hailing a taxi to take me to Sayyida Zaynab, the great mosque that encompasses the tomb of the granddaughter of the Prophet Mohamed, may God be pleased with her and may God bless him and give him peace. In the taxi I completed my 1,000th prayer on the Prophet. I paid the driver, got out and entered the Mosque. As I approached the precincts of the tomb of Sayyida Zaynab, an old Nubian dervish in a long white shirt and colored turban, sitting beside the tomb, head bowed in invocation, looked up as if he sensed something. He spotted me. His eyes brightened as if he recognized me. He cried out: “Allah! Allah!” His hands came up and he pulled them over and over wildly from me toward himself, as if he was trying desperately to gather something unseen from me into his heart. His face was incandescent. I nodded to him. He beamed ecstatically. He then returned to his invocation. About a week later I entered Sayyida Zaynab again. I had not been performing the prayer on the Prophet or any other form of invocation as intensively as I had that day in the Saudi Consulate. I spotted the Nubian dervish and tried to catch his eye. I walked over and sat beside him in front of the tomb. I assumed we had a bond from the week before. He ignored me. When I finally did manage to catch his attention, he looked at me without a glimmer of recognition and returned to his invocations. Whatever he had seen the previous week, it certainly wasn’t me. I suspect that he had seen the prayer on the Prophet. But God knows best. ALL NIGHT LONG Sufi Abdallah cut a striking figure. He was a tall, handsome, powerfully built Pathan with an easy swagger, thick salt and pepper beard, a rakish smile and piercing eyes. It was said he worked sixteen hours a day – two consecutive shifts – as a shop foreman in a Birmingham factory. It was also said that he rarely slept, although I had trouble believing this. He led a Naqshbandi Sufi order in Birmingham. The Naqshbandiyya trace their lineage directly back to our Master Abu Bakr Al-Siddiq, may God be well pleased with him, and their practice, reflecting the quiescence of their spiritual father, was inward and silent. It has been said that the Naqshbandiyya preserved Islam throughout the Central Asian republics during the repressively atheistic Soviet period because their spiritual practice could be carried out in silence, invisibly, without a trace. The Naqshbandis of Birmingham were anything but invisible. They were a flamboyant, vigorous bunch, mostly working class Pakistani emigrants who congregated with a wonderful sense of processional solidarity behind their towering, energetic leader, arriving at gatherings like the Eid prayers by the busload, brandishing banners and flags and carrying trays groaning with Pakistani food. They were far and away the most organized group of Sufis in Britain. I was always impressed by Sufi Abdallah and the men around him but wondered whether theirs was a case of style over substance. I had my chance to find out when a few friends and I were invited to attend a night of dhikr in London. We gathered at a modest brick row house in a working class neighborhood after sunset. We had tea and talked casually until the night prayer, after which a delicious Pakistani supper was served on tablecloths spread across the floor of the room we had gathered in. This seemed more like a social gathering and I began to think my suspicions about these Naqshbandiyya were justified. For us a meal after the night prayer usually signaled the end of an evening. These men, I discovered, were just getting started. A large circle was formed and the invocation began. The practice of the Naqshbandiyya revolved around the silent invocation of La ilaha illa ‘llah - “No god but God” - on the breath and with a rhythmic movement of the head down on the “La” and the “illa” and in a circular motion accompanied by a visualization of light. Although silent, it is an incredibly powerful practice. Sufi Abdallah led the assembly with single-minded intensity. The practice began slowly and accelerated gradually in unison until the group breathed as a single body, lost in remembrance. Time passed. We were swept away in this luminous circular breath. Time flowed. The invocation ended. It was dawn. We prayed the dawn prayer and the assembly broke up. I staggered out into the early morning air, ready to collapse. Sufi Abdallah walked out with me. On the working class street he looked down at me with a twinkle in his eye and a chuckle and gave me a pat on the back with his large hand, as if to say, “Nice try”. He shook my hand with an iron grip. Unruffled, he was ready to head back to Birmingham to start his first shift. As we parted ways in the cold morning light, I realized that I had just experienced a case of substance over style.
- [A Knowledge that Wounds our Nature: The Message of Frithjof Schuon ](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/knowledge-that-wounds) - James Cutsinger If there is a beauty here, it is a beauty that burns. If the message he brings is a good one, it is a goodness that produces a shock, as if one were swallowing light. Click here to view the PDF With thanks to Professor Cutsinger for his permission to republish.
- [Divine Love in Early Persian Prose](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/chittick-divine-love-in-persian-prose) - Prof. William C. Chittick With thanks to the Temenos Academy, we present this video lecture recorded at the Lincoln Centre in London, March 18, 2013. The servant is a pretext and a means, and the Real is one. The flood of Lordhood arrives, and the dust of mortal nature disappears. The reality increases and the
- [Between Philosophy and Mysticism: A Study on Joseph Giqatila](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/blickstein-giqatila) - Rabbi Shlomo Blickstein This PhD thesis studies the life, context and works of Joseph Giqatila (1248–c. 1322), particularly his Ginnat 'Egoz (The Garden of the Nut). Giqatila uses qabbalah as a technical term to denote an esoteric tradition regarding the Divine Names. “The single most striking feature of all Giqatila’s philosophical-qabbalistic writings is the presence
- [Why Socrates Didn’t Charge: Plato and the Metaphysics of Money](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/schindler-why-socrates-didnt-charge) - David C. Schindler Money has the whole of its truth in being a symbol of the soul’s adherence to the good. It is meant to be a “reminder” to those who are wealthy in a true sense. If it is made into the thing itself—as in the measurement of a nation’s wealth by the gross
- [Setting Science Free From Materialism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/setting-science-free) - Rupert Sheldrake To avoid a creator God emerging in a new guise, most leading cosmologists prefer to believe that our universe is one of a vast, and perhaps infinite, number of parallel universes, all with different laws and constants… We just happen to exist in the one that has the right conditions for us. This
- [American Indian Way, an interview with Chief James Trosper](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/american-indian-way-interview-with-james-trosper) - Chief James Trosper, Sun Dance Chief of the Shoshone tribe in Wyoming, granted the Matheson Trust an exclusive interview where he dwelt at length on many different topics related to the Native American spirituality and worldview. Native Americans and Civilisation/The Shoshone and Education When we go to the mountains, the beauty of nature and what
- [Three Sufi Texts of Shaykh Yusuf al-Khalwati](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/shaykh-yusuf-three-treatises) - Shaykh Yusuf al-Khalwati al-Maqassari (d. 1699) translation and commentaries by Mustapha Keraan and Muhammed Haron May He grant you understanding concerning it and be aware that the qiblah is composed of four facets. The first of these is the qiblat al-‘amal (the course of action). The second is the qiblat al-‘ilm (the path of knowledge).
- [The Wisdom of Animals (in Ibn Arabi)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/chittick-wisdom-of-animals) - William Chittick In this talk, Prof. Chittick recounts and elucidates a section of Chapter 198 of al-Futuhat al-makkiyya, dwelling especially on the symbolism of particular letters of the Arabic alphabet, and on the meanings of the Divine Name al-Mudhill, “the Abaser.” …in Ibn Arabi's way of looking at the universe, all things are living words
- [What is Common to Indian and Chinese Art?](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/coomaraswamy-indian-and-chinese-art) - Ananda K. Coomaraswamy The truth as a whole is an eternal, ever accessible, infinity, incapable as such of any improvement or advancement: the wise man is therefore not interested in the history of aspects, but only in the validity of a given statement as a means conducive to the realization of invulnerable happiness. So we
- [Religion, Prayer, Dialogue and Appreciating the Other](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/religion-prayer-dialogue) - In this article I intend to answer the questions: What links the inner invisible life of prayer and the visible fruits of inter faith initiatives? How does dialogue promote collaboration and relationship-building? Does religion bring us together or divide us? This article is based on extracts of other talks and articles that I have produced over the last three years. I begin with the internal as it is often ignored in inter faith initiatives though it has been at the heart of my own work and journey. Inner spirituality and outward fruits Six years ago, just before Eid, I spent nearly two days on i’tikaf at Masjid as-Shifa in Nottingham. After the ?isha’ prayer, followed by tarawih and then the reciting of the final sixth of the Qur’an there was a time of singing and praise of Muhammad, the Nabina. It was a very deep experience to have been at the heart of Islamic spirituality for about eight hours but, finally, it was even more moving to be in the middle of a tight circle of men singing devoutly of their love for Muhammad and praise to God for sending him. In my own tradition I draw on Christian devotion to Jesus and think of Muhammad in a similar way. Muslims in following the Sunnah seek to live according to the gracious example of their Prophet. I have observed over the years that following in the way of the Prophet, with God’s grace, has had a transforming effect on their lives. This leads me to the thought that just as ‘regeneration of the believer’ is a key phrase in devotional, though sometimes dogmatic, Christianity the same effect is an integral aspect of Islamic spirituality, of Islam. This can lead to very challenging thoughts – is God, the Spirit, moving in other religious traditions, creating spiritual ‘fruit’ in the lives of those who believe and think differently to us? Dogma can often say ‘no’, but direct evidence (with the caveat that we cannot know what is going on in the heart of another) usually says ‘yes’ if we are open. My own, originally Calvinist, heritage is famed for saying ‘no’ to this and other open-ended questions. But inter faith encounter and dialogue is about saying ‘yes’ to difference, uncertainty and challenge. I told a colleague, a priest, now a very senior priest, that I was not aware of anything in Christianity, apart from dogma, that did not also exist in Islam. She was not terribly impressed! Three years later, and with increased deepening of my experience of Islam, I still stand by that observation. Without falling into syncretism, I have found the deep teachings and mystical aspects to be very similar, the difference is in the language and the theological distinctives. I have observed Muslim friends and colleagues having the same experience. I was struck a couple of years ago by a Muslim colleague quoting ‘God is love’ in one of his articles. This is a famously Christian expression from the first letter of John in the New Testament, for him it was also Islam, though the particular wording does not appear in the Qur’an. So too Muslims will quote the line ‘God moves in a mysterious way’ from the Christian hymn, probably due to their attending Christian school or assembly, in their youth, but that too proves the point. Our spiritualities and reflections on the Divine are related, not foreign. This deeper connection can be the beginning of dialogue or it may be that dialogue itself will reveal the spiritual heart which is our most meaningful meeting place. This has been excellently expressed in Ray Gaston’s book ‘A Heart Broken Open’, which I strongly recommend, I can only scratch the surface in this piece. If our hearts are ‘broken open’, as they must be if we are to really dialogue with and encounter each other, then we can reach a place where we become able to recognise the grace of God and the workings of the Spirit. And we will see this in all who seek to serve God, realise that God is not limited to one religion and has many Prophets. Dogma may argue differently. There are a variety of pathways that can lead us towards the deeper encounter, for some it will be reading scripture together. However, the encounter with each others ‘Prophets’ can lead us into the heart of the devotional aspects of each faith in a way which scripture may not. These are the thoughts that I shared when asked to speak at the opening of an exhibition on the Prophet Muhammad: ‘It is an honour to be asked to say a few words to open this exhibition. I believe it is very important as it will enable people to get closer to the man, the life and the legacy of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). I hope that it will draw in people who know little about the Prophet and that they will leave with a better understanding. In some ways the best exhibition of all is not a collection of exhibits, and I compliment you on what you have here, but their meaning and impact on us to this day. Just as Muhammad was described as a ‘walking Qur’an’, so those who follow the message Muhammad brought are living exhibitions of God’s ‘mercy to humankind’. Of course, this is an act of da?wah, ‘invitation’, and when done in the best possible way and with the best of intentions, ‘beautifully’ as the Qur’an says, or ‘with gentleness and respect’ as we read in the Bible it is a wonderful thing. ‘A Mercy to Humankind’ is exactly what we need to be hearing when so often our society seems very lacking in mercy, a message which is at the heart of Christianity when we chant in our worship ‘kyrie eleison, christe eleison’, ‘Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy’. Part of the joy of working for the Christian Muslim Forum is being able to share and reflect on our similarities and differences. Muhammad’s legacy gives some fascinating examples of how he engaged with others, one that is especially notable is his letter, kept to this day at St Catherine’s monastery in Egypt, promising the protection and safe treatment of the People of the Book until the Last Day. It has been my privilege over the last 10 years or so to engage very deeply with Muslim friends and colleagues as they live out Muhammad’s legacy, as they follow in his footsteps, his Sunnah. I commend your efforts in organising and hosting this important exhibition. I truly hope that more people will come to know the true Muhammad rather than some of the distortions that are all too prevalent and that you will have the joy of being able to share news of a merciful God.’ And what of ‘love’? I have already mentioned love for the Prophet Muhammad and the Biblical expression ‘God is love’. But we seldom talk in a fully meaningful way of love in our two traditions, it is not at the heart of inter-religious dialogue. But if we do not talk about it what else can we talk about, can we talk about anything? Sadly we are not known for it either, we are not generously sharing our love with each other or the world. Having connected, to some extent, with the spiritual heart of Islam I can say that if people were more aware of Islam that there would be more love. We can see this in the negative all too easily, people think Islam is a religion of hate and they respond with hatred. Similarly in Christianity, Jesus told us to love our neighbours, but some of our neighbours see us as hypocritical and judgemental, rather than loving. It is clear that something has gone wrong, the love at the heart of our religions is not being observed. It may be that the failing is on our part, because we are not bringing love into the public sphere or our religious encounter, or because, despite our best efforts, our love is not being seen. Ignorance, and human interest in bad news (and there is often bad news about religion), breeds fear and prejudice; with knowledge comes recognition, and love. But ‘love’ is not people’s first thought when they think of Christians and Muslims. We might wish our reputation was more like that of the Quakers and the Buddhists (and some deep encounters include Muslims whose faith is informed by Quakerism and Christians shaped by Buddhism). In fact some people might say, ‘Oh, those Christians and Muslims, at each other’s throats again!’ Sometime our religions, or our co-religionists, have been sidetracked, or worse, from time to time. Many of us who are involved in inter faith and are motivated by love, have difficulty understanding how people would see Christians and Muslims, Christianity and Islam, Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad and think anything other than love is on the agenda. However, we need to go back to the inner depths of our religions and express that love on the surface and ‘do’ our inter faith within that loving atmosphere, encountering each other as believers, pilgrims and people, less so as ‘dialogue partners’ and even less as ‘faith representatives’. We can see this journey, which not everyone makes, but is almost inevitable once encounter takes place, in last year’s ‘Make Bradford British’ reality show. There was a lot of suspicion and uneasiness at the beginning. But the participants went on a journey of transformation together, and the outcome was love—Damon and Rashid, Audrey and Sabiyya hug each other towards the end of the programme—they encountered each other in faith and humanity, they were surprised by each other and themselves. We see this inner dimension also played out at a global level. At the (unintended) prompting of the Pope, who quoted a medieval statement of hate about Islam in a famous speech seven years ago, 138 global Muslim thinkers wrote what I have described, in a very informal setting, as a ‘love letter’ to Christians worldwide. That may sound terribly trivialising of the ‘Common Word’ declaration, but it is helpful to have a jolt to awaken the heart! They wrote: ‘we as Muslims invite Christians to come together with us on the basis of what is common to us, which is also what is most essential to our faith and practice: the Two Commandments of love … Let us respect each other, be fair, just and kind to another and live in sincere peace, harmony and mutual goodwill.’ The catalyst was words of hate, but the inner dimension, not the political or the dogmatic, responded with words of love, coming from a place of love. The scholars also write, ‘Love of God in Islam is thus part of complete and total devotion to God; it is not a mere fleeting, partial emotion.’ This reminds us that the starting point for the deeper spiritual encounter begins with our ‘founders’, as the twin statements on loving God and neighbour come directly from Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad. Love, Dialogue and Relationship-Building A particularly Christian perspective is to look at Islam as a ‘challenge’. I recently attended a seminar which was gauging the extent to which Christians feel challenged by Islam. Challenge can be a good thing but often has an air of difficulty or threat. Sometimes this is seen as a challenge to be avoided, i.e. not wishing to engage with Islam or preparing oneself to make a counter-challenge. This is present when some Christians express their perplexity that I spend so much time with Muslims, both during work hours and outside. There is sometimes an assumption that I am keen to ‘water down’ my own religion and that I am propagating the message that others should do so. My own challenge in response is that it is as a Christian (or a human being) that I want to reach out in love to Muslim sisters and brothers, to be a good neighbour. Muslim community initiatives, like Islam Awareness Week, offer a great opportunity for people to see Islam as a loving religion, which is not against Christians, or anyone else. The counter-challenge, for Christians, is living up to the best of our religion and the example set by Jesus Christ (Christ as role model often seems to be a neglected emphasis). Living up to the heart of our traditions roots our dialogue and engagement in spiritual realities, rather than fear, and perceptions of threat. This is the challenge (another one) of inter faith and why we need to focus on the inner dimension, because some of our interactions and blockages to encountering the other are not informed by it, we can often be shaped by fear rather than propelled by love. Our two religions tell us to be motivated by one and that the other is unnecessary, sadly there are many examples where we have got the two mixed up. Archbishop Carey highlighted this at a dinner for the Sheikh of Al-Azhar in 1997, where he said: ‘… there are still fears to be addressed. I do not fear Islam. I understand and respect its strength and those who faithfully worship according to the tenets of Islam and the Prophet Mohammed. Others, however, do retain such fears. The international strength of Islam does create fear among some other religious communities. Equally, I recognise that Muslims can often feel threatened by a culture like ours in Britain which appears so alien, and sometimes, even for the Christian communities, so anti-religion, and religious values … ‘[As] the issues facing us are so pressing that I am convinced of the need to establish fuller bilateral dialogue between Christians and Muslims around the country.’ He recognised the anxieties and the difficulties but, in talking of building dialogical relations and making what is different less alien, he is describing a structural agenda of openness and love. As the successors of that structural mutual commitment (Muslim leaders responded warmly to his invitation), the Christian Muslim Forum brought together Christians and Muslims—inter faith activists and influencers, chaplains, ministers, imams and community workers in England—to celebrate our interactions over the intervening years. Significantly the gathering took place, as did our launch, in the same place, Lambeth Palace, as the original announcement of the manifesto for Christian-Muslim relations. Our challenge, or joint aim, at the event was to identify where we were in relation to each other, the depth of our relationship and whether we were seizing the opportunities presented to us for being good role models. Following the discussions we jointly developed a shared commitment, of which these four bullets are an extract: We pledge, as members of both faiths, to live up to the best of our traditions by respecting, welcoming and being hospitable to our neighbours of other faiths. We will speak generously of other faiths, scriptures and worshippers with our own congregations, while recognising we have some critical theological differences. We will engage openly and honestly with each other about our own faith and scriptures … all issues of concern, including sensitive or painful issues. We will make a point of developing and sustaining friendships with leaders and members of other faiths in our neighbourhoods and regionally … As the architect of the leaders encounter programme and the national gathering I was keen to do two things—to ensure, as far as possible, that the event would make an impact, not just be a place for talk and that it would build on our previous joint initiative— Ethical Witness Guidelines. This building and developing on earlier foundations sought, significantly, to go deeper. The italicised words above, as well as highlighting the key theme of each bullet, also convey the emotional content of our pledges to ourselves and each other, the spiritual fruit which we can share with each other. Having consciously pushed this loving emphasis, inevitably the commitments went too far for some in both faiths. I am aware of some of the reasons which gave cause for concern, others I can perhaps guess at and the reasons for not signing up could be described as ‘complicated’. There is also the distinct possibility that some could not express whole-hearted agreement due to their negative experiences of ‘the other’, though our intention was to offer the commitment as an antidote to negativity. I offer the development of the Ethical Witness Guidelines as an example of dialogue: Ethical Guidelines for Christian and Muslim Witness 1) We bear witness to …our faith not only through words but through our attitudes, actions and lifestyles. 2) We cannot convert people, only God can do that … we should recognise that people’s choice of faith is primarily a matter between themselves and God. 3) Sharing our faith should never be coercive … 4) Whilst we might care for people in need … we should never manipulate these situations in order to gain a convert. 5) An invitation to convert should never be linked with financial, material or other inducements … 6) We will speak of our faith without demeaning or ridiculing the faiths of others. 7) We will speak clearly and honestly about our faith, even when that is uncomfortable or controversial. 8) We will be honest about our motivations … we will inform people when events will include the sharing of faith. 9) Whilst recognising that either community will naturally rejoice with and support those who have chosen to join them, we will be sensitive to the loss that others may feel. 10) Whilst we may feel hurt when someone we know and love chooses to leave our faith, we will respect their decision and will not force them to stay or harass them afterwards. Full version here The catalyst for these guidelines was Dr Andrew Smith’s experience at Scripture Union in Birmingham which highlighted a need for ground rules when introducing Christianity in schools and working young Christians and Muslims. How can Christians be involved in inter faith and fulfil the ‘Great Commission’? He found himself not in an evangelistic but a dialogical situation. The intention of the guidelines is to express the heart of each faith and demonstrate, in a joint document, shared commitment to witnessing. This dialogical approach is supported by both scriptures and is our public commitment to respecting those who receive our witness, by putting aside ungracious competitive attitudes. Scripture says: ‘be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.’ (1 Peter 3.15,16) ‘Invite (all) to the Way of thy Lord with wisdom and beautiful preaching; and argue with them in ways that are best and most gracious: for thy Lord knoweth best, who have strayed from His Path, and who receive guidance.’ (Qur’an 16.125) Our process of producing the guidelines was itself an exercise in dialogue. Andrew describes some difficult dialogue situations: ‘Over the past 14 years I’ve spent a lot of time talking to Muslims of all ages about my faith and listening to them do likewise. Many conversations have been interesting and fruitful, and experiences I would want to repeat. However, some were competitive or aggressive and left me feeling frustrated, defensive and not wishing to go through it all again. As a consequence of these experiences I became concerned not to stifle the conviction of those engaged in evangelism/Da?wah, but to offer an ‘ethical’ approach. The guidelines reflect both pragmatism and genuine desire to recognise and affirm those, of both faiths, who are sharing their faith and help them do it in a way that treats people honourably. Another colleague, Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra, shared more local difficulties when, at the launch of the guidelines, he mentioned taking groups of Christians to visit a Leicester mosque, where they were welcomed and given an overview of Islam. He told us that afterwards, one of the congregation said to him, ‘Brother, it’s great that you’ve brought a group of Christians into the mosque, are they going to embrace Islam?’ He understood where he was coming from, but while he had been sharing Islam with them he was not expecting their conversion. This raises the ethical questions of time, place and intention. When the Christian Muslim Forum began we did not know that this would be an issue that we would work on. In fact, we would not have been ready in our first or second year. We had to get to know each other, build the relationships and then open up the conversation. The best conversations, those that have ‘worked’ are where we have been able to approach an issue fairly equally, where the discussions have not been one-sided or where one group has, or is, the ‘problem’. This leads into the difficulty of dialogue. Why Dialogue is difficult — does religion divide? Reflecting, just over a year ago, on our experiences of working together and developing shared statements I spoke of: ‘role-modelling a productive, committed relationship between Christians and Muslims, which seeks to inspire others. A commitment to learning about each other from each other, collaborating on shared issues, even difficult ones, recognising differences and similarities, while inviting others to join us on the journey. A journey including education, myth-busting, advocacy, honesty, risk-taking. We have created a conversation and invite others to join it.’ And wrote not long after: ‘The understanding and appreciation of each other that comes through patient dialogue, building friendship, exploring perceptions, busting-myths is vital. Trust and friendship gives us a solid base for engaging with difficult issues and when we do so we approach them from a shared position. Our ethical guidelines show that this is possible where our deepest beliefs are concerned and there is most difference between us. I often ask myself, thinking of those who challenge us saying that we are not doing enough, not focusing on the critical issues, who bring some conflict into our work, is this all too simplistic, is it not robust enough? [Yet] … peace and [conflict] resolution are more challenging, worthwhile and at the core of our two religions. Jesus didn’t make things complicated, difficult yes, ‘you shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ There are difficulties, not all are on the journey, some need more encouragement than we have been able to give so far, although I see our engagement (and our gentle challenging) strengthening, going deeper and reaching more contentious places (where we need to work on conflict resolution). This is a journey of peace and we need to watch our egos. One of our Christian supporters, returning to the interior dimension, wrote this: ‘If I look honestly I see the seeds of destruction in my own heart. I am capable of cruelty, anger, deceit. My ego blocks an appreciation of others. It causes me to be jealous, to blame and not to forgive. I lose connectivity with others and desire their pain and downfall. When I hear and see this acted out on the world stage, I am convinced that I must keep looking at myself. I need to keep examining my soul … The human heart has great capacity to show love and compassion, to reflect our Creator’s likeness, but we need to nurture and protect these precious qualities to help them flourish. Love and Compassion are the tools for harmonious living and peaceful existence, the antidote to hatred. I am reminded of the importance of daily discipline to cultivate the soil of our hearts to enable such healing seeds to grow. We need to strengthen our connection to each other through connecting to God in quiet meditation (prayer) and desiring the best for each other. At Easter, we celebrate the resurrection of Christ. It is an event of immense hope and reconciliation. It allows us humans a new beginning and a chance for things to be different. It allows us to tap into God’s cosmic love and accept ourselves as we are, frail and often ego-driven. Through God’s acceptance we can accept others and “otherness”. With his enabling we can hold in check our desire to dominate or belittle, to humiliate or shame. So we return to John Donne: No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’ So even our difficulties and divisions—Christianity at its most distinctive when reflecting on the events of the original Easter—provide a bridge to engage with the other as we embrace God’s acceptance of us. When we talk of God’s acceptance of us and our openness to the other then we are back to love again and the personal, and deeply spiritual, aspect of inter faith. We can often be task and project-focused, thinking of structures and statements, but let’s embrace the personal aspect which can often be left out. Christianity and Islam, Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad (pbut), the Bible and the Qur’an don’t want us to be impersonal because that drives extremism, taking us into places where we cannot dialogue with each other. When we see violence, hatred, war, persecution and oppression then the dialogue has broken down. Society becomes inhumane, people listening to preachers of hate when we should be listening to preachers of love, this permeates the whole of society, we see it on television and the news (I don’t mean actual ‘preachers’). When extremists take over, when excessive (impersonal) religious demands are made which do not respect and value others, when there is no place for the ‘other’ - and we are all other - there is an urgent need for us to speak well of each other, to be gracious and generous, to model good relations, to be loving people committed to dialogue and living the heart of our traditions.
- [Qur'anic Reasoning as an Academic Practice](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/quranic-reasoning) - Qur’anic Reasoning as an Academic Practice Dr. Tim Winter University Lecturer in Islamic Studies Faculty of Divinity University of Cambridge (In Modern Theology July 2006) Paper contributed by Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme: interfaith.cam.ac.uk Abstract The increasing engagement of Muslim theologians with issues of textual criticism raises larger questions relating to the space provided by Western universities for Muslim theological practice. In this paper, these questions are examined in the context of the rapidly- increasing Muslim participation in the Scriptural Reasoning project. It is suggested that classical Muslim theological and mystical scriptural commentary will demonstrate continued relevance and vitality, particularly in conversation with Jewish readers, despite the considerable difference in method resulting from the distinctive shape of Quranic revelation, and the lack of a history of secularisation in most Muslim cultures. According to a hadith of the Prophet, the Qur’an ‘has an outward and an inward aspect, a limit and a place of rising [matla’].’1 The mass of exegesis triggered by this and analogous scriptural proof-texts for the possibility of an esoteric reading of the Qur’an is represented in summary form in a gloss by the Anatolian theologian Daud al-Qaysari (d.1350). The ‘outward’ aspect, or ‘back’ (zahr) of the scripture is ‘what is immediately apparent to the mind,’ and is the first-order exegetic sense accessible to ordinary Muslims as well as to specialists. Rational deduction from this plain sense produces second- order theological insights, which are the ‘inward’ (batin). The greatest theologians reach the ‘limit’, represented by the most abstract texts of philosophical theology (kalam). Beyond this lies the ‘place of rising’, a term suggestive of the splendour of sunrise, which is the knowledge triggered by contemplation of the divine speech, gifted by ‘unveiling’ (kashf): a direct self- disclosure of God.2 Qaysari was a solidly orthodox figure, revered as the first professor of theology in the new Ottoman state.3In his college in Iznik he taught the major texts of Muslim theology in its twin orthodox manifestations of Ash’arism and Maturidism. Such a theology was, Islam being what it is, a scripture-driven exercise, eternally subordinate to the ‘back’, or the supportive plain sense, to which all legal and theological reason was answerable. His fourth, frankly illuminationist category, he took to be no less scriptural; yet it was not taught in mosque or madrasa. For medieval Islam, a reading of scripture that was not subject to formal disciplines of philology, historiography, and learned consensus, formed no part of the schoolmen’s curriculum. Qaysari lived in times of transition (five years previously, his madrasa in Iznik had been a church in Nicea), and of a scepticism generated in part by the profusion of religions and sects in his vicinity. An honoured theologian-legist, he nonetheless acknowledged that formal theology is ‘a deduction from behind a veil’,4confessing that ‘inductive monotheism [al- The Matheson Trust tawhid al-istidlali] seldom delivers safety from doubts and ambiguities.’5 It is only God’s friends, who are in receipt of direct illumination, who may safely call themselves monotheists. This uncertainty continued to preoccupy Ottoman thinkers, who from time to time attempted to reconcile the mystical and ratiocinative epistemologies, both of which were grounded in the Qur’an;6 but the illuminationist method of scriptural reading, despite its prestige, was never thought appropriate as a subject for university students. Instead, its proper place was the Sufi lodge, the tekke, site of what Weberians would identify as the charismatic religion that coexisted, at a distance but quite calmly, with the traditional piety of the madrasas. Such a bifurcation was in certain respects akin to the cognitive dissonance which many modern theologians experience. The language of liturgy and sermon deployed in places of worship, particularly in charismatic contexts, is not always the obvious entailment of the finer work of the divinity schools, and scholar-theologians may find that their discursive assumptions about the origin, authority, and exegesis of scripture may fluctuate in complex ways as they migrate between class and congregation. Often this generates a Spinozan hermeneutic of suspicion towards theology in the secular academy, and a reciprocal devotional disdain for scholarship, and in particular for philosophical theology and scriptural criticism. Classical Islamic civilisation did, however, contrive one method of overcoming this kind of polarity, and of integrating the direct experience of the living scripture into the formal academy. The Qur’an had presented itself as an apologetic miracle, and as the theologies evolved came to be regarded as the principal proof of the Prophet’s mission from God.7 One aspect of this was taken to be the text’s content, as a magisterially clear corrective to the errors of the polytheisms and monotheisms of the decadent age of its appearance. However it was the text’s literary force which was taken to lie at the centre of the phenomenon of i’jaz, of the revelation’s miraculous inimitability. The leading theorist of this quasi-aestheticist argument for God and His prophet was the Baghdad judge and Ash’arite theologian al- Baqillani (d.1013), whose text The Inimitability of the Qur’an is still widely taught. Baqillani lived in an age no less turbulent than that of Qaysari. Sceptics such as Muhammad ibn Zakariyya al-Razi (d. 925) had publicly condemned formal religion on the grounds that had the scriptures all been from the same God, their followers would not have descended into conflict. In place of scripture, Razi and his followers taught, human reason should be sufficient to distinguish right from wrong.8 Against this background, Baqillani begins by lamenting the times, and the inadequacy of the academic theology and scriptural hermeneutics of the day. ‘Everywhere,’ he writes, ‘heretics and unbelievers are challenging the foundations of the faith, and stirring up doubts, while the upholders of truth are few [...] Matters are as they were in the early days [of Islam], with some saying that the Qur’an is the product of sorcery, or that it is poetry, or that it is mere fables handed down from ancient peoples. Nowadays people tell me that they compare it unfavourably with literature.’9 Responding to this failure of the formal theologians of the time to vindicate the truths carried in scripture, he embarks on a theological effort that is also literary: the text which he loves, and which had amazed the pagan Arabs four centuries earlier, can be studied formally so as to show it as miraculously replete, an aesthetic marvel so astounding that its divine provenance could not be rationally doubted. Literary criticism, grammar, rhetoric, and the entire sophisticated structure of Arab analysis of discourse were deployed as publicly verifiable supports for the presence of an aesthetic epistemology that pointed unmistakeably towards God and the divine origin of the text. Modern academic practices of textual criticism are therefore not in principle wholly unassimilable by Muslim theology. The contextual analysis of the Qur’anic text, arguments over the chronology of its pericopes, and the use of a variety of extraneous sources to unravel cruxes, are modern weapons with real medieval precedents. Indeed, there are historians who claim that the higher criticism which has so taxed believing Bible-readers is of Islamic origin.10 Yet most Muslims in the academy are demonstrably alienated by conventional operating techniques in the philological wards. Most recurrently, Muslims point out that while Biblical criticism is carried out largely by Christian and Jewish insiders, the study of Muslim scriptures in the secular academy is carried out largely by Christian and Jewish outsiders; and this has contributed to the sense that the ‘higher criticism’ is an alien and even an adversarial project.11 Matters are not helped by a certain Orientalist paternalism: one leading academic account of the genesis of Islam’s texts specifies in its introduction that ‘this is a book written by infidels for infidels’.12 If, as Gadamer believes, interpetation is a three-way activity, since the understanding (verstehen) of a text presupposes an understanding (verständigung) with another human subject on the meaning of that text,13 it is easy to see why Muslim scholars have often found themselves ploughing a lonely furrow in the faculties, the victims of deeply sceptical reviewers.14 The arrival over the past fifteen years of larger numbers of Muslims in Western universities has both highlighted and eased this asymmetry. Muslims, like their colleagues, belong to their tradition in discrepant ways. Many are comfortable with secular interrogations of the integrity of scripture;15 others reject the right of outsiders to work in the field,16 while many others, perhaps the majority, are negotiating the relationship between the two styles of reading in ways as complex as those current among their Jewish and Christian colleagues. Here the academy, much more than the place of worship, is hospitable to gradations rather than boundaries, and allows a mutual fecundity, which, in the case of the Scriptural Reasoning project, has already progressed with striking results. The Muslim participation in the Journal of Scriptural Reasoning, which presupposes a high degree of comfort with academic paradigms, is much more substantial than that of most Islamic Studies journals, and has been able to platform some of the most significant Muslim theologians. Aref Nayed, Vincent Cornell, Basit Koshul, Muhammad Sohail Omar, among others, are deeply involved in the movement. The classical Orientalist Vernunftreligion may remain sceptical; but the Journal is simply displaying its openness to recent shifts in hermeneutics to which Oriental Studies remain largely oblivious. The trajectory can readily be mapped. Dilthey believed that the genealogy of hermeneutics as a formal discipline can be substantially traced back as far as Lutheran zeal in refuting Tridentine strategies of scriptural appropriation, the kairos theme of the Reformation which ultimately made possible the ‘liberation of interpretation from dogma’,17 and hence from irrationality. Oriental Studies remains largely caught within this objectivist paradigm. With Heidegger, by contrast, interpretation became an ‘ontological event’, a relationship between the reader and the text that cannot be distinguished from the text’s content. The move has been implicitly reinforced by the many writers who have emphasised the subjective quality of the instruments which Dilthey held could permit a measurement or recreation of the interpretative experiences of others. The notion that one might persuasively model the ancient societies in which scripture was embedded has been widely challenged. The assumption that the outsider enjoys a privileged situation of neutrality (an axiom in much of Islamic studies) is under sustained attack.18 Even classical logic has been the site of ambitious refinements that incorporate the role of the human subject, and seek to include a moral teleology.19 Many would therefore concede Gadamer’s prophecy: If, however, the ideal of the historical enlightenment that Dilthey pursued should prove to be an illusion, then the prehistory of hermeneutics that he outlined will also a acquire a quite different significance. Its evolution to historical consciousness would not then be its liberation from the chains of dogma but a transformation of its nature.20 The inevitability of this paradigm shift is still bitterly contested, and indeed, Diltheyan scientism has been pushed even further in a positivist direction by the many thinkers who write in the wake of Emilio Betti. At another extreme, there is the continuing appeal of a totalising hermeneutic of suspicion as espoused by Derrida, which may not even permit the existence of the category of ‘scripture’.21 Yet Scriptural Reasoning, while located somewhere towards the end of late modernity, is usually committed to the effectively pragmatist view that as readers we experience ourselves as at least partially autonomous subjects, who would be unacceptably diminished by the counter-intuitive dogma which denies that there is a subject which reads. Scriptural Reasoning listens to Gadamer’s scepticism about method, but is respectful of many methods, and is itself shaped by its continuing encounter with different methods and participants as well as with the text (which is why it bears no resemblance to fundamentalism, a quite different post-liberal option).22 This has the invigorating consequence that our readings may be competitive: the text may not mean a single thing, but neither are all readings created equal; to use a Milbankian formulation, some scriptures may turn out to ‘out-narrate’ others, and some methods may prove more persuasive than others in contemplating certain types of text. So Scriptural Reasoning, while admitting a certain postmodern reticence about final meaning, is by no means an intrinsically liberal method, and may turn out to be particularly hospitable to conservative thinkers who find that little is being communicated in academic or popular ‘dialogue’ sessions driven by liberal presuppositions.23 Islam and SR What might be the specifically Muslim experience of Scriptural Reasoning? SR is not a method, but rather a promiscuous openness to methods of a kind unfamiliar to Islamic conventions of reading. Although medieval Muslim exegesis could be as discrepantly hospitable in the paradigms it adopted as, say, Origen, contemporary styles of reading the text have for the most part passed it by. The Bible has been complicatedly part of the intellectual world which evolved into the academy within which SR typically takes place; the Qur’an and Hadith have not. For the West, outside a few specialist circles, Muslim scriptures are largely terra incognita, or a backwater, associated by theologians with the culture which, through medieval Avicennism, influenced Europe for a while, before becoming isolated as an oxbow lake. For Muslims, Islam continued in fidelity to classical paradigms of faith, worship and devotion, while the Renaissance re-paganised European thought; and the Enlightenment secularised it. Muslims engaged in scriptural reading are therefore, in many cases, substantially medieval, and are generally proud of having providentially avoided the calamities of infidelity which have beset the West. But this very isolation places them at a certain disadvantage: they may find themselves, for instance, asked to clarify features of scripture which for them are elementary, due to the sheer unfamiliarity of Qur’anic prophecy even to cultivated non-Muslims. A no less substantial inhibitor is the discovery that analytical tools developed in Biblical studies may prove inappropriate when investigating Qur’anic texts, indeed, many Muslims hold that the entire Western culture of scriptural criticism, whether conservative or sceptical, is a reductionist Enlightenment or Protestant project which is apt to be culturally oppressive as well as philologically inappropriate when applied to Muslim sources.24 The Qur’an, after all, is accepted even in sceptical circles to have appeared over the course of a very few decades, and there is no question of identifying a vorlage for the text; it is simply unsuitable for the application of most methods of Biblical form-criticism. Hence as far as theology, or even society, are concerned, for Islam there cannot be a ‘return to Scripture’ in Peter Och’s sense, since the Qur’an has nowhere been abandoned; and Muslim interlocutors in SR are much more likely to feel part of an unbroken tradition than advocates of a latter-day ressourcement. Unlike many Christians and Jews in SR, who come from societies wounded by a great divorce from scripture, Muslim participants are apt to come from societies wounded by fundamentalist misappropriations of scripture, and their appreciation of the insights and the moral teleology of the encounters will inevitably be very different. Properly speaking, a Muslim may only interpret scripture after authorisation (ijaza) from traditional masters, who have themselves been authorised as part of an unbroken succession (isnad) stretching back to the Prophet himself.25 Historicity is hence an axiom: no Muslim Bultmann has yet appeared at an SR seminar. Medieval exegesis, too, is authoritative, and Muslim scholars will, in theory, not use it unless they are accredited in the same fashion, this time as links in a chain extending back to the author of a given commentary. In this way, Muslims see themselves not just as interpreters but as para-witnesses to the scripture and to the exegetic cumulation. This imposes formal restraints on the reflections they are likely to offer. Muslims are not, however, required to be custodians of a univocal tradition. Medieval Muslims, like Jews and Christians, lived in internally diverse worlds; and like Jews, normally inhabited societies where more than one scripture was widely followed. Although the canonical form of the Qur’anic text is not discernibly the product of an internal argument, but of an argument against other religions, the manifold difficulties of its language, and the immense and ambiguous body of hadith which supply its initial exegesis and sitz im leben, prohibit a single Islamic gloss on any given verse. Even the earliest major commentaries show this clearly. Yet the Muslim freedom from Enlightenment constraints is very different from post- Enlightenment, postliberal freedom. Where, for Jews, pre-modern riches may be alive currently in smallish rivulets that escaped the Shoah, and where, for Christians, they might be found on Athos, to be brought home to the seminar room and unpacked, and jubilantly recognised, for Muslims premodern orthodoxy, liturgy, and scriptural reading are likely to exist in the nearest mosque. This will equip Muslims with an always discrepant voice at the seminar table. If SR tends to exclude the search for precision, and to celebrate an ‘irremediable vagueness’ (Ochs), Muslims may demur: God need not choose to disclose himself only in playful obscurity, however successful that disclosure may be. First-order exegesis has the right to be true, rather than merely illuminating. ‘Fallibilism’ is not a doctrine which is easily discerned as the way in which prophetic scriptures seek to be approached. Peirce’s pragmatism will work, perhaps, for Maturidis, persuaded as they are of the consensual discernability of human florescence autonomously of scriptural definitions; but Ash’aris (and so perhaps the majority of Muslim theologians) are committed to a command ethic which will need to interrogate any arbitration between rival interpretations which is attempted merely on the basis of our perception of the humanity of their practical outcomes.26 For Ash’aris, such a pragmatism can in fact be deconstructed, like the great edifice which Rawls erects on thin presumptions about ‘good people’, or like Nussbaum’s virtue ethics. Monotheism, taken seriously, means that God alone is the axiological source; human intuition is liable to set up rivals which may be idolatrous. What would an SR seminar have looked like in Nazi Germany, between, say, a Nazi biblical scholar and a Bosnian Muslim supporter of the Reich, in a world where definitions of human flowering were very different to those which currently prevail? Heidegger, after all, trusted his own phronesis.27 There may be a progressist, liberal substratum here after all; in fact, a ‘hard’ Ash’arism or Hanbalism of a type not uncommon amongst today’s polarities might even interpret SR as yet another Americanisation of religion (not only Peirce, but also Dewey and William James are at work somewhere behind the scenes). As for the hopeful idea that psychomachy will naturally produce a love of the Other, one need only consider Ignatius Loyola’s attitudes to Moors and Jews (examples in the Jewish and Muslim world are also not far to seek). Yet where the vagueness entails an openness to a lack of closure, and nothing more than this, Muslims can and do participate energetically. As an internal validation, they may affirm the need to act in fidelity with the kerygmatic Qur’anic address to Christians and Jews, who are called to love and affirm the Ishmaelite prophet, but also, in other texts, to uphold their own scriptures. Non-Muslim scriptuaries are to be ‘disputed with in the most courteous way.’ (16:125) ‘O people of the Book’ is a frequent Qur’anic appeal, respectful insofar as the great bulk of the exemplary stories embedded in the text concern Israelites and Christians.28The Qur’an is not a national polemic against rival ethnicities; on the contrary, it holds up the diversity of human ‘tongues and colours’ as a sign of God (30:22). Generally hostile to Arab history and values, it is Arabic, but not Arab.29 This latent universalism and kerygmatic openness seems to have been a leading factor behind the growing Muslim participation in SR. Its consequences are not yet easy to discern. Even medieval Muslim encounters with other monotheists could bring about changes in exegesis, or at least an expansion of the boundaries of licit meaning.30 The loose canons of SR are likely further to broaden Muslim interpretations, for instance by encouraging a reading of the Bible whose principal ambition is no longer to seek Muhammadan ‘foretellings’ in the text,31 but to consider it on its own terms, or, if that proves too essentialising, on the terms of a community of its own interpreters. Internal Muslim differences are also likely to flourish, including esoteric-exoteric balances, Maturidi, Ash’ari and Shi’i differentials, and gender- based disparities in the reading of the Qur’an.32 The Muslim-Jewish intersubjectivity Although Scriptural Reasoning is comfortable with the tripartite ‘Abrahamic’ category of monotheistic and historically-grounded traditions,33 Muslim theology is probably more explicitly committed to the category than are either Judaism or Christianity. Afdal al-Din Kashani (d.1213), outlining his theory of scripture (the ‘sending-down’) as the necessary catalyst for self-knowledge, is representative when he writes: [God] adorned the mark of these three sending-downs for three communities: the folk of the Torah, the Gospel, and the Qur’an. Despite all the prophets, He said that only these three levels of sending-down should be kept standing. Thus He says: ‘O Folk of the Book! You are not upon anything until you uphold the Torah and the Gospel, and what was sent down to you from your Lord.’34 (Qur’an 5:68) The three-way dynamic helps to reduce binary polarisations, but it does carry a bias towards the ‘Semitic.’ Muslim-Jewish relations turn out to be privileged for several reasons which may relate to this traditional category. Both traditions are nomocentric, and have been the subject of analogous charges of ‘legalism’, which may have influenced some textual critics.35 Purity laws, for instance, comprise an important area of intertextuality between Torah and Qur’an, and may be the subject of conversations that partially exclude Christian participation.36 Jew and Muslim also converge when they read scriptural tales against a background of a very analogous valorisation of martial prowess and of human sexuality (again, both have on occasion been the subject of Christian critiques). A further convergence which can emerge from SR sessions is that neither tradition is as manifestly committed to teleological views of history than is Christianity, with its proclamation of a radically new covenant. (For Islam, the messiah has come, but his role was to emphasise, in somewhat amended or even Masorti form, the timeless Law of Moses: no new ‘economy of salvation’ is being launched.)37Hegelian notions of a progress from nature and image towards abstraction seem to be interrogated by Semitic naturalism, by the integration of the body and its functions into a liturgy which continues to satisfy modern needs, and, in the arts, by a primordial aniconism.38 It is true that certain forms of liberal Judaism, rooted in Abraham Geiger’s view of Tanakh and Talmud as early, primitive stages of human evolution, remain staunchly committed to ideas of progress; but the experience of the Holocaust has dented this, and encouraged a reversion, (sometimes formalistic, sometimes sophisticated, and sometimes both), to older patterns of ‘awaiting the day of the Lord.’39 Most Muslim and Jewish participants in the joint study of scripture will be alert to messianic references, but will not see the ‘Old Testament’ as either the foreshadowing of full salvation (Augustine), or as the record of a process of moral advancement (Wellhausen), but as the complex memory of a people whose access to the divine was, from earliest times, already complete, a completion that was periodically wounded and healed. There is a historia monotheistica, but monotheism itself does not advance. The cognate quality of Arabic and Hebrew, which frequently enriches the practice of comparative SR, is a well-established topos, having historically permitted substantial cross- fertilisation, as in the case of Muslim scriptural lexis with Hebrew cognates,40 and also subsequently, as the Arab grammarians transformed rabbinic strategies of scripture- reading.41 Still more theologically productive is the fact that both religions have cherished their scriptural languages as meta-languages, uniquely sacred vessels of a real presence, and have developed, and debated, doctrines of Torah or Qur’an as the uncreated divine speech (Torah min ha-shamayim; al-Qur’an kalamu’Llah al-qadim). The power of the bayan, the discourse, expressed in a powerfully pure and consistent language, is itself taken to be evidence of God’s unity, as Baqillani and his tradition saw, supplying a ‘kerygmatic ontology’.42 The ‘sending-down’ of the ‘word made book’, is composed of ‘signs’ (aya); but these turn out to be unlike other signs, in that they are ontological reflections or even instantiations of the divine, a belief that triggered exuberant forms of letter-mysticism both within and outside the paradigms of Kabbalah and Sufism. Gadamer identifies Plato’s Cratylus as the point at which the view of language as comprising icons rather than mere signs begins to decay, leading to the modern view that ‘the word is reduced to a wholly secondary relation to the thing.’ 43 Classical expressions of Judaism and Islam, by contrast, appear to revert to ancient iconic associations of signifier and signified,44 which become the basis for a logocentric theology which is the polar opposite of Saussurean relativism. The Argument from Beauty If scripture is God’s uncreated speech, then to recite it is to speak a miracle; even more, it is, as Baqillani insisted, to speak an apologetic miracle. Hence there is a strongly aesthetical aspect to SR engagement, and this is certainly congenial to Muslim concerns.45 Most hermeneutical theory has stressed beauty as a potential indicator of truth (Gadamer’s Truth and Method starts by mobilising Plato to defend this), and in recent years, in tandem with the decline in classical Kantianism and in reaction against postmodern dismissals of aesthetics as mere reification, there has been a revival of interest in aesthetics as a possible sign of truth. A well-known instance is Elaine Scary’s On Beauty and Being Just, which proposes that beauty offers a ‘radical de-centering’, supplying both ethical intuition and access to timeless truths, which for her include political liberalism and social equality.46 SR has no doubt gained in credibility from the turn which Scary champions; yet in concentrating on the beauty and plenitude of scriptural language it represents a unique and highly concentrated case.47 The three traditions, in their irreducibly distinct ways, experience Truth in the fullness of the text: not the text as meaning, but as reading. Consider Levinas, reflecting on a Talmudic passage, where it is shown that the statement commented upon exceeds what it originally wants to say; that what it is capable of saying goes beyond what it wants to say; that it contains more than it contains; that perhaps an inexhaustible surplus of meaning remains locked in the syntactic structures of the sentence, in its word-groups, its actual words, phonemes and letters, in all this materiality of the saying which is potentially signifying all the time. Exegesis would come to see, in these signs, a bewitched significance that smoulders beneath the characters or coils up in all this literature of letters.48 This is hard to distinguish from the deepest insight of i’jaz theory: the Qur’an is a literary, aesthetic argument for itself, which challenges (tahaddi) present-day readers despite the apparent archaism of its diction and concerns, where the anachronic gap simply adds another fertile dimension to the productive interaction of its letters and sudden shifts in style and subject. The spoken miracle continues to speak thanks to the difficulty of its beauty.49 Qur’anic Reasoning as epistemology: two examples Had they established [aqamu] the Torah and the Gospel, and what has been revealed to them from their Lord, they would have eaten from above them and from beneath their feet. (Qur’an, 5:65-6) The medieval commentaries offer divergent but ‘valid’ (hasana) interpretations of this text. What is it to ‘establish’ the Torah or the Gospel? It is to be faithful to God’s covenant as set forth therein, such fidelity including a receptivity to the possibility that God might will to send a Gentile prophet. Alternatively, it is to apply the laws and commandments which those scriptures contain. Thirdly, it could mean that Christians and Jews are to hold up their scriptures ‘before their eyes’, lest they slip in any observance. ‘What has been revealed to them’ can refer to the new revelation of the Qur’an, or to the books of the Prophets (nabiyyin) such as Daniel. Such are the plain senses, as commended by the leading medieval Ash’arite Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d.1209).50 A Scriptural Reasoning encounter would probably register these meanings, and then press on in unforeseeable ways to consider the consequences of ‘establishing’ Scripture: prosperity, perhaps earthly, perhaps celestial; the metaphor of scripture as a ‘banquet’ (ma’daba) to be savoured (as the Latins put it), with the palatum cordis;51 the implication that faithfulness to scripture places human beings between heaven and earth (the verse continues: ‘Amongst them are a balanced people’). There would be no conclusion, despite the general enrichment and sense of respect for the fecundity of the text; however there would probably be a consensus that the text is presenting scripture as the source and guarantor of a divine gift. And when the Qur’an is recited, pay heed, and listen with reverence, that you may perhaps receive mercy. (Qur’an 7:204) Here the plain sense found by Razi focuses on the use of the imperative mood, and on the deduction, from the ‘perhaps’, that both believers and unbelievers are being addressed.52 The Sufi commentary of Ismail Bursevi (d.1725), affirms Razi’s reading, but adds a reflection on scripture-reading as a source of mercy. The core liturgical habit of Islam is the fivefold daily prayer (salat), and the core of the salat is Qur’anic recitation.53 ‘Paying heed’, for Bursevi, suggests the formal activation of a sense, while ‘listen with reverence’ denotes an appreciation with one’s ‘inward ear’. This is not the batin of Qaysari’s schema, but the matla’, the ‘rising-place’. Bursevi cites another scriptural text, the hadith in which God says, ‘When I love My servant [...] I become the ear with which he hears’; so Bursevi observes that ‘whoever hears the Qur’an with the ear of his Maker has truly heard it being recited,’ and adds a couplet from the poet Jami (d.1492): For you to understand not one letter of the Qur’an is no wonder; The wonder is that your eye can be blind to the sun of His generosity.54 Considering a commentary of this order, an SR seminar might summon other scriptural resources, such as the passage where the Qur’an speaks of its own ‘sending-down’ as a ‘healing’ and a ‘mercy’. (17:82) A discussion on mercy (Ar. rahma, with its Hebrew cognates) as the salvific fruit of worship might include, in the context of the ‘sending-down’, the metaphor of rain (rahmet, in some Islamic languages), and of the ‘healing’ of the earth. Finally, the conversation might ‘fall’ in the direction of the clear soteriological and epistemological intent of these texts. Does scripture purport to supply a sacramental source of knowledge intuited through recital and cantillation that is supra-rational but which cannot be ignored theologically? If so, will this yield simply another private fides ex auditu (the sam’iyyat of kalam), or is it akin to the ‘hermeneutical ontology’ towards which Gadamer worked (or does it resemble it only in its insistence on indeterminacy)? Does the miracle of holding the text point towards its exogenous origin, as in the Muslim legend in which Moses can only lift the tablets of the Law when he invokes the name of God?55 And what of the intuition of fellowship experienced during the seminar, as the texts are tasted as a kind of ambivalent communion in three kinds. Do we find in this new fellowship of intersubjectivity, which is so often tangential to religious boundaries, something transcendent?56 Nothing is sought to be proven; but a context and an energy for further work within one’s own community have certainly been supplied. Perhaps SR’s hermeneuts are to resemble the monks of Ibn al-Farid’s Sufi poem: Joy to the monastery’s people! How much they are intoxicated by this wine; though they have not drunk it, catching only the aroma.57 [1] For this hadith see Gerhard Böwering, The Mystical Vision of Existence in Classical Islam: The Qur’anic hermeneutics of the Sufi Sahl al-Tustari (d.283/896), 139-41. The parallel with the Talmudist’s four levels of meaning, pesht (plain sense), remez (allusive meaning), derash (solicited meaning), and sod (secret meaning) is evident. [2] Mehmet Bayrakdar (ed. and introduction), ‘Risala Fi Ilm at-Tasawwuf li Dâwud al- Kaysari’, Ankara Üniversitesi Ilahiyat Fakültesi Dergisi, 30 (1988), 171-216, p.199. [3] Mehmet Bayrakdar, La Philosophie Mystique chez Dawud de Kayseri (Ankara: Kültür Bakanligi, 1990). [4] Qaysari, Risala, 210. [5] ibid., 210. [6] For an example in translation, see Nicholas Heer, ‘Al-Jami’s Treatise on Existence’, in Parviz Morewedge (ed.), Islamic Philosophical Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1979), 223-56. [7] Muhammad ibn al-Tayyib al-Baqillani, I’jaz al-Qur’an (Cairo: Muhammad Ali Subayh, 1370/1951), 33. [8] Latimah-Parvin Peerwani, ‘Abu Hatim Razi on the Essential Unity of Religions’, in Mohammad H. Faghfoory, Beacon of Knowledge: essays in honour of Seyyid Hossein Nasr (Louisville KY: Fons Vitae, 2003), 269-87; see also P.E. Daiber, ‘Abu Hatim al- Razi (10th century A.D.) on the Unity and Diversity of Religions’, in J. Gort, H. Vroom et al. (eds.), Dialogue and Syncretism: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Grand Rapids and Amsterdam: Eerdmans, 1989), 87-104. For the background see Josef van Ess, ‘Scepticism in Islamic Religious Thought’, in Charles Malik (ed.), God and Man in Contemporary Islamic Thought (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1972), 83-8. [9] Baqillani, 29. [10] Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, Intertwined Worlds: Medieval Islam and Bible Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). [11] See, for instance, Mohammad Khalifa, The Sublime Qur’an and Orientalism (London: Longmans, 1983). For a classic example, see the leading 19th century British historian of Islamic origins, William Muir: ‘The turning point is the genuineness and integrity of our Scriptures; when that is proved, the truth of the Christian religion and falsity of Mohammedanism follow’ (William Muir, The Mohammedan Controversy (Edinburgh, T. and T. Clark, 1897), 54. [12] Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism: the making of the Islamic world (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), viii. [13] Hans-Georg Gadamer, tr. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, Truth and Method (second edition, London: Sheed and Ward, 1989), xvi. [14] Conversely, the association of critical scholarship with Orientalist and hence implicitly imperial aspirations has intensified the difficulties of those working to confirm the integrity of the Qur’an while developing theories of its deep appurtenance to its original Arabian context; this political inhibition is discussed, for instance, by Ömer Özsoy, Kur’an ve Tarihselcilik Yazilari (Ankara: Kitâbiyât, 2004), 98. [15] See, for instance, the various writings of Abdul Qadir Sherif. [16] Abbud Zaki al-Ghamidi, Mawqif al-Mustashriqin min Kitab Allah (Beirut: Dar al- Ghuraba’, 1987). [17] Gadamer, 176. [18] Francis Watson, Text, Church and World: Biblical interpretation in theological perspective (London and New York: T. and T. Clark, 1994). [19] Peter Ochs, Peirce, Pragmatism and the Logic of Scripture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). [20] Gadamer, 177. [21] Wesley A. Kort, ‘Take, Read’: Scripture, Textuality and Cultural Practice (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 4. The Algerian thinker Mohamed Arkoun follows this closely: Mohamed Arkoun, Lectures du Coran (2nd. ed. Tunis: Alif, 1991), 258. [22] It cannot be emphasised too often that SR bears no resemblance to the alliance sacrée between fundamentalism and postmodernism which is emerging in some quarters. [23] ‘The more one is firm about the classical points that divide us the better we know where we stand, and our discussion becomes surprisingly open and fruitful.’ Georges Anawati, ‘Vers un dialogue islamo-chretien’. Revue Thomiste 64 (1964), 627. [24] Ismail Albayrak, Klasik Modernizmde Kur’ân’a Yaklasimlar (Istanbul: Ensar Nesriyat, 2004), 17-9. [25] For the ijaza system see Franz Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant: the concept of knowledge in medieval Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1970). [26] For the Ash’ari-Maturidi split here see Kevin Reinhart: After Revelation: the boundaries of Muslim moral thought (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1995). [27] The dangers are starkly illustrated in Hans-Georg Gadamer (tr. F. Lawrence), Reason in the Age of Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 88-112. [28] Özsoy, 13-5. Christian stories held up for Muslim admiration include the legend of the Seven Sleepers and the ‘Companions of the Trench’. [29] Or, if it is Arab, it is a document of radical autocriticism and affirmation of the Other. The text’s non-Arab nature allowed attacks on the Arabs, on Islamic grounds, by the likes of Abu’l-Rayhan Biruni (Edward D. Sachau, Alberuni’s India [London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1910], 185), and Abu ‘Uthman al-Jahiz, Risala fi fadl al-Turk, in Abd al- Salam Muhammad Harun (ed.), Rasa’il al-Jahiz (Cairo: al-Khanji, n.d.), 1-86. [30] See, for instance, the already-mentioned Abu Hatim Razi, whose consciousness of Christianity and of religious diversity impelled him to read Qur’an 4:157 against the Muslim consensus, as affirming the reality of the crucifixion. (Peerwany, 282-3.) [31] This was the main reason for pre-modern Muslim Bible reading; see for instance Ali b. Rabban al-Tabari (tr. Alphonse Mingana), The Book of Religion and Empire (New Delhi: Kitab Bhavan, 1986). [32] Over the past few decades the number of Qur’anic commentaries authored by women has grown rapidly; see for instance M.Akif Koç, Bir Kadin Müfessir: Aise Abdurrahman ve Kur’an Tefsirindeki Yeri (Istanbul: Sule Yayinlari, 1998). [33] ‘The proper Buddhist place to start the study of Buddhism is not the life-story of the Buddha at all, but through outlining straight away the Dhamma’ (Paul Williams, Buddhist Thought: A Complete Introduction to the Indian tradition [London: Routledge, 2000], 23). [34] William C. Chittick, The Heart of Islamic Philosophy: The Quest for Self-Knowledge in the Teachings of Afdal al-Din Kashani (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 228. [35] This is probably a fair comment in the case of Wellhausen, who worked extensively on the textual sources of both Judaism and Islam. [36] Jacob Neusner and Tamara Sonn, Comparing Religions through Law: Judaism and Islam (New York: Routledge, 1999). For a large but interesting generalisation about the relationship between universalism, law, and the monotheisms, see Huston Smith’s introduction to Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Ideals and Realities of Islam (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966), vii. [37] Mahmoud Ayoub, The Qur’an and its Interpreters II: The House of ‘Imran (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), 149-50. The strictly non-chronological structure of the Qur’anic text is, probably, a further sign of this non-progressism. [38] Some hold that the Qur’an may best be seen as a form of literature older than Torah; see most notably Jaroslav Stetkevych, Muhammad and the Golden Bough: reconstructing Arabian myth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); cf. for instance page 11: ‘Unlike the latter [Genesis account of Joseph] the Quranic rendition is not an ideology- saturated pretense of tribal history, and, for that reason, it is more detached and more archetypal – and thus closer to myth.’ [39] Peter Ochs, ‘The God of Jews and Christians,” in Tikva Frymer-Krensky et al., Christianity in Jewish Terms (Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 2000), 54. [40] Even during the Prophet’s lifetime the Qur’anic vocabulary was being explained with reference to Hebrew cognates: Husayn al-Baghawi, Ma’alim al-tanzil (Beirut: Dar al- Ma’rifa, 1407/1987), III, 22. [41] W. Johnstone, ‘Reading the Hebrew Bible with Arabic-sensitized eyes,’ in W. Johnstone (ed.), William Robertson Smith: essays in reassessment (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 390-7. [42] See further Antoine Maqdici, ‘L’Ontologie kérygmatique de Paul Ricoeur: Approche arabe’, in Gary Brent Madison (ed.), Sens et existence: en homage a Paul Ricoeur (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 170-206, cf. p.188: Arabic ‘a été tellement parfaite, que le rhythme du discours, l’attitude qu’il provoque, la sensibilité qu’il crée, semblent être le travail d’un seul, l’Unique dans son unicité qui crée en exprimant et exprime en créant.’ See also Jacques Langhade, Du Coran a la philosophie: la langue arabe et la formation du vocabulaire philosophique de Farabi (Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1994), 26-7. [43] Gadamer, 414. [44] See, for instance, Kashani, tr. Chittick, 164; certain readings of the Kabbalah also readily sustain this view in a radical way. [45] And to most monotheistic concerns; although note that Calvin would repudiate any SR venture conceived on such principles, since, in his understanding, ‘it was also not without God’s extraordinary providence that the sublime mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven came to be expressed largely in mean and lowly words, lest, if they had been adorned with most shining eloquence, the impious would scoffingly have claimed that its power is in the realm of eloquence alone.’ (Cited in Kort, 26.) [46] Elaine Scary, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); for a thorough critique see Robert B. Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian aftermath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 273-7. [47] Aref Nayed criticises Gadamer for his desire ‘to see hermeneutica sacra only as a special application of a universal General Hermeneutics’ (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/journals/jsrforum/nayed-princeton.pdf); yet ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ hermeneutics will not be so swiftly distinguished in the academy; neither should they be, unless we are to discount the possibility of discerning the transcendent in all texts not conventionally classed as scriptural. [48] Emmanuel Levinas (tr. Gary D. Mole), Talmudic Readings and Lectures (London: Athlone Press, 1994), 109. [49] Talip Özdes, Mâturîdî’nin Tefsîr Anlayisi (Istanbul: Insan, 2003), 279-2. [50] Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, Mafatih al-ghayb (Cairo: al-Matba’a al-Misriyya, 1933), XII, 46- 7. [51] See the hadith ‘the Qur’an is God’s banquet’ (Abu Daud, Fada’il al-Qur’an, 1). For the ‘eating’ of Christian scripture see Peter Norton SJ, ‘Lectio Vere Divina: St Bernard and the Bible,’ Monastic Studies 3 (1965), 165-81, especially pp.174-5. [52] Razi, Mafatih, XV, 102-5. [53] Ismail Haqqi Bursevi, Tafsir Ruh al-bayan (Istanbul: Eser Kitabevi, 1389/1970), III, 303. The hadith is from Bukhari, Riqaq, 38. [54] Bursevi, 305. [55] Al-Rabghuzi, The Stories of the Prophets: Qisas al-Anbiya, an Eastern Turkish Version, ed. H.E. Boeschoten, M. Vandamm and S. Tezcan (Leiden, New York and Köln, 1995), II, 347. [56] Here the seminar might ponder the hadith: ‘My love must come to those who love one another for My sake’ (Muwatta’, Shi’r, 16). [57] Umar ibn al-Farid, ed. and tr. Jean-Yves l’Hôpital, Poemes mystiques (Damascus: Institut Français d’Études Arabes de Damas, 2001), 240-1.
- [Imam Ali and the Power of Compassion](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/imam-ali-power-of-compassion) - Reza Shah-Kazemi In these next forty-five minutes, I want to alert you to the subtle relationships, in the teachings of Imam Ali, between the intellect, the principle of rahma and spiritual realisation, the infinite power which is rooted and radiating through the principle of rahma. Click here to watch the video. This talk was delivered
- [Human Dignity and Mutual Respect](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/human-dignity-and-mutual-respect) - Human Dignity and Mutual Respect Abdal Hakim Murad First Catholic-Muslim Forum, Rome, 5 November 2008 Paper contributed by the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme: interfaith.cam.ac.uk Your eminences, excellencies, distinguished guests and friends. Peace be with you, and the mercy and compassion of God. Our meeting in this historic place is, God willing, a celebration and a sign of hope. Celebration as we together feast on God?s revealed words, nourished and sustained to carry the message of truth and reconciliation to the communities which we represent. And hope, in the assurance that the scrutiny which Heaven assuredly directs to our deliberations and to the states of our hearts in these days will overlook our many shortcomings, and be the sign under which the best and most fruitful exchanges of our two faiths in the past will continue to inspire us, while we find new and successful means of overcoming both those misunderstandings and those errors of intention which have, in past ages, led us into conflicts displeasing to God. It is evident to us all how close is the relationship between the great subject of our discussions yesterday and the subject which we address today. Indeed, it is this relationship which lies at the heart of the distinctiveness of the religious response to the crisis of modernity. Ours is an age in which noble efforts are made to esteem humanity, through codes of human rights and international conventions of many kinds. Yet the philosophy which, in today?s prevailing secular climate, seeks to offer foundations to these efforts today seems to exist in a state of crisis. The Enlightenment, source of much that is precious to our contemporary understanding of human dignity, was attacked in its day by religious and also some secular thinkers who doubted the claims of a purely secular ethic, and of a categoric imperative rooted in an immense optimism about the moral capacity of unaided reason and science. That pessimism has, in part, proved reasonable. Europe, cradle of Enlightenment, is today the cradle of a postmodern relativism of a most virulent kind. The spirits released from the Pandora?s box of the Lumières and the Aufklärung, and in my own country by Locke and Hume, have proven, in some cases, to be allies to the angels; but in others to be unmistakeably from the infernal realms of subversion and enmity. Europe – and I speak here as a European – is in crisis, and believers, who for so long, sometimes rightly, and sometimes cravenly, stood against the Enlightenment project, are called upon today to heal its deep pain. Christians and Muslims, as followers of Europe?s two largest religions, must surely work together as never before in finding a remedy. We must also work to ensure that Europe?s heart-sickness, expressed today in an almost unrivalled religious indifference, is not exported to the world. This is, in fact, where I wish to direct my remarks. As a citizen and advocate of the European Union, I find myself part of a tragically Godless society. Recently a sociologist published a book with the title The Death of Christian Britain, and this hurts me deeply, because in fact what is dying is the set of monotheistic convictions and a life of prayer and human giving that The Matheson Trust as Muslims we wish to see thrive around us. Yet I am also a member of Islam. That combination of the European and the Islamic is one that would be less difficult were Europe to be more faithful to the Christian dimension of its heritage. I prefer to live in a Christian society than in a secular one. This sense of loss motivates my own particular commitment to the Common Word process. As you are aware, the meeting of this Forum here in Rome is one consequence of the initiative launched a year ago by Muslim scholars who, distressed by the current state of the world, offered a hand of support and goodwill to the spiritual heads of Christendom. My own reason for signing, in addition to the consensus of the document?s signatories that the world is in need of healing, and that Muslims are summoned to call mankind to the undying principles of love of God and of neighbour, was that I am particularly distraught by Europe?s lack of faith, and the diminution of human dignity and conviviality that surely results. If, in many inner city areas, and increasingly elsewhere, Muslims live as a significant European constituency, then there is much scope for working together against our continent?s current degraded view of human vocation and destiny. And it is my belief that the Holy See?s current insistence on the revival of the heritage of religious reason is entirely correct. It is important to recollect that the Catholic Church, as the world?s oldest institution, has a long memory which encompasses other, earlier episodes when the prospects seemed dark. St Benedict of Nursia, fifteen hundred years ago, lived during barbarian invasions, which seemed to threaten Europe with a polytheistic relativism, and an inhuman ethic of greed and domination. The remedy, as Benedict saw, and as he lived in the actuality of his life, was the immense power of revealed certainty defended and reinforced by reason. With its present leadership, the Holy See is well-placed to justify its claims to be a support for true reason. And this places it, as Muslims see matters, in an ideal position for cooperation with Muslims, and surely with others, in the great task of defeating pessimism and the rule of arbitrary opinion. Islamic theology, we now know, took some of its early methods and categories from Christians such as John Philoponus, whom we knew as Yahya al-Nahwi. Likewise, at key junctures in its own history, Christian Europe has been strengthened by the study of Islamic thinkers. Who can deny the impact of Ibn Rushd, the Shari?a judge of Cordoba, on Europe in the age of St Thomas Aquinas? Or the importance of Ghazali, known to the Latins as Algazel, in his rigorous refutation of the misplaced and sometimes sub-Pagan metaphysics of Avicenna? Or the mutakallimun, the Muslim theologians known as „Loquentes? in the West, whose rigour in the use of reason made them ideal interlocutors, albeit at the distance required by the culture of the time, for the most rigorous of Christian thinkers? As Europe today confronts the new barbarians, who are the postmoderns and other relativists who, not from abroad, are from an evolution of its own inner life, such a convergence can prove a vital asset. Our mutual respect can be based on the practice of shared rational confrontation of Europe?s disease. The need to base our dialogue on ideas is further underlined by the imperative of mission, so salient in both traditions. A mere collaboration on practicalities would risk muffling the theological conversation which is surely close to the heart of any true comparison of the religions? claims. Of the great European students of Islam in the past century, many of the greatest were faithful Catholics who, following Maritain and the neo-Thomist interest in Arabic philosophy, made profound contributions to our understanding of Muslim theology. Among them we must cite the great Dominican scholars, Georges Anawati and Louis Gardet, whose 1948 manual of Islamic theology shows the importance of reason to Islamic culture, and the value of detailed comparisons with Thomism. Their Islamic focus was on Hanbalism and Ash?arism. But Maturidism, the third great school of Sunni theology, became the special concern of Josef Van Ess of Tübingen University. Van Ess has reminded us of the Maturidi insistence, present also in Ghazali and his school, on the rationality of God. In his great four-volume history of early Muslim theology, Van Ess stresses Islam?s insistence on the divine ground of reason again and again. He even writes this: Christianity speaks of the “mysteries” of faith; Islam has nothing like that. For Saint Paul, reason belongs to the realm of the “flesh”, for Muslims, reason, „aql, has always been the chief faculty granted human beings by God.1 Van Ess, and earlier Catholic scholars, have done the world an incalculable service. Secular activists of an earlier generation liked to see Islam as the worshipper of a God of unreason, a legalistic tyrant far removed from human analogy or concern. Often Islam was paired with Judaism, which an older Orientalism chose to see as analogously „Semitic? in its rejection of Hellenic or any other type of reason. Here, for instance, is Ernest Rénan, the arch-rationalist, writing in 1862: At the present time, the essential precondition for the spread of European civilization is the destruction of the Semitic thing par excellence ... the destruction of Islam ... Islam is the most complete negation of Europe: Islam is fanaticism ... The future, sirs, is therefore Europe?s, and Europe?s alone ... Here is eternal war, the war which will end only when the last son of Ishmael dies in misery, or is banished through terror to the depths of the desert.2 Rénan, hero of the lumières, is convinced that Islam and Judaism can have nothing to say to the idea of human dignity. We would add that his understanding of classical Christianity is, of course, hardly more sympathetic. By the grace of God, we have since moved on, and Muslims need to thank Catholic scholars for having banished older and effectively anti-Semitic categories in favour of an understanding of Islam as a faith in which reasoned belief in a reasonable God is central to serious theology. Such Catholic scholars have allowed us an image of Islam which converges in key respects with modern Catholic understandings of the inherent dignity of human beings. Shaykh al- Buti has frequently referred to many of the Koranic indicants of this principle. „We have ennobled the descendents of Adam?, says the Koran (17:70). Adam alone is the creature to which God orders the angels themselves to bow down (7:11). This is because God has created within him a spirit which is from God Himself (15:29; 32:9; 38:72). It is thus that our theorists, and particularly the Maturidis and Hanafis, insist that rights are innate in human beings, rather than conferred subsequently in a way that would make them entirely subject to religious confession. I would like to quote, in this connection, the words of Imam Sarakhsi, the Hanafi jurist who died in 1090: Upon creating human beings, God graciously bestowed upon them intelligence and the capability to carry responsibilities and rights. This was to make them ready for duties and rights determined by God. Then He granted them the right to inviolability, freedom, and property to let them continue their lives so that they can perform the duties they have shouldered. Then these rights to carry responsibility and enjoy rights, freedom, and property exist with a human being when he is born. The insane/child and the sane/adult are the same concerning these rights. This is how the proper personhood is given to him when he is born for God to charge him with the rights and duties when he is born. In this regard, the insane/child and sane/adult are equal.3 This high regard for the dignity of the human person, in medieval times produced societies where non-Muslim communities flourished for centuries. Naturally the assurance was that certain rights inhered more fully in those who accepted the final revelation of God in the Koran. That assurance was in no way strange for its time, and indeed may be regarded as normative in a certain way of traditional religion. Remember, much more recently, Pope Leo XIII, author of the encyclical Libertas, a theologically brilliant meditation on the nature of human dignity. This is his teaching: Justice therefore forbids, and reason itself forbids, the State to be godless; or to adopt a line of action which would end in godlessness – namely, to treat the various religions (as they call them) alike, and to bestow upon them promiscuously equal rights and privileges.4 Muslims, historically, would agree with this teaching. Some continue to do so today. But just as Papal teaching, even on matters of such grave moment, must and does change, so too Muslims must today, as a matter of some urgency, address their own failures in charity towards members of minority religions. But – and here we enter less familiar ground - Muslims are also called, by the same great teaching of the inalienable dignity of man, to press their various governments to respect the rights of Muslims as well. In too many Muslim countries the right of Muslims fully to practice the faith, to wear the garments decreed by tradition in public and educational places, to construct mosques and colleges, and to call freely for the reform of rulers they consider corrupt, is curtailed. Muslims must also, as well as calling for such necessary restorations of the Koranic ideal of the dignity and honour of the Adamic creature in countries where they form a majority, stand in solidarity with Muslims who live in parts of Europe where the rise of a new pagan tribalism is making life for the Muslim faithful intolerable. We know, and receive with respect and gratitude, the commitment of Catholic clergy and faithful, to overcome the many disadvantages faced by Muslim believers in Europe, most particularly in municipalities which are controlled by far- right political formations. I have returned, as is evident, to my theme of the tragedy of Europe. I have already indicated my belief that, as supporters of the People of the Book, we lament Europe?s spiritual crisis, and wish the Churches well in their struggle to heal it. I call to mind the writing of the Catholic conscience of Belgium, Jacques Neirynck. In his novel The Siege of Brussels (Le siège de Bruxelles), Neirynck depicts a nightmarish future in which chauvinism has brought about the persecution and expulsion of Belgium?s hated Muslim minority; but he closes by showing how the humane mainstream voices in Islam and Christianity will ultimately prevail. My own confidence is that cooperation and mutual respect will, indeed, triumph against barbarism. I turn now to an internal Muslim argument. Some Muslims appear to believe that this convivial, moral interaction and mutual support on issues of social concern must be detached from an attention to theology. In some cases one even hears the thought that Christianity, rooted in a belief in human sinfulness, is mistrustful of the intellect, and that its doctrines are based in a mere leap of faith. This is then contrasted with Islam which, such thinkers aver, is pre-eminently the religion of reason and of a reasonable God. One finds such perceptions in the polemics of Rashid Rida and his still very considerable school. One hears it also among less cultivated Muslims. But it is clear from any study of Catholic doctrine that natural reason is central to the Catholic intellectual enterprise. This surely means that the claim that our cooperation should be merely pragmatic, not principial, is gravely misguided. It is time that Muslims welcome cooperation with Catholics in an awareness that Catholicism, like Islam, speaks the universal language of reason. Once this is achieved, there is much more to be achieved. Together, Muslims and Catholic Christians account for over two and a half billion souls: considerably over a third of the planet?s population. TheCommon Word document stresses, from its scriptural perspective, the need not only to affirm the shared abstract principles of love of God and of neighbour, but to show the sincerity of our commitment in pastoral action. The two principles are in fact symbiotic. We know that ours is a time of challenges to our relationship. There are Muslims, and there are Christians, who wish that our gathering here had not taken place. The Common Word has been condemned by some Muslim voices; and some Christians have expressed their alienation from the warm and positive Christian responses which have come from Yale, Lambeth Palace, and other centres of the Christian conscience. In some places our relationship is improving; in others it seems to be suffering from an intractable deficiency. The commandment to love God and love neighbour, which is in practice a single commandment, is not always obeyed in practice and in our hearts. There is a valid Christian fear of Muslim extremism. And there is undeniably a Muslim fear of what Hans Küng, in his book on Islam, calls America?s „aggressive imperialistic foreign policy?,5 driven, as some see it, by Christian nationalists among whom, as he says, „the crusade mentality is currently being revived.?6 We both need to acknowledge the Other?s fear of us. As Muslims, called to be open-hearted towards the founders of all three Abrahamic faiths, we are particularly pained by such tensions. The Common Word initiative is one expression of that pain. But we must move forward. And one admirable advocate of this has been His Eminence Cardinal Tauran, in his message for the end of Ramadan, issued six weeks ago. He entitles his letter: Christians and Muslims: together for the dignity of the family. Here the cardinal commends past solidarity among Muslims and Catholics in the great task of defending this elemental institution of society, and prays for further collaboration in the future. I believe that His Eminence is entirely correct, and that he has identified one of the most important areas in which our shared commitment to human dignity can find practical expression. Muslims and Catholics alike, to the scorn of secular commentators, courageously uphold an image of marriage as the proper context for the expression of human sexuality. His Holiness Pope Benedict, in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est, has in a timely fashion reminded the world of the dignity and holiness of human sexual desire. The erotic should be part of our spirituality, not a delation from it. The due context for this vital aspect of our dignity as incarnated beings is manifestly matrimony. And here, Muslims and Catholics will wish to differ from a certain reductionist tendency in contemporary culture to assume that men and women are different in ways that are only socially conditioned, rather than alternate, but equally valuable, expressions of aspects of the power of the One who has created humanity in the image of the Divine. Let us borrow, in an analogising way, an insight from the Trinitarian theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar. Here the Swiss genius-theologian draws our attention to the relationship between the persons of the Trinity. He writes: „The hypostatic modes of being constitute for each other the greatest opposition we could think of [...] precisely so that the most intimate interpenetration we could think of becomes possible.?7 And, defying the impoverished modern view of gender, he goes on to identify the giving and taking of the persons of the Trinity in frankly gendered terms: the masculine principle identified with the fecundating, dynamic role, and the feminine with the receptive and the florescent.8 Such a validation of classical Christian understandings of the mutuality of the genders in family life is clearly close, in its outcomes, to Muslim assurances; although the Trinitarian language about the inner life of God is undeniably far from Islamic faith. Shared conclusions about the value of „alternative sexualities? will surely follow. Another area where we have already worked together to good effect is indicated in Archbishop Rowan William?s splendid and detailed response to the Common Word. He points to the importance of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as „at or near the top of the list of issues that concern both Christians and Muslims all over the world?. Muslims are convinced that the Apostolic See, concerned for the Catholic and other communities of Jerusalem, will stand in solidarity with Christian and Muslim believers who, while renouncing cruel and arbitrary terroristic responses, stand courageously for their right to dignity in their own land. Muslims have been immensely heartened by the courage of many Christians, such as former American president Jimmy Carter, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu of Cape Town, in condemning what they describe as Israel?s apartheid policies against the Muslim and Christian communities of the occupied territories. It has been rightly said that upholding the dignity of the Palestinian people is the surest path to Muslim hearts, and we are confident that the Vatican will remember this as it attempt to advocate a peaceful and just solution for Jews, Muslims and Christians alike in the Holy Land. But there are other places in God?s earth where human dignity is being outraged. It is not right for Muslims, including Arab Muslims, to call attention to the plight of the Palestinians, and to pay less attention to the victims of the current atrocities in Darfur. That scandal needs to be urgently explained and addressed. And even more recently, the tragedy in Eastern Zaire is summoning us all to joint action. One recalls, with reassurance, the good relations which were so frequently maintained between Catholics and Muslims in neighbouring Rwanda, even at the height of the appalling events of the early 1990s. Such calamities which disfigure God?s earth are a summons, and a judgement. We have not always been agents of God?s peace. It is surely a source of discomfort for us to learn that the twentieth century?s most celebrated man of peace, Gandhi, was neither a Muslim nor a Christian. And as a European, citizen of a continent which is proud of its monotheistic heritage, I continue to be desolated by the memory of the wars of the past century, which outstripped both in scale and ferocity those of any other continent. We are called, it is evident, to prove to the world that we are a force for good. The modern crisis of faith is all too often triggered by a sense that religion yields the bitter fruit of enmity and even conflict. Our most urgent task, then, as we seek to recover our place as defenders of human dignity and mutual respect, is to show, in practice, and not only in words, that we can cooperate together for the common good. Natural disasters, seemingly so prominent in our environmentally troubled times, offer an obvious field for common labour, and one follows with delight the progress of the cooperation between CAFOD and Islamic Relief, after the historic Memorandum of Understanding which they signed in 2003, in which they pledge support for each other?s activities in emergency work.9 Islamic Relief and Christian Aid are also, in my own country, sending joint Muslim-Christian teams to areas of southern Africa, in a pilot scheme which holds the promise of further and more systematic cooperation. And at the enormous Cut the Carbon Rally in Birmingham, on August 21 2007, Christian Aid, and several Muslim charities, demonstrated the healing power of a public event which announces to the world that its environmental suffering can be healed by interreligious cooperation, pooling energy and resources to tackle a problem that is too large for the agencies of one faith alone. The global famine that seems to come ever closer, prompted, perhaps, by the rise in biofuel consumption, is already creating lethal competition for scarce resources in many Third World countries. Deaths from hunger are increasingly reported, and small producers too are suffering. In India, figures show that an appalling 166,000 farmers have committed suicide since 1997.10 Our shared wisdom regarding just distribution, compassion for the needy, the evils of usury, and a political struggle on behalf of the oppressed, should surely be put to use in a joint campaign, in the name of our father Abraham, to defend those who suffer in this way. This should be particularly our duty and burden. Both Islam and Catholicism are in Europe. But neither should claim a privileged relationship with that continent, for fear of relegating others to a secondary status. Both of our traditions have substantial roots in Asia and Africa. Asia is, in one sense, the privileged continent, the continent of the spirit, as Heaven has made it the birthplace of all the major religions. Today many parts of it thrive, but in others, human dignity is suffering grievously. And in Africa, now a continent shared intimately between Islam and Christianity, we are also called to work together for what we hold in common. Jesus and Muhammad were not only champions of the poor, they lived among the poor, and will surely be resurrected among them. That is a vital aspect of their brotherhood and of ours. If we live in privilege, taking vain pride in our titles and garments, but fail to work with our own hands and hearts for those whose livelihoods are precarious, then we will have betrayed the Abrahamic principle of submission to God?s will, which is that we be ready to sacrifice even what is most precious to us, unhesitatingly, with full hearts for God?s sake. The words of the Koran are summoning and reproaching us all: Have you seen the one who denies religion? It is he who pushes away the orphan, And who does not urge the feeding of the poor. So woe to those who worship, Who are absent-minded in their prayer; Those who make a show of themselves, And refuse neighbourly assistance. (Sura 107) [1] Josef Van Ess, The Flowering of Muslim Theology (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 153-4. [2] Ernest Rénan, De la part des peuples sémitiques dans l?histoire de la civilisation, discours d?ouverture du cours de langue hébraique, chaldaïque et syriaque au College de France (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1862), 27-8. [3] Cited in Recep Sentürk, „Minority Rights in Islam: From Dhimmi to Citizen?, in Shireeen T. Hunter and Huma Malik (eds.), Islam and Human Rights:Advancing a US-Muslim Dialogue (Washington DC: Center for International and Strategic Studies, 2005, 67-99, p.74. [4] Pope Leo XIII, Libertas, 21. [5] Hans Küng, Islam (Oxford, 2007), p.453. [6] Küng, p.311. [7] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-drama II, 258, cited in Rowan Williams, „Balthasar and the Trinity?, 37-50 of Edward T. Oakes SJ and David Moss (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar (Cambridge, 2004), see p. 41. [8] Theo-drama V, cited in Rowan Williams, „Balthasar and the Trinity?, 45. [9] www.cafod.org.uk/partnership/other-faiths [10] Randeep Ramesh, The Guardian, 1 March 2008.
- [Ficino: On a Healthy Life](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/ficino-on-a-healthy-life) - Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) Some salutary advice for scholars, from the unique perspective of the famous Italian scholar who translated Plato’s works into Latin in the 15th century. An expert craftsman takes most diligent care of his instruments—a painter his pencils, a coppersmith his hammers and anvils, a soldier his horses and arms, a hunter his
- [Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/taylor-rule-and-exercises) - Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667) A practical excerpt from the classic English treatise on the Christian theory and discipline of Ars Moriendi (“the art of dying”). HE that would die well must always look for death, every day knocking at the gates of the grave; and then the gates of the grave shall never prevail against him
- [Buddhist Scholars and Mystics (<em>Anguttara Nikaya</em> 6.46)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/buddhist-scholars-and-mystics) - On one occasion Ven. Maha Cunda was staying among the Cetis in Sanjatiya. There he addressed the monks, "Friend monks!" "Yes, friend," the monks responded to him. Ven. Maha Cunda said, "Friends, there is the case where Dhamma-devotee monks[1] disparage jhana[2] monks, saying, 'These people are absorbed and besorbed in jhana, saying, "We are absorbed,
- [Theology and Beauty](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/theology-and-beauty) - Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh This example I give you because there is in each person that reality which we do not see, because we are blind, but which is a reality of beauty, a reality of truth, a reality of communion with the only One who is real, that is, the Living God. Click here
- [Reasoning the Stone](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/reasoning-the-stone) - The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson Every mitzvah can, and ought to, be related to as the unfathomable will of G-d, driven by the obedience to G-d etched in the core of our souls. Click here to view the PDF With thanks to the Meaningful Life Center.
- [Reflections on the Relation Between Philosophy and Theology](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/reflections-on-the-relation-between-philosophy-and-theology) - Gerald van Ackeren, S.J. In sacra doctrina all things are treated under the aspect of God, either because they are God Himself, or because they are ordered to God as to their principle and end. Hence, God is the subject of this science. Click here to view the PDF With thanks to Theological Studies at
- [The Principle of Love as the Key to Peacemaking in the Abrahamic Faiths and in the Teaching of Jesus](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/cumming-principle-of-love) - Joseph L. Cumming To speak of love is to take the meaning of peace to a deeper level. The word “peace” can mean simply the absence of conflict. If we separate from each other, so that we are not killing each other, then we have a certain kind of peace. But if our vision of
- [Songs of the Love between Radha and Krishna (<em>Bangiya Padabali</em>)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/coomaraswamy-vidyapati) - The whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite and corrupt. This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment. —William Blake. Be drunken with love, for love is all that exists. — Shamsi Tabriz. VIDYAPATI THAKUR is one of the most renowned of the Vaishnava poets of Hindustan. Before him there had been the great Jayadeva, with his Gita Govinda made in Sanskrit ; and it is to this tradition Vidyapati belongs, rather than to that of Ramananda, Kablr, and Tul'sl Das, who sang of Rama and Sita. Vidyapati's fame, though he also wrote in Sanskrit, depends upon the wreath of songs {pada) in which he describes the courtship of God and the Soul, under the names of Krishna and Radha. These were written in Maithill, his mother-tongue, a dialect intermediate between Bengali and Hindi, but nearer to the former. His position as a poet and maker of language is analogous to that of Dante in Italy and Chaucer in England. He did not dis- dain to use the folk-speech and folk-thought for the expression of the highest matters. Just as Dante was blamed by the classical scholars of Italy, so Vidyapati was blamed by the pandits : he knew better, however, than they, and has well earned the title of Father of Bengali literature. Little is known of Vidyapati's life\ Two other great Vaishnava poets, Chandi Das and Umapati, were his contempories. His patron Raja Shivasimha Rupana- rayana, when heir-apparent, gave the village of Bisapl as a rent-free gift to the poet in the year 1400 A.D. (the original deed is extant). This shows that in 1400 the poet was already a man of distinction. His patron appears to have died in 1449, before which date the songs here translated must have been written. Further, there still exists a manuscript of the Bhagavata Purana in the poet's handwriting, dated 1456. It is thus evident that he lived to a good age, for it is hardly likely that he was under twenty in the year 1400. The following is the legend of his death : Feeling his end approaching, he set out to die on the banks of Ganga. But remembering that she was the child of the faithful, he summoned her to himself: and the great river divided herself in three streams, spreading her waters as far as the very place where Vidyapati sat. There and then he laid himself, it is said down and died. Where his funeral pyre was, sprang up a Shiva lingam, which exists to this day, as well as the marks of the flood. This place is near the town of Bazitpur, in the district of Darbhanga. Vidyapati's Vaishnava padas are at once folk and cultivated art — -just like the finest of the Paharl paintings, where every episode of which he sings finds ex- quisite illustration. The poems are not, like many ballads, of unknown author- ship and perhaps the work of many hands, but they are due to the folk in the sense that folk-life is glorified and popular thought is reflected. The songs as we have them are entirely the work of one supreme genius ; but this genius did not stand alone, as that of modern poets must — on the contrary, its roots lay deep in the common life of fields and villages, and above all, in common faiths and super- stitions. These were days when peasants yet spoke as elegantly as courtiers, and kings and cultivators shared one faith and a common view of life — conditions where all things are possible to art. It is little wonder that Vidyapati's influence on the literature of Eastern Hindustan has been profound, and that his songs became the household poetry of Bengal and Behar. His poems were adopted and constantly sung by the great Hindu lover, Caitanya, in the sixteenth century, and they have been adapted and handed down in many dialects, above all in Bengali, in the Vaishnava tradition, of which the last representative is Rabindranath Tagore. A poem by the latter well resumes and explains the theory of the Vaishnava lovers : Not my way of Salvation, to surrender the world I Rather for me the taste of Infinite Freedom, While yet I am bound by a thousand bonds to the wheel : In each glory of sound and sight and smell I shall find Thy Infinite Joy abiding : My passion shall burn as the flame of Salvation, The flower of my love shall become the ripe fruit of Devotion. This leads us to the subject of the true significance of poems such as Vidyapati's. It is quite true, as Mr. Nicholson says, that students of oriental poetry have sometimes to ask themselves, ' Is this a love-poem disguised as a mystical ode, or a mystical ode expressed in the language of human love ? ' ^ Very often this question cannot be answered with a definite 'Yes' or 'No' : not because the poet's meaning is vague, but because the two ideas are not at all mutually exclusive. All the manifestations of Kama on earth are images of Pursuit or Return. As Vidyapati himself says (No. LXIII) : The same flower that you cast away, the same you use in prayer. And 'with the same you string the bow. It is quite certain that many poems of Vidyapati have an almost wholly spiritually significance/ If some others seem very obviously secular, let us remember that we have no right to detach such poems from their context in books and still less any right to divorce them from their context in life. We may illustrate this point by a comparison with poetry of Western Europe. Take for example a poem such as the following, with a purely secular significance (if any true art can be said to be secular) : Oh ! the handsome lad frae Skye That's lifted a' the cattle, a oor kye. He's t'aen the dun, the black, the white. And I hae mickle fear Me' s t'aen my heart forbye. Had this been current in fifteenth century Bengal, every Vaishnava would have understood the song to speak as much of God and the Soul as of man and maid, and to many the former meaning would have been the more obvious. On the other hand, there are many early medieval Western hymns in which the language of human love is deliberately adapted to religious uses, for example : When y se blosmes springe, And here foules songe, A suete love-longynge Myn herte thourh out stong ; Alfor a love newe, 'That is so suete and trewe. That gladieth al mi song. Here the 'new love' is Christ. Finally, there are other Western lyrics, and very exquisite ones, that could equally be claimed as religious or secular, for example : Long ago to thee I gave Body, soul and all I have — Nothing in the world I keep. The Western critic who would enquire what such a poem meant to its maker and his hearers must be qualified by spiritual kinship with him and with them. Let us demand a similar qualification from those who propose to speak of Oriental poetry: Wer den Dichter will verstehen. Muss in Dichter’s Lande gehen, — if not in physical presence, at leaBt in spirit. In ecstasy, man is beside himself: that this momentary escape from 'himself is the greatest gift life offers, is a promise, as it were a foretaste, of Release, warranting us that Nirvana is something more than annihilation. At the same time, be it well understood that such ecstasies are not rewarded to those who are followers of Pleasure, nor to those that cling to self-will. In Vaishnava literature this is again and again emphasized. It is not till the ear ceases to hear the outside world, that it is open to the music in the heart, the flute of Krishna. If the objection is still made that our poet sings rather of human than divine love, — and we do not deny that he worships physical beauty, albeit the critics have told us that Rabindranath Tagore is the first Indian poet to do so, — we answer with him that Love is One, and we would also quote the very splendid passage of the Prema Sagara where the doubt is resolved, " How could the love of a certain milk-maid have brought her salvation, notwithstanding that her love for Krishna was paramours, and she knew him not as God, but as man ?" The answer is given as follows : Shri Krishna sat one moonlit night at the edge of a deep forest, playing his flute with intent to lure the milk-maids from their homes. The Braj girls could not rest nor resist the call, and abandoning the illusion of family and the ties of duty, they hurried in confusion from their homes to the forest. But one was seen and detained by her husband ; yet she, in the intensity of her absorption in the thought of Hari, abandoned her body and was the first to reach Him. Perceiving the love of her heart. He gave her final release. ' Thus the Hindus hold that it is better to be the foe of God, or to use His name in vain, than to live without knowledge of Him and without speaking His name. The king to whom the story has been thus far related, remarks that the milk-maid did not worship Krishna knowing him to be God, but regarded him as an object of sensuous desire, and asks, 'How then was she saved by her love .''' The answer is given that even they who worship Krishna unawares obtain emancipation ; just as the water of life makes the drinker immortal, without question whether he knows or does not know its virtue.' Should anyone with any purpose worship, he will be emancipated. Shri Krishna was reverenced in many ways, and in each was salvation obtained. Thus, " Nand, Yashoda and others knew him as a child, the milk-maids as a lover, Kans worshipped him by fear, the cowherds called him their friend, the Pandavas knew him as an ally, Shishupal worshipped him as a foe, the Yaduvamsis thought him one of themselves, the Yogis, Yatis and Munis meditated upon Him as God ; but at last everyone of these obtained deliverance. What wonder then if one milk-maid by devotion to Him, was able to cross the sea of life, — to reach the further shore ?"^ This pure humanism is the Vaishnava equivalent for: "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto these, ye have done it unto Me," and "The worship of God is . , . loving the greatest men best." We may also give here the Indian answer to the objection sometimes raised respecting the morality of Krishna Himself, — much as the Pharisees questioned the right of Christ to pluck the ears of corn. The Bhagavata Purana in one place answers as Blake or Nietzsche might, that dharma is not the same for the great and the small. More than this, it is a fault in logic to subject to ethical criticism a Power Who is by hypothesis Infinite, beyond the Pairs of opposites. As Purnendu Narayan Sinha expresses it : " Nothing that we know, nothing that we are composed of, nothing that shapes our experiences, that causes our likes and dislikes, limits Krishna. He is the absolute, for the relatives we know of, or which we may even think of, have no place in Him."^ And indeed, this ought to be obvious to anyone that understands the language of mythology ; for the multiplication of Krishna's form in the circular dance, and at Dvaraka, and the fact already alluded to, of His accessibility in every form, are clear indications of His Infinity. It is nowhere suggested that the illusion of family and the ties of duty may be abandoned except in self-surrender to Him. It must also be remembered that the Krishna Lila is not a historical record (as Nilakantha remarks, 'The narration is not the real point') ; His Lila in Brindaban is eternal, and Brindaban is the heart of man. We are thus concerned with ideas and symbols, and not with history. The most that an objector could then adduce, would be to suggest that the symbolism may be unwisely chosen, and may be misunderstood. 1 should treat this objection with respect, and would agree that it may be valid from the standpoint of the objector. But I do not think it is valid from the standpoint of the lover. I would not even say. Let those who are able to take this passionate literature only in a carnal sense (and we have admitted that much of it has a carnal as well as a spiritual sense), therefore ignore it ; for if the worship of loveliness is not Love, it is none the less a step on the way to Love. Again, however, it is not meant to imply that the pastoral and romantic conditions indicated in Vaishnava literature do not exist, and have never existed, anywhere in India. On the contrary, if India is the classic country of lyrical poetry, this is because she is also the classic country of love/ Love is certainly of more significance to the Indian consciousness than to the European, and the Western fear of voluptuousness is hardly known in the East. But just as beauty was never in India glorified as an end in itself, so romantic love never obtained there such hold and possession over life and art as it has in the West. To put the same conclusion in other words, the Indian culture is nowhere corrupted by sentimentality. The reason of this is to be found, I think, in a wide-spread and deep-rooted consciousness of the principle of Impermanence. It is just this consciousness of evanescence which gives to the voluptuous and passionate art of Ajanta the spiritual significance that is all the more impressive because of its sensuous setting. Non-attachment is a greater quality than non-participation. Where life is transparent, the enjoyment of life is never a spiritual bondage. One might almost believe that to the Ajanta painters and the Vaishnava poets had been granted the prayer of Socrates, — "O beloved Pan, and all ye other gods of this place, grant me to become beautiful in the inner man, and that whatever outward things I have may be at peace with those within." A few words are needed to explain the method of translation. The rendering is line for line, and often word for word, but whenever a choice lay between ex- pressing the letter and the spirit of the original, the latter has been considered of the first importance. Vidyapati reflects a certain view of life : it is this, rather than the form of his utterance, however perfect, that touches us most nearly. A single word in the original is often rendered by two or three in the translation, for the terseness of the Bengali could rarely be repeated. Notwithstanding that our translation does not pretend to be metrical, much care has been taken with the phrasing, to make it readable : for it would appear that alike in music and poetry, rasa is more closely bound up with phrasing than with a regular division into bars or feet.^ At the same time, a few examples of the original text are quoted in the ' Notes,' in order to give the reader some idea of their form. ^We have already mentioned the Gita Govinda. ' It needs scarcely to be said that Indian lyrical poetry is of still older ancestry. The reader of Kalidasa s ' Shakuntala^ for example^ will find there innumerable parallels both to Vidyapati' s combined tenderness and wisdom, and his quaint conceits. These parallels are so many that we have made no attempt to mention them in the ' Notes' The same spirit, too, is already recognizable in the lyrical passages of the 'Ramayana.' All this is no more than to say that Vidyapati is essentially and typically Indian. It should be noticed that the songs here translated are but a part of Vidyapati's Bangiya Padabali. Two hundred and two songs are given in the edition of Kaliprasanna Kavyabhisharad which we have chiefly used ; and there are over nine hundred in that of Shri Nagendranath Gupta published in Nagari character for H. H. the Maharajah of Darbhanga, — to whom I am indebted for a copy of the edition. The order of our versions follows that of Kaliprasanna Kavyabhisharad ; the songs omitted are those which are almost repetitions of those translated, or of which we could not make a satisfactory rendering. It has been very difficult to find such words as can express Vidyapati's transparency. English since the Elizabethan age has grown poor in purely lyrical words and idioms, for modern literature, like modern plastic art or music, rarely deals with unmixed feelings. To present Vidyapati in English in a form at all com- parable with the original, would require all the facility and elegance of the Elizabethans joined to nearly all the seriousness of the earliest English lyrics. I say nearly all, for Vidyapati is a very conscious artist, with a considerable sense of humour ; and though he is certainly far more serious than the elegant Elizabethans, he is not in any sense a primitive. The rendering of certain words in the original demands a brief explanation. Sakhl (the cheti oiyix. Bain's beautiful Sanskrit imitations), meaning a girl-friend and confidante of the heroine, usually used in the vocative, is translated as 'my dear.' Dutika,. messenger or go-between, is a sakhi or any woman who carries messages between the lovers : but often, too, the poet himself is the messenger, and in this case there is perhaps a conscious reference to the artist as go-between God and the soul. The gopis are the milk-maids of Gokula, of whom Radha is Krishna's beloved. Ancala, meaning the upper part of the sari, thrown across the breast and over the shoulder, also forming a head-veil, we have translated, not quite accurately, as wimple,' for want of a better word. Nibibanda, which means the knotting of the sari round the waist, is rendered as 'zone' or 'girdle,' though it is not properly a separate garment. The word rasa can never be adequately translated into English, and perhaps it should be adopted there as a loan-word, together with such others as karma, yoga, dharma, samsara, nirvana. Rasa, like the word 'essence,' has both a concrete and an abstract significance; it has, amongst others, such meanings as juice, nectar, essence, taste, flavour, savour, lust, and in an abstract sense, taste, appreciation, passion, ecstasy, love and so forth. Rasa is equally the essential element ^According to Hindu theory, Kavya (poetry) includes both prose (gadya-kavya) and verse (padya-kavya). in love and in art. It would be defined from the Indian standpoint as an emotion provoked by the recognition of reality. From rasa are derived the two important words rasika (a connoisseur, lover) , and rasavanta or rasamanta ('possessing rasa^ said either of an individual or of a work of art). It is a canon of Indian dramatic criticism, not only that rasa is unique, but that those only can experience rasa who are temperamentally qualified to do so by virtue acquired in a former life, — Poeta nascitur non fit. All these associations give great weight to Vidyapati's splendid aphorism : Rasa bujhai rasamanta ' None knoweth love but the lover, none ecstasy save the ecstatic' If we apply this to life and art, it means what Blake meant when he said that enthusiasm is the first and last principle of criticism. It should not be forgotten that Vidyapati's songs, like those of all the Vaishnava poets — from Jayadeva to Rabindranath Tagore — were meant to be sung ; and as the latter says himself, " In a book of songs the main thing is left out : to set forth the music's vehicle, and leave out the music itself, is just like keeping the mouse and leaving out Ganapati himself" {Jiban-smrti,' p. 148). The padas of Vidyapati may still be heard on the lips of Bengali singers, albeit often in corrupt forms. It may also be noted that song was constantly illustrated by the conventional language of descriptive gesture. We are able to partly compensate the lack of this in reproducing the eleven illustrations from Indian sources ; for although not de- signed directly to illustrate Vidyapati's text, there is to be found in these an immediate expression of the same ideas. A further account of all the illustrations is appended to the ' Notes.' Finally, in the matter of transliteration : since these versions are intended rather for the rasika than for the, pandit, we have done no more that mark the long and short vowels of Indian names and words occurring in this Introduction or in the text. The reader will not go far wrong if he pronounces such words as if in Italian. C has the the sound of ch in church : for ? and s we have used sh throughout. It is by an inexcusable oversight that the poet's name has been printed as Vidhyapati throughout the text.
- [<em>Sahaja</em>](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/sahaja) - Ananda K. Coomaraswamy He who looks upon a woman with desire (be it even his wife) has already committed adultery with her in his heart, for all desire is adultery. We remember that saying, but do not always remember that the converse is also true—that he who embraces a woman without desire has added nothing
- [A Contemplation of the Herbs](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/adams-contemplation-of-herbs) - Thomas Adams (1583–1653) “The Shakespeare of the Puritans” A meditation on the garden of our hearts, and the four virtues of its herbs. Humbleness roots downward, yet no herb hath so high branches. We say, that proud men have high minds: they have not; for their minds only aspire to some earthly honours, which are
- [The Divine Liturgy: The Sacrifice](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/hani-sacrifice) - Jean Hani As the High Priest of His own sacrifice, Christ “officiates” from the cross which is a cosmic symbol erected on the height of Golgotha—the cosmic mountain… The sacrifice of Calvary transfers the totality of the human spatio-temporal cosmos into the divine world. Thus the Fall is effaced, and so to speak, sin and
- [The Meaning of the Expression ‘Son of God’](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/meaning-of-son-of-god) - Joseph L. Cumming For example, the Arabs say that a certain person is ibn al-watan or ibn al-balad, or even ibn al-Nil [‘son of the nation’ or ‘son of the country’ or even ‘son of the Nile’]. This does not mean that al-watan or al-balad or even al-Nil took a wife and sired a child
- [Paths That Lead to the Same Summit](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/paths-that-lead) - Ananda K. Coomaraswamy A chapter from The Bugbear of Literacy, 1943. Never let us approach another believer to ask him to become “one of us” but approach him with respect as one who is already “one of His” who is, and from whose invariable beauty all contingent being depends! Click here to view the PDF
- [Mirror of Gesture (<em>Abhinaya Darpana</em>)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/mirror-of-gesture-abhinaya-darpana) - Nandikeshvara translation by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and Gopala Kristnayya Duggirala Nandikeshvara (2nd century AD) is one the great theorists on stage-craft of ancient India, and his Abhinaya Darpana is a short compendium of Indian dramatic technique. The introductory pages by Coomaraswamy put the work in our modern context, addressing the needs of our contemporary mentality,
- [On Translation: <em>Maya, Deva, Tapas</em>](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/coomaraswamy-maya-deva-tapas) - Ananda K. Coomaraswamy In this little known article, Coomaraswamy offers suggestions raisonnees as to the rendering of three well known Sanskrit words, viz. Maya, Deva, and Tapas, proposing that they should be rendered consistently by “Magic,” “Angel,” and “Intension,” or retained in their original forms untranslated. Click here to view the PDF
- [<em>Om</em> and <em>Amen</em>](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/valsan-om-amen) - Michel Valsan translated by Edin Q. Lohja In this article, Michel Valsan examines the significant philological and functional parallelisms between the Hindu Om and the Semitic Amen or Amin, thus shedding light on both traditions. This article appeared originally as a section of “The Triangle of the Androgyne and the Monosyllable Om”, in the volume
- [The Secret of Shakespeare, Part 1 (<em>Introduction</em>)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/secret-of-shakespeare-1) - The Secret of Shakespeare (part 1) by Martin Lings Source: Tomorrow, Vol. 13, No.1. (Winter 1965) © World Wisdom, Inc. www.studiesincomparativereligion.com The Earl of Gloster (blind) The trick of that voice I do well remember. Is't not the king? ... 0, let me kiss that hand. King Lear (mad) Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality (IV, 6.) In the last few decades there has been a considerable increase of interest in the Middle Ages, which is no doubt partly due to a reaction, but which is also, much more, a case of ignorance giving way to knowledge. In another sense, it is simply a rising to the surface of something that has always been there and is always being rediscovered. Could it not be said that wherever the Middle Ages have not ceased to be accessible, wherever despite the barrier of the Renaissance they have always remained with us, as in the poetry of Dante, for instance, or—to take a more immediately accessible and inescapable example—as in their architecture, their superiority has always been felt at heart? This feeling implies also, if only sub-consciously, the acknowledgement of a more general superiority, for it is quite impossible that the great Norman and Gothic cathedrals should have sprung from an age that had no inward excellence to correspond to these superlative outward manifestations. One of the particular reasons for the present increase of interest in the Middle Ages is in itself highly significant: during the last fifty years or so Europeans have taken more interest in the art of other civilizations than ever before, and this has no doubt uprooted many prejudices and opened the door to a certain freshness and objectivity of judgment. Having come to know some of the best examples of Hindu, Chinese and Japanese art, and then turning back their attention from these to the art of their own civilization, many people find that their outlook has irrevocably changed. After looking at a great Chinese landscape, for example, where this world appears like a veil of illusion beyond which, almost visibly, lies the Infinite and Eternal Reality, or after having been given a glimpse of that same Reality through a statue of the Buddha, they find it difficult to take seriously a painting such as Raphael's famous Madonna, or Michelangelo's fresco of the Creation, not to speak of his sculpture, and Leonardo also fails to satisfy them. But they find that they can take very seriously, more seriously than before, some of the early Sienese paintings such as Lippo Memmi's Annunciation, for example, or the statuary and stained glass of Chartres Cathedral, or the XIIth and XIIIth century mosaics in St. Mark's at Venice, or the Icons of the Orthodox Church. The reason why mediaeval art can bear comparison with Oriental art as no other Western art can is undoubtedly that the mediaeval outlook, like that of the Oriental civilizations, was intellectual. It considered this world above all as the shadow or symbol of the next, man as the shadow or symbol of God; and such an attitude, to be operative, presupposes the presence of intellectuals, for earthly things can only be referred back to their spiritual archetypes through the faculty of intellectual perception, the insight which pierces through the symbol to the universal reality that lies beyond. In the theocratic civilizations, if an artist himself was not an intellectual, he none the less obeyed the canons of art which had been established on an intellectual basis. A mediaeval portrait is above all a portrait of the Spirit shining from behind a human veil. In other words, it is as a window opening from the particular on to the universal, and while being enshrined in its own age and civilization as eminently typical of a particular period and place, it has at the same time, in virtue of this opening, something that is neither of the East nor of the West, nor of any one age more than another. If Renaissance art lacks an opening on to the universal and is altogether imprisoned in its own epoch, this is because its humanistic outlook considers man and other earthly objects entirely for their own sakes as if nothing lay behind them. In painting the Creation, for example, Michelangelo treats Adam not as a symbol but as an independent reality; and since he does not paint man in the image of God, the inevitable result is that he paints God in the image of man. There is more divinity underlying Simone Martini's painting of Saint Francis than there is in Michelangelo's representation of the Creator Himself. 2 Shakespeare was born less than three months after Michelangelo's death, and the two are often spoke of in the same breath as being among "the great geniuses of the Renaissance." Yet how does Shakespeare stand in the light of an intellectual approach which enhances, if possible, our respect for Dante, but which greatly diminishes our estimate of several others whose pre-eminence had long gone unquestioned? The following chapters are an attempt to answer this question in some detail; but a general answer can be given immediately. Let us quote, as touchstone, a masterly summing up of the difference between mediaeval and renaissance art: "When standing in front of a Romanesque or Gothic cathedral, we feel that we are the centre of the world: when standing in front of a renaissance, baroque or rococo church we are merely conscious of being in Europe." 1 Now without trying to give Shakespeare so essential a place in the art of Christendom as the place which is held by the mediaeval cathedrals or by The Divine Comedy, could it not be said that to be present at an adequate performance of King Lear is not merely to watch a play but to witness, mysteriously, the whole history of mankind? But this remark could not possibly be made about the majority of Shakespeare's writings; and if we wish to form any estimate of the mature dramatist whose secret bestowed on him a universality that is a prolongation of the universality of the Middle Ages, the first thing to be done is to set the histories and most of the comedies on one side for the moment so as not to confuse the issue. Few writers can have developed so much during their period of authorship as Shakespeare did. By the end of the sixteenth century he had written some twenty-two plays; but none of these can be said to represent his maturity, though some of them, in various ways, give an unmistakable foretaste of what was to come. Shortly after 1600 there was a sharp and lasting change, not in orientation—that change seems to have come before—but in intensity. It was as if Shakespeare had suddenly come to grips with the universe after having contemplated it for sometime with a half-detached serenity. From being in earnest, he had come to be in very deadly earnest. This change is forced on our attention above all by Hamlet; and the scope of this book lies mainly, except for one or two backward glances, between Hamlet and The Tempest which was almost certainly his last complete play. * * * * 3 It is too often said that the marvelous variety of Shakespeare's characters makes it impossible to divine anything about the author himself. About his temperament this may be true to a certain extent, but as regards his outlook and ideals it is altogether false. There are three characters in Shakespeare's maturer plays who have something of the looker-on about them and who maneuver the other characters, usurping as it were sometimes the role of dramatist. One of these is Prospero; another is the Duke of Vienna who, without magic, plays much the same part in Measure for Measure that Prospero plays in The Tempest; the third is Edgar in King Lear. They have much in common, being almost identical in their outlook; and as we shall see later, there are other strong reasons also for thinking that each of these characters is no more than a thin veil over the person of the author himself. But in any case they are not indispensable to us for our knowledge of Shakespeare the man. We can learn much about him, indirectly, even from his villains; and from his heroes we can learn much more, especially towards the end of a play, after he has fully developed them. But when the hero, in a manifest state of un-development, at the beginning or in the middle of a play, gives vent to his ideas about this and that, he is perhaps revealing his own immaturity and may well even be saying the very opposite of what Shakespeare himself thinks. A striking example of this is in King Lear when Gloster, who has an important part in the subplot, says, before Shakespeare has fully developed him: As flies to wanton boys, are we to the Gods: They kill us for their sport. (IV, 1) Edgar's comment on these words is: Bad is the trade that must play fool to sorrow, Angering itself and others; and it is at this moment that he decides to set upon his strange course of action for the purpose of saving his father from despair and suicide. Thanks to his efforts, Gloster is able to say eventually: henceforth I'll bear Affliction till it do cry out itself 'Enough, enough,' and die. (IV, 6) 4 and later still: You ever-gentle Gods, take my breath from me: Let not my worser spirit tempt me again To die before you please! (Ibid.) Now the great weakness of Gloster which he eventually overcomes, is akin to one of the weaknesses of Hamlet which he also overcomes, and which is lack of faith in Providence. The "To be or not to be" soliloquy, from which so much has been deduced about Shakespeare's own views, does not merely express the immaturity of Hamlet but it shows him at his most immature, for in a sense the Prince goes back in development after the beginning of the play before he begins to go forward. When this particular soliloquy comes his faith is at its lowest ebb. Having more or less said at the beginning of the play that he would commit suicide if only God had not forbidden it, he now implies that he would do so but for the dread of something after death. It is always possible that Shakespeare may have drawn on his own past experience for this soliloquy. But we can be certain that it does not represent in any way his settled convictions because its whole tenor is completely contradicted in the last scene of the play by the fully developed, perfectly balanced Hamlet voicing the maturity which Shakespeare has gradually shaped and built up for him. In this scene we find that he has altogether overcome his doubts. His now full-grown royalty of nature causes Horatio to exclaim, half in admiration, half in surprise: Why, what a king is this!; and his faith in Providence is unshakable. He says to Horatio: There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will. This conversation leads up to what is perhaps the greatest speech of the play, though it is seldom quoted, partly no doubt because it is in prose. Hamlet's fencing match with Laertes is about to take place. Hamlet tells Horatio that he is confident of victory; yet at the same time he has a premonition that he is going to die, and he intimates as much to Horatio, who begs to be allowed to postpone the match. But Hamlet will not allow this. He says: There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, if it be now, 'tis not to come, if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be. The gist of this speech, the readiness is all, is repeated almost word for word in an equally significant passage in the last act of King Lear. The news of the defeat and capture of Lear and Cordelia plunges Gloster once more into despair. Edgar pulls him out of it by reminding him that just as a man has to submit to Providence as regards the time and manner of his birth, so also he must submit as regards the time and manner of his death and not seek to pluck the fruit before it is ripe. The only thing that matters is fulfillment of destiny. Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all. (V, 2) It will be noticed that in these two speeches of Hamlet and Edgar, as also elsewhere, Shakespeare is concentrating on the most universal aspect of religion. He is concerned with man's having the right attitude of soul towards Providence rather than with any particular mode of worship; nor could he have written otherwise, with any safety, for in the extreme religious soreness and sensitivity of sixteenth and seventeenth century England, Christianity was a very dangerous topic. Before the end of his period of authorship it was even forbidden by law to mention the name of God on the stage. But one could always refer to "the gods"; and if he deliberately chose to set nearly all his maturer plays in a pre-Christian setting—Hamlet is almost the last to be set in Christendom—it is to be noticed that his attitude to Greece and Rome is far more typical of the Middle Ages than of the Renaissance. He does not merely borrow the surface of classical antiquity. He places himself at the centre of that world. For him, and for Dante, just as for the ancient priests and priestesses at Delphi, Apollo is not the god of light but the Light of God. * * * * In the form of his drama Shakespeare is typical of his age. Marlowe's Dr. Faustus is externally in some respects more mediaeval than anything Shakespeare wrote. But in outlook Marlowe was altogether a man of the Renaissance, as were Ben Jonson and 6Webster, whereas Shakespeare seems in a sense to go back as time goes forward and by the turn of the century he had become, unlike any of his fellow dramatists, the continuer and the summer-up of the past, the last outpost of a quickly vanishing age. To say this is not really to say anything new; it is rather a case of putting two and two together. Bradley says, cautiously, of King Lear: "It does not appear to disclose a mode of imagination so very far removed from the mode with which we must remember that Shakespeare was perfectly familiar in the Morality plays and in the Faerie Queene." Of Othello Wilson Knight says: "Othello, Desdemona and Iago are Man, the Divine and the Devil," and he remarks in general that Shakespeare's heroes are "purgatorial pilgrims." Of Macbeth Dover Wilson says: "Macbeth is almost a morality play," and he says much the same of the two parts of Henry IV. Moreover, in this last connection, and with regard to Shakespeare as a continuer of past tradition, he reminds us: "Before its final secularization in the first half of the sixteenth century, our drama was concerned with one topic and one topic only: human salvation. It was a topic that could be represented in either of two ways: (i) historically, by means of miracle plays which in the Corpus Christi cycles unrolled before the spectators' eyes the whole scheme of salvation from the Creation to the Last Judgment, or (ii) allegorically, by means of morality plays, which exhibited the process of salvation in the individual soul on its road between birth and death, beset with the snares of the World or the wiles of the Evil One." 2 Dover Wilson does not define the word "salvation" and for the purpose of his book it is not necessary to do so. But as regards mediaeval art in general, it is important to distinguish between what may be called esoteric works, which look beyond salvation to sanctification, and exoteric works, in which sanctification is not really conceived of at all. If Shakespeare is a continuer of the past, which of these two categories does his art belong to, the exoteric or the esoteric? An example of what may be called an exoteric work which stops short at salvation in the lowest sense is The Castle of Perseverance. In this morality play mankind (humanum genus) is represented as having led a very questionable life, and he is saved from Hell in the face of justice by operation of the Divine Mercy. A supreme example of an esoteric work is the Divine Comedy which presupposes salvation and deals with man's purification and his ultimate sanctification or in other words his regaining what was lost at the Fall. It may be said that in the Middle Ages the mass of the laity was considered as following the path of salvation, whereas the monastic orders, and the lay orders attached to them, and one or two other brotherhoods such as those of the Free-masons and the Companions, aspired to follow the path of sanctification. In other words they aimed at passing through Purgatory in this life. It is now known that Dante belonged to a brotherhood which was affiliated to the Order of the Temple, and which was more or less driven underground when the Order of the Temple was abolished. Some have supposed that Shakespeare was a member of the brotherhood of the Rosie Crosse; others believe him to have been a Free-mason. This is a part of his secret which will probably never be known, and in any case it is not within the scope of these pages to dwell on anything that is not obvious from what he wrote. What is obvious, however, is that his plays far transcend the idea of salvation in its more limited sense; and it may be remarked in passing that this does suggest that their author was following a spiritual path, which itself implies attachment to an order. At the beginning of Act V of the Winter's Tale, with reference to the long penance done by King Leontes during the sixteen years which elapse between the two parts of the play, the priest-like Cleomenes says: Sir, you have done enough, and have perform'd A saint-like sorrow: no fault could you make which you have not redeem'd; indeed, paid down more penitence than done trespass. At the last, Do as the heavens have done, forget your evil; with them forgive yourself. In King Lear the blind Gloster, recognizing the King's voice, asks to kiss his hand. Lear, still mad, replies: Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality. This remark contains not only the very essence of the play but also of most of Shakespeare's other maturer plays; for in the course of them what does Shakespeare do but wipe away mortality, that is, the sin of Adam, from the hand of the hero? The hand must be altogether clean: there is no question of more or less. In Hamlet the prince says of himself in the middle of the play that he is not so bad as people go—or in his own words, I am myself indifferent honest; but Shakespeare's purpose goes far beyond such mediocrity. The porter to the Gate of Purgatory, that is, the gate to salvation, is by definition of almost unfathomable mercy. Hamlet could have passed by him at the beginning of the play; so could Leontes at the moment of repentance, sixteen years before the speech just quoted; and so could Lear long before the end of the play. But the porter to the Gate of Paradise, that is, the gate to sanctification, is relentlessly exacting; and for his heroes and heroines, Shakespeare stands as that porter. He will let nothing pass except perfection. Character after character is developed by him to a state of virtue which is pushed, one feels, to the very limits of human nature until each could say, with Cleopatra: Give me my robe; put on my crown; I have Immortal longings in me. (V, 2) Even those who refuse to admit that Shakespeare himself speaks through any of his characters cannot escape from the fact that it is Shakespeare himself, and no one else, who is the architect of his plays. And when, after a certain maturity has been reached, play after play follows the same quest for human perfection, each play in its totality (over and above the wide variety of detail) conveying the same message, we have no alternative but to conclude that Shakespeare was altogether preoccupied, at any rate for the last fifteen years of his life or more, by the same questions which preoccupied Dante. (To be Continued) 1 Frithjof Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions (Faber), p. 84. 2 The Fortunes of Falstaff (C.U.P., 1964), p. 17.
- [The Secret of Shakespeare, Part 2 (<em>Henry IV</em> & <em>Hamlet</em>)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/secret-of-shakespeare-2) - If Hamlet is Shakespeare’s first really great play, the outlook which dominates it is none the less already to be found in several of his earlier plays. Particularly striking in this respect is Henry IV which, in its two parts, must have been written within three or four years before Hamlet, probably between 1597 and 1599. For Dover Wilson Henry IV appears to be no more than what might be called an “exoteric” morality play. He says: “Henry IV was certainly intended to convey a moral. It is, in fact, Shakespeare’s great morality play.”1 He adds: “Shakespeare plays no tricks with his audience...Prince Hal is the prodigal, and his repentance is not only to be taken seriously, it is to be admired and commended. Moreover the story of the prodigal, secularized and modernized as it might be, ran the same course as ever and contained the same three principal characters: the tempter, the younker, and the father with property to bequeath and counsel to give.”2 This is altogether convincing, as far as it goes; but the story of the prodigal has in itself a deeper meaning also, in addition to the one which Dover Wilson seems to be considering here. Is it conceivable that this could have escaped the notice of the man who, within the next ten years, was to write Hamlet and King Lear? Not that there need be any question of “either.... or.” Dover Wilson is unquestionably right, and Henry IV is a morality play; but that would not prevent it from being, at the same time, something more than a morality play. The idea of different meanings existing simultaneously at different levels, however strange it may seem to us, was altogether familiar to men of letters throughout the Middle Ages and even down to the end of the XVIth century— 1 The Fortunes of Falstaff, Cambridge University Press, 1964, p. 14. 2 Ibid, p. 22. witness Spenser’s Faerie Queene. According to Dante “writings are to be understood and should be expounded chiefly according to four meanings”3 or in other words the literal meaning should be considered as a veil over three others, which he specifies as “allegorical, moral and anagogical.” The same principle is to be found also in other arts: the idea that a true work of architecture should have at least three meanings was certainly familiar to Freemasons as late as the XVIth century. A cathedral, in addition to its literal meaning as a place of worship, was planned as a symbolic image of the whole universe, and by analogy, as an image of the human being,4 both body and soul. The symbolism of a building as an image of the human soul, the inner world of man, corresponds to the fourth and highest meaning mentioned by Dante, the one which he calls “anagogical,” and which he illustrates by interpreting the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt to the Promised Land to mean, in addition to its literal or historical meaning, the exodus of the soul from the state of original sin to the state of sanctification. Now this is also the highest or deepest meaning of the story of the return of the Prodigal Son, and it could be said to underlie all faithfully told stories of the prodigal, including Shakespeare’s Henry IV, even without the author’s intention. But Shakespeare’s intention is undoubtedly there; we do not need to examine his text over carefully to see that he conceived the newly crowned King Henry V’s rejection of Falstaff as representing more than salvation in the ordinary limited sense of the word; for him it is clearly no less than the equivalent of the Red Crosse Knight’s victory over the dragon in the Faerie Queene; and this victory signifies the soul’s final purification, its final complete triumph over the devil. Dover Wilson does in fact unlock the door and open it for us, even if he does not open it very wide. We must be grateful for his timely reminder that “Shakespeare lived in the world of Plato and St. Augustine; since the French Revolution we have been living in the world of Rousseau; and this fact lays many traps of misunderstanding for unsuspecting readers.”5 He also says: “The main theme of Shakespeare’s morality play is 3 Il Convivio, II, cap. I. 4 For details of these correspondences see Titus Burckhardt, Principes et Méthodes de l’Art Sacré, p.70 (Derain, Lyons, 1958). 5 p. 7. 2 the growing up of a madcap prince into the ideal king.”6 Putting two and two together, it must be remembered that in the world of Plato and St. Augustine no man who was less than a saint could possibly pass as “the ideal king.” But, it may be argued, this does not prove that Henry IV has a truly esoteric significance, since even from the point of view of an exoteric morality play no limit can be set to the extent of Prince Hal’s reform. His world is very remote indeed from the world we live in, the world of mediocrities and relativities in which epic is stifled beyond breathing point, while the psychological novel thrives and grows fat. There is an unmistakable ring of the absolute about the last scenes of Henry IV which makes it difficult, from any point of view, to attribute to the new king anything that falls short of perfection. None the less this play can be said to have two meanings in relation to the human soul, one exoteric and moral, and the other esoteric and mystical; but as elsewhere in Shakespeare these two meanings are not altogether distinct, for the lower meaning as it were opens on to the higher. Henry IV can be considered as a morality play in which the final perfection is looked at quite objectively and remains far above the spectators’ heads, although it serves as a shrine of orientation for their ideals; and it can be considered as an esoteric or mystical drama the purpose of which is to draw the spectator into subjective identity with the hero. The presence of this higher meaning presupposes that the author himself has something more than a purely theoretical understanding of perfection. As regards the text itself, one of the keys to this meaning lies in the son’s identification of himself with his dead father. A strange “alchemy” has taken place by which the spirit of the old king is reborn in the person of the new king whose former faults—affections or wildness as he calls them— have died and lie buried with the old king. My father is gone wild into his grave, For in his tomb lie my affections, And sadly with his spirit I survive. (Pt. 2, V, 2) The young king also uses the image of the corrupt tide of vanity flowing out into the 6 p. 22. 3 waters of the ocean so that a new and truly royal tide may flow in. Not far below the surface here, as elsewhere in Shakespeare’s plays, lie the words of the Gospel “Except a man be born again he cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” The heir’s identification of himself with his father is important because in order to have a full understanding of Henry IV it is necessary to understand that “Everyman” or the human soul is represented not merely by the Prince alone and by the King alone, but also, above all, by a synthesis of the Prince and the King. In its static aspect, as a fallen soul that “smells of mortality” and must die before a new soul can be born, the soul is personified by the King; and the symbolism is strengthened by the fact that the King is a usurper to the throne, just as fallen man is a usurper to the throne of earth which belongs by rights only to man in his original state, man created in the image of God. On the other hand, in its dynamic aspect, inasmuch as the soul is capable of being purified, and inasmuch as the foundations of the new soul are being laid there, the soul is personified by the Prince who, at any rate according to the logic of the play, will not be a usurper when he becomes King. It is not only the faults of the Prince which die with his father’s death but also the stigma of a crown that had been usurped. The dying King says of his own wrongful seizure of the throne: All the soil of this achievement goes With me into the earth... How I came by the crown, O God forgive, And grant it may with thee in true peace live. (IV, 5) The substance of the soul of “Everyman” is also represented by England which is in a state of discord and which is gradually brought into a state of peace. The two plots of the play, the bringing to order of the Prince and the bringing to order of the country run parallel to each other and have the same significance. Civil war is a most adequate symbol of the fallen soul which is by definition at war with itself; and the meaning of this particular internal strife in England is heightened by the King’s intention to convert its energies, as soon as possible, into a holy war. The whole play is in fact consecrated by beginning and ending as it were in the shadow of the Holy Land. At the beginning of part I the King announces his intention of leading a crusade to Jerusalem; and towards the end of part II he reaffirms this intention, announcing that all preparations have been made to 4 set out for Palestine as soon as the rebels at home have been defeated: Now, Lords, if God doth give successful end To this debate that bleedeth at our doors We will our youth lead on to higher fields And draw no swords but what are sanctified. Our navy is address’d, our power collected, Our substitutes in absence well invested, And everything lies level to our wish. (IV, 4). The rebels have in fact already been defeated, but the news has not yet reached him. Symbolically connected with this is another “already” which, though it dawns on him later, he has also not yet grasped: he is already in “Jerusalem”—the Jerusalem Chamber of the Palace of Westminster where this scene takes place; and here, shortly after his just quoted speech, when news comes that the civil war is at an end, he suddenly sinks down in mortal sickness. For the moment the play’s deeper meaning wells to the surface as it were and obliterates the other meanings. The only connection between the good news and the King’s illness is a spiritual one: the end of the civil war means that the pilgrim’s journey is at an end, that the old soul is now almost ripe for death so that the new soul may be born. If the King is no more than dying and not yet dead, this is simply because the return of his prodigal son has not yet been altogether fulfilled. Once this has taken place the King asks to be carried back into the Jerusalem Chamber, in order that he may die in Jerusalem. The Jerusalem Chamber has also its meaning for the Prince. We may remember that in the Faerie Queene the Red Crosse Knight is only able to overcome the dragon because the fight takes place at the threshold of the Earthly Paradise, within reach of the Waters of Life and the Tree of Life.7 Now Jerusalem is symbolically equivalent to the Earthly 7 Spenser died in 1599, about the time that Shakespeare was writing this play. The Faerie Queene, which death prevented him from finishing, is mentioned here and else-where as an example of symbolism parallel to Shakespeare’s at the end of the XVlth century, without any suggestion that Spenser had a profound understanding of the symbolism that he was using. It would perhaps not be unjust to say that compared with the Divine Comedy and the best of Shakespeare, the Faerie Queene is like a plane surface as compared with a form of three dimensions. 5 Paradise; and the Prince’s real victory over himself, when he speaks of The noble change that I have purposed takes place as he stands by his dying father’s bed at the threshold of the Jerusalem Chamber, before his final meeting with Falstaff. This symbolism is strengthened by another; for if any particular moment can be assigned to the Prince’s victory, it is at his foretaste of royalty when, believing himself to be by rights already king, he places the crown on his own head. The last scenes of Henry IV pt. 2, if adequately performed, make an undeniably strong spiritual impact. But neither part of Henry IV, when taken as a whole, has anything approaching the closely knit intensity of a play like Hamlet. In particular, we cannot help noticing that there is no real conflict: like the killing of the dragon the rejection of Falstaff symbolizes the most difficult thing in the world, and yet the Prince has not had, as far as we can see, the slightest difficulty in rejecting him. Secondly—and this weakness is connected with the first—Shakespeare makes the rejection of Falstaff very dramatic, but he has not previously brought home to us dramatically Falstaff’s utter villainy. The villainy is there in the text, but we only discover it by analysis; the plot of the play does not depend on it at all, so that at the end we have a certain sense of disproportion which leaves us with a vague feeling of injustice. But it may well be that we partly owe the excellence of some of Shakespeare’s later plays to his experience in writing this. Perhaps when conceiving the part of Iago he said to himself, thinking of Falstaff: “This time there shall be no mistake!”; and perhaps when he set Hamlet to kill the dragon he said to himself: “This time it shall not be easy!” Hamlet The basic theme of Hamlet is summed up in the Prince’s own words: Virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it. (III, I). This means: It is no use plastering one or two superficial virtues over our old stock, that is, the original sin which permeates our nature, since in spite of all such virtues, we shall still continue to reek of the old stock.” But in order to express fully what is in Hamlet’s mind here we must add: “There is only one thing which can effectively wipe out the 6 stench of our old stock and that is revenge, or in other words, a complete reversal of the state of affairs which caused the Fall.” In its immediate impact upon us sacred art8 is like a stone thrown into water. The ever widening ripples illustrate the limitless repercussions that are made, or can be made, upon the soul by this impact, fraught as it is with several meanings at different levels. One meaning can, as we have seen, open out on to another deeper meaning9 that lies beyond it. In this way sacred art often conveys far more than it appears to convey, far more sometimes even than the mind in question is conscious of or could take in by way of ordinary didactic teaching. The initial impact itself captivates the mind and the emotions. According to the literal meaning of Hamlet, our sense of Queen Gertrude’s culpability goes far beyond the sin of marriage to a dead husband’s brother, just as we are given many strong and obvious reasons why Hamlet should kill Claudius, enough at any rate even to make us forget for the moment that revenge is unchristian. None the less, it would be true to say that there is no common measure between the literal meaning of this play and the deep sense of urgency that Shakespeare instills into us. There is something mysteriously enormous and unfathomable about the Queen’s guilt. Moreover, so long as we are in the theatre we are not far from feeling that revenge is the most important thing in the world; and we are right, for there is nothing more important, and indeed nothing more Christian, than what revenge stands for here. The Ghost’s revelation to Hamlet is, as regards its symbolic meaning, like a puzzle with a few missing pieces which it is not difficult for us to supply in the light of those pieces which we are given—the garden with its fruit trees, the serpent, the guilty woman. The Genesis narrative is undoubtedly here. There is also, explicitly, the first-fruit of the Fall, the sin of fratricide. But the Fall itself was in fact a murder also, the slaying or making mortal of Adam by the serpent, and the forbidden fruit was the “poison” through 8 Shakespeare’s plays cannot be considered as sacred art in the full and central sense of the term, but they can be considered as an extension of it, and as partaking both of its qualities and its function. 9 Needless to say, not every detail in the text has a deeper meaning. Conversely, there are certain details which only make good sense on the deepest plane of all. 7 which that murder was effected. The Queen is not merely Hamlet’s mother; she is his whole ancestral line going back to Eve herself; and inasmuch as she is Eve, she represents, in general, the fallen human soul, especially in its passive aspect. In other words, she represents that passivity which in man’s primordial state was turned towards Heaven and which after it lost contact with the Spirit has come more or less under the sway of the devil or, in the words of the play, having sated itself in a celestial bed has come to prey on garbage. Like the father and son in Henry IV, mother and son here can each be taken separately as representing “Everyman,” but above all they are to be taken together as constituting fallen human soul, Hamlet himself being the personification of its active aspect—its conscience and its intelligence. The attitude of the son towards his mother, which many people consider to be something of an enigma and which has prompted more than one grotesque explanation, is amply explained if we consider that allegorically mother and son are one person, different faculties of one and the same soul. Unlike the writer of epic, the dramatist has a very limited space at his disposal. Consequently he often chooses to build a house of more than one story. In Hamlet the soul is not only represented by the Prince and his mother; its state is also reflected in the condition of the country. Not that there is actually a sub-plot of civil war as in Henry IV, but none the less Something is rotten in the state of Denmark and The time is out of joint and needs to be set right. Moreover, as a parallel to the whole action of the play, the soul of King Hamlet is being purified in Purgatory. But the dead King has also another aspect. Just as Adam was not only the man who fell but also the most perfect of all creatures, made in the image of God, so also King Hamlet, who in a sense corresponds to Adam, is not only a purgatorial pilgrim but also a symbol of man’s lost Edenic state. It is in virtue of this that he refers to his own marriage with Gertrude as a celestial bed. And is spoken of by Hamlet in terms of human perfection: A combination and a form indeed Where every god did seem to set his seal To give the world assurance of a man. (III, 4) 8 It is also in virtue of this aspect that he acts as spiritual guide to his son. The difference between simple piety and mysticism might almost be summed up by saying that the averagely pious man looks at the story of the Garden of Eden for the most part objectively, whether he takes it literally or allegorically. The mystic, on the other hand, looks at it subjectively as something which intensely, directly and presently concerns himself. Again, the averagely pious man is aware of the existence of the devil, but in fact, if not in theory, he imagines him to be more or less harmless and has little idea of the extent of his own subservience to him. In general he is extremely subject to the illusion of neutrality. But the mystic knows that most of what seems neutral is harmful, and that one may smile and smile and be a villain. The Ghost initiates Hamlet into the Mysteries by conveying to him the truth of the Fall not as a remote historical fact but as an immediate life-permeating reality, an acute pain which will not allow his soul a moment’s rest.; and every man in fact is in exactly the same situation as the Prince of Denmark, did he but know it, that is, if he were not Duller...than the fat weed That roots itself at ease on Lethe wharf. (1, 4). What the Ghost says to Hamlet could almost be paraphrased: “Latterly you have been feeling that all is not well. I come to confirm your worst suspicions and to show you the remedy. Since man has been robbed by the devil of his birthright, there is only one way for him to regain what is lost and that is by taking revenge upon the robber.” With all the ardor of the novice, in answer to his father’s last injunction Remember me! the Prince replies : Remember thee? Yea, from the table of my memory I’Il wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there; And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain, Unmixed with baser matter. (1, 4). 9 Spiritual wisdom, from a worldly point of view, is a kind of madness; and so madness can be made to serve, in certain contexts, as a symbol of spiritual wisdom. Shakespeare avails himself or this possibility more than once in his plays; and in Hamlet, in addition to its more outward meaning as a stratagem and a blind, the antic disposition which the Prince puts on serves above all to underline the drastic change that has taken place in his life. In his soliloquies he shows no trace of madness; but as soon as he has to race the world, that is, when Horatio and Marcellus enter, shortly after the exit of the Ghost, the new found spiritual outlook which fills his soul almost to bursting point has to find an outlet in what Horatio describes as wild and whirling words. It is under cover of this “wildness” that Shakespeare momentarily allows the deeper meaning of the play to come to the surface, for what Hamlet says is: And so without more circumstance at all I hold it fit that we shake hands and part You, as your business and desire shall point you, For everyman hath business and desire Such as it is; and, for mine own poor part, Look you, l’ll go pray. And prayer, which in the widest sense of the word may be said to comprise all forms of worship, is in fact man’s chief weapon of “revenge”.10 It is not however Horatio and Marcellus who represent the world in Hamlet. They do so in this scene only incidentally, because they are the first living creatures that the newly initiated Prince is called upon to face. But he soon takes them both half into his confidence, and later he confides everything to Horatio. The world, not only in its incomprehension, but also in its allurements, everything in “ordinary life” which it is difficult to give up but which the man who has taken his vows must break with altogether and leave behind him is summed up in the person of Ophelia. Hamlet’s subsequent visit to her, which she describes to her father, would seem to be prompted by the vain hope 10 The already quoted line: Let me wipe it (my hand) first; it smells of mortality, which brings the deeper meaning of King Lear to the surface, is spoken by Lear when he is mad. The fact that Hamlet’s madness is feigned whereas Lear’s is not makes no difference to its symbolism. Another kind of “madness” which has the same significance is the “folly” of the professional fool. 10 that it may not be necessary to turn his back on the world altogether, or that it may be possible as it were to take the world with him. But when he looks into her face he sees that he must go his way alone; she would be quite incapable of sharing his secret; and so he leaves her without saying a word. In the “nunnery scene,” where we first see them together, Shakespeare once more allows the deeper meaning of the play to rise to the surface under cover of Hamlet’s “madness.” The first part of the spiritual path is “the descent into Hell.” The deeper meaning of Dante’s Inferno 11 is the descent of Dante into the hidden depths of his own soul. The novice has first to learn the meaning of “original sin”; he must come to know the evil possibilities which lie, almost unsuspected, beneath the surface illusion of being indifferent honest. The gist of all that Hamlet says to Ophelia in this scene is in the following speech: Get thee to a nunnery; why wouldest thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do, crawling between heaven and earth? We are arrant knaves all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. (III, I) This calling of oneself to account has a remarkably close parallel in the hovel scene in King Lear, where Edgar, also under cover of feigned madness, accuses himself of having been false of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand, hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in madness, lion in prey. (III, 4). 11 The references here and elsewhere to Dante do not mean to suggest that Shakespeare owes anything to him directly. Of this we know nothing. The Divine Comedy can none the less help to throw light on certain aspects of these plays because it is based on principles with which Shakespeare was certainly familiar. 11 Elsewhere “the descent into Hell,” that is, the discovery of sinful propensities in the soul which were hitherto unknown, takes the form of actually committing the sins in question, as happens, for example, with Angelo in Measure for Measure and with Leontes in the Winter’s Tale. Despite Hamlet’s antic disposition, all that he says to Ophelia in the “nunnery scene” makes profound sense. But “the world” is quite uncomprehending; for Ophelia it is all nothing more than Sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh. In the Divine Comedy the discovery of the soul’s worst possibilities and purification from them are treated separately. The Inferno and the Purgatorio correspond to an altogether exhaustive Confession followed by a full Absolution. The “architecture” of Dante’s poem demands this separate treatment, as also the fact that it has an eschatological as well as a mystical meaning. Occasionally, as we shall see, Shakespeare also treats the two phases separately, but more often, as in Hamlet, he represents them as taking place simultaneously. The killing of Claudius will mean not only the bottom of Hell but also the top of the Mountain of Purgatory, for revenge means purification. When Hamlet, on his way to speak with his mother, suddenly comes upon Claudius praying and is about to kill him, he refrains from doing so on the grounds that to kill him while at prayer would amount to sending him to heaven which would be hire and salary, not revenge. According to the more outward meaning, that is, according to Hamlet as a morality play, the Prince’s failure to kill Claudius at this juncture springs from the inability to take decisive action, the readiness to snatch at any pretext for procrastination. At this level a more or less blind eye has to be turned to the actual pretext given. None the less, it is difficult to pass it over altogether as an unpremeditated excuse which flashes across Hamlet’s mind and is seized on without being weighed, because later in the play Hamlet deliberately sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to a sudden death, no shriving time allowed, without even knowing whether they are in the plot against his life or not— and in all probability they are not. We can accept the normal idea of revenge without too much difficulty, even in a morality play, for revenge is or can be a name for justice. But 12 what sin can compare with the implacable determination to send a soul to Hell?12 And how is such appalling malevolence to be reconciled with the fact that Hamlet is unquestionably a man of great nobility and magnanimity of character, with a profound love of good and hatred of evil and with even much of the priest in his nature—witness the wise, benign and moving sermon he preaches to his mother in the next scene? It must be admitted, with regard to these questions, that the play’s deeper meaning strains here the outward sense almost to breaking point. But once the deeper meaning is understood, the difficulties vanish. Revenge on the devil must be absolute. It requires no apologies. There must be no scruples and no compromise. But the time is not yet ripe. There would be no revenge, and therefore no self-purification, in killing Claudius at that moment because Claudius is not himself. Sometimes the soul’s worst possibilities may manifest themselves only partially, in such a way that it would be quite easy to overcome them. But nothing final could be hoped for from resisting them on such an occasion; it is only when those possibilities really show themselves for what they are, when they are rampant in all their iniquity, only then it is possible, by stifling them, to give them the death-blow or mortally wound them. As Hamlet says: When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage, Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed, At gaming, swearing, or about some act That has no relish of salvation in’t; Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven And that his soul may be damned and black As hell, whereto it goes. (III, 3). In this scene the devil is far from manifesting himself fully in Claudius. The dragon has not yet come out into the open. Or in other words, Hamlet has not nearly reached the bottom of Hell. He has not even had yet any direct experience of the full villainy of 12 As answer to this question we may quote from Measure for Measure (written about the same time as Hamlet) what the Duke says about sending a soul to Hell. He has been trying to prepare Barnardine for death, a criminal justly sentenced to be executed for murder. When asked if Barnardine is ready to die, the Duke replies : A creature unprepared, unmeet for death; And to transport him in the mind he is Were damnable. (IV, 3). 13 Claudius. All that he has learnt so far is relatively indirect compared for example with what he finds when he opens the letter to the King of England and reads Claudius’ instructions to have him beheaded immediately on arrival; but the very bottom of Hell is only reached when the Queen lies dead and Hamlet’s own body has tasted the poison. Meantime, before he can kill the great devil he has first of all to account for the lesser devils—Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; and like Dante’s “cruelty” towards some of the sufferers he sees in Hell, who are really elements in his own soul, Hamlet’s attitude becomes immediately understandable and acceptable and reconcilable with his nobility of nature if we realize that all the victims of his revenge are in a sense part of himself. What has so far most impeded Hamlet upon his path is a certain apathy, sluggishness and lack of fervor. Lapsed in time and passion is the way he describes himself. The basic cause of this half-heartedness, the chief reason why it is out of the question that Claudius should be killed at this moment of the play is that the soul is divided against itself, being still, in so far as it is represented by the Queen, largely under the Devil’s domination. It is only in the next scene that a certain unity of soul is achieved when Hamlet wins his mother over to his side. This scene is as it were the centre of the play. Personifying the soul that is afraid of its conscience the Queen is afraid of her son and has been holding him at bay. Even now, when the two are to be alone together at last, she has contrived, or rather let us say willingly consented, to have a third party present, one of the devil’s spies, hiding behind the arras. Polonius is the embodiment of hypocrisy. His presence at the beginning of this scene means the presence, in the soul, of the determination to brazen things out. The Queen’s first words to Hamlet are shameless in their effrontery: Hamlet, thou has thy father much offended (III, 4). But when Hamlet’s sword pierces the body of Polonius, conscience pierces through the soul’s mask of self-justification, and with all possibility of intervention at an end the soul is forced to listen to its better self: Leave wringing of your hands. Peace, sit you down And let me wring your heart; for so I shall If it be made of penetrable stuff, 14 If damned custom have not braz’d it so That it is proof and bulwark against sense. The Queen is eventually driven to say: O Hamlet, speak no more: Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul; And then I see such black and grained spots As will not leave their tinct.13 No sooner is the soul’s repentance assured than its good angel appears. Gertrude, representing the lower part of the soul, cannot sense directly the spiritual power which the ghost of her dead husband represents; but Hamlet sees and hears it, and under its inspiration he tells his mother what she must do. In this scene, which is really an epitome of the whole play, even the literal sense rises to heights that are almost mystical. It is as if the drama’s outer meaning, in virtue of which it is a morality play, had been drawn up to the level of its inner meaning. For whether we consider the Prince to be addressing another person or to be addressing his own soul, he is in any case speaking with an exaltation worthy of a spiritual master who is admonishing and counseling a disciple. According to the first Quarto14 version of this scene Hamlet succeeds in destroying once and for all Claudius’ hold over Gertrude. Moreover she promises to help Hamlet to accomplish his revenge. This is left out of the masterly revised text of the second Quarto,15 which leaves the audience with the impression, not that Gertrude has completely conquered her weakness for Claudius but that she is well on her way to doing so and that she is sincerely repentant and determined to give her son all the passive support she can. They feel that like Hamlet himself, she still has some obstacles to overcome; and indeed if she had not, and if Hamlet had not, Claudius would have to die then and there. 13 Nothing I can say to myself will make them leave their black tint to take on a lighter color. 14 1603. 15 1604. 15 To judge from the cuts in the First Folio edition of Hamlet, published only seven years after Shakespeare’s death, we may assume that the full text of this play was considered then, as now, too long for the requirements of theatrical performance. Unfortunately one of the passages nearly always sacrificed is Act IV, scene 4, without which the balance of the play as a whole is seriously upset. In this scene Hamlet, on his way to the Danish coast to set sail for England, has a glimpse of Fortinbras, the young Prince of Norway, who is leading his army through Denmark to fight against the Poles; and this glimpse reveals to Hamlet a hero endowed with all those virtues which he himself most needs to develop. Fallen man stands between two perfections, one past and one future, that which was lost and that which is to be gained. In this play it is the dead King Hamlet who stands for the past perfection and its loss, whereas Fortinbras represents the perfection in which the redeemed soul, after its purification, will be reborn. It is he whom the dying Hamlet is to name as his heir. The analogy between the symbolism of this play and that of Henry IV is by no means exact in every detail; but the dead King Hamlet partly corresponds to the dead King Richard II, whereas Queen Gertrude and her son, taken together, correspond to the synthesis of King Henry IV and his son,16 while Fortinbras in a sense corresponds to that son regenerated as King Henry V. But this scene, where Fortinbras first appears, is needed above all in that it marks a stage in the development of Hamlet, who drinks a new strength into his soul from his vision of the hero prince. In the soliloquy which is prompted by this foretaste of his own true self there is a ring of confidence and resolution which we have not heard before. It must be remembered in this connection that the symbolism of honor throughout this play is inextricably connected with the symbolism of revenge. In other words, as the incentive to revenge, honor means spiritual aspiration. In Hamlet, as also in King Lear, the play begins with worldly wisdom in a state of triumph. It is as if Shakespeare had set up a pair of scales, and to begin with he allows the 16 Needless to say there is no exact correspondence here between parent and parent and between son and son. It is true that Gertrude is burdened with guilt towards King Hamlet just as Henry IV is burdened with guilt towards King Richard; but Prince Hamlet, the censurer of self and others, also has much in common with Henry IV, whereas Gertrude in some respects comes closer, symbolically, to the repentant prodigal Prince Hal. 16 weight of worldly wisdom in one scale to lift the opposite scale of spiritual wisdom right up into the air, so that it appears as “light” as folly. But as the play goes on, more and more weight is thrown into the spiritual scale until, even before the last act, it has sunk down to rest on a solid, sober foundation. By the time King Lear is drawing to its close the Fool has disappeared, Edgar has ceased to feign madness, and Lear has recovered his sanity. Similarly in Hamlet we see no more of the Prince’s “madness” after he has left for England; and when he returns he astonishes Horatio with his new-found strength and determination. Meantime it is the scale of worldly wisdom which, found sadly wanting, hangs poised aloft in insecure suspense; and the “lightness” of this world, unstable and transitory as it is, racing towards decay, ruin and death, is pictured in the madness of Ophelia. For her there are only two categories—the dead and the dying. And will he not come again? \ And will he not come again? No, no, he is dead. Go to thy death bed. He never will come again. (IV, 5). Ophelia’s madness is like a mirror for the failure of all worldly aspirations, the shattering of all worldly hopes; and it is significant, considering what she stands for in the play as a whole, that the corpse which is being buried in the church-yard scene is none other than hers. In this scene, Hamlet, who is himself to die the next day, has the inevitable certainty of death brought home to him with a concrete realism which makes his bones ache, and those of the audience too. He is made to hear death in the knocking together of dead men’s bones as the grave-digger throws down one against another; he sees, touches and smells death as he takes the jester’s skull in his hands; he even almost tastes death as he remembers how often as a child he had put his lips against what is now no more than two rows of teeth set in two jaw-bones: Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. (V, I). Moreover the scene is to end with the actual burial of everything that had represented, for Hamlet, the possibility of earthly happiness. His own days are numbered too, for it comes 17 out that the grave-digger had taken up his profession on the day that Hamlet was born, thirty years previously; and for him the Prince is already almost a thing of the past, one who has not only come but gone. There is a strange and sudden chill about the words, spoken with the objectivity of a chronicle: It was the very day that young Hamlet was born; he that is mad, and sent to England. We are reminded by this scene that more than one mystic has sought before now to familiarize himself with death by laying himself out in a coffin; and this is precisely what Hamlet is made to do here. It leads up to his speech in the final scene where he expresses his readiness to die at any time. What does it matter if a man die young, since no man really ever possesses any of the things he leaves behind him at death? Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? We have come a long way from the fears expressed about death in the most famous of his soliloquies. That soliloquy, To be or not to be...., marks Hamlet’s lowest ebb. As has already been pointed out in an earlier chapter, he goes somewhat back after the first encounter with his father before he begins to go forward. We cannot start to trace the development of the soul he represents until the play-scene, in which doubts are altogether removed and faith confirmed. Onwards from there, the soul gains singleness and sincerity from the reconciliation between Hamlet and his mother; confidence, resolution, a sense of true greatness and even a foretaste of perfection from the glimpse of Fortinbras; resignation to death and a foretaste of death from the churchyard scene; and complete trust in Providence from the discovery of Claudius’ letter to the King of England. Hamlet’s discovery of this plot to have him killed in England takes place shortly after he sees Fortinbras, but we only hear of it in the last scene of the play. He ascribes, with considerable insistence, every detail of his escape to Divine intervention, and his account of what happened enables trust in Providence to take its place as cornerstone in the remarkable image of royalty which Shakespeare gives us in Hamlet at the beginning of this scene. Without the least arrogance, but with an altogether objective sense of values, he dismisses Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as baser natures who have perished for 18 daring to step between two mighty opposites, that is, between himself and Claudius— mighty because, as we may interpret, since all Heaven is on his side, as he now knows beyond doubt, the clash is ultimately between Michael and Lucifer. Why, what a king is this! exclaims Horatio in wonderment. It is significant also that only here, for the very first time, does Hamlet mention among Claudius’ other iniquities, that he has robbed him of his rightful crown; and when Horatio implies that there is no time to be lost because news of what has happened will shortly come from England, and when Hamlet replies: It will be short; the interim is mine; And a man’s life’s no more than to say “One “ we know that Claudius has not long to live. The keynote of this opening passage to the final scene is maturity—readiness in every sense of the word, and it is summed up in the words the readiness is all. “Everyman” knows that he has almost come to the end of his journey and that the end will be victory but also, necessarily, death. The confidence in the one and the foreboding of the other are expressed in Hamlet’s words to Horatio: I shall win at the odds. But thou wouldst not think how ill all’s here about my heart. These words, with their combination of victory and death, are equivalent to Henry IV’s: And wherefore should these good news make me sick? (IV, 4). as he hears of his victory over the rebels. Symbolically the two situations are identical; Henry IV here corresponds exactly to Hamlet before the fencing match. All that remains to be achieved, in either case, is the complete redemption of the other aspects of the soul, represented in Henry IV by the Prince and in Hamlet by the Queen. As regards the Queen, “the return of the prodigal” has in a sense already taken place; but art demands that it should be clinched beyond all doubt. In this respect, what is generally accepted today as the final text is almost certainly more elliptical than Shakespeare originally intended it to be when he conceived the play. After the King and Laertes withdraw together at the end of Act IV, scene 5, the first Quarto has a scene in which Horatio tells the Queen of 19 Claudius’ unsuccessful attempt to have Hamlet killed in England and of Hamlet’s return. When the Queen learns that her son is back in Denmark she tells Horatio: Bid him awhile Be wary of his presence, lest he fail In that he goes about which means, freely paraphrased: “Tell him to make quite sure that Claudius does not kill him before he kills Claudius.” But although this scene is left out in all the later editions of the play, according to the final text a letter is brought from Hamlet to his mother, presumably telling her everything. Moreover, on the basis of Claudius’ remark at the end of the churchyard scene: Good Gertrude, set some watch upon your son, we may imagine that mother and son have ample time to discuss the whole situation. However that may be, the Queen would be certain that Hamlet’s life was in the greatest danger, and she would be watching Claudius’ every move. It is very likely, to say the least, that she is suspicious of the drink that Claudius has prepared for her son, and that she drinks from it herself to test it. Though not clear from the text, this can be made clear by the actress. But even if we do not accept this interpretation, Shakespeare has completed his symbolism beyond all doubt by making this last action on the part of the Queen an act of direct disobedience to Claudius who had forbidden her to drink, and by making her final words whole-heartedly on the side of her son: No, no, the drink, the drink,—O my dear Hamlet,— The drink, the drink!—I am poison’d. As to Hamlet’s last words, it is no doubt significant that they are a message to Fortinbras. This, together with the entry of Fortinbras immediately after Hamlet’s death makes a certain continuity between the dead prince and the living one. There is a suggestion that Hamlet is mysteriously reborn in Fortinbras, though Shakespeare does not indicate this “alchemy” explicitly here as he does in Henry IV. At the end of Hamlet the stress lies rather on what rebirth leads to “Except a man be born again....” If the play as a whole corresponds to an interpenetration of Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio, the Paradiso is none the less not merely implicit. It is expressly anticipated in Horatio’s farewell prayer for Hamlet: Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!
- [The Secret of Shakespeare, Part 3 (<em>Othello</em>)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/secret-of-shakespeare-3) - THE essential feature of man’s primordial state was the union of his soul with the Spirit; and one of the most universal symbols of the regaining of that state is marriage, the union of lovers. The prototype of this symbolism in Christianity lies in Christ’s own references to himself as “the Bridegroom”; and the Middle Ages were dominated by the conception of the Church or, microcosmically, the soul as the bride of Christ. Let us quote from the beginning of Ruysbroek’s The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage: “This Bridegroom is Christ, and human nature is the bride; that which God has made in His own image and after His likeness. And in the beginning He had set her in the highest and most beautiful, the richest and most fertile place in all the earth; that is, in Paradise. And He had given her dominion over all Creatures; and He had adorned her with graces; and had given her a commandment, so that by obedience she might have merited to be confirmed and established with her Bridegroom in an eternal troth, and never to fall into any grief, or any sin. Then came a beguiler, the hellish fiend, full of envy, in the shape of a subtle serpent.... And the fiend seduced the bride of God with false counsel; and she was driven into a strange country, poor and miserable and captive and oppressed, and beset by her enemies; so that it seemed as though she might never attain reconciliation and return again to her native land. But when God thought the time had come, and had mercy on the suffering of His beloved, He sent His Only Begotten Son to earth, in a fair chamber, in a glorious temple; that is, in the body of the Virgin Mary. There he was married to this bride, our nature.”1 1 Jan van Ruysbroeck, The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, translated by C. A. Wynschenk Dom. pp. 3-4. (John Watkins, 1951). Mediaeval art was continually expressing this union, in various ways, as for example in pictures of the mystical marriage of St. Catharine of Alexandria with Christ, she representing the perfect soul and he the Spirit. But the Virgin Mary, in virtue of her Assumption and Coronation and her function as Co-Redemptress, also stands for the Spirit, and so by extension may a perfect woman. In The Divine Comedy, when Dante reaches the Garden of Eden on the top of the Mountain of Purgatory, Beatrice his beloved, personifying spiritual wisdom, descends from Heaven and the two meet in the terrestrial Paradise; and in the Faerie Queene, the sequel to the Red Crosse Knyghte’s victory over the dragon is his marriage to the Lady Una. In Othello the black Moor and his white lady are soul and Spirit. Like Cordelia, Desdemona is “the pearl of great price” which was wantonly thrown away. Othello describes himself as: One whose hand Like the base Judean threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe. As for Iago, Othello says of him, after his iniquity has been revealed: I look down towards his feet; but that’s a fable, meaning: I look down to see the devil’s cloven hooves; but since I see that Iago, who is unquestionably the devil, has ordinary human feet, I now learn that the current idea about the devil’s feet is a mere fable. Then he strikes at Iago with his sword saying: If that thou be’st a devil, I cannot kill thee, and in fact he cannot kill him. Iago remarks to the Governor: I bleed, sir, but not killed. The sudden and secret marriage of Othello and Desdemona at the beginning of the play has taken Iago by surprise. But this union of soul and Spirit is only virtual; it marks the outset of the spiritual path, not the end, and symbolizes initiation rather than realization; and the first scene opens upon the devil preparing to do all in his power to wreck the marriage before it can come to fullness. To start with he can do little, for although husband and wife are temporarily separated, the Senate agrees that Desdemona shall follow Othello to Cyprus; but their first night there together is disturbed by the drunken brawl which Iago has staged; and the next morning he begins to imbue Othello with the suspicion that Desdemona is unfaithful to him, so that the two lovers are never really in peace together until at the end they are lying dead side by side upon the marriage bed. Only then, after it has passed through the “narrow gate” of death, is the soul truly united with the Spirit. But it has a foretaste of Paradise, when the Moor arrives in Cyprus to find that Desdemona is already there before him. Her speedy coming has been almost miraculous, for as Cassio says: Tempests themselves, high seas and howling winds, The gutter’d rocks, and congregated sands, Traitors ensteep’d to clog the guiltless keel, As having sense of beauty, do omit Their mortal natures, letting go safely by The divine Desdemona. (II. 1) When Othello enters he says: It gives me wonder great as my content To see you here before me. O my soul’s joy! If after every tempest come such calms, Let the winds blow till they have waken’d death! And let the labouring bark climb hills of seas Olympus-high, and duck again as low As hell’s from heaven! We have here an anticipation of the terrible “storm” that is to follow, but also, in a sense, a guarantee of the final peace. It may be asked: If Desdemona symbolizes the Spirit, why does she not see through Iago, as Cordelia would undoubtedly have done? But apart from the fact that Desdemona’s proneness to think well of people unless given good reasons for not doing so is an aspect of her generosity and childlikeness and therefore part of her perfection, it must be remembered that a symbol can never account for every aspect of the higher reality that it symbolizes. One has the impression that no one was more critical of Shakespeare’s symbols than the author himself and that in his later plays he was continually striving to make his symbols fuller and more all-embracing. It is probable that Claudius in Hamlet represents Shakespeare’s own consciousness of the inadequacy of Falstaff as a personification of the devil; and Iago is certainly an “improvement” on Claudius. Similarly the transcendence of Cordelia no doubt partly reflects Shakespeare’s consciousness of certain shortcomings in Desdemona as a symbol of the Spirit. None the less, granted that a symbol must always fall short in some respects, Desdemona is unquestionably adequate to fulfill her function in this play. She is convincingly perfect, and human perfection is a symbol of Divine Perfection. Moreover she is the ideal complement to Othello. The Ancient Worlds and the Middle Ages held that every human being is perfectly matched by another human being of the opposite sex. The two may be separated by time and space and may never meet in this life, but if they do, no ordinary earthly passion can compare with the love that each feels for the other. Consequently, since a true symbol must be perfect of its kind, we may say that where the symbolism of sexual love is used, only such total and “absolute” love as this is fully worthy to represent the primordial relationship between soul and Spirit, and it is clear that Shakespeare had no less than such love in mind when he drew the characters of Romeo and Juliet, for example, of Othello and Desdemona, and of Antony and Cleopatra. In Othello, as in these other plays, we are made to feel that there is something cosmic and universal in the intense mutual attraction between the lovers; and our thoughts leap to identify themselves with Othello’s when he says in the last scene, with reference to his wife’s death: Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse Of sun and moon, and that the affrighted globe Should yawn at alteration. Iago, by far the most villainous of all Shakespeare’s villains, is his last representation of the devil as such, and it is difficult to conceive how this representation could be surpassed. In his subsequent plays, as we shall see, it suits his purpose better to let his villains represent certain aspects of evil, without actually personifying evil’s root. Edmund, in King Lear, is no doubt the second most villainous of Shakespeare’s villains, but there is no common measure between him and Iago as regards what motivates their crimes. Edmund’s chief motive is worldly ambition, whereas Iago’s villainy is ultimately determined by love of evil and hatred of good. They have none the less much in common as regards outlook, and this outlook serves, incidentally, as a clear indication of where Shakespeare stands in the transition from Middle Ages to Renaissance which was still not quite complete in the England of his day. More than once his drama is a meeting place, almost a battleground, for the two points of view; and it is significant that Iago and Edmund are both out and out humanists, that is, typically representative of the Renaissance, and typical rebels against mediaeval tradition. Iago even goes so far as to deny the existence of virtue as an ideal since that implies, most unhumanistically, that there is some power above man which sets a standard for man to conform to. Virtue! a fig! ‘tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens to the which our wills are gardeners....If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most preposterous conclusions; but we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts. (I, 3) Iago might almost have said: “Thou, reason, art my goddess” just as Edmund does in fact say Thou, nature, art my goddess. (I, 2) Either remark is centrally humanist, for according to humanism, humanity is the highest thing in existence, and humanity as such is limited to reason and to nature. Beyond reason, which marks nature’s upper boundary, the supernatural begins. Under the flag of Renaissance humanism, naturalism in art and rationalism in thought march together side by side. It is clearly humanism, the rationalistic denial of all that is superhuman and supernatural, that the mediaeval Hamlet means by the word “philosophy” when he says: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. (I, 5)2 2 These lines are certainly not directed against Horatio. The possessive "your" is here general and impersonal. The Arden editors quote as a parallel Hamlet's Your worm is your only emperor for diet. Nor can there be any doubt that Hamlet is here voicing Shakespeare’s own view. The same may be said of the equally mediaeval Duke of Vienna in Measure for Measure when he sums up Barnadine’s-badness: Sirrah, thou art said to have a stubborn soul That apprehends no further than this world. (V, 1) In Othello, unlike Hamlet, Hell and Purgatory are treated separately and successively. Almost the whole of Othello is taken up with the descent into Hell: the soul, personified by the Moor, gradually plumbs the very depths of error, that is, of thinking that black is white and white is black, that falsehood is truth and truth falsehood. But although the descent is gradual, there is no correspondingly gradual development of soul in this play. The first stage of the journey only becomes spiritually effective when, at the bottom of Hell, the truth suddenly breaks in upon Othello like a flash of lightning which lights up in retrospect the whole descent that he had made in darkness, and he is transformed in an instant from a dupe to a wise man. Then follows Purgatory, with an equally concentrated brevity. Although compressed into only a few lines, its anguish is so intense that it altogether convinces us of expiation and purification. Othello anticipates, and therefore wears out to nothing, all that would have separated him from Desdemona, this heavenly sight, on the Day of Judgment when we shall meet at compt. He cries out: Whip me ye devils, From the possession of this heavenly sight! Blow me about in winds! roast me in sulphur! Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire! (V, 2) Then, as it were in sign that his expiation is complete, a deep calm settles upon his sadness almost from that moment until the end. The everlasting union of soul and Spirit after death is indicated by Othello’s dying upon a kiss and also by the marriage sheets on the bed of death, a detail that Shakespeare stresses just as much as he stresses the fact of Henry IV’s death in the Jerusalem Chamber. Everything is really explained in the Moor’s own objective judgment of himself at the end when he tells the Venetians that they must speak of him as Of one that loved not wisely but too well, Of one not easily jealous but, being wrought, Perplexed in the extreme. He does not mean by the words not wisely but too well that he had loved Desdemona too much, but on the contrary that he had not loved her enough. Wisdom here is certainly not worldly wisdom such as might limit the extent of passion, but wisdom in the higher sense which would have added its light to the heat of passion and made him see that Desdemona was in fact goodness itself. Then he would have been proof against Iago’s deceptions, whereas a blind love which had too much passion in proportion to its wisdom made him a relatively easy victim. In this play it is blindness above all that characterizes fallen man, leaving a loophole for him to be wrought, that is, worked on by the devil, until he is so perplexed that he comes to believe the exact opposite of the truth. Unlike Shakespeare’s other heroes, the Moor is almost perfect even at the outset, and this partly helps to make the quickness of his passage through Purgatory so convincing. It is as if only one element were lacking to complete his perfection, an element of wisdom or vision. Now the descent into Hell for the discovery of the soul’s worst possibilities is only necessary because these possibilities are an integral part of the psychic substance and need to be recovered, purified and reintegrated, for in order to be perfect the soul must be complete. This question will have to be considered more fully in connection with Measure for Measure. For the moment it is enough to bear in mind that the lost and perverted elements have first to be found and then redeemed, and that the interval between finding and redemption is likely to be fraught with danger. The case of Othello might be described by saying that when he reaches the bottom of Hell he finds a hitherto unknown blind eye, namely the lost element of vision, lying in the depths of his soul. Corruptio optimi pessima, and since this eye, as well as being virtually the most precious is also the most powerful of the psychic elements, it is able to transmit its blindness to the rest of the soul, and he throws away “the pearl of great price.” Then dawns the truth. Shakespeare achieves here an overwhelming impact of a kind which drama alone, of all the arts, makes possible. Emilia’s revelation of the innocence of Desdemona and the villainy of Iago, her instantaneous and dazzlingly clear proof that white is white and black is black, comes as a fiat lux. The blind eye is filled with light and takes its rightful place at the summit of the soul. “The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner.”
- [Contemporary Crises: A Qur’anic Response](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/contemporary-crises-quranic-response) - Reza Shah-Kazemi In this lecture, Dr Shah-Kazemi highlights some of the spiritual principles more strikingly evident and inspiring in the Qur'an, principles that help us to understand, diagnose and overcome, at least inwardly, the multiple variegated crises with which we are confronted in the modern world. Recorded in Karachi, December 2012. With thanks to Riaz
- [“Fasting is Mine”](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/fasting-is-mine) - Abdal Hakim Murad (T. J. Winter) A talk delivered on the first day of Ramadan 2009, focusing on the famous hadith qudsi in which God says “Fasting is mine.” “Fasting is not just about another thing that we do—or in this case something that we don’t do—that brings about a reward in the next world.
- [Is There a Problem of Evil?](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/is-there-a-problem-of-evil) - Marco Pallis “Divine grace always leaves us this one hope; God who now seems so distant is ever close at hand—‘closer than your jugular vein,’ as the Koran has it. The Tree of Life is standing in this room, as certainly as it stood in Eden; it is a pity if we will not use
- [The Presence of the Qur'an ](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-presence-of-the-quran) - Abdal Hakim Murad (T. J. Winter) Cambridge, 17th February 2011. In this talk Abdal Hakim Murad dwells on the transformative experience of the Word of God in the breast of the believer. The Qur'an exists as the driving force and symbol of Islamic civilisation. Without experiencing the Presence of the Qur'an, with its ability to
- [Reflections on the Stone ](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/reflections-on-the-stone) - Reflections On The Stone by Robert Bolton Therefore thus says the Lord God, Behold I am laying in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone, of a sure foundation: He who believes will not be in haste. (Isaiah Ch. 28, v.16 R.S.V.) Tradition, Philosophy and Gnosis The orthodox interpretation of the above text in Christian tradition is always that the stone represents Christ, the promised Messiah, as is also the case in comparable texts, such as “the stone which the builders rejected,” in the Psalms. This symbolism of the stone was adopted from more ancient uses, however, and the latter may be the means of connecting it with the so-called Philosophers’ Stone, especially as historical revelation will normally correspond to a universal and atemporal order. The idea of the “stone” naturally evokes the idea of philosophy and its creative endeavours in a traditional context, and we may wonder what place it has there. For most of those who follow the ideas of Guénon and Schuon, the emphasis in traditionist thought is overwhelmingly on gnosis, rather than on either philosophy or empirical knowledge, because the modern deviation from tradition is attributable to the reduction of metaphysical truths first to matters of individual speculation, and then finally to the fads of public opinion. There is no doubt that changes of this kind have taken place, and their negative results are only too well known, so that advocacy of more human forms of knowledge may seem to be in conflict with the restoration of tradition. To some, there may appear something absurd about the implicit claim that gnosis is not enough. How should the highest and completest knowledge need to be supplemented? One answer to this can be seen to lie in the very exactitude and finality of gnosis, which link it inseparably to the realm of the finite, a defect which indicates that it needs to be completed by something else, since man was made for the infinite. (This finitude characterizes the mode of being of gnosis, not its theoretical content, of course; these two things should not be confused). Conversely, while the outreach of philosophical thought lacks the ordered perfection of gnosis, it does answer to man’s dynamic relation to the infinite. There should thus be an overall equality between the two, that is, between a precise and complete, but knowledge, and one which is untidy and ever-incomplete, but adapted to the infinite in its operation. The distinction highlighted by this simple dichotomy comprises something which must always be felt as long as mankind is in a temporal state. These reflections are prompted by what has been written on this subject by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in recent years, especially where he says that gnosis alone is he negation of philosophy for the reasons just mentioned, that philosophy is a pursuit of truth where the results are never predictable or final. It this expresses a conjunction between knowledge and the flowing process of life live in time, whence it is adequate to the whole human state of its temporal and intellectual levels. Quite apart from the weight we allow to theoretical comparisons between philosophy and gnosis, there remains the undoubted fact that philosophy was always a part of both Christian and Moslem civilizations throughout the Middle Ages, where it existed alongside both gnosis and religious belief. We do not need to rely on theory to show that philosophy was always a part of both Christian and Moslem civilizations throughout the Middle Ages, where it existed alongside both gnosis and religious belief. In view of its role in the traditions alone, then, we should not have the right to equate philosophy as a whole with the purely individualistic exploration of reality without the revelation which it has become today. But if we are to allow that it is ultimately a dimension of the spirit without being gnosis, what would its validity derive from? There is no doubt that for the traditions it was the expression of a substantial reality, which was called the Philosophers’ Stone or the lapis, and a good many other things besides, such as the Unique (or One) Thing, the Divine Water, the Lion, and the Sodic Hydrolith. Under this diversity of names it was not distinguished from the prima materia, as I shall try to show. Attempts to explain what these terms mean always run the risk of ending up in a quagmire of obscurities which has to some extent been caused deliberately, but the attempt is necessary if we are to clarify the spiritual role of philosophy, that is, its relation to revealed religion in a traditional context. This subject would become less obscure if it could be shown to be connected with a generally acknowledged reality, albeit one which is usually thought of only in connection with gnosis. Despite the references in scripture like the one under the heading, the lapis (understood as the philosophers’ stone) is not so much conveyed by revelation as presupposed by it, as the receive which corresponds by nature to the Divine initiative. It is something more than a creature, but equally it is not God, an idea which is familiar in traditional thought where it is a question of an element in the human soul which transcends creation and relates directly to God. This is frequently to be found in Eckhart, as where he says: there is an agent in the sole such that if the soul were wholly this, it would be uncreated.1 A modern expression of the same idea is given by Philip Sherrard where he says that patristic theologians do recognize the presence in man of something which, if it is not divine, is yet not undivine; which if it is not uncreated, is yet not created. 2 Sherrard is emphasising the point that this principle is not just another name for God, as simplistic ways of thinking might take it to be. On the contrary, the peculiar nature of the consequences which follow from it is owing to the fact that it is neither God nor nature, but something sharing the atrributes of both, and that human nature can be to varying degrees conformed to it. If we cannot be precise about it, it is still necessary to look at some of the things that have been said about it, so that we may be able to understand its role in the life of the spirit. The Stone in Tradition Traditional accounts of the Stone do not always distinguish it from the prima material, as where both are referred to as the Unica Res (the unique 1. Defense IX, 3. 2. The Rape of Man and Nature, Ch.1,p.32 or only thing) and “Adam and Microcosm.” 3 This implies that the usage of Hermetic thought differs here from that of Neoplatonism, for which mater is the lowest of realities, a mere empty and unstable receptivity. Instead, it is said to be “the first hyle of the wise, the prima materia of the perfect body” and is said to be a substance in which everything is contained in a positive way, by which it has a creative power as a source principle in nature.4 Jung quotes Mylius’ statement that it is “the pure subject and the unity of forms,” with both passive and active aspects. We are also told that this mysterious substance is called “radix ipsius (root of itself). Because it roots in itself it is autonomous and dependent on nothing.” 5 But the supremacy it has in relation to other creatures does not include any question of its creating the world or itself; it has therefore an autonomy in relation to nature, as well as to God in a different way. There are obviously close analogies between it and both God and the world, as might be expected of something with microcosmic potential: The definition of this spherical being as... ‘the most serene God,’ sheds a special light on the perfect ‘round’ nature of the lapis which arises from and constitutes the primal sphere; hence the prima materia is often called lapis. 6 The above does not help us to understand why, in view of its subtlety,“stone” should have been so prominent among the names used for thissubject, when in its religious context it never had a name at all, except where it was referred to as the “divine spark” in an unofficial manner. James Hillman’s explanation 7 is that this is because, like a physical stone, it has a power to force its presence on our attention by its impenetrable and irreducible quality. Everything in nature from flowing water to roots of trees has to yield to the presence of stones, which combine a certain power with inactivity. They can often punish those who ignore their presence. Stone-lie properties, he says, are an emblem of freedom from subjectivity, and not merely as a quantity of hard and enduring material, but as a unique individuality, different from that of 3. C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, III, Ch.4,i. 4. Jung, ibid., III, Ch.1,iii. 5. Jung, ibid., III, Ch.4, ii. 6. ibid. III, Ch.4,iii 7. see: Concerning the Stone—[see: Sphinx No.5] 124 every other stone. Thus it evokes the idea of the monad. The last point shows that it is not too much of a paradox that a very subtle reality could force itself on our attention as a stone does. The essential point here is individuation. Persons or souls encounter one another as quasi-atomic realities, which is why the soul is referred to in philosophy as a “simple substance.” Just as the physical stone shows the qualities of impenetrability and irreducibility, so the individual soul is impenetrable inasmuch as it is the container of all natural forces in its representation of the world, to which it is not itself external. Here, then are some representative observations about the Stone, which must now be linked with what was said above about the quasidivine principle in the soul, and the resulting implications for philosophy. If this “naturally supernatural” principle, as Schuon would call it, were considered, not in relation to God, but as a normative principle for both man and nature, much that has been said of the lapis would be relevant to it. Contradictory attributes like those of “stone” and “water” would not be surprising in something which was an archetype and an epitome of the complex range of realities which make up the natural order. On the one hand, a deepening understanding of this interior reflection of the divine must be implicitly redemptive, as historically it was taken to be, while on the other, the redemption and regeneration brought by revealed religion must, inter alia, bring the individual into a closer communion with this same interior reality. These two movements of the soul, far from being exclusive, have always been conceived as working together in the same persons, at least when they were involved in Hermeticism. The Lapis and the Monad This brings us to a significant double meaning in this interior agency: because the lapis mediates between God and creation, it can be seen with equal reason as either the base of a mystical or gnostic ascensus to God, or as the apex of an integrating movement in the natural order. Such a conception would suffice to connect the mysterious, protean Stone with a basic idea which is accepted in most forms of traditional wisdom. The duality involved in this idea is no more than what is implied in the duality of the human state, consisting as it does of body and soul, and residing on the boundary of nature and the supernatural. On this basis, I shall try to account for some consequences which would naturally be realised by the creative work of philosophy. While the lapis is unique in itself, it exists in as many instances as there are persons, so that something qualitatively equivalent to the Whole exists in every being which forms part of the Whole, giving a special meaning to the idea that “all is one.” In this case, the One would in some sense be present in every part of the All, an idea which Leibniz expresses in the Monadology where he says that souls are “living mirrors of the universe of created things, . . each mind being as it were a little divinity in its own department.” 8 This matches the idea that “the sulphur philosophorum is substance in which everything is contained.” 9 Such an interpenetrating view of the one and the any has always found a place in Christian cultures, because the doctrine of the Eurcharist follows a similar patter. Each consecrated host becomes the Body of the Lord, and at the same time, so does each particle of each host; the unique One is infinitely multiplied, and not merely as a symbol. At the same time, the Incarnation and the Ascension reflect the relation between the divine and the material which is a model for human life inasmuch as it is true to its destiny. Leibniz’ philosophy is deeply influenced by the Hermetic tradition, which is distinguished as a meeting place of philosophy and magic, with its idea of a reality which is microcosmic through and through. Parts not only reflect the whole, but have powers of attraction and influence among themselves in proportion to the similarities between the ways in which they reflect the world and the degrees to which they do so. From thence come the evocative powers of magic and the influences of astrology. Each portion of matter may be conceived as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fish. But ever branch of each plant, every member of each animal, and every drop of their liquid parts is itself likewise a similar garden or pond.10 This power of reflecting the whole of things has also implications which are relevant to the idea of the lapis, because the soul, in reflecting a naturally indestructible universe will itself be indestructible in the same 8. Leibniz, Monadology 83 9. Jung, ibid., III,Ch.1,iii 10. Monadology 67 11. ibid. 77 way 11, in a way which belongs among the stone-like properties. Similarly, this goes with a certain impenetrability, which results simply from the fact that it is in a real sense a whole and not a part, and so cannot be directly subject to external natural agencies in the way that the contents of sense-perception are. By definition, then, souls or monads can be subject only to God in a direct sense, while their interactions could only take place by the indirect way of interior changes which create new sets of relations or weaken or strengthen existing relation among them. Such properties as the above are the context in which philosophy becomes a condition for the realization of the human state as such, not least because the subject of philosophy is reality as a whole, while a representation of the world as a whole is part of the essence of each rational being. Such is a primary aspect of the spiritual soul, as compared with souls of animals, which relate only to parts of the world and so are necessarily peripheral to the human state. A microcosmic being must philosophize (judge reality as a whole) in order to be itself, therefore. This has consequences for religion because the perspective of faith also places man in relation to reality as a whole just as much as to God. Both faith and philosophy involve a positive relation to infinite. Implications for the Esoteric The above consequences apply in particular to a feature which both exoteric and exoteric religion strangely have in common. However much they differ in other ways, they both see the individual person as a negation, or as a blank to be filled in, so to speak. Thus both are equally dominated by the view that God is everything and man is nothing, even though there are doubts as to how literally this is meant. This applies to both cases for different reasons. In exoteric religion this is because here the central place belongs to the personal relationship between God and the individual, which could not really be a relationship if it was between a reality and a true nothing, though it could be if the “nothing” was a relative one. In esoteric religion, this view of God and man is strange because here we have access to a deeper conscious understanding, for which simplifications should not be necessary. The relation to God is not the problem in the esoteric, because it is thought of here only in conjunction with non-personal realities which are meant to overcome our usual limitations. The reason for this similarities which are meant to overcome our usual limitations. The reason for this similarity with the exoteric in regard to the individual may well result from nothing deeper than the modern world. That they have such an aspect is undeniable, and under this aspect they clearly are negligible in relation to the Whole. But the objection to this from a Hermetic point of view is that it springs from a quantitative way of looking at the world, which is usually an unconscious side-effect of modern science. Thus one ignores the qualitative infinity in beings which are only parts in an external way. The more we shall be free from defeatist views about the value of the individual as such. This makes it much easier to understand the truth that the things which individuals intend, do, and refrain from doing, have an effect on the world which goes far beyond anything they are able to perceive. This reflects the idea that only like can truly act on like, as in this case it is the rational being who is in a real sense equivalent to a world who can therefore act significantly on the world of which he is outwardly a part. Conversely, the actions of animals have no such independent power over nature because they are solely parts in relation to the Whole. There are both spiritual and magical implications for this kind of relation which mankind has to its world, connected with the idea that there is a point at which religion, philosophy psychology and magic have a region in common. The reality of some such convergence as this was believed in by Jung, and it was the basis of his idea of the necessary role of the individual, to which he opposed collectivistic beliefs. He regarded the latter as irrational, because no religion, philosophy, or ideology could exist without consciousness, and the individual person is the only possible vehicle fro consciousness. Consequently, all systems which downgrade the individual are ultimately self-defeating; neither collective entities nor mystical systems can of themselves supply the consciousness necessary to make them work. Equally, the higher forms of knowledge can have no direct power over individual consciousness, but only what the latter can see it right to concede. To some, this may appear only too obvious, but there are many who are so blinded by the external and quantitative aspect of things that they hardly see it at all, or regard it as a delusion. A Meaning for Autonomy What has been said about the basis of individuality can be linked to the question of whether the person or monad can be said to have autonomy. This issue can be seen in the fact that two pillars of received wisdom are that man must be open and receptive to whatever Providence may send or allow, and that he is responsible for the control of his own thoughts. It seems that there is a flat contradiction between these two precepts, although they can be reconciled by the fact that the operative principle is radix ipsius while for all that, it did not create itself. The aspect of autonomy is necessary for philosophy, for obvious reasons, and it remains to delineate some of the features of the human mind which express what has been said theoretically about it. An obvious feature of this kind can be seen where every mind is ac tive in selecting its objects, at least as much as it is passive in receiving them, while there are many differences possible in the proportions between the two. The more the active power of selection is developed, the greater the degree of free will, since the freedom of the will is in practice dependent on the sphere in which it operates, even though in principle it is present in everyone. The complexities of this function can be seen from the fact that not only are there many degrees of this selective activity, there are at the same time innumerable criteria by which it can operate. The process of selection is thus a form of “self-expression’ in a quite exact sense of the word. The least effective form of it follows the broadest of all criteria, that of pleasure, but without trying to judge the reasons why it is pleasurable or to compare different kinds of pleasure. Whatever its degree or quality, this expression of autonomy is not just a matter of culture, but is characteristic of mind as such, in the light of the foregoing. It is reflected only partially by the senses, because on the one hand they automatically continue to convey to us the same things as long as we are present to them, regardless of our choice; in this respect they are passive, while on the other hand choice must depend on the removal either of the objects or of one’s physical presence. As the mind makes its selections among the contents of the world it has a representation of, these choices of object not only express and reinforce the quality it already has, but they also have a determining influence on the objects which will come to it, as it were ab extra, at future times. While there is a clear common sense distinction between things we choose to perceive and think about, and things which come to us unbidden and without warning, this is only because the latter seem not to be chosen, but nevertheless they are chosen in the same sense that we choose the experiences comprised in a journey simply by our initial decision to travel from A to B. In a more subtle way, the things we occupy the mind with at a given time will place the mind in the “qualitative locality” of those things, so that others coherent with them will later be encountered, apparently by accident. The more purposive our selection of mental objects or stimuli, the more clearly this effect on future experience will be felt, while in proportion as we fall short in this respect, the more future events will assume a random character. The contents of the world appear in the mind as so many different determinations of it, rather as clay is made into innumerable pieces of pottery. The mind is in effect an infinite substance which receives an infinity of modifications ranging from basic sensations to the subtlest kinds of insight. If it should still appear that the autonomy attributed to it is contradicted by experience, the relation of the mind to its world must be seen in the light of the different possibilities offered by the power of control. Practical life is full of examples of apparently uncontrolled happenings which are in reality under exactly as much control as are orderly and constructive ones, only with the difference that in the former it is an ignorant and foolish use of control. So with the human mind and its relation to life in the world; even its worst failures never amount to loss of its directing role. The autonomy it has in relation to its world finds a typical expression in philosophy, and this does not imply any conflict with the authority of religion, because orthodox religious teachings, if lived our, lead to the same stated of freedom in relation to nature. The Relation to Grace The traditional role of philosophy, based on the above properties of mind, has implication which are not consistent with the majority views of tradition today, even though it does not coincide with gnosis. It would imply that a spiritual realization which was solely universal, as is maintained by Ananda Coomaraswamy 12, for example, would be no more of an ideal than one which was solely individual. Instead, individuality would have spiritual potentialities just as much as the profane ones it is usually associated with, while conversely there would be nothing to 12. see: The Pertinence of Philosophy. (Sacred Web 1) 130 prevent anti-individualistic systems from serving profane delusions as well as wisdom, as modern history shows. Finally, what has been said in regard to the potentialities of the individual has been said from a specifically human point of view, that is, without its being directly related to God, who alone can act on the human will. But the fact that man is nevertheless dependent on grace to make positive choices has not been referred to, only because the factor of Divine causality does not detract anything from the reality of an independent principle in mankind, nor from the fact that every tendency to realize it increases the natural autonomy of the person. Neither does it call for any modification to the idea that each soul or monad contains a representation of its world, which is as it were the theater of its spiritual progress. There is a point at which man’s control coincides with that of God, as might be expected from the nature of the lapis, inasmuch as it is said to be “the water which rule everything, in which errors are made and in which the error itself is corrected.” 13 What these things imply about human nature appear to be so profoundly part of it that it expresses the plan of creation—not a result of the Fall—and is thus a perfect cooperation with the will of God. 13. C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, III, Ch. 1, iii.
- [Beauty as Outward Virtue — Virtue as Inward Beauty: The Sacred Art of Living](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/beauty-as-outward-virtue) - Deborah and Jonathan Bell Click here to view the PDF Reproduced here by kind permission of Sacred Web
- [Of Art and Skill](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/of-art-and-skill) - Brian Keeble Click here to view the PDF Reproduced here by kind permission of Sacred Web
- [The Problematic of the Unity of Religions](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/borella-problematic) - Jean Borella Click here to view the PDF Reproduced here by kind permission of Sacred Web
- [<em>The Cave of the Heart: The Life of Swami Abhishiktananda</em>, by Shirley du Boulay](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/review-cave-of-the-heart) - The Cave of the Heart: The Life of Swami Abhishiktananda, by Shirley du Boulay Maryknoll, NJ: Orbis Books, 2005, 276pp. Reviewed by Harry Oldmeadow, published in Vincat Omnia Veritas (religioperennis.org) Father Henri Le Saux, a French Benedictine monk, arrived in South India in 1949 to join his compatriot, Father Jules Monchanin, in the establishment of a ‘Christian Ashram’ at Kulittalai, on the banks of the sacred Kavery River. In A Benedictine Ashram (first published 1951) they articulated their goal this way: ... to form the first nucleus of a monastery (or rather a laura, a grouping of neighboring anchorites like the ancient laura of Saint Sabas in Palestine) which buttresses the Rule of Saint Benedict — a primitive, sober, discrete rule. Only one purpose: to seek God. And the monastery will be Indian style. We would like to crystallize and transubstantiate the search of the Hindu sanny?s?. Advaita and the praise of the Trinity are our only aim. This means we must grasp the authentic Hindu search for God in order to Christianize it, starting with ourselves first of all, from within. In short: Vedantic philosophy, Christian theology, Indian lifestyle. The hope was that ‘what is deepest in Christianity may be grafted on to what is deepest in India’. This was not a syncretic exercise which would issue forth some kind of religious hybrid but an attempt to fathom the depths of Christianity with the aid of the traditional wisdom of India which, in the monks’ view, was to be found in Vedanta and in the spiritual disciplines of the renunciate. The bridge between Indian spirituality and the Church was to be monasticism, ‘the plane whereon they may feel themselves in consonance with each other’. They looked forward to the day when God would send to the hermitage many ‘true sons of India, sons of her blood and sons of her soul’, priests and laymen alike, gifted with a deep spirit of prayer, an heroic patience, a total surrender, endowed with an iron will and right judgment, longing for the heights of contemplation, and equipped, too, with a deep and intimate knowledge of Christian doctrine and Indian thought... The lifestyle at the ashram was to be thoroughly Indian: meditation, prayer, study of the Scriptures of both traditions, a simple vegetarian diet, the most Spartan of amenities. Each donned the ochre cloth of the sanny?s? and lived Indian-style — sleeping on the floor, dispensing with almost all furniture, eating with the hands, and so on. Thus it was that Le Saux, soon to be known as Swami Abhishiktananda, embarked on a spiritual journey which continued to the end of his life in 1973. Shantivanam, the ashram opened on the Feast of St Benedict, 1950, later came to full fruition under the guidance of Father Bede Griffiths, and survives to this day. The establishment of the ashram is but one chapter in Abhishiktananda’s life in India. Over nearly a quarter of a century he immersed himself in Advaita Vedanta and in the spiritual practices of Saivite Hinduism, always seeking a bridge between his deeply-rooted Christian faith and the mystical awakenings which came through his encounters with two indubitable Indian sages, Ramana Maharishi and Swami Gnanananda, and through his extended meditations and austerities on the holy mountain of Arunachala. Eventually Abhishiktananda left the ashram which he had founded with The Matheson Trust Monchanin, built a small hermitage at Gyansu in the Himalayas, and adopted the life of a semi-itinerant renunciate. In the last decade of his life he wrote about a dozen books, concerned with such subjects as Advaita Vedanta, the teachings of the Upanishads, Hindu- Christian dialogue, the Church in India and the ideal of renunciation. Among his most captivating and striking works are Guru and Disciple (first English edition, 1970), The Further Shore (1975) and The Secret of Arunachala (1978). He also wrote dozens of articles and maintained a spiritual journal, running to something in the order of two thousand pages by the time of his death. There is now a burgeoning interest in the life and work of this obscure but quite extraordinary monk. Shirley du Boulay’s The Cave of the Heart is the second biography to appear, following James Stuart’s Swami Abhishiktananda: his life told through his letters (1989). Stuart undertook an heroic labour in assembling Abhishiktananda’s prodigious correspondence, and in weaving it into a autobiographical narrative. As well as Stuart’s work we have various articles, memoirs, tributes and the like, written by friends and acquaintances of ‘Swami-ji’. Then, too, there are the excerpts from his journal, edited by his friend and internationally renowned scholar, Raimon Panikkar, and published as Ascent to the Depth of the Heart (1998). However, du Boulay provides us with the first full-dress biography which takes account of all the available sources and traces the full sweep of Abhishiktananda’s life. She follows a more or less chronological trajectory, starting with the childhood of young Henri, the first of seven children born into a pious bourgeois family in St Briac, on the northern coast of Brittany. The story ends sixty-three years later, in 1973; soon after Abhishiktananda has experienced a series of mystical illuminations in the Himalayas he is struck down by a heart attack in the marketplace of Rishikesh, one of the sacred cities of the Ganges. Between his childhood and his final days lies a remarkable pilgrimage which took Abhishiktananda deep into the spiritual treasure-hold of one of the world’s primordial traditions. The scope of the present review does not allow us to rehearse the inspiring and often poignant story of Abhishiktananda’s life — his happy childhood which instilled an abiding love of his family and his homeland, the long years in a French monastery, the second World War, the ‘call of India’, the struggle to establish a Christian ashram in South India, the dramatic meetings with Ramana and Gnanananda, the direct and momentous lightning-strike of advaita (non-duality), the search for some sort of experiential and existential reconciliation of Vedantic non-dualism and Christian Trinitarianism, the lonely years of self-interrogation and self-doubt, the intrepid exploration of a foreign spiritual universe, bringing him finally to a resolution of the theological and existential predicaments entailed in the attempt to fully fathom the depths of the two religious traditions to which he was heir. Readers will find this story sympathetically and elegantly rendered in du Boulay’s splendid biography. Shirley du Boulay has a well-earned reputation as an intelligent, clear-eyed and sensitive biographer, having previously given us engaging studies of such figures as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, St Teresa of Avila and Father Bede Griffiths, another bridge-builder between the spiritual worlds of East and West, and one of Abhishiktananda’s friends and associates. In her treatment of Abhishiktananda she navigates a skilful course between the Scylla and Charybdis which lie in wait for the unsuspecting biographer of religious subjects — the temptations of sentimental hagiography on one side, a corrosive ‘debunking’ exercise on the other. The biography is clearly a labour of love in tribute to a man whom the author admires deeply — and, indeed, what better motive could there be? She is also attuned to the spiritual modalities which shaped the life of this pilgrim of the Absolute. Abhishiktananda’s personal life is portrayed in some detail and the book sheds much light on his hitherto little-known life in France. The Cave of the Heart is generously illustrated with many photographs, not only of Abhishiktananda at various stages in his life, but of his family, friends and teachers. The biography is not marred by the heavy-handed and impertinent psychologism which is so much in vogue these days. This highly readable book is written with a light and deft touch, and is burdened with neither unnecessary theological speculation nor pompous academic theorizing In the end, du Boulay is interested not only in the contours of this particular life but in its exemplary significance. Both in his own person and through his writings Abhishiktananda communicated a timeless teaching about the inner unity of all the great religious traditions, a message of the most urgent significance in our own troubled times. Many years ago, in Sufi Essays (1971), Seyyed Hossein Nasr wrote of those vocation it is to provide the keys with which the treasury of wisdom of other traditions can be unlocked, revealing to those who are destined to receive this wisdom the essential unity and universality and at the same time the formal diversity of tradition and revelation. To be sure, Abhishiktananda belonged to this small company. Much of Abhishiktananda’s thought, tempered in the crucible of his Indian experiences, was in accord with the sophia perennis which has been so authoritatively exposited in recent times by figures such as René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Frithjof Schuon and Titus Burckhardt. Abhishiktananda did not have recourse to their work and he occasionally succumbed to some of the prejudices of modernity; but he intuitively understood that the surest guides on the spiritual path were the great Scriptures, the teaching and example of the saints and sages, and the religious forms and spiritual practices sanctioned by Tradition. In his case this meant an immersion in both the Gospels and the Upanishads, a devotion to both the Church Fathers and to his Indian gurus, an unflinching fidelity to his monastic vocation, and an untiring search for the inner meaning of the religious rites and disciplines of both Latin Christianity and Saivite Hinduism. He also came to the hard-earned understanding that the necessary formal diversity of religions is complemented by an inner harmony — by what Schuon called ‘the transcendent unity of religions’. As Abhishiktananda wrote in Saccidananda (first French edition 1965), ‘...diversity does not mean disunity, once the Centre of all has been reached.’ If pressed for a criticism of du Boulay’s book, one might suggest that this aspect of Abhishiktananda’s life and work is not given the kind of close-grained study which it deserves. It might also be argued that our biographer marvellously evokes the mystical riches of the Catholic tradition but that the further reaches of Hindu spirituality are perhaps sometimes beyond her grasp. But it would be mean-spirited to dwell on those things which the book does not do — let us rather give thanks for its very considerable accomplishments. The Cave of the Heart will perform a noble service in bringing the attention of a much wider audience to one of the few spiritual luminaries of recent times. In our own crepuscular era, the story of Abhishiktananda’s life will provide hope, inspiration and guidance for all genuine spiritual wayfarers, no matter on what particular path they are travelling. Here are the closing lines from this fine biography: Here was someone who risked everything, who reached his goal... Abhishiktananda was a pioneer who had the courage to break boundaries and to forge a path that inspires and illumines people today... Over his sixty-three years he himself was transformed, but the significance of his life has not stopped there. This was a man who joined a small group of people whose lives have changed our perception and reminded us that we are all capable of simply ‘being’ and that the Awakening is there for all of us (p242). (Harry Oldmeadow’s forthcoming book, Abhishiktananda: A Christian Pilgrim in India, will be published by World Wisdom Books.)
- [The Ternary and the Quaternary](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/ternary-and-quaternary) - The Ternary and the Quaternary by Robert Bolton The Ternary and the Quaternary are two universal, numerically-based relationships which manifest the archetypal relationships between many realities in both the spiritual and physical realms. In particular, they apply to and govern the inner constitution of the human state, together with its position in regard to God and the various orders of creation. In order to explain these things, I shall refer to some things said about them by René Guénon in his book The Great Triad, and also by Fabre d’Olivet, whose works Guénon makes use of. The Quaternary results from the fact that there are two different kinds of Ternary, as Guénon shows. The first kind of Ternary is the more metaphysical of the two, as it is one in which the first term has some kind of superiority over the other two, which result from it. It can be represented by an upright triangle (see Figure 1) in which the two points at its foot both proceed equally from its apex. A possible example of this would be the Trinity, in which the second and third Persons both proceed from the Father. It also applies to the three Hypostases of Neoplatonism, which are not so much God as the primary realities which proceed from God, although there is a clear inequality between the Nous and the World Soul. Nevertheless, these two resultant terms are both implicit in the One, and are distinct realities when manifest. Other examples of this kind of Ternary abound in nature and religion. It appears that kingship and priesthood are both implicit in prophethood (as appears from the Old Testament), and derive from the latter as two simpler and more specialized realities. In geometry, there are a number of three-dimensional forms which give rise to two others when they are reduced to two dimensions. For example, a cone gives rise to a triangle and circle by this means; a cylinder gives rise to a circle and a rectangle; a cube to a square and hexagon; and a spheroid to an ellipse and a circle. More generally still, the laws of quantity give rise to the two realms of arithmetic and geometry. In physics, there are important phenomena which are manifest and treatable both as waves and as particles, as in the case of light, for example. One and the same planet, especially Venus, can give rise to both a morning star and an evening star. In the living world, the archetypal Species usually cannot manifest itself in physical form except as the male and female halves of it. The second kind of Ternary is the less metaphysical of the two, and is more easily seen to be a part of creation. It is represented by an inverted triangle (see Figure 2) in which the two upper terms converge downwards to their resultant at the apex. The most obvious example of this is the relation of father, mother and child. Besides, binary combinations 2 3 on the chemical level which result in a third compound are only too numerous. One striking natural example of this Ternary is the way the rain- bow results from rain and sunlight. Fire and water give rise to steam. Another example is the way the orbital motion of planets and satellites results from linear motion and a force of attraction to a fixed point. A more subtle example in this class is that of knowledge, as every act of knowing results from a relation between the two prima- 4 Figure 2 ries, the knower and the known. If the difference between the two kinds of Ternary relation is kept in mind, we shall be able to see how the Quaternary results from some among them. It depends on a combination of a Ternary as in Figure 1, where elements 2 and 3 derive from element 1, and another one as in Figure 2, where element 4 derives from elements 2 and 3, the latter being the same in both Ternaries. If the upper line of the inverted triangle is joined to the base of the upright one, elements 2 and 3 are common to both, and the result is quadrilateral relating the four elements (see Figure 3) and showing how 4 results directly from 2 and 3 and indirectly from 1. If this were applied to living creatures, 1 would be the archetype of the species, 2 and 3 would be the male and female members of the physically instantiated species, while 4 would be their new-born offspring. The fourth element is in a sense a recapitulation of the first on a lower level, which 2 also has some bearing on the meaning of child- hood in relation to God. The four most universal realities which are related in this manner are known to both Pythagorean and Far-Eastern teachings under different names, these being God, Providence (or universal spirit), Nature (or fate), and Man (or universal soul). According to this scheme, Providence and Nature both proceed from God, while man is as it were the child of Providence and Nature, though he is no less a creature of God at the same time. This peculiarity of human origin is also indicated by the account in Genesis where Adam and Eve are only created on the sixth day of creation, the last of all beings. On this basis, the human can be taken to be resultant of divine action and the created natural order as a whole. Because of this relation to creation as a whole, the human state is understood to be an epitome or microcosm of all being, so that each person (the fourth element) will be composed of the same things as the “three worlds,” namely the providential or archetype world, the psychical or subtle world, and the material world. This is the three-fold inner structure which Fabre d’Olivet represents by the Intellective, Animic, and Instinctive spheres in that of the human soul. 4 Figure 3 These spheres are represented by four circles (see Figure 4), three of which stand on a vertical line, while the fourth surrounds these three. The lowest circle of the three represents the life of instinct which attaches to the body, ruled only by pleasure and pain, because its higher possibilities depend on its participation in those of the soul. The central one represents what is most typically the soul, the realm of the emotions, which are roused by the sense of good and bad. The third circle is that of intellect, which is activated by truth and falsehood. All conscious activity is distributed among these three, in all kinds of combinations and proportions. Their combined effect is what determines the movement of the fourth circle, which represents the will of the whole person. 3 Intellective Animic The Will Instinctive Figure 4 At birth, the soul or self is almost wholly identified with the Instinctive sphere, and it is only through the development of the possibilities of this sphere that it is able finally to trigger the development of the second, or Animic, sphere, which is that of soul as such. Similarly, the development of life through the Animic opens up the possibilities of the Intellective sphere. Human beings are thus unique in being made up of a union of material, psychical, and noetic principles, reflecting the whole order of creation of miniature. In effect, the soul’s activity evolves from a level inferior to the one specific to it, through that of its intrinsic nature, and up to one above its own level, in which it participates as the body participates in the soul. This account of our inner formation is capable of being shown as another Quaternary relationship, which reflects the universal one. The fourth circle, representing the will of the person, relates to body, soul, and intellect in ways that reflect the relation of God to Providence, Nature (or Macrocosm), and Man (see Figure 5). There are thus two Tetrads with a common term, Man, which could be called the Great and the Little Tetrad respectively, and which show the correspondences between Providence and the intellect, between Nature and the body, and between God and Man. One thing this figure does not show is that these relations are dynamic, and in no way static, since the human will is able to strengthen or weaken the relationships it has to the others. Unless there was such a being as Man, comprising both archetypal and material reality at once, these two orders of being would have no means of relating to one another. It is thus a question of Man’s being a natural or universal pontifex, so long as it is understood that this function is a potentiality in need of realisation, which Fabre d’Olivet expresses as follows: “At the moment when man arrives on earth he belongs to Fate, which leads him captive for a long time in the vortex of fatality...When this seed is fully developed, it constitutes the Will of Universal Man, one of the three great powers of the universe.” God Providence Fate Great Tetrad Guénon points out that this mediating role of mankind in the cosmos is the macrocosmic equivalent of the mediating role of the soul in each human being, where it relates to and connects the spiritual and the material realms. All this has far-reaching implications where it concerns the freedom of the will. If we start from the complex nature of the person, as above, and bear in mind that the Instinctive, Animic, and Intellective spheres are by no means bound to act in concert, but can modify the will by the equivalent of rotation at various speeds, both with and contrary to one another, there will be more than enough to support the idea of free will. (The usual philosophical reasonings about free will are based on the most minimal assumptions, for example, simply that we are capable of knowing and willing. This approach has some value, owing to the simplicity of its assumptions, but it is bound to be inconclusive insofar as it is based on incomplete knowledge of what we are). Intellect The interior complexity means that each person has the means to unite himself or herself in an equally natural way to either the Providential or the Fatidic order. However, we do not apply the term “free will” to both of these options, because what we understand by freedom does not belong to Nature, where all is subject to efficient causality, but rather to Providence, which comprises the archetypes or formal causes of all that belongs to Nature. Providence is said to be free because it comprises the essential realities of the world as they are “before” being instanced in Man Body Soul Figure 5 Little Tetrad material form and so subjected to all kinds of constraint. The soul, which aligns itself with Providence and therefore with freedom, will thus be the one which realises the possibilities of the intellective nature of the fullest extent possible for the individual concerned. This involves an orientation of the whole person, which is not to be confused with the divisive effects of an unintegrated intellectuality which is made an end in itself, and so denies its spiritual and sacramental role. On the contrary, it applies to the body as well, by its participation in the soul, which in turn participates in intellect; it too is spiritualised in its own way, therefore. Concerning the effects of this union, Guénon says: “In uniting itself to Providence and consciously collaborating with it, the human will can become a counter-balance to destiny and finally neutralise it. In the words of Fabre d’Olivet, ‘the harmony between the Will and Providence is what constitutes the Good. Evil is what results from their opposition... Man either perfects himself or becomes depraved according to whether his tendency is to merge into the universal Unity or to distinguish himself from it.’ In other words he approaches either perfection or depravity depending on which of the two poles of manifestation he gravitates towards: the pole of unity or the pole of multiplicity.” This also makes it easier to see how each soul can choose its own destiny, since the inward relations it makes with its material, psychical, and spiritual possibilities are in effect the formal causes of the outward conditions under which it lives and develops. In other words, it is not so much a matter of the person being modified by a set of conditions as of a soul gravitating to a set of conditions which correspond to its interior relations, and under which the latter will be best able to realise their potential. This leads to certain questions about the will, which are hardly ever treated theoretically, particularly whether the distinction, so absolute for common sense, between the things we do and the things we suffer is ultimately sustainable. If events to which we see ourselves as passive were in fact occasioned by interior acts of thought and will, some ideas of morality would have to be different. The idea of responsibility would especially be affected, not being absolutely greater or less, but considerably redistributed. The choice of freedom and free will outlined above is implicitly obedience to the will of God, where the universal Divine will can be discerned by means of the three-fold constitution of the being. Its implication is that each person is born with a destiny to develop as much as possible through the Instinctive, Animic, and Intellective levels, with the grace of sacred tradition. This is not merely in the interests of the individuals concerned, and their personal freedom, but it is also for the greater good of the world, since it is only through such persons that nature as a whole can connect with its archetypal causes, and thereby with God. Such is the relation upon which natural harmony and order among the elements depends. This universal destiny is necessarily adversely affected by the Fall. For “unfallen” humanity, it would have been spontaneous and would have been wholly self-motivating. In the fallen state, however, there is much less, or even none, of the will to fulfil this destiny, so that individuals may often be content to remain even at the instinctive level if conditions allow. This is why in the actual world, this higher evolution usually does not take place except where individuals are subject to relentless external pressures which force them onto the battlefield, so to speak. Increasingly, it is a spiritual accomplishment if this kind of growth is recognised and undertaken voluntarily in later life. The deepening identification between the soul and the intellective principle, which mediates between the Divine, is of course a union with an eternal reality. As such, it should obviously amount to what is meant by the immortality of the soul, especially as union with Providence must mean a deliverance from Fate. Mortality belongs explicitly to Fate, since aggregation and decay are its typical operations. For Guénon, however, personal immortality seems to be no more possible for those who unite with Providence than for those who unite with Fate. There are two reasons for this: firstly it is because his idea of the soul is conditioned by its role in occultism, where one is concerned with the “subtle body,” which is defined as a quasi-material intermediary between the personal soul and the body. Following this materialised view of “soul,” Guénon expresses the view that the soul, just like the body, is an aggregate of elements drawn from its surrounding world, as in fact is the case with the “subtle body.” Secondly, Guénon’s position is determined by his belief that there could be only one real being, which he refers to as the “Principle.” But the implicit idea that an exclusive reality must enhance that of the Principle is in any case the exact opposite of the truth. To think in this way is to betray a suspicion that the higher reality will have to be exclusive because it is in fact too insubstantial to relate effectually to any other. At the same time, Guénon maintains that the individual person is what results when the Principle intersects a certain plane of existence, although this interaction would inconsistently imply that the Principle and the plane are both phenomena which have enough in common to be able to interact. He also speaks of a “passage” from one plane of existence to another without explaining what it is that thus passes. One is left with a supposed interaction of a reality which is beyond the need for salvation with a relative being which is incapable of it. Finally, there is another aspect of this subject which reveals a close parallelism between Pythagoreanism and Far-Eastern tradition which is referred to in The Great Triad (p. 143), though no explanation is offered for the squaring of the numbers. This appears in the way that the 3, 4, 5 right-angled triangle is used by both traditions to symbolise the way in which the human Will in union with Providence can prove equal to Nature or Fate. Providence is represented by 3, because 3 is the first numerical unity after Unity itself, as befits the first reality in order after God. Man, or the human Will, is represented by 4, because this Will is the fourth principle in which the Instinctive, Animic, and Intellective are integrated. Fate is represented by 5, because 5 is the “first multitude” and so symbolically the origin of multiplicity. In Far-Eastern symbolism it represents Earth, while 6 represents Heaven. In the 3, 4, 5 triangle, however, the sides corresponding to 3 and 4 only equal 5 when all the sides are squared, as in 9 + 16 = 25. This raises the question of the symbolic aspect of the power to which the numbers are raised. The raising of a series of numbers to different powers appears in the Platonic Lamda, with its series 1, 2, 4, 8 and 1, 3, 9, 27, that is to say, 1, 21, 22, 23 and 1, 31, 32, 33. (In either group, 1 would result from a zero index as 20 =30 =1).The unit is common to both and is any number to the power of zero. The indices are therefore 0, 1, 2, and 3. The power of zero represents all realities as they are in God “before” any kind of creation. With the power of one, the realities represented by 3, 4, and 5 are the level of archetypal reality. Here, Providence (3) and Man (4) clearly outweigh Fate (5), as is shown by the way 3 and 4 exceed 5. In the human microcosm, this 3 corresponds to the Intellective sphere. Conversely, at the lowest extreme of instantiation in matter, the relation between these three elements appears as 33 + 43 or 27 + 64 = 91, while 53 = 125, so that at this level Nature or Fate (5) must dominate the other two, Providence (3) and the human Will (4). In man, this corresponds to the Instinctive sphere. Intermediate between the Intellective and the Instinctive levels is the realm of subtle or psychic reality, to which the Animic sphere corresponds, and here the index applied must be 2. It is also here that Providence (3) and the human Will (4) together can balance Fate, as represented by32 +42 =52 =25,or9+16=25.This applies to the highest level of creation as natura naturata, where Fate (5) is joined to its Divine origin by man’s Will (4) being united to Providence (3). At this level, then, it is not a question of absolute superiority over Nature or Fate, but of an equality which can imply a richer and more prolific possibility than superiority alone could imply, because it must include a mutuality enriching both sides of the relation: Nature is spiritualised as its possibilities are able to reach their highest perfection, and the soul shares in another range of realities while remaining true to its own.
- [The Metaphysical Underpinnings of Prayer](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/connaughton-underpinnings) - The Metaphysical Underpinnings of Prayer By Philip Connaughton The opinion which would deny that Absolute Being is the source of manifestation cannot claim to be more than mere opinion since, by precluding ‘absoluteness’ it reduces all knowledge and truth to the domain of relativity, where any statement can be counterbalanced by its opposite. When agnostics or atheists claim that only the world of relativity is certain and real because it is ‘demonstrably so’ they clearly opt for only one aspect of relativity, and one hardly needs a demonstration to see that relativity is, in virtue of its obvious transience, likewise ‘demonstrably unreal’: “how can that be a real thing which is always passing away, and is first this and then that?” (Plato, Cratylus, 439,e). What atheism and agnosticism actually demonstrate is a negative subjectivity rather than a capacity for objective truth, since relativity, by definition, depends on the Absolute which, for its part, is not so much demonstrably, as self evidently Real. Worldliness in general, if called to task, is thus obliged to cling to the absurd assumption that relativity is self-sufficient — or in theological terms — that the world is more real than God! Contradiction is inherent in all worldly ‘philosophies’ because they are firstly predisposed to (earth-bound) limits, and then presume to ‘pluck the stars from the sky’ as, for example, when agnostics claim that man cannot have certainty and are then at pains to oppose those who would believe in the Beyond. Contradiction is also obvious in the predisposition of atheists who — simply because Transcendent Reality is beyond sensory perception — believe in its absence! Worldliness precludes that which by definition cannot be disproved, and then refuses to acknowledge its self-imposed limits. To claim that reality consists only of transience and flux, is pure contradiction, for transience could not even be observed or remarked upon without some awareness of the underlying presence of its opposite, just as one could not observe or remark upon darkness without the assumption of light. Moreover,just as the capacity to observe transience as such is possible only on the assumption of an underlying continuity, so too, the actuality of transience is possible only on the basis of the actuality of its underlying Substance. The underlying thread of continuity, which pervades all of manifestation and upon which it depends for its existence, is not other than the Heavenly or Creative Ray traditionally known as the Axis Mundi. Though the discursive intellect has, of course, the capacity to discern continuity, it is faith which spontaneously sees continuity as an expression of the Axis Mundi which is essentially ‘beyond measure’. Prayer,as the expression of faith, is the microcosmic affirmation of the ‘thread of life’ or of the Axis Mundi by which man may return to his Source. The fact that faith may appear as a ‘mere intuition’ is a reflection, not so much of the Reality to which it relates, but of its assimilation within the limits of the discursive intellect. Faith is measured, not by empirical demonstration, but by the degree to which it ‘transports’ man beyond his passive identification with the transient world. The essentially transcendent nature of faith is verified by the fact that it also characteristically manifests as a ‘flash’ of insight — in contrast to man’s habitual ‘darkness’ — and conveys certitude that is appropriately ‘beyond’ question. Ultimately Knowledge is strictly personal and incommunicable, not because of a lack of ‘objectivity’ but because it transcends the limits of manifestation. It is for this reason that faith — being knowledge of Transcendence — is not subject to demonstration since it relates to that which is ‘beyond measure’. The content of faith is thus only ‘subjectively verifiable’ since its criterion of validity corresponds to St. Anselm’s, “I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand”(Proslogium; Chapter1). In other words, in saying that the content of faith is “subjectively verifiable” one means that it cannot be ‘demonstrably verified’ because of its essentially Transcendent nature; “He’s a Blockhead who wants a proof of what he can’t Perceive, And he’s a fool who tries to make such a Blockhead believe” (William Blake, Epigrams: 16). In this context humility corresponds to the ‘objective’ criterion of truth for, like Knowledge itself, it allows man to transcend himself and could also, by that fact, be regarded as the ‘aesthetic’ hallmark of truth. The uncompromising opposition between worldliness and religion, or between this world and the Beyond, or again, between appearance and Substance is irreducible on the plane of duality and is crystallised in the statement, “He that is not with me is against me and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad” (Matt.12:30), or in the very notion of Transcendence. Since this opposition in effect constitutes the fabric of duality it is reflected throughout manifestation and consequently imposes itself on man so much so that even the attempt to avoid it results in ‘choice by default’ and represents a passive recapitulation of the ‘separation’ which reigns between the Absolute and the relative, or between God and man. The raison d’être of human intelligence — to discern truth by seeing beyond (transient and insubstantial) appearances to the underlying substance — is ultimately that man may choose the Truth and embrace the Real. It is thus in the nature of things that the avoidance of choice, is to choose the insubstantial by default since not choosing that which is Real is in effect to choose that which is not Real. It is because worldliness restricts itself to sensory perceptions and the rational and discursive intellect that it is blind to the lack of common measure between continuity — which as the underlying Substance gives life—and transience which consumes man. Blindness to the significant difference between the intelligibility of continuity and the unintelligibility of flux epitomises worldliness and is equivalent to saying that the very notion of significance is without significance! Passivity rests on the inability to see continuity as a reflection of Substance. Prayer,on the other hand, is an active ascendancy which results from the intuition or faith which transcends the sensorial or passive intelligence. Prayer, being the active affirmation of continuity, is opposed to worldliness which is passivity in relation to transience. Since faith, as an intuition of the Source, and ultimate unity of manifestation, is commensurate with Transcendence, it is in opposition to the specific nature of the discursive knowledge which is commensurate with the manifested world of duality. Faced with this opposition between faith and mere discursive reasoning — which as mentioned, not only corresponds to the ‘separation’ between God and man, but is irreducible on the level of manifestation — faith necessitates a ‘retreat’ from the outward world of duality with which the discursive intellect deals. In other words, in light of the opposition between worldliness and the Beyond, saying “Yes” to God (the Real) is preconditioned by the capacity to say “No” to the world. If prayer can be thought of as a ‘dying to the world’ or if “true philosophers are half dead” (Phaedo, 64b) it is because prayer is actually a “dying to [the illusory nature of] the world”. The necessity of saying “No” to world, or the ‘retreat’ from outwardness is graphically confirmed by the fact that the Luminous Ray or Axis Mundi, which descends from the Transcendent, has its direct point of contact at the centre of the plane of existence whence it radiates horizontally or, as it were ‘indirectly’, to that entire plane of existence. Despite the fact that all creation depends on it, the horizontal radiation of this Luminous Ray — as opposed to its vertical descent — represents an ‘indirectness’ and is thus the ‘outward’ or ‘fallen’ refraction of the Vertical. It is for this reason that man, in reversal of the fall, is required to retreat to the (microcosmic) centre where he and his perception of relativity become as it were (humbly) concentrated into a single point directly beneath the Axis Mundi. The fact that this retreat is susceptible of such graphic illustration highlights its essentially ‘universal’ nature, which is seen again in the direct correspondence between the physical retreat from the outward world, and the spiritual/Inward goal. The physical retreat which prayer typically entails is not only the material reflection of Centrality, but also represents a ‘support’ whereby man can realise Inwardness; ”when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou has shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret” (Matt. 6:6). Likewise, prayer “without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17) being a constant affirmation, is like a holy monotony that opposes the temporal flux and distraction of the world; “since...fallen man inevitably tends to become the slave of habits, the religions meet this necessity by the regular performance of rites, which become as it were sacred habits. Thus,through the Divine Mercy, the very limitations of fallen man are made the vehicles of spiritual influence” (Abu Bakr Siraj Ed-Din, The Book of Certainty, P. 84). The retreat from this world to the Inward point beneath the Divine Axis is in effect the realisation of humility. Humility is essentially the concrete assimilation of the ‘unreality’ of relativity vis a vis the Reality of the Absolute, and the realisation that there is no common measure between the two. Humility corresponds to the devotional sacrifice of oneself, while prayer corresponds to the active devotion which then extends, from this central point, upwards along the vertical life-line. Prayer has the capacity to bridge the unimaginable chasm between man (the relative) and God (the Absolute) in virtue of its ‘universality’, for while it consists of faith which aspires to the highest possible Reality, its necessary point of departure is humility. Faith — which aspires to the ‘abstract’ heights of Transcendence from the ‘concrete’ depth of humility — is realised by prayer which corresponds to the practical embrace — ‘with both hands’ — of its theoretical content. Faith and humility together transcend the dichotomy of the ‘abstract’ height and the ‘concrete’ depth, and are thus, in principle, the conditions of universality. The practical or actual synthesis of the two (faith and humility/abstract height and concrete depth) in prayer is possible in virtue of the latter being the subjective/microcosmic realisation of the Axis Mundi. While prayer is thus the hallmark of universality, or microcosmic integrity — the degree to which the aspiration of one’s theoretical knowledge coincides with the depth of one’s concrete being — it is also the spontaneous expression of integrity, and the discipline whereby it continues. In other words, if the ‘fall of man’ is characterised by a passive lack of integrity, prayer is the active re-integration of one’s being with one’s knowledge. Man’s (spiritual) integrity, or true microcosmic status — aspirational height combined with humble depth — is, in principle, possible by virtue of the Axis Mundi, and is realised, in practice, by its subjective counterpart prayer. As seen above, the outright denial of the Beyond stems ultimately from blindness of the fact that there is no common measure between worldly transience and its underlying continuity. There is also a ‘lesser blindness’ which consists of having a theoretical awareness of the Beyond but which does not bring forth prayer. Though this lesser blindness corresponds to a belief in the Beyond, it is not accompanied by a correlative assimilation of the ‘unreality’ of manifestation and results in the Beyond being assimilated in specifically human terms or as merely an ‘abstract extension’ of the material world. Though this state represents a lesser blindness it is in a sense ‘neither here nor There’ for while it claims to have some inkling of the Beyond it remains more or less passive in relation to the flux of the world. A true assimilation of Transcendent Reality entails the corresponding assimilation of the ‘unreality’ of this world, which is to say faith in the Beyond, properly speaking, entails a corresponding humility. Faith in the ‘abstract’ height of Transcendence presupposes ‘concrete’ depth of humility; just as saying “Yes” to God and saying “No” to the world are essentially simultaneous aspects of the same spiritual journey. Just as the beauty of a flower is clearly ‘from Heaven’, its upward tendency or aspirational splendour cannot be realised without its roots in the earth. The vertical stem or life-line between the roots and the manifestation of Beauty (essentially Divine and Transcendent) is the Axis Mundi and the sap within it is prayer. In other words while the fragile and ephemeral beauty standing at the summit of the vertical stem/axis is clearly ‘not of this world’ and recalls that Beauty in itself is Transcendent the particular realisation of its earthly splendour depends on humility or having realised its ‘roots in the mundane’ as it reaches toward its Heavenly Source. Humility which is the earthly correspondence of Divine Beauty, finds its expression in prayer, the aspirational life-force (or sap) which connects the two. The fact that the greatest of saints frequently considered themselves the greatest of sinners exemplifies the coincidence of humility and Transcendence. The particular manifestation of humility that such saints represent is not so much a lack of objectivity as the realisation that, in contrast with their intimate sense of the Absolute, they, and the world, seem‘less,or worse than nothing’. Nonetheless, in metaphysical terms, humility is not so much a self-abasement or sense of unworthiness, as knowledge of the ‘nothingness’ of relativity, just as conversely, the pride of imagining oneself to “be someone” is not so much pretence as ignorance of Reality. It may seem impious to suggest that humility and prayer depend on knowledge rather than on the merit. In actual fact, it could be said that the reverse is true, for man’s merit is his humility and corresponds to the humble realisation that his knowledge at best represents a mere shadow of Knowledge as such, as when Plato, speaking on behalf of the Oracle at Delphi says, “The wisest of you men is he who has realised, like Socrates, that in respect of wisdom he is really worthless”(Apology,23b). In other words, this humility, or acknowledgement of limits corresponds to the summit of human knowledge. Moreover, in virtue of being the “summit of human knowledge”, humility is “the objective criterion of truth” — as stated above — in the context of knowledge which is only “subjectively verifiable” or otherwise ‘beyond demonstration’. In actual fact humility (extinction of the ego) corresponds not only to the summit of human knowledge but is also the ‘basis of Wisdom’ for it is where human knowledge meets — and is extinguished by — Knowledge as such. It is, again using graphic imagery, only at this ‘geometrical point’ or this isthmus that the Divine ‘directly’ meets the human. The ‘humility of Socrates’ represents therefore, not only the summit of human knowledge, but also the basis of Wisdom since only when the ‘unreality’ of relativity is acknowledged can the Reality of the Absolute be made known. If prayer reaches from the ‘here below’ to the Transcendent Beyond, it also allows the Transcendent to reach man; for in prayer man not only meets God but a fortiori God meets man; “...and whoso seeketh to approach Me one span, I approach him one cubit: and whoso seeketh to approach Me one cubit, I approach him two fathoms: and whoso walketh towards Me, I run towards him; and whoso cometh before Me with an earth full of sins, and believeth solely in Me, him I come before with a face of forgiveness as big as the earth”(hadith qudsi). The superabundance of the Divine response confirms the content of man’s faith that there is no common measure between the Absolute and the relative, for prayer is actually not so much man’s gift of himself to God, but God’s gift of Himself to man. It is the Divine that meets man, for human efforts—in accordance with the Transcendence of God — cannot as such stretch to the Beyond. Knowledge, which is not aware of its natural limits, is not knowledge but folly, manifesting as pride, while humility — defined by an awareness of its limits — is the implicit foundation of knowledge. The gift of intelligence is of value only in so far as it recognises its limits, which is to say that The summit of human knowledge paradoxically coincides with the (humble) recognition of its limits and only at this point or summit can the Divine, or true Reality directly meet man. Man’s part, strictly speaking, is in saying “No” to (the world of) illusion, Reality says “Yes” to man. In retreating from the world to the central Axis the direct nature of the link between man — the last in the sequence of creation — and the Source, is re-established which is then clearly not so much a case of man saying “Yes” to God, as God saying “Yes” to man: “My slave ceaseth not to draw near unto Me by devotions of his free will until I love him; and when I love him, I am the hearing whereby he heareth and the sight whereby he seeth and the hand wherewith he smiteth and the foot whereon he walketh” (hadith qudsi). Human knowledge, which is ignorant of its natural limits, is, by that fact, bound by them and will manifest its ignorance in pride. Without the insight which humility represents it remains a passive conceit which is blind to the ever-presence of Divine influence. Knowledge which, on the other hand, is conscious of its ‘conditional’ limits is thereby able to transcend them for the quality of humility coincides with the Activity of Heaven reaching down to man. The change of emphasis from man searching for God, to God searching for man corresponds to a shift to the perspective which assumes the ‘non-duality’ of Reality (Source and manifestation) or the ‘Oneness of Being’ (Wahdat al-wujúd) and that consequently all ‘conditional reality’ or relativity depends entirely upon its participation in (unconditional) Reality. As seen above when considering knowledge, the intrinsic ‘universality’ of knowledge depends entirely on its (humble) awareness of being nothing in itself and that this awareness of its conditions or limits indicates that it is ‘essentially above and beyond’ them. Ignorance of, or a proud refusal to acknowledge the ‘natural’ limits, on the other hand, ensures subjection to them. This paradoxical quality of ‘conscious humility’ as the sine qua non of true Knowledge illustrates precisely that all ‘relative knowledge’ is nothing apart from its (conscious) participation in Knowledge as such, for knowledge which is not conscious is not, properly speaking, knowledge. This is as much to say that the measure of veracity depends on the (humble) awareness of active or conscious participation in Knowledge itself, viz. the Logos or the Activity of the Creative Ray. When the specifically metaphysical perspective of ‘non-duality’ or the ‘Oneness of Being’ is paraphrased in theological terms it is equivalent to saying, as above, that “man’s merit is his humility” or that it depends on his realisation (knowledge) that he does not have merit apart from God who is the only Reality. All relative merit not only depends on, but is also measured by the consciousness of its dependence on the superabundance of God. In this ‘definition of merit’ it is seen that prayer is merit, for prayer is nothing other than the overflowing of this consciousness of dependence upon God. When man, for the sake of the one and only (Transcendent) Reality, abandons himself and this world as being nothing more than a transient illusion ‘his’ knowledge is then essentially a participation in Knowledge as such (the Creative Logos) whereby Transcendence coincides with Immanence and the world is thus ‘transmuted’ into nothing less than the continuous participation in the Divine Source. The superabundance of Divine response, “and whoso walketh towards Me, I run towards him” from the hadith qudsi quoted above, is also found in the Gospels: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness; and all these things will be added unto you” (Matt.; 6:33). With this in mind, if sacrifice is saying “No” to oneself and the world, it can just as easily be seen as the first phase of God saying “Yes” to man, for that which we sacrifice is returned to us (sacer-ficio; literally “to make sacred”) as the continuous Splendour of God — the superabundance expression of the only Reality. In other words, after the sacrifice of, or retreat from the false plenitude of the world, manifestation in all of its multiplicity is then transmuted to its sacred aspect, the overflowing abundance of God’s Immanence. To the worldly, as it were intoxicated or overcome by duality, manifestation appears alternately as a seductive plenitude or a disappointing vale of tears, and is, in either case always assumed to be ‘real’. For the spiritual traveller, on the other hand, this world is both an earthly exile and the Splendour of Divine manifestation which never seems quite real. In light of the fact that worldly flux ‘is not other than’ Divine Splendour, the transmutation mentioned above, is really a ‘subjective realisation’ and while it may appear as a ‘dramatic event’, there is ‘in Reality’ no change. Objectively, or rather from the point of view of the ‘Oneness of Being’, manifestation is the Splendour of Reality for despite being ‘outside’ God’s Absoluteness, it is contained Eternally within His Infinity.
- [Faith and Modernity](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/faith-and-modernity) - Faith and Modernity by Karen Armstrong In the Western world, a strong belief in the objective truths of religion, which are viewed as incontrovertible, demonstrable facts, is regarded as essential to the life of faith. When asking if somebody is religious, people often inquire: “Does he or she believe?” as though accepting certain credal propositions was the prime religious activity. Indeed, faith is equated with belief, but this equation is of recent provenance. Originally the meaning of the word faith was akin to trust, as when we say that we have faith in a friend or an ideal. Faith was not an intellectual position but a virtue: it was the careful cultivation, by means of the rituals and myths of religion, of the conviction that, despite all the dispiriting evidence to the contrary, life had some ultimate meaning and value. The Latin word credo (translated now as “I believe”) seems to have derived from the phrase cor dare: to give one’s heart. The Middle English word beleven meant to love. When Christians proclaimed: credo in unum Deum, they were not so much affirming their belief in the existence of a single deity as committing their lives to God. When St. Anselm of Canterbury prayed in the eleventh century: credo ut intellegam (“I have faith in order that I may understand”), 1 he was not blindly submitting to the doctrines of religion in the hope that one day these incredible assertions would make sense to him, if he abdicated his critical intelligence. His prayer should really be translated: “I commit myself in order that I may understand.” The meaning of dogma would only be revealed when he lived a fully Christian life, embracing its mythology and rituals wholeheartedly. 1. Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion, 2. This attitude is foreign to modernity. Today people feel that before they live a religious life, they must first satisfy themselves intellectually of its metaphysical claims. This is sound scientific practice: first you must establish a principle before you can apply it. But it is not the way that religion has traditionally worked. In the modern world, faith has come to mean an acceptance of credal truths as objective facts. When people find that they are not convinced by the so-called “proofs” of God’s existence, they think that they have lost their faith. Because the doctrines of religion cannot be demonstrated logically and empirically, they seem untrue. Our western modernity has led us to an entirely different notion of truth, and, as a result, we can no longer be religious in quite the same way as our ancestors. Our scientifically oriented society has lost the sense of the symbolic, which lay at the heart of all pre-modern faith. In the perspectives of tradition, where every earthly reality was a replica of its celestial archetype, the symbol was inseparable from the transcendent reality to which it directed our attention. Likeness denoted presence, in rather the same way as the son of a deceased friend brings his father into the room with him and, at the same time, makes us newly conscious of our loss and distance from the dead and makes us yearn towards the departed. For traditional faith, Christ was present in this way in the eucharistic symbols of bread and wine. Once the Protestant reformers stated that the eucharist was only a symbol, and essentially separate from Christ, the modern spirit had declared itself. In the traditional world, there were two recognized ways of thinking, speaking and acquiring knowledge, which scholars have called mythos and logos.2 Both were essential to humanity; neither was considered superior but both were regarded as complimentary, each with its special area of competence. Myth related to what was thought to be timeless and constant; it looked back to the origins of life, to the beginnings of culture, and to the deepest levels of the mind. Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning. Unless we find some significance in our lives, human beings fall very easily into despair. The mythos of a society provided people with a context that made sense of their day-to-day existence. It directed their attention to the eternal and universal. 2. See, for example, Johannes Sloek, Devotional Language, trans. Henrik Mossin (Berlin and New York, 1996), 53-96). It was also rooted in what we would call the unconscious mind. The various mythological stories were not intended to be taken literally, but can perhaps be understood as a primitive form of psychology. When people told stories about heroes who descended into the underworld, struggled through labyrinths, or fought with monsters, they were bringing to light the obscure regions of the subconscious realm, which is not accessible to purely rational investigation. Because of the dearth of myth, many now resort to the techniques of psychoanalysis to help them to come to terms with their inner world. Myth could not be demonstrated by logical proof; its insights were more intuitive and similar to those acquired by means of art. Myth only became a reality when it was embodied in cult, rituals and ceremonies which worked upon the worshippers aesthetically, evoking within them a sense of sacred significance and enabling them to apprehend the deeper currents of existence. Myth and cult were so inseparable that it is a matter of scholarly debate which came first: the mythical narrative or the cult that was attached to it. Myth was also associated with mysticism, the descent into the psyche by means of structured disciplines of focus and concentration which have been developed in all cultures as a means of acquiring insight that lies beyond the reach of reason. The words “myth” and “mysticism” are both related etymologically to the Greek musteion: to close the mouth or the eyes.3 They are both, therefore, associated with experience that is silent, obscure and not amenable to the clarity of truths which are self-evident or rationally demonstrable. But without a cult or mystical practice, the truths of mythology make no sense, and seem arbitrary and incredible. In rather the same way, a musical score remains opaque to most of us and needs to be interpreted instrumentally before we can appreciate its beauty and intuit the “truth” that the music is trying to convey. In the pre-modern world, people had a different view of history, which was not seen as a chronological sequence of unique events but a way of expressing truths that were timeless, constant realities. Hence history would tend to repeat itself: in the Bible, the people of Israel pass miraculously through a sea, which has opened to let them cross dry-shod, on at least two occasions. Historical narratives were composed precisely 3. John Macquarrie, Thinking About God (London, 1957), 34. to bring out this eternal dimension, and were not designed to relate what actually happened.4 They attempted to define the meaning of an event. Thus we do not know what really occurred when the ancient Israelites escaped from Egypt and passed through the Sea of Reeds. The biblical tale has been deliberately written up as a myth, and linked with other stories about rites of passage, immersion in the deep, and gods splitting a sea in two to bring a new reality into being. Thus well-meaning, modern attempts to explain the story (by referring to the frequency of flashflooding in the region, for example) are entirely misplaced. The myth has become central to Jewish identity by means of ritual. Every year the Passover Seder brings this strange story into their lives and helps them to make it their own. Indeed, the Haggadah reminds worshippers that every single Israelite must regard himself or herself as a member of the generation that escaped from slavery in Egypt and passed through the Sea of Reeds. One could say that unless an historical event is mythologized and ritualized in this way, it cannot be religious. The cult and the mythical narrative liberate the original incident from the confines of its historical period and make it a timeless reality in the lives of the faithful. To ask whether the Exodus from Egypt took place exactly as recounted in the Bible or to demand historical or scientific evidence to prove that it is factually true is a modern attitude that mistakes the nature and purpose of this story. In the same way, St. Paul made the historical Jesus into a myth by means of such rites as baptism and the eucharistic meal. In baptism, he explained to his Roman converts, the Christian entered into the death of the Messiah in the hope of rising again with him to new life;5 when they broke bread and drank wine in memory of Jesus, as he had instructed his disciples, Christians “proclaimed the death of the Lord,” making it ritually present again, and thus making it a redemptive factor in the lives of those present.6 Indeed, Paul makes it clear that Christians were not concerned any longer with the historical Jesus, who lived “according to the flesh.” They now know the Christ in a different, more spiritual way.7 4. Sloek, Devotional Language 73-74; Thomas L. Thompson, The Bible in History: How Writers Create a Past (London, 1999), 15-33. 5. Romans 6:31-11. 6. I Corinthians 11:23-28. 7. 2 Corinthians 5:16. To this day, Catholics are taught that the Mass recreates the sacrifice of Calvary in a mystical manner, lifting this distant event from the first century and making it a living reality by means of the stylized cultic actions of the priest. In the Islamic tradition, the rites and practices of the Law liberate the Prophet Muhammad from the seventh century: by imitating the way the Prophet lived, loved, prayed, washed, ate and worshipped, Muslims hope, by cultivating his external sunnah, to acquire his attitude of perfect surrender (islam) to God; in a real but trans-rational way, the Prophet thus lives again in every devout Muslim, who has internalized Muhammad and made him part of his or her very being. Shii Muslims do the same with Imam Husain, when they reproduce the circumstances of his death in their passion plays and ritual dirges; when they march in mourning processions through the street on the fast day of Ashura, the anniversary of Husain’s martyrdom, they promise to join his struggle against tyranny and injustice. The rites have made the historical tragedy of Husain’s murder at Kerbala a potent myth, which expresses the Shii sense of an unseen but constant battle for justice that lies at the core of human existence. But in the traditional world, logos was equally important. Logos was the rational, pragmatic, and scientific thought that enabled men and women to function effectively in the world. Our modernity may have reduced our understanding of mythos, but we are very familiar with logos, which is the basis of our society. Unlike mythos, logos must relate accurately to the factual evidence and correspond to external mundane reality if it is to be effective. It must work efficiently in the ordinary world. We use this logical, discursive reasoning when we have to make things happen, get something done, or persuade other people to adopt a particular course of action. Logos is practical. Unlike myth, which looks back to the beginnings and to the foundations, logos forges ahead and tries to discover something new: to elaborate upon old insights, achieve a greater control over our environment, invent something novel, or find something fresh.8 In the pre-modern world, both mythos and logos were regarded as indispensable. We have always needed science, even if only to make an arrow sharp or effective, or to find the best way of harvesting our crops. 8. Sloek, Devotional Language, 50-52, 68-76. It was the discipline of logos which enabled rulers to govern society efficiently, to arrive at satisfactory political decisions, and to succeed in battle. Mythos could do none of these things, but it was also considered essential for humanity. We are beings that fall very easily into despair. Unlike other animals, we fret about the human condition, are haunted by the fact of our mortality, and distressed beyond measure by the tragedies that flesh is heir to. As soon as men and women became recognizably human, they began to create religions, at the same time and for the same reasons as they created works of art: the myths and cults of tradition gave their lives a sense of sacred significance which made them worthwhile; they provided the context within which they could pursue their logos-driven activities. But mythos and logos were essentially distinct, and it was held to be dangerous to confuse mythical and rational discourse. They had separate jobs to do. Myth was not reasonable; its narratives were not expected to be demonstrated empirically. You were not supposed to make mythos the basis of a pragmatic policy. If you did so, the results could be disastrous, because what worked well in the inner world of the psyche was not readily applicable to the affairs of the external world. When, for example, Pope Urban II summoned the First Crusade in 1095, his plan belonged to the realm of logos. He wanted the knights of Europe to stop fighting one another and tearing the fabric of Western Christendom apart, but instead to expend their energies instead in a war in the Middle East and so extend the power of the Roman church. But when this military expedition became entangled with folk mythology, biblical lore, and apocalyptic fantasy, the result was catastrophic, practically, militarily, and morally. Throughout the long Crusading project, it remained true that whenever logos was in the ascendant, the Crusaders prospered. They performed well on the battlefield, created workable colonies in the Middle East, and learned to relate more positively with the local Muslim population. But whenever the Crusaders made a mythical or mystical vision the basis of their policies, they were usually defeated and committed terrible atrocities.9 Yet logos also had its limitations. It could not assuage human pain or sorrow. Rational discourse could make no sense of tragedy. Faced with 9. Karen Armstrong, Holy War: The Crusades and their Impact on Today’s World (London, 1988; London and New York, 1991), 3-75, 147-274. the natural catastrophes and man-made atrocities which punctuate human life, reason is silent and has nothing to say. A scientist could make things work more efficiently and could discover astounding new facts about the physical world, but he could not explain the meaning of life. Logos could not answer our anguished questions about the ultimate value of human life. That was the preserve of myth or cult.10 In the traditional worldview, faith had a different meaning. People did not, for example, read their scriptures in a literal manner. After the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, some of the exiles found comfort in the teaching of Isaac Luria (1524-1572), who evolved a new creation myth, which born no relation to the creation story in the Book of Genesis. But to Luria’s disciples, the new myth made perfect sense. They were still reeling with the shock and trauma of exile, and Luria’s version of creation resonated deeply with this experience. It began with an act of voluntary exile. In order to make room for the world, the infinite, inaccessible and omnipresent god (which Jewish mystics call Ein Sof: “Without End”) shrank into itself, evacuating, as it were, a region within itself in order to make a space for the physical universe. In its compassionate desire to make itself known in and by its creatures, Ein Sof had inflicted exile on a part of itself. Unlike the orderly creation described in Genesis, this was a violent process of primal explosions, disasters and false starts, which seemed to the Spanish exiles a more accurate picture of the cruel world they had experienced. At an early stage, Ein Sof had tried to fill the vacuum it had created with light, but the “vessels” or “pipes”, which were supposed to channel this divine light shattered under the strain. Sparks of heavenly light remained trapped in the world of matter; everything was now in the wrong place, and Luria’s disciples imagined the Shekhinah, the Presence that is the closest we come to an apprehension of the divine in this life, wandering through the world, a perpetual exile, yearning to be reunited with the Godhead.11 If the mystics of Safed had been asked if they believed that this had really happened, they would have considered it an inept question. The primordial events described in such mythos were not simply incidents that had happened once in the remote past; they were also occurrences that happened all the time. They pointed to the fundamental truths and 10. Sloek,DevotionalLanguage,143. 11. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism(London,1955),245-280. laws that underlay phenomena and historical happenings. The Spanish Jews would probably have replied that exile was a basic law of existence. All over the world, Jews were uprooted aliens; even the Gentiles experienced loss, disappointment, and a sense that they were not quite at home in the world, and Luria’s creation myth revealed this is a wholly new way. The exile of the Shekhinah and their own lives as refugees were not two separate realities, but were one and the same, since exile was inscribed in the very Ground of being—even in God itself. Today people would be disturbed by such a flagrant departure from scripture, yet Luria’s vision became a mass-movement, the only theological system to win such general acceptance among Jews all over the world at this time.12 A literal reading of Scripture is a modern preoccupation. In the traditional world, Jews, Christians and Muslims all relished highly allegorical, inventive and esoteric interpretations of the sacred text. Since God’s word was infinite, it was capable of multiple readings. So Jews were not distressed, as many modern people would be, by Luria’s divergence from the plain meaning of the Bible. His myth spoke to them with authority because it explained their lives and provided them with meaning. But despite the power of its symbolism, Lurianic Kabbalah would not have become so popular had it not been expressed in ritual and meditative disciplines. Jews who followed Luria’s vision would make night vigils, rising at midnight, weeping, and rubbing their faces in the dust. These ritual gestures helped them to express their sense of grief and trauma, and linked them with their exiled God. They would lie awake all night, calling out to God like lovers, lamenting the pain of separation which is at the heart of the experience of exile. There were penitential disciplines —fasting, lashings, rolling in the snow—which were believed to hasten the end of this divine exile. Kabbalists would go for long hikes through the countryside, wandering like the Shekhinah, and acting out their sense of homelessness.13 But Luria insisted that there was to be no unhealthy wallowing. His mystics must work through their sorrow in a disciplined stylized way, until they achieved a measure of joy. The midnight rituals always ended with a meditation on the reunion of the Shekhinah with 12. Gershom Scholem, Sabbetai Sevi, The Mystical Messiah (London and Princeton, 1973), 23-25; R.J. Weblowsky, “Messianism in Jewish History” in Marc J. Saperstien (ed.), Essential Papers in Messianic Movements in Jewish History (New York and London, 1992), 48. 13. R.J. Weblowsky, “The Safed Revival and Its Aftermath,” in Arthur Green (ed.), Jewish Spirituality, 2 Vols., (London, 1986, 1989), II, 15-19. Ein Sof, and, consequently, the end of the separation of humanity from its divine source. The mystic was told to imagine that every one of his limbs was an earthly shrine for the Divine Presence.14 They were also taught the techniques of concentration (kawwanot), which helped them to become aware of the divine spark of light within their own selves and which filled them with bliss and rapture. These mystical disciplines and cultic rituals filled Jews with joy at a time when the world seemed alien and cruel.15 Rational thought cannot assuage our sorrow. After the Spanish disaster, Jews found that the logical discipline of philosophy, which had been popular among the Spanish Jews, could not address their pain.16 To make life bearable, the exiles turned from logos to mythos, which enabled them to make contact with the unconscious sources of their sense of loss, and anchored their lives in a vision that bought them comfort. Without a cult, without prayer and ritual, myths and doctrines seem arbitrary and meaningless. Without the special rites he devised, Luria’s creation story would have remained a senseless, bizarre fiction. Faith is only possible in such a liturgical, prayerful context. Once people were deprived of that type of spiritual activity, they would lose their faith. This is what happened to some of the Jews who elected in 1492 to stay behind in Spain and convert to Christianity. This had been the choice offered to Jews by Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic monarchs of Spain, when they signed the Edict of Expulsion. While many of these Jewish converts to Christianity became fervent and even influential Catholics, many never fully made the transition to the new faith. This was hardly surprising, since, once they had been baptized, they were scrutinized by the Inquisition, and lived in constant fear of arrest on the flimsiest of charges. Ever watchful for any signs of a convert lapsing back into Judaism (such as refusing to eat shellfish or work on the Sabbath), this scrutiny by the Inquisition could mean imprisonment, torture, death, or, at the very least, the confiscation of the suspects’ property.17 As a result, some of the converted Jews became alienated from religion alto- 14. GershomScholem,OntheKabbalahandItsSymbolism(NewYork,1965),150. 15. LaurenceFine,“TheContemplativePracticeofYehudiminLurianicKabbalah”inGreen (ed.), Jewish Spirituality II, 89-90; Louis Jacobs, “The Uplifting of the Sparks in Later Jewish Mysticism” in ibid., II 108-111. 16. J. Weblowsky, “The Safed Revival and Its Aftermath,” 17; Jacob Katz, “Halakah and Kabbalah as Competing Disciplines of Study” in Green (ed.), Jewish Spirituality, II, 52-53. 17. PaulJohnson,AHistoryoftheJews(London,1986),225-29. SACRED WEB 4 25 gether. They could not identify with the Catholicism which made their lives a misery, and, since there was no practising Jews left in the Iberian peninsula, Judaism itself became a distant, unreal memory. Even if the converts wished to practice Judaism in secret, they had no means of learning about Jewish law or ritual practice. In consequence, some were pushed into a religious limbo. Long before secularism, atheism, and religious indifference became common in the rest of Europe, we find instances of these essentially modern attitudes among the Marrano Jews of the Iberian peninsula.18 Some of the Jewish converts did try to adhere to Judaism in secret, but because they did not know how to pray, or to perform the rites of the Law, their “Judaism” bore little relation to the reality. Because those closet Jews did not know how to pray or how to perform the rites correctly, they fell back perforce on reason, creating a form of rational deism, not dissimilar to the philosophical religion that became popular in Europe during the eighteenth century Enlightenment.19 In the seventeenth century, some of these secret Jews escaped from the Iberian peninsula and fled to Amsterdam, where Jews were allowed to practice their faith openly and without persecution. But when they encountered a real Jewish community, a few of them were appalled. The laws and customs of Judaism seemed senseless and barbaric. They had studied modern sciences in Iberia, such as logic, physics, mathematics, and medicine. The abstruse dietary laws and the rituals of purification seemed barbaric and meaningless to these sophisticated Jews, who found it difficult to accept the explanations of the rabbis because they had become accustomed to thinking things out rationally for themselves.20 To an outsider, many of the laws and customs of the Torah seem bizarre: they make sense only in a cultic context which had been denied to the secret Jews of Spain. Two of these Jewish refugees from the Spanish Inquisition achieved notoriety in Amsterdam, because they found it quite impossible to adapt. In the early seventeenth century, one Uriel Da Costa was expelled three times from the Jewish community of Amsterdam: he had written a treatise attacking Jewish law, declaring that he believed only in human reason and the laws of nature. As an excommunicate, he 18. Yirmanyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics, I. The Marrano of Reason (Princeton, 1989) 91, 93, 102. 19. Ibid.,75-76. 20. Ibid.,51-52. 26 SACRED WEB 4 lived an isolated, miserable life, jeered at by children in the street, and shunned by Jews and Christians alike. In 1640, he finally shot himself in the head.21 In 1657, the rabbis were forced to expel Juan da Prado, who had been horrified by the Judaism he had discovered in Amsterdam. In Portugal, he had belonged to the Jewish underground, fighting for his right to think and worship as he chose, but his idea of Judaism was entirely idiosyncratic. Why did Jews think that God had chosen them alone?, he demanded of the Amsterdam rabbis; was it not more logical to think of God as the First Cause rather than as a personality who had dictated a set of barbarous, absurd laws?22 To Jews such as Prado and da Costa, the mythos of Judaism seemed nonsensical, because they approached it from the standpoint of reason, outside the liturgical context that alone could endow it with significance and spirituality. Many modern people have a similar problem, when they confront the mythology of religion with logos alone. They do not meditate, perform rituals, or take part in any ceremonial liturgy, and find that the myths of religion are senseless, barbaric and incredible. At the same time as da Costa and Prado were struggling with the mythology of Judaism, modernity was slowly and painfully coming to birth in Europe. It was a long and complex process, but by the eighteenth century, the people of Europe and America had achieved such astonishing success in science that they began to think that logos was the only path to truth and began to discount mythos as false and superstitious. The new world that was being created contradicted the dynamic of the old mythical spirituality. Our religious experience in the modern world has changed, and because an increasing number of people regard scientific rationalism alone as true, they have often tried to turn mythos into faith in logos, even though in the pre-modern world it was always considered dangerous to conflate the two. We can see the dearth of mythical thinking in the philosophy of the French scientist René Descartes (1596–1650), who was only able to speak in logoi. For Descartes, the universe was a lifeless machine, the physical world inert and dead. It could yield no information about the divine: the sole living thing in the cosmos was the human mind, which could find certainty only by turning in upon itself. We could not even be sure that 21. Ibid.,42-51. 22. Ibid.,57-73. anything besides our own doubts and thoughts exists. Descartes was a devout Catholic, and he wanted to satisfy himself about God’s existence. But he could not submit to the rhythms of mythos, so deeply was he involved in the disciplines of rational thought. Where myth had always looked back to the primordial beginnings, Descartes was a child of logos, which is always pressing forward and seeking something new. He could not therefore go back to the imaginary past of myth and cult. Nor could he rely on the insights of the old prophets and holy texts. A man of the new age, he would not accept received ideas. The scientist, he believed, must make his mind a tabula rasa. Truth could only be supplied by mathematics or by such self-evident propositions as “What’s done cannot be undone.” Since the way back was closed, Descartes could only inch his way painfully forward. One evening, sitting besides a wood stove, Descartes evolved the maxim: Cogito ergo sum: “I think, therefore I am.” This, he maintained, was self-evident and certain. The only thing of which we could be certain was our mind’s experience of doubt. But doubt showed the imperfection of the human mind, and the very notion of “imperfection” would make no sense if we did not have a prior notion of “perfection”. Since a perfection that did not exist would be a contradiction in terms, God— the Ultimate Perfection—must exist.23 This so-called proof is unlikely to convince a modern sceptic. It shows the impotence of reason, when it is not backed up by prayer and ritual, when faced with ultimate issues. Descartes, sitting beside his stove, in his cold, empty world, locked into his own uncertainty, and uttering a “proof” which is little more than a mental conundrum embodies the spiritual dilemma of modern humanity, which has lost the traditional understanding of the role and truth of mythos. We can see how impossible it was for a man of reason to think mythically in the case of the British scientist Sir Isaac Newton (1642 1727), who was perhaps the first fully to make rigorous use of the new scientific methodology of experimentation and deduction. But this total immersion in the world of logos made it impossible for Newton to appreciate that other, more intuitive forms of perception might also offer human beings a form of truth. He was a deeply religious man; in the course of his studies, as he contemplated what he believed to be the scientific 23. cf. René Descartes, Discours de la methode,II:6:19. 28 laws that governed the universe, he used to cry aloud: “O God, I think Thy thoughts after Thee!”24 But for Newton, mythology and mystery were primitive and barbaric: “’Tis the temper of the hot and superstitious part of mankind in matters of religion,” he once wrote irritably, “ever to be fond of mysteries and for that reason to like best what they understand least.”25 Newton became almost obsessed with the desire to purge the Christian faith of its mythical doctrines. He became convinced that the a-rational dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation were the result of a fourth century conspiracy. While working on his magnum opus Philosophiae Naturalis Principia, he was also hard at work on a treatise called The Philosophical Origins of Gentile Theology, which argued that Noah had founded a superstition-free religion which had no revealed scriptures, no doctrines, but only a Deity which could be known through the contemplation of the natural world in a rational manner. Later generations had corrupted this pure faith, and imposed the abominable doctrines of Trinitarianism upon the Church by forging the evidence. Newton was now so thoroughly imbued with pure logos that he could not see that the Greek Orthodox theologians of the fourth century had devised the doctrine of the Trinity precisely as mythos. As Gregory of Nyssa, one of the doctrine’s creators, had explained, the three hypostases of Father, Son and Spirit were not objective facts but simply “terms that we use” to express the way in which the “unnameable and unspeakable” divine nature adapts itself to the limitations of our human minds. It made no sense outside the cultic context of prayer, contemplation and liturgy.26 But Newton could only see the Trinity in rational terms, had no understanding of the role of myth, and was therefore obliged to jettison the doctrine. The difficulty that many Christians today experience with trinitarian theology, which is the crux of Greek Orthodox spirituality, show that they share Newton’s bias in favour of scientific rationalism. Hitherto, in the perspectives of tradition, mythos and logos had always been seen as complimentary. Now for the first time in human history, they were beginning to be seen as incompatible. But even though 24. Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View (New York and London, 1991), 300. 25. Richard S. Westfall, “The Rise of Science and the Decline of Orthodox Christianity: A Study of Kepler, Descartes and Newton,” in David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (eds.), God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1986), 231. 26. GregoryofNyssa,“ToAlybius:ThatThereAreNotThreeGods.” SACRED WEB 4 29 logos can provide us with great gifts on the practical level, it is incapable of yielding a sense of sacred significance or of addressing the ultimate questions. At a time when science and unfettered rationality were forging brilliantly ahead, life was becoming meaningless for an increasing number of people, who for the first time were having to live without mythology. The British philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588 1679) believed that there was a God, but for all practical purposes, God might just as well not exist. God, Hobbes thought, had revealed himself at the beginning of history and would do so again at its End, but until that time we had to get along without him, and wait for him in the dark.27 For the French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623 1662), an intensely religious man, the emptiness and the “eternal silence” of the infinite universe opened up the modern science inspired pure terror: When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost with no means of escape. I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.28 Reason and logos had never been deemed capable of assuaging such existential terror. As a result of the modern jettisoning of mythos, despair and alienation of the sort so eloquently described by Pascal have been a part of the modern experience. By the end of the nineteenth century, scientific rationalism had been so astoundingly successful that an increasing number of scientists, who could command a large popular following, maintained dogmatically that reason must be the sole criterion of truth. As T.H. Huxley (1825–1895), who popularized Darwin’s ideas, explained, people would have to choose between mythology and science. There could be no compromise: “one or the other would have to succumb after a struggle of unknown duration.”29 Truth was now narrowed down to what is “demonstrated 27. Joshua Mitchell, Not By Reason Alone: Religion, History and Identity in Early Modern Political Thought (Chicago, 1993), 58, 61. 28. Blaise Pascal, Pensées trans. A.J. Krailsheimer (London,1966),209. 29. Quoted in Peter Gay, A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism and the Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven and London, 1987), 6-7. and demonstrable,”30 which, religion aside, would exclude the truths told by art or music. For a man like Huxley, there was no other path. Reason alone was truthful and the dogmas of religion were truthless, because they could not be proved logically and empirically. Once religious truth was treated as though it were rational logos, it became incredible. This was perceived by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who declared in The Gay Science (1882) that God was dead. He told the parable of a madman running one morning into the marketplace crying “I seek god!” When the amused bystanders asked if he imagined that God had emigrated or taken a holiday, the madman glared. “Where has God gone?” he demanded. “We have killed him—you and I! We are all his murderers!”31 In an important sense, Nietzsche was right. Without myth, cult, ritual, and prayer, the sense of the sacred evoked only by these means inevitably dies. By making “God” a wholly notional truth, struggling to reach the divine by intellect alone, as some modern believers were attempting to do in the new age, modern men and women had killed it for themselves. The whole dynamic of their future-oriented culture had made the traditional ways of apprehending the sacred psychologically impossible. Like the Iberian Jews, who had been forced to convert to Christianity and tried to hold on to their Judaism in secret, they had been thrust into a religious limbo, and many people imbued with the rational ethos of modernity experienced the truths of religion as tenuous, arbitrary and incomprehensible. Nietzsche’s madman believed that the death of God had torn humanity from its roots, thrown the earth off course, and cast it adrift in a pathless universe. Everything that had once given human beings a sense of ultimate direction had vanished. “Is there still an above and below?” he had asked. “Do we not stray, as though through an infinite nothingness.” 32 A profound terror, a sense of meaningless, rage and fear of annihilation has become a part of the modern experience. Modernity has been enthralling, empowering and liberating for those of us who are fortunate enough to live in the privileged sectors of the world. But without a faith that life has some ultimate value, human existence becomes prey to despair. The terrible icons of our century, Auschwitz, Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo, give us a chilling glimpse of a world in which all sense of sacredness 30. T.H. Huxley, Science and Christian Tradition (New York, 1896),125. 31. FriedrichNietzsche,TheGayScience(NewYork,1974),181. has been lost. To recover our sense of the divine, however we choose to formulate it, we need somehow to recover our sense of mythos, reinstating it as the partner of scientific logos. 32. Ibid.
- [Islam, Catholicism and Orthodoxy: The Matrices of Conceptual Transfer](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/islam-catholicism-orthodoxy-matrices) - Islam, Catholicism and Orthodoxy: The Matrices of Conceptual Transfer By Rusmir Mahmutcehajic Beyond the modern outlook Today, as always in times past, humankind’s image of Reality and Reality itselfneedtobereconciledwithoneanother. Neverbefore, though, has there been more experience for such an undertaking than now. In this experience, confirmationcouldonceagainbefoundforthe view that human liberation from fear and hatred can be achieved through a shift in the understanding of Reality and its images; for Reality itself remains essentially unalterable and, as such, independent of all its images. It is only through assent to human openness towards the Absolute that every image of the world shows itself to be contingent, and that the human individuals who hold that image are beings whose original and final nature may be guaranteed only by the humility and generosity through which they draw perpetually nearer to the better and distance themselves from the worse. If, on the other hand, the image is taken for the Absolute, individuals elevate themselves above it and inevitably commit violence against themselves, the world and God. These two opposing possibilities must be distinguished one from another if our insight into the causes and effects of fear are to have a surer foothold in the human quest for original and final perfection. If the conflicting identities in the Balkans are sketched out as they are today, here – as in every other similar situation world-wide – it is possible tooptfordifferingwaysofconstruingtheirrelations. Oneoftheseisby defining their ethnic identities, whiich are demarcated along political, cultural and economic fault-lines. The tensions at those demarcation lines, which manifest themselves as fear and hatred, are not a perpetual condition. The prevailing understanding of these tensions is reached through the modern outlook on this condition of both the human individual and society, which is taken to be the only one capable of shedding lightonthehumanpredicament. Themajorityofcontemporaryanalysts are unaware that there is another possible way, different in principle, of seeing humankind and the world. And even if they acknowledge its existence, they accord it lesser value and a subordinate position in the absolutizing images that have arisen and are upheld in the era of modernity. Theproblemisthatanunderstandingofthenatureoftheseimages cannot simply be transposed from one era to another, nor set in some unalterable relationship with one another or transposed from one outlook, one mindset to another. Every self can be said to be the other facet or manifestation of the Self that is the root of all things. Here too, in construing this self/Self differentiation,twowhollycontradictoryapproachesarepossible. Inthefirst, the Self is the first principle of all things: which means that there can be noselfwithouttheSelf. Reasonisalowerdegreeofpotentialoftheself initsorientationtowardstheSelf. Thisorientationleadstotheultimate limits of the quantifiable, measurable world in which its potential to raise itself towards the Self, as the foundation of all, is still present. In the second approach, the principle of the self lies in its basest content – in a drop of dark matter. Here, reason is its highest potential, in which the self achieves itself as the ultimate level of all existence. In this, it is selfsufficient in its opting for the best choice among the innumerable multiplicity of ends towards which the course of history runs. The concepts of tradition and modernity may be associated with these differingoutlooksinthelightoftheirpredominantcontent. Thetotality of existence is arrayed from the Highest towards the lowest in the traditional view, and from the lowest to the highest in the modernist. Since human individuals, too, are located on that vertical axis, their existence includes the descent to lower levels and the ascent to higher levels. Their origin, too, may derive from above or below – from the word, or frommatter. Derivationfromaboveisthecorrelateofcreation,thatfrom below is the correlate of evolution. If the self is created or derived, it reflects the Creator or the Word, as denoted by the words of the Torah and the Recitation1: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him2; We indeed created Man in the fairest stature3. HeretheWordisthecreativeprinciple,thebeginningandend of all things4. In both cases the presence of evil is inherent in the issue of this differentiation, which leads to tension in the world and orientation towards the Absolute. If the basis of the mindset is the lower and lesser, human development, or the ascent from humankind’s dark origins, should mean a distancing from evil. The reality of humankind, society andtheworld,however,doesnotbearevidencetothis. Withevolution, the enigma of evil becomes ever more complex, with the result that most modernideologieshavegivenupeventryingtofindanswerstoit. Inthe outlook that sees creation arrayed in descending order, from the Truth – which is to say from the wholly good – to contingent or conditional modes of manifestation and existence, the human potential for free will remains embroiled in the inevitability of good and evil: for evil is an attribute of the quantifiable world, which means that it belongs, too, to humankind and all its views and interpretations. Evil cannot be overcome, then, solely by that which is constrained and confined within the world and the human individual. Demarcations and tensions between ethnic identities, which inevitably involve the issue of good and evil, can characterize the relations between ethnic identities – as it might be Serbs, Croats, Bosniacs and others. If these terms are taken to mean national demarcations, it is 1 Here the noun “recitation” is used as a translation of the Arabic word al-Qur’an, the original meaning of which is “recitation”, “reading”, “narrating”. It is also the name giventotheentireDivineRevelationtotheProphetMuhammad. TheRecitationtakes the shape of an entire book with signs (ayat) and images (sura). 2 Gen 1:27 3 Sura 95:4. [Except where otherwise noted, Qur’anic quotations are from the translation by Arthur J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964. Trans.] 4 Here it is important to refer to the perennial religious teachings on God’s creation by the Word. ThecreativeWordintheRecitation,kun,correspondstotheBiblicalfiat. Thisis not flatus vocis. It infers being in truth. Creation has purpose, although God has no purpose other than Himself: And when He decrees a thing, He but says to it “Be”, and it is (Sura 2:117); and the day He says “Be”, and it is; His saying is true (Sura 6:73). This corresponds to the words at the start of the Torah: And God said, Let there be light: and therewaslight(Gen.1:3). ThesamenotionistobefoundinPsalm33(v.6):Bytheword of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth. Creation,then,isanannunciationinwhichGodspeaksofHimself. [AllBiblicalquota- tions are from the 1611 Authorized Version of King James VI. Trans.] 14 19 worth noting that their most important element – the presence and influence of national ideologies – is an input from modernity. It is in these that the beginnings of national awareness, the foundation of the state, and the focus on its future realization in conformity with the given ideologicalimageareconstrued. Inthisview,theinitialvision,itschampions, and their initial achievements encounter resistance from others, whocomefromtheranksofoutsidersortraitors. Thecourseofhistory is cut short by some disruption or disaster; and it is here that suffering anddeath,errancyandexpectationbegin. Thedeclineishaltedbyanew pure nucleus which takes upon itself the promise, and undertakes to shape a new beginning in which all the values of the chosen model will be understood and reinforced. The self-understanding of this nucleus is that it is the finest expression of the misunderstood and forgotteninthenationaltotality. Its“we”istotallyexclusive: allthosewhodo not accept its construction of reality and its appeal remain beyond the bounds of the declared homogeneous entity, as an obstacle that must be removed. Theiralteritycannotbetranslatablethroughtheunicityofthe transcendentauthorityoftheSelf. Religionandthesacredtraditionare coopted and exploited by modern ideologies, but are always in a subordinateposition. InthisneithertheWordnortheNamethatbothpermeate and transcend every individual entity of language, meaning and symbol are recognized. The modern understanding of humankind, society and the world is an outlook that differs from one era and region to another. If, for example, history and religion, and their concomitant narratives, have acquired distinct and differing images in Bosnia’s modern identities within the various ideological entities, comparing them with real or imaginary perceptions from earlier periods could contribute to identifying reasons for tolerance. As well as an organized society, experienced as the reality, there are also other experiences: the spiritual experiences of order as expressed in prophecy, metastatic faith, apocalypse and gnosis, described by Eric Voegelin as “the indepth differentiations of the ground of being by mysticism on which are based tolerance and the balancing of the symbolism of order by the ineffability; further still the experiences of rebellion with the corresponding ‘philosophies of history’ and their mass movements, and so on.”5 20 14 Religious teachings, rituals and virtues, with meanings that were markedly different in premodern times, are a part of the existing ideological tensionsthathavemoderncivilizationastheirframework. Understanding these differences is a prerequisite for a transformation of the prevailing tensionsoftheindividual,societyandhistory. Contemporaryfearof the Other, and the hatred that it gives rise to, incorporate the languages, meaningsandsymbolsoftraditionintomodernideologies. Traditionis thereby inverted, and transformed into its opposite. The fears of one period are simply transposed to times when traditional languages, meaningsandsymbolshaveessentiallydifferentontologicalimplications. From this emerges an interpretation of history as an uninterrupted welling-up of hatred. Modernity, with its ideology and all its consequences for the circumstances of the individual and society, is justified by appeal to its links with ancient roots. But the heart of the question remains: how is modernity linked with tradition; how did the notion of the autonomy of the self and the sufficiency of reason to build a social order without the need for a transcendent foundation arise? These questions are inseparable from the entanglement of two languages, the modern and the traditional. The failure to articulate their differences is a barrier to establishing relations that could become the translation of one and the same perennial teachings into a multiplicity of languages, meanings and symbols, for only thus would it be possible to identify the extent to which adopted interpretations and emerging images of humankind, society and the world have been mutilated. The history of the Bosnian case offers paradigmatic experiences for the potential premised in these terms. In that country, differing Christologies that are a part both of the traditional outlook – as their essential component 5 Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis, trans. and ed. Gerhart Niemeyer, Columbia: University of Missouri Press,, 1990, p. 207. 14 21 – and of the modern – where they take the form of resistance to ideological blueprints – have met and collided throughout history6. Unbroken continuity Every ideological identity strives to justify itself by reference to history and to demonstrate its unbroken continuity of evolution from some archetypicalnucleusthatitpreserves,transmitsandconfirms. Thisisthe normal and prevailing concept or illusion of modern ideology, central to which are the arrogation and understanding of the self as wholly autonomous and sufficient in itself to construct the social order. The ramparts ofthisundertakingaretheEnlightenmentandrationalism. Inthisview, theclaimedunbrokencontinuitycanbedemonstratedintwoways. A clear differentiation of these two modes could contribute to a better understanding of old and new tensions of the identity-based I/we towardstheOther. Toleranceisthemeasureoftensionsattheinterfaceof that duality of identity. The first mode is through a fundamentalist perspective. Here archetypal phenomena of the self and/or of society are defined, and there is always some time and place associated with them in which the Word has potential unity with Reality, since when Reality has parted company with 6 The term Christology is used here to designate a theological understanding of Jesus Christ (Christos, Messiah, Mesih, the Anointed One), particularly as regards his nature. Although the Gospel describes Jesus Christ in various ways, neither Christ’s revelation of himself nor the narratives of his disciples concerning him need be regarded as Christological, since ecclesiastical reflections on the nature of the person of Jesus Christ did not appear until the first centuries of the early Church. Both the Gospels and the epistlesofStPaulemphasizeboththehumanandthedivinenatureofJesusChrist. The early Church was soon drawn into an acrimonious and exhaustive debate on the nature of Christ. Towards the end of the first century the Docetists who, like the Greeks, equated sin with the corporeal, believed that Christ had only apparently taken on human form. They also believed that Jesus’s earthly life, suffering and death were almost wholly illusory. The Ebionites denied the divinity of Christ, and asserted that he was onlya human being. The early Churchwasthusfacedwithtwo opposing standpoints. The flames of the debate were stoked in the fourth century by Arius’s interpretation of Jesus Christ ashaving neithereternalnordivinenature. TheChurch Fathers proclaimed the divinity of Jesus Christ and his oneness with the Father at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. The debate on the dual nature of Jesus Christ continued, for all that, over the ensuing centuries. Proffering and advocating various notions and interpretations became an open-ended and ramifying trend. The mediaeval experience of the Bosnian Krstjani, followers of the distinct Bosnian church, also belongs in that much-ramified debate. 22 14 theWordandbecomeincreasinglyadenialandbetrayalofit. TheWord, however, no longer exists as one and the same presence, but “sinks” into history. The guardians and interpreters of the Word, as they claim and many believe, know how to eliminate the fissures and rifts that external enemies and internal inconsistencies have produced. This knowledge, as proposed by those who claim ownership of it, can be materialized in a remoulding ofsocietyaroundthe“purecentre.” Itsmodern,ideological nature is what determines this bid for social change as the final and complete moulder of human destiny. In the ideological blueprint, it would be the means of “returning,” through social action, to the “golden age,” which would be to achieve a society without tensions or wholly focused on eliminating them. In such a link with the archetype, in or through which the Truth is manifest in human speech, the sequence of transmissionfromonegenerationtothenextisrepudiated. Anything that happened between the archetypical beginning and the unacceptable presentisdeniedandrejectedasa“betrayal.” The“purenucleus”represents itself as the possessor of knowledge and the link with the paragon society in the distant past. Its “we” subjugates all those who associate themselves with it and excludes all those who do not. There is nothing above it to which it would bear witness in submission. The other mode is the conception and realization of the national state, an undertaking that also accepts the view of the course of history as flowing from the constructed beginning to the new inversion: the sea change. In this view, historical circumstances have impeded the full evolution to social and state power. The original formula, however, has undergoneallkindsoftrialsandtransformations. Thismodelisadopted by the new national elite, which sets it at the heart of the ideology that adopts,developsorassumesanappropriatephilosophyofhistory. Here the construction of a new social order is shifted to a level that transcends the individual: the promised order becomes a god to which the individual is subject. There are no external interdicts to that relation between the given order in history and the individual who materializes it. The ideological elite proclaims itself, and subjugates its disciples to itself as the possessor of knowledge; its members bridge the temporal disjuncture between the distant archetype and the disordered present whose reshaping into order they promise. This is a reshaping of society and state in the quantifiable world, whose boundaries, and the content they encompass, are defined by a rational blueprint to which all available and sustainable means are permissible. In both cases – the fundamentalist and the nationalist – “we” designates the “pure centre.” In this view, everything that lies outside it is represented as an immature or hostile element in history, the elimination or destruction of which is justified by equating the ideological “we” and the inexorable course of history, or truth itself. In each case it is possible to reconstruct both the scientific and the religious image of humankind, society and the world into constructs from that pure centre. The expression “I” in relation to the higher levels of being cannot surpass that ideological “we.” The self is thereby closed and isolated, and its foundations reduced to society, or rather to the image of society proposedbytheideologicalinterpretation. Theopennessoftheselftothe Self is repudiated for the sake of the assumption that society can be reshaped according to formulae that are compatible with the rational attitude to nature and its matter. Tradition has its own self-imposed constraints that the Enlightenment lacks. Thisdifferenceshouldberecognizedandgivenshapeinselfhood. As long as the Divine interdict has meaning, there remains the potential for soul-searching and the openness of the self to the Foundation in which lies the guiding call to the good. To acknowledge the interdict means to accept that the Good does not depend on the individual, but that it is the individual’s perpetual and inexhaustible potential. If the interdict is disrupted, the potential for constraints within the traditional entityalsovanishes. Thecorrelateofthisisthetwodifferingresponses tothecrucialityoftheDivinedecree–thehumanandthesatanic. After violating the Divine interdict and succumbing to temptation, leading to the Fall from the original condition, humankind acknowledged: Lord, we havewrongedourselves!7 Satan’sresponseistheopposite:Now,forThy perverting me . . . 8 In these two patterns of consciousness of the relationship between the contingent and the Absolute, the created and 7 Sura 7:23 8 Sura 7:16 24 14 the Eternal, are comprised two views or voices in the human centre.9 The first view or voice accepts its existence as a long submission to the Absolute, which is external, and yet such that there is no interiority that it does not encompass. The second view or voice repudiates the Absolute,andseesitsowninteriorityassufficientforitsownself-rule. Inthe first view, the individual is perpetually facing the Truth; in the second, the individual confronts the totality of the material world. Submission and humility are the nature of the first condition, pride and power of the second. Traditionisthedomainofthefirst,modernityofthesecondof these two mindsets.10 In these views, the issues of evil and good, of rights and duties are addressed differently; their origins and purpose, too, are different. In the modern view, impediments to the evolution of the original nucleus are understood as external and objective circumstances. In this view, evil comes from without; it is a subjective fact for humankind, not thereflectionofthestateoftheindividualself. Thedivisionofphenomena into being and knowledge is transformed, when the link with the Logos is lost, into a duality of distinct and apparently self-sufficient forms ofexistence. Eachofthemmayimposeitselfonanotherassuperiorand greater. The greater the force of that imposition, the wider the gulf between being and knowledge, and the more numerous the damaging consequences in the human individual and in the world. By influencing and changing these circumstances, this environment, it is possible, in the ideological image of humankind, society and the world, to ensure the full manifestation of this nucleus of social evolution. Natural and social circumstances are what mould every individual, and thus changes to nature or nurture lead to the elimination of these hindrances in the human individual. 9 In the modern meaning of the terms Satan and hell it is hard to find anything corresponding to their meaning in traditional speech. Here the differentiation advocated between the modern and the traditional viewpoint implies the ability of the reader to understand that Satan and hell are in the individual. See, for example, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, “Who is ‘Satan’ and Where is ‘Hell’?”, in Coomaraswamy: Selected Papers, Metaphysics, ed. Roger Lipsey, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977, pp. 23-33. 10 The term tradition corresponds, more or less, to the Arabic din and the Latin religio. This is the top-down sequence that is wholly inverse to the modern evolutionary picture of development from the lesser to the greater. See, for example, Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World’s Religions, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992. 14 25 Traditionseesthingstheotherwayaround. Noexternalcircumstances can prevent the self either from distorting its original rectitude or from findingitselfthereonceagain. Differentlevelsofhumanpotential,manifest in degrees of will, love and knowledge, retain both oblivion and recollection. Distortion or decline is an expression of forgetfulness, while the rediscovery of rectitude derives from recollection, which is none other than perpetual openness of the self to the Self. The basis of all creation, as a whole and in all its elements, is the one and the same word. That it is always one and the same can be confirmed by the multitude of its expressions or traditions. As soon as a given tradition, which is per se both exclusive and inclusive, denies that link with the unicity of the creative or original word, which is ever the same, it can no longer be translated into another traditional language, nor, retaining its fullness, can it receive and acknowledge that same principled inclusivity and exclusivity of every other tradition. But when tradition is thus reduced to untranslatability, its denial and violent denigration of others becomes the only way for it to affirm itself, though this affirmation is a merefantasyofprivilegeandpower. Exclusivityandinclusivitywiththe Logos are then reduced to the denial and annihilation of the other for the sake of idols by which openness to the Truth is turned into ideology. At various periods these two mindsets have been present in different waysandhaddifferentimpacts. Modernityhasarrogatedtoitselfsuperiority over the traditional; but its experiences of ordering the world have undermineditsdelusionsofsuperiority. Thisfacilitatesadiscussionon the traditional understanding of humankind, society and the world, the doctrines, rituals and virtues of which modernity repudiates entirely. Given the prevailing disruptions, violence and destruction of modernity, this raises the question of whether it is possible to restore an intellectuality in which different traditions would be recognized as different expressions of one and the same Logos, and whether they would become translatable through this intellectuality, which would imply the other ceasing to be a priori the unalterable facet of the unknown that prompts fears and is reflected in hatred. Fear and knowledge Tensions between societies and communities are a reflection of the state of the individual selves that form those communities. Fear of the other depends on the porosity of the boundaries between them and the knowledge of what lies beyond them. One could say that when the relationship between “us” and “them” is one of tension, it amounts to the sum total of the individual fears of the members of one collectivity in regardtoanother. Whenthesefearspersist,theymanifestthemselvesas hatred. Thedemarcationlineoftheindividualorcollectiveselfinregard to alterity is thus the occasion for fear or hatred, with the presence and nature of the unknown or alien other as the source of fear. If the self is that which knows, knowledge is the relationship between it and the known;andtheknowniseverythingwithinandexternaltotheself. Itis a process that acquires its mutability from Reality and gives of itself to Reality. There is, as a result, a tension in knowledge to which there are twofacets. Ifbotharequantifiable,comparingthemcannotbewithout residue: there are always differences between them. But if one facet is the Absolute, the other is merely its sign or manifestation. Beyond the bounds of individuality, therefore, there remain two possibilities: the first is finitude, the second the Absolute. In finitude, everything is possessed of duality or comparability; but the Absolute is one and only, like nothing else and not to be compared with anything else. If there is no world beyond the quantifiable, comparison or translation is never withoutresidue. Inconsequence,ignoranceofalterityisinsoluble. Inherent in every bestowal of trust in alterity there is also an unresolvable fear. If, on the other hand, the relationship between the phenomena of the quantifiable world is reduced to the expression of voluntary submission to the Absolute, fear of the other as a quantifiable expression becomes transposed from the Unquantifiable to a differentiation of awareness withthetestimonythatthereisnoselfotherthantheSelf. Thentheone and the same Self, the one and the same Word, the one and the same Truth lies beyond the boundaries of the self. Every individual turns to that Self with the potential of experiencing It through Its Name, while maintaining the diversity of doctrines and rituals. The greater the ignorance of what lies beyond the boundaries, the stronger the fear of that unknown. As a result, fear and knowledge are interdependent as well as conditioned by the absence of an awareness of theselfthatmayalwaysandeverywherebewitnessedandcalledto. The demarcation line between the self and its alterity may be permeable, or may be crossed by a forcible incursion into alterity in order to subjugate or know it, or both. The attitude towards alterity may take different forms – discovery or translation into one’s own language, inclusion within it to the accompaniment of changes to or loss of the previous distinctive identity, enduring the other and different, taking possession of all that lies beyond the boundary, or wreaking havoc on or annihilating the other. Be that as it may, the mutuality of fear, permeability of boundaries and knowledge is identifiable, and can be algebraically designated with the formula: F=M(I) where F = fear, I=Ignorance, and M = the manner of their mutuality. Given that contemporary fear is in some way an extension of previous fears and, as a result, invariably the uneffaced imprint of earlier traumas in the totality of the human being; and given, too, that during the past millennium its duration in Bosnia has been defined by two important dividing lines – the first in the fifteenth century, when Muslims became an additional element of the Bosnian self and alterity, and the second in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the modern ideological delineation and remoulding of humankind, society and the world began – insights into alterations of knowledge of the self and others call for a definition and comparison of the essential elements of past and present fears of the other. This consideration is aimed at developing a procedure for the comparison of present-day or modern (Fm) and traditional (Ft) fears in Bosnian society, applying them to selected examples of modern understanding of the relationships between differentidentitiesandtheirimpositiononpremodernconcepts. Thisis expected to facilitate an understanding of forthcoming shifts from modern ideologies to a new presence of intellectuality of which the essence is the perennial wisdom. If it can be reliably ascertained that the fears and hatred between Bosniacs, Croats and Serbs are the cause of the dangerous tensions among them, tensions that cannot be brought into equilibrium, alleviating them is possible by a diminution of ignorance about themselves and others and of the impermeability of the boundaries with the unfamiliar or unknown. Giventheimpactofthelastingtensionsinquestion,alleviating or eliminating them is a need common to every participant in the country’s social diversity. The principal ignorance in modern ethno-national ideologies appears to lie in the understanding of the place and role of religious differences. The reason for this is the diminished importance of religion in the mod- ern mindset, and the determination to treat it as such in periods that are epistemically ordered by a wholly different view of humankind, society and the world. Since the state of the individual self in the modern mindset is subordinate to the undertaking of remoulding society, it would be worth bringing the fears among Catholics, Muslims and Orthodox11 into a more clearly articulated relationship with their knowledge one of theother. Herethequalitativemutualitybetweentheseconceptsinthe contemporary or modern and the traditional eras of Bosnian society will be introduced: dox in the modern era; CmCm, CmMm, CmOm the attitudes of Catholics towards themselves, Muslims and Orthodox, or the impermeability of the boundaries of one self towards its own openness and towards others, in all the mutualities here under consideration (and mutatis mutandis for Muslims and Orthodox), and I m, I m and I m stand for the ignorance If this same ratio is set in the previous qualitative matrix equation to relate to the particularities of religious communities in Bosnian society of the fifteenth century, the Bosnian Krstjani, followers of the Bosnian Church12, should be substituted for the Muslims. 11 Although this consideration is rhetorically confined to Christian-Muslim relations, with particular reference to the Bosnian experience, it is essentially inseparable from the direct and indirect presence and involvement of the Jewish element in each of the phenomena with which this study deals. 12 The Bosnian Krstjani were members of the strictly organized Bosnian Church, the existence of which is inseparable from the various forms taken by the Bosnian state and society from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. They regarded themselves as the “true apostolic church”, and were resolutely opposed to both the Catholic and the Orthodoxchurches. Thephenomenonasawholeformsaparticularityofdoctrine,ritual and structure, which regarded its justification and interpretation as an unbroken and faithful descent of the tradition from Christ to their own spiritual leaders. They called their community the Bosnian Church, and themselves Krstjani. Others, against their will, called them Patarenes, heretics, Manicheans, Bogomils, Babuni, and so forth. 14 29 OCOMOO oo where F m, F m and F m are the fears of Catholics, Muslims and Orthocmo cmo of Catholics, Muslims and Orthodox in that same era. Impermeability at the interface between different selves may also be represented by the untranslatability of their languages, meanings and symbols. Thus if, for example, the doctrines, rituals and virtues given shape by Catholicism suit or fit one self, the boundary between that self and the Muslim or Orthodox self is impermeable to the extent that their doctrinal and ritual languages, meanings and symbols are untranslatable. Translatability means that, not withstanding their distinctiveness as a whole, different sacred languages, meanings and symbols invariably express the one and the same Ineffable that is their root and fruit, their beginning and their end, their interiority and their exteriority. Adherence to the inexpressible that confirms unicity, and that unicity in turn multiplicity, is an element of every tradition in the original meaning of the term. It is the relationship of the manifest to the Nonmanifest or of the spoken to the Silence13. It is precisely here that there lies the differentiation between the modernandthetraditionaloutlooksonthepotentialforchangestofear. In the traditional view, the ultimate cause of fear is the absolute: fear of the absolute liberates the individual from all other fears. The Self then manifests Itself as utter alterity to the totality of being that phenomena manifestandtowhichtheybearwitness. Asaresult,eachindividuality,including every language, regardless of its distinctive features, maintains the link with the Absolute and through it is translatable into every other individuality, while at the same time preserving and enhancing its own particular nature. This totality of existence reveals the Truth: in humankind is summed up all of existence, and the individual human self is the concentratedtotalityoftheuniverse. Theyareliketwomirrorsinwhich the Self reveals itself in the selves and the outer world of existence. Language, meaning and symbols may differ, just as monastery, church, synagogue and mosque are different, but in all of them, with the mention of God’s Name, the one and the same Word is present, transcending theirspatialandtemporalmeasure. ItisthroughthatWordthattheyare inter-translatable, and cannot be reduced solely to ratios of quantity and power. If humankind, society and the world are wholly within the scope of 1 3 For this consideration it is instructive to refer to the opening words of the Recitation (Sura 2:1-3): That is the book, wherein is no doubt, a guidance to the godfearing who believe in the Unseen. 30 14 rationalpotential,theyarequantifiable. Ineffabilityandunquantifiability mustbeeitherdisregardedorrepudiated. Liberationfromfearassumes a knowledge of all that is outside of and contrary to the individual. But this is simultaneously to postulate that everything that exists may be contrary to the human being who will transcend it. In this view, the universe is not identical to the human being. Its signs do not speak of the truth in the same way as can human beings who remember their original and final perfection. The impossibility of simple transfer Present-day Bosnian society is paradigmatic of the world as a whole. Although historically, territorially and linguistically one, it is divided into opposing ethnic, religious and political entities, known today as Bosniacs, Croats and Serbs. These are not religious communities; but in their ethno-national and political ideologies, religion is an element without which, it seems, the existence of these different entities in their entirety would not be possible. Religion retains the consciousness of historical existence, but its doctrines, rituals and virtues have become subjugated and reshaped in order to be coopted into the ideological blueprint. The key concepts of religion are losing the meanings that they had in traditional intellectuality, meanings that are commonly inverted to the opposite of their original sense. The endeavour to use those altered meanings to describe and study past historical phenomena invariably leads to a flawed or distorted picture. Today’s Christianity – both Orthodox and Roman Catholic – and Islam are not and cannot be the same concepts and phenomena with the same meanings that belonged to them in any earlierera. Thesimpletranspositionoftoday’smeaningstootherperiods cannot but do violence to the process of presenting and interpreting historicalphenomena. Theconsequencesofthisarethelossofreligious intellectualityanditsoriginal,authenticmeaning. Thelanguage,meanings and symbols of religious doctrine and ritual are losing their links withvirtue. Theircooptionintoideologicalnarrativesandsocialundertakingsdeprivesthemoftheirlinkwiththesupra-individual. Inthisway they acquire an existence that is detached from the Foundation and is construedasrealityitself. Therefollowsfromthisadistortionofawareness, which gives rise to grotesque social phenomena of which the worst forms are the massive violence and destruction of the twentieth century. 14 31 Unicity manifest in the apparent duality of the self and the Self is riven apart. The awareness of humankind, society and the world becomes frozen into one or other of its images, and in so becoming, its alterability isdenied. Thereisnomorerealityoftheself,andthecontingentimages that the self has accepted are thus declared to be absolute. The human individual, society and the world, which are undeniably out of kilter with that image, must be transformed. This collision between the human remoulding of the world to bring it into conformity with an absolutized image, on the one hand, and the eternally unseizable reality, on the other, takes on a grotesque manifestation in which political power inevitably gives rise to suffering, death and destruction. This paper aims to indicate this relationship between the contemporary image of Bosnia – in the modern and the traditional outlooks – and the way it was remodelled in the transitional period of the fifteenth century. Contemporary phenomena and the extension of the power of modern structures have not left a single corner of the world untouched. It may well be, though, that they manifest themselves paradigmatically in the Bosnian individual and social reality more clearly than anywhere else. It was a society that, intuitively or consciously, fostered the desire to maintainanequilibriumbetweenandrighttodifferences. Itsmodern fate reflects global circumstances as a whole. As a result, it is possible to recognize and study in its language, meanings and symbols, which are associated with religious differences, the major instances of distortion of the religious in modernity and vice versa. The key concepts of Religion may take different forms and have different meanings, but as long as they belong to religion they cannot lose their link with the Ground of being. When this loss does nonetheless occur, they become coopted into ideological discourse, in which the interdict at the centre of human openness acquires the form of unchallengeableideologicalpostulates. Thiscorrespondstotheteachingabout forgetfulness as ignorance, in which human individuals become detached from their selves to the extent of which the measure is their forgetfulness of the Self: Be not as those who forgot God, and so He caused them to forgettheirsouls;those–theyaretheungodly.14 Religiousconceptsthus 1 4 Sura 59:19 32 14 have two essentially different meanings – one in their original traditional context and the other in modernity. Depending on which of these two meanings is adopted, an entirely different view of humankind, society and the world results. If the interdict with its transcendent reason is introduced solely with rational foundations into the dis-enchanted world, that interdict cannot be other than an acceptance of the inevitability of error or falsehood in the ideological map of movement from the lower to thehigher. Inthisunderstanding,boththeworldandthehumanindividual originate in non-intellect, and somehow manage to develop that nonintoreason. Thatnonbecomesanineradicableflawineverydevelopment or evolution, given that it is a matter of principle and as such denied or disguised. One of the solutions to this collision of meanings is to accept that the Truth was once with humankind and the world, only later to abandon them to solitude and self-sufficiency. Different relationships between reality and its name can be ascertained. Changes in the way reality is construed may reach such an extent that the starting point is fundamentally reshaped. Reality remains eternally one and the same, despite the fact that its images and interpretations constantlychange. Thenamesthatareassignedtorealityanditsimagesmay remain unaltered during that entire process of change, but their meanings alter, and may be replaced with entirely new ones. What is meant today by the terms Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Judaism and Islam, with the concomitant symbolic crystallization of their doctrines, rituals and virtues in monasteries, churches, synagogues and mosques, is not exempt fromthosealteredimagesandunderstandingsofreality. Thatthisisso may readily be demonstrated by a study of the meanings of the terms prayer, mosque, church, praise, anointing and so forth in the two outlooks – the modern and the traditional. The term religion, in its original sense, means the linking of self and Self through knowledge and being, with the inclusion of consciousness. Reestablishing that link means recognizing the truth in its image, or vertical orientation towards the original perfection. Religious doctrine and ritual derived from none other than that towards which the link or verticalityisestablished. Theyarerevealedorsentdownsothattheself may recognize and embrace them through free will or the adoption of what the truth itself entrusts to it. Their language, meanings and symbolstranslatefrommultiplicitytowardsunicity. Butsinceunicityiscon- 14 33 firmation of the ineffable, the multiplicity of languages, meanings and symbols – which is to say, too, of sacred doctrines and rituals – reflects perfect translatability through that unicity that descends and ascends as the Word. The Word is both accessible and absent in every individual, regardless of language, through the presence of its name, without which the world, matter and time can only be death veiled by the illusion of life and power. It is only in this way that different religious languages are mutually translatable, which is the precondition of their potential for directing the self towards its foundation. Free will as the reality of the self is recognized in the potential to reject the Will of the Self. It is only in the potential to embrace what That Will offers that human reality manifests itself: as recollection or forgetfulness, acceptance or rejection, loss or discovery. If that potential for differentiating between will and Will is reduced to the quantifiable world, the same forms of language, meanings and symbols thereby acquire a different content, and their transposition from one era to another is impossible without taking into consideration the essential transformation they undergo when they pass fromoneoutlooktoanother. Modernitydoesnotruptureitslinkswith tradition by discarding the sequence and duration of language, meanings and symbols as spoken forms: it retains them, but radically reshapes them. What is conferred on them by their introduction into a new mindset cannot be simply transposed into their original horizons in the heritage of languages, meanings and symbols. It seems, then, that it would be more correct to speak of an inversion or distortion of the traditional outlook in the modernist, rather than of a rupture between them. Arecognitionofthiscouldcontributetounderstandingthesources and causes of the grotesque modern condition in which individual and collective orientation towards the Self is replaced by ossified images or interpretations of Reality. Islam, Catholicism and Orthodoxy In the modern religious and political mindset, or mindsets, Islam and Christianity are separate and often confrontational phenomena. This separation cannot be transcended in the modernist reduction of tradition to the world as the one and only level of being, for the reason that onlythequantifiableworldisaccessibletorationalknowledge. Ifthereis no descending hierarchy of worlds or levels of being from the Heavens to 34 14 earth, from Unicity to multiplicity, there can be no encounter of different doctrinesandteachingsintheLogos. Furthermore,nationalideologies, as a modern phenomenon, do not evade the sequence of evolution from below upwards the consequence of which is that nothing in the totality of humankind, society and the world transcends quantifiability. The humanbeingisatthepeakofthatevolutionarypath. Humanreasonand the ability to recognize the course of history enables the individual – or so the ideological outlook believes – to devise and put into effect a blueprintfortheworldorder. Inthisapproach,religionsareasocialand historical phenomenon, and human individuals are always superior to themintheirpotentialforunlimiteddevelopment. Thereisnoreligio perennis as the irreplaceable and inexhaustible content of every religion or,inotherwords,ofthelinkwiththeTruth. ThereisnoNamethrough which the one and the same Eternity is present in every place and at every point in time, and open to the call in every language. There is no Word that enables human beings, for all that they are “barred in with bones woven in flesh,”15 continually to renew their link with the Infinite. Humankind is not seen as the image of God – on the contrary, God becomes the image, the projection of humankind. It can be ascertained of all three forms of Christianity in Bosnia – the Bosnian Church, Catholicism and Orthodoxy – that they are historically and doctrinally inseparable from the canonic New Testament and the Nicaeancreed. ItcanthereforebesaidthattheBosnianKrstjani,Catholics and Orthodox possess the same books in principle, but that the interpretationsandstructuresthattheyderivefromthemdiffer. Forthe Catholics, their understanding of the scriptures and their structure are inseparable from the Church authorities, which regard themselves as the heirs and guardians of the original doctrines, rituals and virtues as taught by Christ to his disciples and taken up and preserved by the Church as they spread through the world and over time. The doctrinal and ritual schism between the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Church was regarded by both as a departure from the truth or as the other’s flawed doctrine. This discord never remained external to politics or without politicalconsequences. Theirunderstandingsorimagesoftherealityof /Stone Sleeper, trans. Francis R. Jones, Sarajevo: Did, 1999, 14 35 1 5 Mak Dizdar, Kameni spava p. 33. Christ were represented as that reality itself, and as a result, there remained no place for different understandings, which means that there was no place, either, for anyone who did not submit to that absolutized image of Reality. The Bosnian Krstjani had similarities in principle and common doctrines, but differed essentially in their understanding of the holy scriptures, as an anonymous Catholic reported to the Cardinals of Rome in 1623 when meeting their evangelists: . . . habent in suo vulgari textum s. Evangelii Christi secundum Ecclesiam Romanam, sed commenta et glossae sunt haereticae secundum varias haereses, precipue circa haeresim Pauli Sosometani, a quo denominantur Paulini.16 It was from these understandings of the holy scriptures that the doctrines, rituals and structure of the Bosnian Church were derived. The Church and its members were denied any validity, their doctrines and rituals were regarded as untenable, and they were indeed denied the right to life itself. The differences that separated that Church from its neighbours can be identified from its own writings17 and from those of Catholic18 and Orthodox19 circles. The arguments over the nature of Christindisputablyfallintothiscategory. Theconsequencesofdisagreements in understanding manifest themselves as openness to the major issues of doctrine and ritual that were central to the ecumenical councils of Nicaea, in 325, Constantinople, in 381, and Chalcedonia in 451 CE. The arguments and debates over these fundamental issues did not cease. Faith in judgment through the Holy Spirit became ever weaker. At the heart of the debate there occurred, between 610 and 632 CE, yet another in, Acta Bulgariae ecclesiastica, Mon. Slav. Merid., vol. 18, Zagreb, 1887, p. 21. For Bosnian manuscripts in Bulgaria see also Aleksandar Solovjev, “Vjersko Eusebius Fermend 1 6 17 18 1 9 36 14 u 45. See Herta Kuna, Srednjovjekovna bosanska knji evnost, Sarajevo: Institute for Literature, 1992. See Dragutin Kniewald, “Vjerodostojnost latinskih izvora o bosanskim krstjanima”, Rad JAZU, CCLXX, Zagreb, 1949, pp. 115-276. enjebosanskecrkve”,Zagreb:YugoslavAcademyof ScienceandtheArts,1948,pp.44- anstva pravoslavnih izvora o bogomilstvu na Balkanu”, Annual of the Historical Society of Bosnia and Herzegovina, V, Sarajevo, 1953, pp. 1- See Aleksandar Solovjev, “Svedo 103. “opening of the Heavens”20 and “descent of the Holy Spirit” so that, as it claims and its followers believe, the dispute over Christ should be completelyandfinallyresolved. Inthiswaythereenteredintothecourseof history further discussion on Christ on the part of those who found their reasons, evidence and understanding not only in the New Testament but alsointheQur’an. DebatesamongBosnianKrstjani,CatholicsandOrthodox, along with altering political circumstances, led to gains and losses of strength, of greater or lesser porosity or impermeability of the boundaries of these religious communities. These debates are inconceivable and inexplicable without taking into consideration the phenomenon that acquired the name Islam only in the modern era.21 Philosophically speaking, the phenomenon is the ontological indebtedness or duty – the correlate of this being the Arabic term din – of all that exists to the Ineffable. Seenfromthehumanperspective,thisindebtednesshasthree degrees:submission(islam),faith(iman)anddedication(ihsan). Here Eternity manifests itself in the moment, and history in distortion. The Bosnian social reality as a whole, then, in both its modern and its traditional expressions, comprises both Christians – Catholics and Orthodoxalike–andMuslims. Inthemodernerathissocialrealityhas lost the openness of the individual to Transcendence. As a result, the fundamental concepts of anointment and submission have also become distorted. The cosmos, or the totality of existence, in submission to Unicity – with the exception of that element of human free will that enables the individual to become conscious of the Divine Name – is evaporating in modernity as the vital evidence of human orientation towards the Ground of being out of free will, an orientation that expresses itself as recollectionoftheCreatorandaddressingHimthroughtheName. Beingthrough submission to God ceases to be the fullness of the human individual as the image of God in the way that characterizes all the worlds: To Him has surrendered who so is in the heavens and the earth.22 The traditional 20 21 2 2 See Martin Lings, His Life Based Upon the Earliest Sources, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1988. The reference is to p. 376 of the translation of this work by Rusmir Mahmutc ?ehaji ?c, Muhammed: ivot njegov osnovan na vrelima najstarijim, Ljubljana: Oslobod-enje International, 1996. On the modern introduction of and content of the term “Islam”, see Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 199. Sura 3:83 14 37 2 3 24 25 26 Sura 2:138 Since God is the first unicity, willing submission to this unicity in all its fullness is the firstsubmission. ThePraisedOneistotalsubmissionandanointment,justastheAnointed One is total submission and all praise. This is the meaning of the words of the Recitation (Sura6:138):NoassociatehasHe. EvensoIhavebeencommanded,andIamthefirst of those that surrender. God is close to all things. In relation to Him, all things are as nothing,whileHeisAllinrelationtoallthings. Theacceptanceofsubmission,anointment and praise entails being part of that nothingness on the one hand and fullness on the other (Sura 10:62): Surely God’s friends – no fear shall be on them, neither shall theysorrow. Theverbwaliya,withitsderivatenounwali,pl.awliya,meansprimarily to be close to. Thus God is near unto those who have faith (Sura 2:257, in the translation by Muhammad Asad, The Message of the Qur’an, translated and explained, Gibraltar: Dar al-Andalus, 1980). The same term can be used to designate relationships between people, but then, from the perspective of tradition, it includes derivation from the first submission and nearness, as can be considered in other concepts of sacred teachings also, such as confidence, covenant, prostration in prayer and so forth. “Praised” is a literal translation of Muhammad, from the verb hamida, to praise, and is used by the author of this paper to designate the Prophet Muhammad. Trans. As the Recitation says (Sura 96:6-8): Surely man waxes insolent, for he thinks himself self-sufficient. Surely unto thy Lord is the Returning. view of submission and anointment as identical is unrecognizable in the modern bottom-up hierarchy. Anointment or baptism make sense if they are sent down; and this means that the entire universe is baptized, in the original sense. The perfect image of this is the Anointed or the Submissive, in whatever archetypal manifestation it may be: The baptism of God; and who is there that baptizes fairer than God?23; I am the first of those that surrender.24 Baptism is the relationship between God, Who baptizes,andthehumanindividualthatreceivesthebaptism. Ifthisrelationship is full and perfect, there remains nothing in the self of the baptized otherthantheSelfoftheBaptizer. ThesameistrueofthetriadPraiser– praise – Praised.25 When the relationship is perfect, the Praiser reveals the Word from the centre of his self, which is none other than the Self. As against that submission or humility as the supreme human potential in the face of Perfection, the converse is humankind’s notion of the individual as a being of sufficiency and power.26 If it is accepted that anointment or baptism means the acceptance of submission or humility as the supreme human potential in relation to the absolute, that submission and humility can only mean the willing exposure of the self to the readiness and expectation of receiving and accepting baptism as the self’ssupremepotential. Inthisneitherlanguage,northemeanings, nor the symbols of the sacred teachings and rituals are other than a 38 14 means or signs in the self and in the outer world that continually bear witness to the Truth as the fount of all that exists. If it is otherwise, they become part of the discourse of ossified images and interpretations of Reality that have been taken as sufficiency. Anointment or baptism and submission must then be reduced to certain interpretations that find theirjustificationinhistoricalnarrativesandrepresentations. Theresult of this is a diversity of languages, meanings and symbols that no longer confirmstheunicityofthecommonword. Monasteries,churches,synagogues and mosques lose the call of the one and the same Name, and become separate material entities subjugated to comparisons and quantifications of individual and collective power. Translation of languages Despite the uncontestable similarities between the teachings of the Bosnian Krstjani, Catholics and Orthodox Christians, their insistence on differences of interpretation, ritual and modes of expression of virtue is what defines them as separate entities. With a common Word, their differencesaresustainable;withoutit,theyareunresolvable. Anyconcessions by the Bosnian Krstjani to the Catholics or the Orthodox meant beingsubmergedbythemastheresultoflosingtheirdistinctiveness. If what is known of them and their Church is studied, it can be shown beyond doubt, as Aleksander Solovjev notes, that “for the most part the accusations levelled against them by Serb archbishops and ecclesiastical councils, by the Pope in Rome and by Franciscan monks, are accurate, and correspond to the actual state of affairs.”27 These differences can be linked to the perennial endeavour of Christianity as a whole, as well as of other sacred traditions, to find answers to the question of the coexistence of evil and good, and to shed light on the mystery of the precedence of good. Although both Christianity and Islam resolutely reject the possibility of there being two principles, one of good and one of evil, throughout history there has been no reading or interpretation of the tradition in which the issue is not debated. It has never been hard to accuse others of dualist beliefs, although the reasons adduced have in principle almost invariably been equally true of the accuser.28 2 7 Aleksandar Solovjev, “Vjersko u 2 8 See Christian Dualistic Heresies in the Byzantine World, c. 650 – c. 1450, a selection, trans. and annotated by Janet Hamilton and Bernard Hamilton, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. 14 39 enje bosanske crkve”, pp. 44-45. Suspicion of the Bosnian Krstjani provoked by their difference from the Serbian Orthodox and Roman Catholics could be resolved by their renouncing their insistence on the specific nature of the doctrines, rituals and virtues that their Church fostered and interpreted. Since the tradition of the Bosnian Church was freely accepted by its members, the debate with the other, the difference, which is the essence of that and every other specific entity, was meaningful as long as violence was no part of it and it recognized the possibility of manifestation of the one and the same Word in differing teachings and ways. Throughout the history of the Bosnian Church, however, there were efforts to divert its members from their faith by force and to detach them from their freely chosen witnessing to the Word. This radically refocused their quest for new reasons and interpretations of distinctiveness, above all in the light of those who had opted for violence as a means of altering the interpretation of the sacred tradition to which the members of the Bosnian Church were true. Recantation of this kind could be interpreted as being for evangelical reasons, just as could their insistence on the specific nature oftheirteachings. Furthermore,thereasonforsafeguardingtherightto difference from the Catholics and the Orthodox could be found in the introduction into the debate of the Recitation, as the Word sent down by GodtothePraisedOneinthenewopeningoftheHeavens. Here,too, thereasonscouldbewhollyevangelical. Thereisnotasinglecontested issue of the doctrines on Christ that cannot be found in the Recitation, where there are also interpretations and judgments from God and through the Holy Spirit. As a result, all the terms and concepts of evangelical language of which they emphasized the differences are differently focused on the issue of Christ (the Anointed) and Muhammad (the Praised). The loyalty of the Bosnian Krstjani to their belief in the decisiveness of God’s mercy found full confirmation in the fact that the Recitation is founded on the words In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. The Recitation thus proffers both witness to and support for their faith, and opens up a way to unification through the crucial words of prayer: Our Father which art in heaven29 and Praise belongs to God, the 2 9 The Lord’s prayer, Matt. 6: 9-13 and Luke 11:2-4. In its Bosnian Church form the opening words of the Lord’s prayer read: O e naš’i e esi na n(e)b(e)sih’. From Zbornik krstjanina Radoslava. See Franjo ‘anjek, Bosansko-humski krstjani i katarskodualisti kipokretuSrednjemvijeku,Zagreb:Kršc ?anskasadašnjost,1975,p.159. 40 14 Lord of all Being.30 All the elements of the sacred language, which offer and preserve the duty and right to difference, are now focused on translation from the Gospel according to the Qur’an and vice versa. Once the nature of the two epistles as two manifestations of the Word is recognized and attested, their transmitters – Christ and Muhammad – must be inherent in themasintheirfirstprinciple. Andthere,inthetraditionallanguage,the historicallinkbetweenthetwoisnolongeratissue. Theybearwitness, one to the other, to the Truth, the Holy Spirit and the Word. For this to be comprehensible, a mindset is required in which the heavens and the earth are signs of the Spirit and the body, between which is the fissured, fracturedhumansoul. TheopeningwordsoftheGospelaccordingtoSt John point to this hierarchy from the top down, from the one and the same Word to the multiplicity of its manifestations: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. Iskoni bje slovo, i slovo bje ot’boga, i bog’ bje slovo. I se bje iskonje u boga. I vsa tjem’ bješe, i be nego e ni Since God is the Praiser, human perfection lies in the exclusion of everything from the self except praise of Him, so that in the praise that linksthePraiserandthePraisedisnothingotherthanIam. ThePraiser is then the same as the Anointed, for in the fact that there is no self other than the Self all dualities are resolved. In the ideological blueprints of collective identities, developed in the raising of awareness and enhancement of power in relation to others, it is impossible to speak of the principled oneness of differing sacred languages. Thisistheresultofthefactthatsacredlanguages,meaningsand 30 Sura1:2 3 1 John1:1-5. TheBosnianChurchversionistakenfromObrednikCrkvebosanske(Zbornik krstjanina Radoslava) in Franjo Šanjek, Bosansko-humski krstjani i katarsko-dualisti pokret u Srednjem vijeku, p. 160. ki 14 41 to e bje. V’tom’ ivot’ bje, i ivot’ bje svjet’ lov[je]kom,’ i svjet’ bje v’tmi svitit’ se, i tma ego ne obuje.31 e enebje tury on. See, e.g. Aleksandar Solovjev, “Svedo anstva pravoslavnih izvora o bogomilstvu symbols can no longer have a lasting connection with the Word as their foundation,asderivedfromtraditionalteachings. Focusingonthatfoundation, for which reason is a means, maintains tensions within the consciousness and gives rise to constant changes in the notion of reality. Not one image of reality is the same as reality itself. Everything remains behind the veils of the world, but what is behind them becomes ever more present as the truth of existence. Individuals are thus constantly moving towards a foundation from which they remain infinitely distant as long as there can be any independence from the Self in that tension withintheself. Independenceisinfactmerelyaphantomdualityfrom which there arises the fantasy of power summed up in the postulate that human beings can be reduced to their desires and the rationalization of theirexistence. Ifthisreductiveviewistrappedwithinthequantifiable world, it can resolve nothing of the human orientation towards the Ultimate. It becomes mere passion for the acquisition of more and more, in which greater power means greater suffering and a greater distance from the meanings symbolized by baptism and submission in regard to Perfection. The Bosnian Church, comprised by “vsi naricajušte se krstjani i krstjanice,aneklajanuštesvetimikonamikrstu asnome”(Allthelamenting Krstjani, who do not pray to the holy icons and the holy Cross),32 was indeed a community with its own teachings on Christ, its own rituals, its own interpretations and expressions of virtue. It was incessantly controverted and ravaged in the name of the doctrines and rituals of others, its followers continually subjected to investigation and forcibleconversiontomainstreamChristianity. Thereisnotadocument or book on that period of Bosnia’s history that does not provide evidence of the persecutions and denial of the Bosnian Krstjani.33 Contrary to their belief that the Bosnian Church was the only apostolic 32 From Serbian synodal documents, in which the “bosanski krstjani i krstjanice” – Bosnian Krstjani, men and women – are anathematized from the first half of the thirteenth cen- na Balkanu”, p. 57. 33 See, e.g., Aleksander Solovjev, “Nestanak bogomilstva i islamizacija Bosne”, Annual of the Historical Society of Bosnia and Herzegovina, I, Sarajevo, 1949; Dominik Mandi ?c, Bogomilska crkva bosanskih krstjana, Chicago: The Croatian Historical Institute, 1962; Ante Babic ?, Bosanski heretici, Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1963; Franjo Šanjek, Bosansko-humski krstjaniikatarsko-dualisti kipokretuSrednjemvijeku. 42 14 church and that there was no salvation outside it, similarly exclusivist views were expressed for both Roman Catholicism and Rascian Orthodoxy.34 ThepersecutionsandforcibleconversionsoftheBosnianKrstjani reached their peak in the fifteenth century, when even the Bosnian king, under pressure from external religious and political will, joined in their annihilation. The choice given them, of conversion or death, is seen from two perspectivesthataredifferentinprinciple. ThefirstisthattheOneGod eternally reveals only one truth and that it must have only one doctrine and one form of ritual. As a
- [Formal Diversity, Essential Unity: Frithjof Schuon on the Convergence of Religions](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/formal-diversity-essential-unity) - Formal Diversity, Essential Unity: Frithjof Schuon on the Convergence of Religions (A talk delivered at the Australasian Association for the Study of Religions Conference on the theme “The End of Religions? Religion in an Age of Globalization,” Sydney University, September 1999) by Kenneth Oldmeadow Introduction It is a commonplace that we are living in an unprecedented situation in which the different religious traditions are everywhere impinging on each other. There has, of course, always been some intercourse in ideas and influences between religions. Nevertheless, each civilization formerly exhibited a spiritual homogeneity untroubled, for the most part, by the problem of religious pluralism. For the vast majority of believers in a traditional civilization the question of the inter-relationship of the religions was one which was either of peripheral concern or one of which they remained unaware. The homogeneity of Christian civilization has long since been ruptured, and in the last few centuries European imperialism has itself been the agent for the disruption and extirpation of traditional cultures the world over. All manner of changes have made for a “smaller” world, for “the global village,” and there is nowadays a good deal of talk about “globalization.” I must confess I have only the haziest notion of what this might mean beyond the obvious point that more often than not what it seems actually to mean is Americanization: McDonalds in Mongolia, so to speak. However, it is clear that the question of the relationship of the religions one to another and the imperatives of mutual understanding take on a new urgency both for comparative religionist and theologian and, indeed, for all those concerned with fostering a harmonious world community. In an age of rampant secularism and scepticism the need for some kind of inter-religious solidarity makes itself ever more acutely felt. At least three other alternatives arise out of “globalization,” each disastrous for humankind’s spiritual welfare: 5 95 intensifying internecine theological and/or political warfare; the disappearance of the religions under the onslaughts of modernity; the dilution of the religions into some sentimental, “universal” pseudo-religion. The philosophical question of the inter-relationship of the religions and the moral concern for greater mutual understanding are, in fact, all of a piece. We can distinguish but not separate questions about unity and harmony; too often both comparative religionists and those engaged in “dialogue” have failed to see that the achievement of the latter depends on a metaphysical resolution of the former question. Today I wish briefly to consider the implications of the convergence of religions from the traditionalist perspective exemplified in the works René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy and, particularly, Frithjof Schuon. The traditionalists are committed to the explication of the philosophia perennis which lies at the heart of the diverse religions and behind their manifold forms. However, unlike some of those who sought to popularize the notion of the perennial philosophy—most notably perhaps, Aldous Huxley, various neo-Hindus and some “Aquarian” New Agers— the traditionalists are also dedicated to the preservation and illumination of the traditional forms which give each religious heritage its raison d’être and which guarantee its formal integrity and, by the same token, ensure its spiritual efficacy. I shall have time to do no more than drastically adumbrate some of the central themes of the traditionalists as they impinge on the questions with which we are presently concerned. Religions and Revelations The traditionalist understanding of the nature of religion, and thus of the inter-relationships of the religious traditions, depends on four key ideas or principles. These are (1) the necessary diversity of multiple Revelations and thus of the religious forms which derive from those Divine dispensations; (2) the principle of orthodoxy which ensures that each integral religious tradition furnishes its adherents with an adequate metaphysical doctrine and an effective spiritual method; (3) the distinction between the outer, exoteric and the inner, esoteric domains of religion; and, (4) the transcendent or metaphysical unity of religions which surpasses but in no way invalidates their formal diversity. Given the limited compass of this talk I can only here address the last two of these governing ideas, and even then only in severely abbreviated fashion. 96 5 There is a good deal of talk these days about the traditional religions being “played out,” “inadequate to the problems of the age,” “irrelevant to contemporary concerns” and so on. “New solutions are needed,” it is asserted, “appropriate to the times.” From the traditionalist viewpoint, and I quote from Schuon, Nothing is more misleading than to pretend, as is so glibly done in our day, that the religions have compromised themselves hopelessly in the course of the centuries or that they are now played out. If one knows what a religion really consists of, one also knows that the religions cannot compromise themselves and they are independent of human doings... The fact that a man may exploit a religion in order to bolster up national or private interests in no wise affects religion as such... as for an exhausting of the religions, one might speak of this if all men had by now become saints or Buddhas. In that case only could it be admitted that the religions were exhausted, at least as regards their forms.1 To the diverse human collectivities are addressed Revelations which are determined in their formal aspects by the needs and receptivities at hand. In a sense the Revelations are communicated in different divine languages. Just as we should baulk at the idea of “true” and “false” languages, so we need to see the necessity and the validity of multiple Revelations.2 This is not to suggest that all “religions” which claim to derive from a “Revelation” do so in fact, nor that there is no such thing as a pseudo-religion. The principle of multiple Revelations is not accessible to all mentalities and its implications must remain anathema to the majority of believers. This is in the nature of things. However, as each religion proceeds from a Revelation, it is, in Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s words, both ...the religion and a religion, the religion inasmuch as it contains within itself the Truth and the means of attaining the Truth, a religion since it emphasizes a particular aspect of Truth in conformity with the spiritual and psychological needs of the humanity for whom it is destined. 3 In other words each religion is sufficient unto itself and contains all 1. Frithjof Schuon, “No Activity Without Truth,” in The Sword of Gnosis, ed. Jacob Needleman, Baltimore: Penguin, 1974, 29. See also Frithjof Schuon, Stations of Wisdom, London: John Murray, 1961, 11. 2. The comparison of religions and languages is a common one. For some examples see Max Muller: “Chips from a German Workshop,” in Jacques Waardenburg (ed) Classical Approaches to the Study of Religion, The Hague: Mouton, 1973, 88-89; and R. Zwi Werblowsky, “Universal Religion and Universalist Religion,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 2:1, 1971, 10-11. 3. See Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Ideals and Realities of Islam, London: Allen & Unwin, 1966, 15. 5 97 that is necessary for man’s sanctification and salvation. Nevertheless, it remains limited by definition. The recognition and reconciliation of these two apparently antagonistic principles is crucial to the traditionalist perspective: the key is to be found in relationship of the exoteric and esoteric aspects of religion. The Exoteric and Esoteric Domains We are accustomed to drawing sharp dividing lines between the religious traditions. The differences here are, of course, palpably real and Schuon has no wish to blur the distinctions. We shall not find in the work of the traditionalists any Procrustean attempt to find a unity on a plane where it does not exist nor an insipid universalism which posits a unity of no matter what elements as long as they lay some claim to being “religious” or “spiritual.” However, this notwithstanding, Schuon draws another kind of dividing line which in some senses is much more fundamental: that between the exoteric and esoteric. In discriminating between the exoteric and the esoteric we are, in a sense, speaking of “form” and “spirit.” Exotericism rests on a necessary formalism: Exotericism never goes beyond the “letter.” It puts its accent on the Law, not on any realization, and so puts it on action and merit. It is essentially a “belief” in a “letter,” or a dogma envisaged in its formal exclusiveness, and an obedience to a ritual and moral Law. And, further, exotericism never goes beyond the individual; it is centered on heaven rather than on God, and this amounts to saying that this difference has for it no meaning. 4 It follows that exotericism must thereby embody certain inevitable and in a sense therapeutic limits or “errors” which from a fuller perspective can be seen in both their positive and negative aspects. Religion, in its formal aspect, is made up of what the Buddhists call upaya, “skillful means” which answer the necessities of the case, what Schuon calls “saving mirages” and “celestial stratagems.” 5 The limiting definitions of exoteric formalism are “comparable to descriptions of an object of which 4. 5. 98 Frithjof Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, London: Perennial Books, 1965, 76. Frithjof Schuon, Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism, Bloomington: World Wisdom Books, 1986, 185 fn2. See also Frithjof Schuon, The Transfiguration of Man, Bloomington: World Wisdom Books, 1995, 8: “In religious esoterisms, efficacy at times takes the place of truth, and rightly so, given the nature of the men to whom they are addressed.” 5 only the form and not the colors can be seen.”6 Partial truths which might be inadequate in a sapiential perspective may be altogether proper on the formal exoteric plane: The formal homogeneity of a religion requires not only truth but also errors— though these are only in form—just as the world requires evil and as Diversity implies the mystery of creation by virtue of its infinity... The religions are “mythologies” which, as such, are founded on real aspects of the Divine and on sacred facts, and thus on realities but only on aspects. Now this limitation is at the same time inevitable and fully efficacious. 7 The statements of a formal exotericism can thus be seen as intimations of Truth, as metaphors and symbols, as bridges to the formless Reality.8 In other words the forms of exotericism represent certain accommodations which are necessary to bring various truths within the purview of the average mentality. As such they are adequate to the collective needs in question. For the normal believer the exoteric domain is the only domain. However, if “exotericism consists in identifying transcendent realities with dogmatic forms” then esotericism is concerned “in a more or less direct manner with these same realities.” 9 Esotericism is concerned with the apprehension of Reality as such, not Reality as understood in such and such a perspective and “under the veil of different religious formulations.” 10 While exotericism sees “essence” or “universal truth” as a function of particular forms, esotericism sees the forms as a function of “essence.” To put it another way, exotericism particularizes the universal, esotericism universalizes the particular: What characterizes esoterism to the very extent that it is absolute, is that on contact with a dogmatic system, it universalizes the symbol or religious concept on the one hand, and interiorizes it on the other; the particular or the limited is recognized as the manifestation of the principial and the transcendent, and this in its turn reveals itself as immanent.11 6. Frithjof Schuon, Understanding Islam, London: Allen & Unwin, 1976, 80. 7. Frithjof Schuon, Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, London: Perennial Books, 1969, 70. 8. Frithjof Schuon, Understanding Islam, 110. 9. Frithjof Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, New York: Harper & Row, 1975, 144. See also Frithjof Schuon, Esoterism as Principle and as Way, London: Perennial Books, 1980, 37. 10. Frithjof Schuon, Esoterism as Principle and as Way,19. 11. Frithjof Schuon, Esoterism as Principle and as Way, 19. 5 99 Esotericism is “situated” on the plane of mystical experience, of intellection and realization, of gnosis, a plane on which the question of orthodoxy cannot arise, operative as it is only on the formal plane: If the purest esotericism includes the whole truth—and that is the very reason for its existence—the question of “orthodoxy” in the religious sense clearly cannot arise: direct knowledge of the mysteries could not be “Moslem” or “Christian” just as the sight of a mountain is the sight of a mountain and not something else.12 Nevertheless, the two realms, exoteric and esoteric, are continually meeting and interpenetrating, not only because there is such a thing as a “relative esotericism” but because “the underlying truth is one, and also because man is one.”13 Furthermore, even if esotericism transcends forms, it has need of doctrinal, ritual, moral and aesthetic supports on the path to realization.14 Herein lies the point of Schuon’s repeated affirmations of orthodoxy, such as this: Orthodoxy includes and guarantees incalculable values which man could not possibly draw out of himself. 15 It is not surprising that the exoteric elements in a religious tradition should be preserved and protected by custodians whose attitude to esoterism will be, at best, somewhat ambivalent, at worst openly hostile. In addressing itself to the defence of the credo and of the forms which appear as guarantors of truth the exoteric “resistance” to esotericism is entirely positive. But sometimes the exoteric defendants of orthodoxy overstep themselves and in so doing beget results that are both destructive and counter-productive, especially when a religious tradition is endangered by a preponderantly exoteric outlook: The exoteric viewpoint is, in fact, doomed to end by negating itself once it is no longer vivified by the presence within it of the esotericism of which it is both the outward radiation and the veil. So it is that religion, according to the measure in which it denies metaphysical and initiatory realities and becomes crystallized in literalistic dogmatism, inevitably engenders unbelief; the atrophy that overtakes dogmas when they are deprived of their internal dimension recoils upon them from outside, in the form of heretical and atheistic negations. 16 12. Frithjof Schuon, Understanding Islam, 139. See also Frithjof Schuon, Sufism, Veil and Quintessence, Bloomington: World Wisdom Books, 1981, 112. 13. Frithjof Schuon, Esoterism as Principle and as Way, 16. 14. Frithjof Schuon, Esoterism as Principle and as Way, 29. 15. FrithjofSchuon,SpiritualPerspectivesandHumanFacts,113.SeealsoFrithjofSchuon, Islam and the Perennial Philosophy, London: World of Islam, 1976, 5. 100 5 How much of post-medieval Christian history bears witness to this truth! Recall the theological and ecclesiastical ostracisms that have befallen some of the mystics and metaphysicians seeking to preserve the esoteric dimension within their respective religious traditions. The supra-human origin of a religious tradition in a Revelation, an adequate doctrine concerning the Absolute and the relative, the saving power of the spiritual method, the esoteric convergence on the Unitive Truth: all these point to the inner unity of all integral traditions which are, in a sense, variations on one theme. However, there remain certain puzzling questions which might stand in the way of an understanding of the principial unity which the religio perennis discloses. The Limits of Religious Exclusivism One frequently comes across formulations such as the following: “It is sometimes asserted that all religions are equally true. But this would seem to be simply sloppy thinking, since the various religions hold views of reality which are sharply different if not contradictory.”17 This kind of either/or thinking, characteristic of much that nowadays passes for philosophy, is in the same vein as a dogmatism which reveals itself not only by its inability to conceive the inward or implicit illimitability of a symbol, but also by its inability to recognize, when faced with two apparently contradictory truths, the inward connection that they apparently affirm, a connection that makes of them complementary aspects of one and the same truth.18 It is precisely this kind of incapacity which must be overcome if the transcendent unity of the religions is to be understood. As Schuon remarks, A religion is not limited by what it includes but by what it excludes; this exclu- 16. Frithjof Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, New York: Harper & Row, 1975, 9. A spiritually alert minority has recently given much thought to the implications of this principle. The intuition and affirmation of its lessons was perhaps the most important aspect of the work of the late Thomas Merton. Merton’s work has too often been seen as an enterprise in dialogue, which indeed it was, without any thought as to what end this was to be directed. The end Merton had in view was, of course, precisely, the revivification of the contemplative and esoteric dimension within the Catholic tradition. 17. O. Thomas: “Introduction” to Attitudes to Other Religions, London: SCM, 1969, quoted by Huston Smith, “Introduction to the Revised Edition” in Frithjof Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, xiii fn. 18. Frithjof Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, 3. See also Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred, New York: Crossroad, 1981, 281. 5 101 sion cannot impair the religion’s deepest contents—every religion is intrinsically a totality—but it takes its revenge all the more surely on the intermediary plane... the arena of theological speculations and fervors... extrinsic contradictions can hide an intrinsic compatibility or identity, which amounts to saying that each of the contradictory theses contains a truth and thereby an aspect of the whole truth and a way of access to this totality. 19 Examples of “contradictory” truths which effectively express complementary aspects of a single reality can be found not only across the traditions but within them. One might instance, by way of illustration, the Biblical or Koranic affirmations regarding predestination and free will. 20 From an esoteric viewpoint the exclusivist claims of one or another religion have no absolute validity. It is true that “the arguments of every intrinsically orthodox religion are absolutely convincing if one puts oneself in the intended setting.”21 It is also true that orthodox theological dogmatisms are entitled to a kind of “defensive reflex” which makes for claims to exclusivism. However, and this is crucial, The exoteric claim to the exclusive possession of a unique truth, or of Truth without epithet, is... an error purely and simply; in reality, every expressed truth necessarily assumes a form, that of its expression, and it is metaphysically impossible that any form should possess a unique value to the exclusion of other forms; for a form, by definition, cannot be unique and exclusive, that is to say it cannot be the only possible expression of what it expresses. 22 The argument that the different religions cannot all be repositories of the truth because of their formal differences and antagonisms rests on a failure to understand this principle. The lesson to be drawn from the multiplicity of religious forms is quite different: The diversity of religions, far from proving the falseness of all the doctrines concerning the supernatural, shows on the contrary the supra-formal character of revelation and the formal character of ordinary human understanding: the essence of revelation—or enlightenment—is one, but human nature requires diversity. 23 Schuon has deployed several images to clarify the relationship of the religions to each other. He likens them to geometric forms. Just as it would be absurd to imagine that spatial extensions and relationships 19. Frithjof Schuon, Islam and the Perennial Philosophy, 46. 20. Frithjof Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, 4. 21. Frithjof Schuon, Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, 14. 22. Frithjof Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, 17. 23. Frithjof Schuon: “No Activity Without Truth,” 4. See also Marco Pallis, A Buddhist Spectrum, London: Allen & Unwin, 1980,157. 102 5 could only be expressed by one form so it is absurd to assert that there could be only one doctrine giving an account of the Absolute. However, just as each geometric form has some necessary and sufficient reason for its existence, so too with the religions. Ecumenism and Dialogue From a traditionalist viewpoint, the vexed issues of ecumenism, dialogue and the inter-relationship of the religions are all strands in the same web. It should be noted, firstly, that the recognition of the proper status of traditions other than one’s own depends on various contingent circumstances and does not in itself constitute a spiritual necessity. In some respects a religious intolerance is preferable to the kind of tolerance which holds fast to nothing: “...the Christian saint who fights the Moslems is closer to Islamic sanctity than the philosopher who accepts everything and practices nothing.”24 Secondly, traditional orthodoxy is the prerequisite of any creative intercourse between the traditions themselves. To imagine that dialogue can usefully proceed without firm formal commitments is to throw the arena open to any and every kind of opinion and to let loose a kind of anarchy which can only exacerbate the problem. Thirdly, and crucially, the question of the relationship of the religions to each other can only decisively be resolved by resort to traditional esotericisms and by the application of trans-religious metaphysical principles. The “problem” of religious pluralism can only be resolved through a penetration of the exoteric barriers which each tradition has erected. As Seyyed Hossein Nasr has pointed out, “Ecumenism if correctly understood must be an esoteric activity if it is to avoid becoming the instrument for simple relativization and further secularization.”25 A proper understanding of the exoteric-esoteric relationship would put an end to all the artificial and quite implausible means by which attempts have been made to reconcile formal divergences. As Marco Pallis, starting from a Buddhist perspective, has suggested, Dharma and the dharmas, unitive suchness and the suchness of diversified existence: here is to be found the basis of an inter-religious exegesis which does 24. Frithjof Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, 182. See also Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred, 291 & 307 fn28. 25. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred, 282. 5 103 not seek a remedy for historical conflicts by explaining away formal or doctrinal factors such as in reality translate differences of spiritual genius. Far from minimizing the importance of these differences in the name of a facile and eventually spurious ecumenical friendliness, they will be cherished for the positive message they severally carry and as necessities that have arisen out of the differentiation of mankind itself. 26 There have been several attempts to reconcile these formal antagonisms under an array of different philosophical and theological canopies—theosophy, “anonymous Christianity,” “natural religion,” “universal religion,” the perennial philosophy as espoused by the likes of Aldous Huxley and Vivekananda. As Coomaraswamy has remarked, these various attempts at a universal religion amount to a kind of religious Esperanto—with about as much chance of success! The outlook implied in the passage from Pallis depends on a recognition of the exoteric-esoteric relationship and a subordination (not an annihilation) of exoteric dogmatism to the metaphysical principles preserved by traditional esotericisms. The main obstacle on this path is the tenacity with which many representatives of an exoteric viewpoint cling to a belief in the exclusive claims of their own tradition and to other “pious extravagances.” 27 Schuon goes to the heart of the matter: ...if exoterism, the religion of literalism and exclusive dogmatism, has difficulty in admitting the existence and legitimacy of the esoteric dimension...this is understandable on various grounds. However, in the cyclic period in which we live, the situation of the world is such that exclusive dogmatism... is hard put to hold its own, and whether it likes it or not, has need of certain esoteric elements... Unhappily the wrong choice is made; the way out of certain deadlocks is sought, not with the help of esoterism, but by resorting to the falsest and most pernicious of philosophical and scientific ideologies, and for the universality of the spirit, the reality of which is confusedly noted, there is substituted a so-called “ecumenism” which consists of nothing but platitudes and sentimentality and accepts everything without discrimination.28 For many scholars the dilemma has been this: any “theoretical” solution 26. Marco Pallis,ABuddhistSpectrum,pp109-110.Theessayfromwhichthisexcerptis taken can also be found in Ranjit Fernando (ed), The Unanimous Tradition, Colombo: Sri Lanka Institute of Traditional Studies, 1991. See also Victor Danner, “The Inner and Outer Man,” in Yusuf Ibish & Peter Lamborn Wilson (eds), Traditional Modes of Contemplation and Action, Tehran: Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, 1977, 407ff. 27. The phrase is from Schuon’s essay “Deficiencies in the World of Faith,” Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism, 125. 28. Frithjof Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, 4. 104 5 to the problem of conflicting truth claims demands a conceptual platform which both encompasses and transcends any specific theological position; it must go beyond the premises of any particular theological outlook but at the same time not compromise the theological position to which one might adhere. Traditionalism shows the way out of this impasse. It neither insists on nor precludes any particular religious commitment. Once the necessity of orthodoxy is accepted, and the principles which govern the relationship of the exoteric and the esoteric are understood, then one can remain fully committed to a particular tradition while recognizing the limits of the outlook in question. Traditionalism requires neither a betrayal of one’s own tradition nor a wishy-washy hospitality to anything and everything. The observation made by an early reviewer of Schuon’s The Transcendent Unity of Religions might be applied to traditionalism as a whole. It presents “a very concrete and specific philosophy of religion for an ecumenical age...It opens... [the] way for discovering a basis for coexistence for the different creeds.”29 29. F.H. Heinemann in The Journal of Theological Studies 6, 1955, 340. 5 105
- [The Translucence of the Eternal](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/translucence-of-the-eternal) - “The Translucence of the Eternal” Religious Understandings of the Natural Order by Kenneth Oldmeadow Thou art the fire, Thou art the sun, Thou art the air, Thou art the moon, Thou art the starry firmament, Thou art Brahman Supreme: Thou art the waters, The creator of all! Thou art woman, thou art man, Thou art the youth, thou art the maiden, thou art the old man tottering with his staff; Thou facest everywhere. Thou art the dark butterfly, thou art the green parrot with red eyes, Thou art the thunder cloud, the seasons, the seas. Without beginning art thou, beyond time, beyond space. Thou art he from whom sprang the three worlds. (The Upanishads)1 The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork. (Psalms)2 Crazy Horse dreamed and went out into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, 1. Svetasvatara Upanishad IV.2-4. 2. Psalms XIX.1 2 11 and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that world. (Black Elk)3 For the sage each flower is metaphysically a proof of the Infinite. (Frithjof Schuon)4 Introduction The modern mentality characteristically looks for solutions to our most urgent problems in the wrong places; more often than not the proposed remedies aggravate the malady. Various responses to the so-called environmental crisis are of this type. Hardly anyone is now foolish enough to deny that there is something fundamentally wrong with our way of “being in the world.” The evidence is too overwhelming for even the most sanguine apostles of “progress” to ignore. Much of the debate about the “environment” (itself a rather problematical term) continues to be conducted in terms derived from the secular-scientific-rationalist-humanist world-view bequeathed to us by that series of upheavals which demolished the medieval outlook—the Renaissance and Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment. My purpose in this paper is to turn our attention to some general principles which informed traditional religious understandings of the natural order and of the human place in it. No “solution” to the environmental crisis is proposed here. However, it is perfectly evident to those with eyes to see and ears to hear that the desecration (one uses the word advisedly) of nature cannot be remedied without recourse to the principles which governed traditional understandings of the natural order. These might offer some hope where modern scientism (the ideology of modern science) has so spectacularly failed. Traditional Cosmogonies The first question which might present itself in any inquiry into religious perspectives on nature is this: how does this or that religion in particular, or how do religions in general, envisage the origin, the source of the universe? Generally speaking we can say that the different religions, from 3. 4. 12 Black Elk in John Neihardt Black Elk Speaks London: Abacus, 1974, p67. Frithjof Schuon Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts London: Perennial Books, 1969, p10. 2 both East and West, and from both primal and literate cultures, account for the beginnings of the universe through a mythological account, a cosmogony. In the Judeo-Christian tradition we find it in the Genesis story. While the narrative details vary, this is not essentially different from, let us say, the mythical accounts of the Vedas, or of the Aboriginal Dreaming. These days “myth” is often a pejorative term meaning either a naive and childish fabrication or simply a story which is untrue. This kind of view is probably rooted in the 19th century where many scholars and theorists (anthropologists, folklorists, sociologists and the like) took this condescending and disabling view of mythology. Thus, Andrew Lang, for instance, took it that “primitive” mythologies were “a product of the childhood of the human race, arising out of the minds of a creature that has not yet learned to think in terms of strict cause and effect.”5 Myths were thus understood as a kind of fumbling proto-science. We must return to earlier outlooks if we are to understand religious myths (from wherever they come) aright—as allegorical or symbolic narratives which articulate, in dramatic form, a world-view whose elements will necessarily include a metaphysic (an account of the Real; the metacosmic), a cosmology (an account of the visible world, in the heavens and here on earth; the macrocosmic) and an anthropology (an account of the human situation; the microcosmic). In combating the impertinent reductionisms of the anthropologists Ananda Coomaraswamy eloquently reminds us that, Myth is the penultimate truth, of which all experience is the temporal reflection. The mythical narrative is of timeless and placeless validity, true nowhere and everywhere... Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words...6 Cosmogonies can be located on a spectrum one end of which might be labelled creationist/theistic and the other emanationist/monistic: the former kind envisages the universe as a creation of a divine power or deity while the latter conceives of the universe as a spatio-temporal manifestation of an ultimate, spiritual reality. The Abrahamic 5. Eric Sharpe Comparative Religion London: Duckworth, 1975, p61. 6. Ananda Coomaraswamy Hinduism and Buddhism New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1996, p6 & p33, n21. 2 13 monotheisms are of the former type, while Platonism and some forms of Hinduism represent the latter. In the Mundaka Upanishad , for instance, we are told that, As a spider sends forth and draws in its threads, as herbs grow on the earth, as hair grows on the head and the body of a living person, so from the Imperishable arises here the universe.7 Traditional cosmogonies necessarily deal with the relationship of spiritual and material realities, one which lies at the heart of all religious understandings of nature. Philosophically speaking, most religions posit the existence of two “worlds,” one spiritual, immutable and absolute, the other material, mutable and relative, usually with an intermediary realm (which might variously be referred to as ethereal, subtle, astral and the like). Cosmogonies affirm the primacy of the spiritual: the material world derives from a divine creativity, or, at least, from a divine plenitude. In the religious context it is axiomatic that the material world did not and could not create itself; it is suspended, so to speak, within a reality which is immaterial and which is beyond time and space; the material world has no independent or autonomous existence. Consider a few quotes (one could easily assemble hundreds of such passages from all over the globe): 7. 14 Mundaka Upanishad I.i.7. Of the major religious traditions the one which has least to say about the origins of the universe is Buddhism which is generally suspicious of metaphysical speculation and eschews what the Buddha called the Indeterminate Questions, which is to say questions which are either unanswerable, at least in terms accessible to the ordinary human mentality, or which are distractions from the business at hand. Sometimes it is said by Buddhists that the universe “always was”; this, perhaps, is to be understood as being upaya —a kind of sufficient expedient, so to speak. However, from a metaphysical viewpoint, and as the Prajna-Paramita states, “the belief in the unity or eternity of matter is incomprehensible....” Quoted in Whitall Perry The Widening Breach: Evolutionism in the Mirror of Cosmology Cambridge: Quinta Essentia, 1995, p44. 2 There is something obscure which is complete before heaven and earth arose; tranquil, quiet, standing alone without change, moving around without peril. It could be the Mother of everything. I don’t know its name, and call it Tao. (Tao Te Ching)8 The Imperishable is the Real. As sparks fly upward from a blazing fire, so from the depths of the Imperishable arise all things. To the depths of the Imperishable they again descend. Self-luminous is that Being, and formless. He dwells within all and without all...From him are born breath, mind, the organs of sense, ether, air, fire, water and the earth, and he binds all these together. (The Mundaka Upanishad)9 This world, with all its stars, elements, and creatures, is come out of the invisible world; it has not the smallest thing or the smallest quality of anything but what is come forth from thence. (William Law)10 Cosmogonies tell of the coming into being of the cosmos, a living, organic unity displaying beauty, harmony, meaning, intelligibility as against the chaotic, opaque, inert, and meaningless universe of modern science. (“Kosmos,” in its original Greek and in archaic times meant Great Man as well as “world”: in the light of various cosmogonies, particularly the Greek and the Indian, this fact is not without significance. In the Vedas we have but one of many accounts of the universe being created out of Purusa, a cosmic man, Primordial Man, a Divine Archetypal figure.) One of the most beautiful expressions of the idea of an underlying harmony in the universe is to be found in the Taoist tradition and in the symbol of the Tao itself wherein we see the forces of yin and yang intertwined, these being the two fundamental forces or principles or energies out of which the fabric of the material universe is woven. In Hinduism the harmony, order and intelligibility of the universe is signalled by the Vedic term rta which we find in the earliest Scriptures. Religious doctrines (which might be expressed in any number of forms, not necessarily verbal) about the relationship of the spiritual and material worlds necessarily deal with the transcendence and immanence of the Absolute (whether this be envisaged in theistic, monistic, panentheistic or apophatic terms—God, Allah, Brahman, Tao, WakanTanka, nirvana, or whatever): the “interplay” of these two “dimensions” varies from religion to religion but both are always present. Whatever 8. Tao Te Ching XXV. 9. Mundaka Upanishad II.i.1-4. 10. Selected Mystical Writings,quotedin Whitall Perry A Treasury ofTraditionalWisdom London: Allen & Unwin, 1971, p26. 2 15 accent a particular spiritual economy might place on these aspects of the Real the underlying principle is always the same. It might best be summed up by an old Rabbinic dictum: “The universe is not the dwelling place of God; God is the dwelling place of the universe.”11 At this point it is as well to dispel a misunderstanding which bedevils many discussions of the beliefs of non-literate peoples, one signalled by the term “pantheism,” i.e. the worship of the natural order as co-terminous with “God.” This, we are sometimes told (usually by anthropologists) was the practice of this or that “primitive” people. In reality, pantheism, if ever it existed as anything other than an anthropological fiction, could never have been more than a degenerate form of what is properly called “panentheism,” which is to say a belief in the overwhelming presence of the spiritual within the natural world—a quite different matter from the “pantheistic” fallacy that the natural world is somehow identical to (and thus exhausts) “God.” Black Elk, the revered holy man of the Oglala Sioux, clearly articulated the panentheistic principle: We should understand that all things are the work of the Great Spirit. We should know that He is within all things; the trees, the grasses, the rivers, the mountains, all the four-legged animals and the winged peoples; and even more important we should understand that He is also above all these things and peoples.12 The Sacred and the Profane A category without which we cannot proceed very far in the study of religion is the sacred. There are many ways of defining it. Here is one from a discussion of Sacred Books by the foremost metaphysician of our own time, Frithjof Schuon: That is sacred which in the first place is attached to the transcendent order, secondly possesses the character of absolute certainty, and thirdly, eludes the comprehension of the ordinary human mind... The sacred is the pres- 11. Quoted in Sarvepalli Radhakrisnan Selected Writings on Philosophy, Religion and Culture ed. Robert A. McDermott, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1970, p146. 12. Black Elk The Sacred Pipe ed. Joseph Epes Brown, Baltimore: Penguin, 1971, pxx (my italics) . 16 2 ence of the centre in the periphery... The sacred introduces a quality of the absolute into relativities and confers on perishable things a texture of eternity.13 Of course, the category can apply to all manner of things: events, texts, buildings, images, rituals. In the context of our present concerns we might isolate two applications of this category or principle: to space and time, and to life itself. The traditional mind, especially in primal, nonliterate societies, perceives and experiences space and time as “sacred” and “profane,” which is to say that they are not uniform and homogeneous as they are for the scientific mind, but are qualitatively differentiated. A good deal of ceremonial life is concerned with entry into or, better, participation in sacred time and space.14 Through ritual one enters into sacred time, into real time, the “once upon a time,” illo tempore, a time radically different from a “horizontal” duration. Likewise with sacred places, remembering that a natural site can be made sacred through various rituals and practices, or it can be recognized as sacred— a place where the membrane, so to speak, between the worlds of matter and spirit are especially permeable. Rivers, mountains, particular types of trees and places related to the mythological events are sites of this sort. The sacredness of Mt Kailas or Uluru, for instance, is not conferred but apprehended. The sanctity of life itself is expressed in different ways in the various religious vocabularies. In the Judeo-Christian tradition this principle or theme begins in the affirmation in Genesis that man is made in the image of God, that the human being carries an indelible imprint of the divine. Thence we have what might be called the principle of the spiritual equality of all human beings no matter what their station in life or their natural attributes and shortcomings —“all equal before God,” as the Christian formulation has it. The Judeo-Christian tradition has primarily affirmed the sanctity of human life, sometimes to the neglect or abuse of other life forms. One of the lessons of the great Eastern and primal religions is the principle of the moral solidarity, if one may so express it, of all living forms: in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism this is embodied in the traditional 13. Frithjof Schuon Understanding Islam London: Allen & Unwin, 1976, p48. 14. Oneofthemostuseful expositionsof archaic understandings of sacredand profane time and space is to be found in Mircea Eliade The Sacred and the Profane New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959. 2 17 Indian value of ahimsa (non-injuriousness). Here is what Gandhi had to say about the cow: The central fact of Hinduism... is ‘Cow Protection’. Cow Protection to me is one of the most wonderful phenomena in all human evolution; for it takes the human being beyond his species. The cow to me means the entire sub-human world. Man through the cow is enjoined to realise his identity with all that lives ... Hindus will be judged not by their correct chanting of sacred texts, not by their pilgrimages, not by their most punctilious observance of Caste rules, but by their ability to protect the cow ... “Cow protection’ is the gift of Hinduism to the world; and Hinduism will live so long as there are Hindus to protect the cow.15 “Man’s identity with all that lives”—this is the key phrase to what appears at first sight to be a rather startling claim from the Mahatma. William Blake affirmed the same notion in his famous words, “all that lives is holy.” The Human Situation The principle of the sanctity of life, and what I have termed “the moral solidarity” of living forms should not blind us to the fact that all traditional wisdoms affirm, in their different ways, that the human being is especially privileged. The human is an axial or amphibious being who lives in both the material and spiritual worlds in a way which is not quite true of other living beings, and is thus a bridge between them. Seyyed Hossein Nasr reminds us that, Man’s central position in the world is not due to his cleverness or inventive genius but because of the possibility of attaining sanctity and becoming a channel of grace for the world around him... the very grandeur of the human condition is precisely that he has the possibility of reaching a state “higher than the angels” and at the same time of denying God.16 This religious understanding is, of course, quite incompatible with the notion that man is simply another biological organism. By the same measure, it is utterly at odds with that most seductive and elegant (and certainly one of the most pernicious) of scientistic hypotheses, Darwin- 15. Gandhi, quoted in Eric Sharpe: “To Hinduism through Gandhi” in Arthur Basham et al., Wisdom of the East Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1979, pp61-62. 16. Seyyed Hossein Nasr Ideals and Realities of Islam London: Allen & Unwin, 1966, 18 2 pp24-25. ian evolutionism. As Blake so well understood, “Man is either the ark of God or a phantom of the earth and of the water.” As “the ark of God” man is the guardian and custodian of the natural order, the pontifex, the caliph, “the viceregent of God on earth” in Qur’anic terms.17 The peculiar position of the human being can also illuminated by recourse to the traditional cosmological principle of the microcosm/macrocosm, expressed most succinctly perhaps in the Hermetic maxim, “as above so below.” In brief, man is not only in the universe but the universe is in man: “there is nothing in heaven or earth that is not also in man” (Paracelsus).18 The Buddha put it this way: “In truth I say to you that within this fathom high body ... lies the world and the rising of the world and the ceasing of the world.”19 Others have rendered the same truth poetically. Recall the beautiful lines of Thomas Traherne: You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.20 Similarly, from Blake: To see a world in a grain of sand, And Heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour.21 One of the keys to this principle resides in the traditional understanding of consciousness as infinite, as surpassing the temporal and spatial limits of the material world—which, in fact, is nothing other than a tissue of relativities, a world of appearances, a fabric of illusions, maya in the Hindu lexicon.22 17. See Jean-Louis Michon:“The Vocation of Man AccordingtotheKoran”inFragments of Infinity: Essays in Religion and Philosophy ed. Arvind Sharma, Bridport: Prism Press, 1991, pp135-152. See also Kenneth Cragg The Mind of the Qur’an: Chapters in Reflection London: Allen & Unwin, 1973. 18. Quoted in T.C. McLuhan Cathedrals of the Spirit: The Message of Sacred Places Toronto: Harper Collins, 1996, p270. 19. Quotedin Huston Smith Forgotten Truth:ThePrimordialTraditionNewYork:Harper & Row, 1976, p60. 20. Centuries of Meditations 1.29 21. “Auguries of Innocence” 2 19 The Symbolism of Natural Forms and the Cosmological Sciences In “Frost at Midnight” Coleridge, addresses these lines to his baby son: But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds, Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible of that eternal language, which thy God Utters, who from eternity doth teach Himself in all, and all things in himself. The idea of the natural order as not only sacred but as a symbolic language strikes the modern mind as somewhat strange, perhaps as “poetic fancy.” In reality it is the modern outlook which is idiosyncratic. As Mircea Eliade points out, the notion of a world of inert, opaque matter, a wholly desacralised universe, is a modern invention.23 The traditional mind perceives the natural world as a hierophany, a theophany, a revelation—in short, as a teaching about the Divine Order. It is so by way of its analogical participation in the Divine qualities, which is to say that natural phenomena are themselves symbols of higher realities. A symbol, properly defined, is a reality of a lower order which participates analogically in a reality of a higher order of being. Therefore, a properly constituted symbolism rests on the inherent and objective qualities of phenomena and their relation to spiritual realities. The science of symbolism proceeds through a discernment of the qualitative significances of substances, colours, forms, spatial relationships and so on. As Schuon has observed, ...we are not here dealing with subjective appreciations, for the cosmic qualities are ordered both in relation to being and according to a hierarchy which is more real than the individual; they are, then, independent of our tastes...24 22. 23. 20 Furthermore, as Lama Anagarika Govinda reminds us, “If the structure of our consciousness did not correspond to that of the universe and its laws, we should not be aware either of the universe or the laws that govern it. “Creative Meditation and Multi-Dimensional Consciousness Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1976, p162. Eliade Sacred and Profane p13. 2 This kind of symbolism is an altogether different matter from arbitrary sign systems and artificial representational vocabularies. Only when we understand the revelatory aspect of natural phenomena, their metaphysical transparency, can we fully appreciate the import of a claim such as this: Wild Nature is at one with holy poverty and also with spiritual childlikeness; she is an open book containing an inexhaustible teaching of truth and beauty. It is in the midst of his own artifices that man most easily becomes corrupted, it is they who make him covetous and impious; close to virgin Nature, who knows neither agitation nor falsehood, he had the hope of remaining contemplative like Nature herself.25 Or this, from the great 13th century Zen sage, Dogen: They passed eons living alone in the mountains and forests; only then did they unite with the Way and use mountains and rivers for words, raise the wind and rain for a tongue, and explain the great void.26 Nature, then, is a teaching, a primordial Scripture. To “read” this Scripture, to take it to heart, is “to see God everywhere,” to be aware of the transcendent dimension which is present in every cosmic situation, to see “the translucence of the Eternal through and in the temporal” (Coleridge).27 Here are a few formulations which signal the same principle. The invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made. (St Paul)28 24. Frithjof Schuon Gnosis: Divine Wisdom London: Perennial Books, 1979, p110. The most systematic and magisterial explication of the science of symbolism in recent times is to be found in René Guénon’s Fundamental Symbols Cambridge: Quinta Essentia, 1995. For a brief but incisive discussion of symbolism-proper and its relation to intellectuality, see Ananda Coomaraswamy: “Primitive Mentality” in Coomaraswamy 1: Selected Papers, Traditional Art and Symbolism ed. Roger Lipsey, Princeton: Bollingen Press, 1977, pp286-307. 25. Frithjof Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds Perennial Books, London, 1965, p.84. 26. From Dogen’s Shobogenzo, quotedinDharmaGaia:A Harvest of EssaysonBuddhism and Ecology ed. Alan H. Badiner, Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1990, pxiii. 27. Coleridge quoted in Kathleen Raine Defending Ancient Springs Cambridge, Golgonooza Press, 1985, p109. 28. Romans I.20. 2 21 If we look at the world...with the eyes of the spirit we shall discover that the simplest material object...is a symbol, a glyph of a higher reality and a deeper relationship of universal and individual forces... (Lama Anagarika Govinda)29 Stones, plants, animals, the earth, the sky, the stars, the elements, in fact everything in the universe reveals to us the knowledge, power and the will of its Originator. (Al-Ghazali)30 The creatures are, as it were, traces of God’s passing, wherein he reveals his might, power, wisdom and other divine qualities. (St John of the Cross)31 The great, gashed, half-naked mountain is another of God’s saints. There is no other like him. He is alone in his own character; nothing else in the world ever did or ever will imitate God in quite the same way. That is his sanctity. (Thomas Merton)32 It is in the primal cultures (so often dismissed or patronised as “primitive” and “pre-literate”), such as those of the Australian Aborigines, or the African Bushmen, or the American Indians, that we find the most highly developed sense of the transparency of natural phenomena and the most profound understanding of the “eternal language.” As Joseph Epes Brown has remarked of the Sioux experience, “each form in the world around them bears such a host of precise values and meanings that taken all together they constitute what one would call their ‘doctrine’.”33 In the traditional world the natural order was never understood or studied as an autonomous and independent reality; on the contrary, the 29. Govinda Creative Meditation p102. 30. Al-Ghazali quoted in Cathedrals of the Spirit p107. For a study of the symbolism of animals within one particular spiritual economy see Joseph Epes Brown Animals of the Soul: Sacred Animals of the Oglala Sioux Rockport: Element, 1997. 31. TheSpiritualCanticleV.iii,quotedinElizabethHamiltonTheVoiceoftheSpirit:The Spirituality of St John of the Cross London: Dartman, Todd & Longman, 1976, p89. Compare with the well-known hadith qudsi: (in which God Himself speaks): “I was a hidden treasure, I wanted to be known and I created the creatures.”; or with St. Thomas Aquinas: “Each creature is a witness to God’s power and omnipotence; and its beauty is a witness to the divine wisdom ... Every creature participates in some way in the likeness of the Divine Essence.” Aquinas quoted in Matthew Fox The Coming of the Cosmic Christ Melbourne: Collins Dove, 1989, p75. 32. Thomas Merton New Seeds of Contemplation New York: New Directions, 1961, p31. 22 2 natural order was only to be understood within a larger context, drawing on theology and metaphysics as well as the cosmological sciences themselves. The material world was (and is) only intelligible through recourse to first principles which could not, and can not, be derived from empirical inquiry but from revelation, esoteric knowledge, gnosis, metaphysics: The knowledge of the whole universe does not lie within the competence of science but of metaphysics. Moreover, the principles of metaphysics remain independent of the sciences and cannot in any way be disproved by them.34 No one has stated the crucial principle here better than the great Vedantic sage, Sankara, who taught that the world of maya (i.e. the world of appearances, of time-space relativities) is not inexplicable, it is only not self-explanatory.35 To describe the futility of a purely materialistic science (such as we now have in the West), Sankara compares it to an attempt to explain night and day without reference to the Sun. In other words, the study of the natural world is not primarily an empirical business, although it does, of course, have an empirical dimension: matter does not exist independently and its nature cannot be understood in purely material terms. This is the great dividing line between the sacred sciences of the traditional worlds and the Faustian science of our own time. The Western Desacralisation of Nature Western attitudes to nature, before the onslaughts of a materialistic scientism, had been influenced by archaic pagan ideas (derived principally from Greece and from Northern Europe), Platonism and Islam, and, pre-eminently, the Judeo-Christian tradition. Many contemporary 33. Joseph Epes Brown The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indians New York: Crossroad, 1982, p37. Two works, comparatively free of the evolutionist and modernistic prejudices which colour much of the anthropological literature, might be recommended as introductions to the Bushmen and Aboriginal cultures: James Cowan Mysteries of the Dreaming Bridport: Prism, 1989; and Laurens van der Post The Heart of the Hunter Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. 34. SeyyedHosseinNasrManandNature:TheSpiritualCrisisofModernManLondon: Allen & Unwin, 1976, p35. 35. See my article, “Sankara’s Doctrine of Maya” in Asian Philosophy 2:2, 1992, pp131146. 2 23 environmentalists point the finger at the so-called “dominion ethic” apparently sanctioned by the Genesis account. There is no gainsaying the fact that Christian institutions have for centuries been accomplices in an appalling environmental vandalism and one understands the reasons why many environmentalists resort to a clutch of clichés about the destructive influence of Christianity. Like all clichés, those bandied about by anti-religious propagandists in the environmental debate have some truth in them. However, if we look a little more closely we will find that the story is rather more complicated than is often supposed.36 Here I can do no more than offer a few fragmentary remarks. Like all cosmogonies, the Genesis myth deals with the relationship of spiritual and material. The natural world is affirmed as God’s handiwork. Throughout both Testaments of the Bible we are reminded that “All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.”37 Furthermore, we are to understand the Creation itself as both a psalm of praise to its Creator and as a revelation of the divine qualities. As one contemporary commentator put it, “Creation is nothing less than a manifestation of God’s hidden Being.”38 In the Psalms we have many affirmations of this kind: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork. “ We find many similar passages in The Qur’an: “The seven heavens, and the earth, and all that is therein, magnify Him, and there is naught but magnifieth his praise; only ye understand not their worship,”39 and “All that is in the heavens and the earth glorifieth Allah.”40 In fact we can find like passages in many of the great Scriptures from around the globe: thus in the Bhagavad Gita, to choose one example, the universe is celebrated as the raiment of Krishna who contains within himself all the worlds of time and space.41 In the Genesis account, the world of nature is not man’s to do with as 36. SeeWendellBerry’sessay“ChristianityandtheSurvivalofCreation”inSex,Economy, Freedom & Community New York: Pantheon Books, 1993, pp92-116. 37. John I.3 38. Philip Sherrard Human Image: World Image Cambridge: Golgonooza Press, 1992, p152. 39. The Qur’an XVII.44 40. The Qur’an LVII.2 41. Goethehadsomethingofthesortinmindwhenhewrote,“Natureistheliving,visible 24 garment of God.”; quoted in Victor Gollancz From Darkness to Light London: Victor Gollancz, 1964, p246. 2 he pleases but rather a gift from God, one saturated with divine qualities, to be used for those purposes which sustain life and which give human existence in particular, dignity, purpose and meaning. That this stewardship ethic could degenerate into a sanction for wholesale exploitation and criminal ruination is actually a betrayal of the lessons of Genesis. How did this come about? The cooperative factors at work in the Western desacralisation of nature are complex but we may here mention a few of the more salient: Christianity’s emergence in a world of decadent pagan idolatry which necessitated a somewhat imbalanced emphasis on God’s transcendence and on “other-worldliness”; the consequent neglect of those sacred sciences which might later have formed a bulwark against the ravages of a materialistic science; the unholy alliance of an anti-traditional Protestantism with the emergent ideologies of a new and profane world-view.42 In the post-medieval European world, various other ideas about and understandings of nature have appeared: nature as chaos, disorder, wildness, in contrast to “civilisation,” a threatening space which lay “outside” the social order (this motif has some pagan antecedents, especially in the Teutonic-Scandinavian religions rather than the Mediterranean and classical); nature as matter, and as a mechanistic system governed by various “physical laws” amenable to investigation by an autonomous, secular and materialistic science (the legacy of the Scientific Revolution, of Newton, Bacon, Locke, Copernicus, Galileo, et al.); as raw material, an inexhaustible quarry to be plundered and, simultaneously, as “enemy” to be subdued, “tamed” or, even more ludicrously, “conquered” (industrialism, which provided a new field of applications for the “discoveries” of science); as an Edenic paradise peopled by “noble savages” (the romantic naturism of Rousseau and his many descendants); as uplifting spectacle (Wordsworth); as the Darwinian jungle, “red in tooth and claw”; as an amenity, a “resource” to be “managed” and protected for human recreation, tourism and the like; as Gaia, a single living organism (“deep ecology”); and as “Wilderness” (a quasi-religious secularism, if one might so put it, which absolutizes “Nature” under a certain guise and thus becomes a form of idolatry—which is nothing other than the mistaking of the symbol for its higher referent). 42. The most authoritative analysis of this process is to be found in Nasr’s Man and Nature. 2 25 In my view, none of the post-medieval understandings in themselves offer any very real hope of providing a way out of our predicament. Clearly some contemporary developments and movements (“deep ecology,” “eco-feminism,” the new physics) yield some insights and can be helpful in dismantling the modern mind-set which has brought us to the current situation. But too often these well-intentioned gropings towards a more holistic understanding are bereft of any properly-constituted metaphysical and cosmological framework. (This is evident, for instance, in the fact that for all their radical aspirations the proponents of “a new ecological awareness” often fall prey to the materialistic and evolutionist assumptions which are at the root of the problem which they are trying to address. It must also be said that those who are properly sceptical about the pretensions of scientism are also often vulnerable to a kind of sentimental and warmed-over pantheism—sometimes on display in the effusions of the “New Age” enthusiasts.) No, what is required is a reanimation of the principles and understandings which governed traditional understandings. The key, perhaps, is to be found in the word “sacramental”—and the catechistic formula is altogether precise and apposite: “an outward and visible sign of an inner and invisible grace.” One might schematize the contrast between traditional and modern world-views, and their respective “attitudes” to nature this way: Traditional Cultures mythological cosmogonies spiritual worldview; primacy of the spiritual qualitative, synthetic and holistic sacred sciences natural forms symbolic and transparent religious culture reciprocal & cooperative relationship with nature ecological and “natural” economies sacramental Modern “Civilisation” the geological/historical “record” scientific worldview; primacy of the material quantitative, analytic and fragmentary science natural forms mute and opaque secular culture exploitative & combative relationship with nature industrial and artificial economies profane Like all such schemas, this vastly oversimplifies the case—but it can perhaps serve as a signpost to those modes of understanding and of “being in the world” which we need to reawaken in the modern West. Before any such a healing process can proceed (a healing of ourselves, of the earth, of our “relationship” with the whole cosmos and with what lies 26 2 beyond it) we must accept that, at root, the “environmental crisis” is actually the symptom of a spiritual malaise. To return to health we must get to the seat of the disease rather that merely palliating the symptoms. As a contemporary Sufi, Abu Bakr Siraj Ed-Din, has so well expressed it: The state of the outer world does not merely correspond to the general state of men’s souls; it also in a sense depends on that state, since man himself is the pontiff of the outer world. Thus the corruption of man must necessarily affect the whole...43 In this context we might also feel the force of Emerson’s claim that, “the views of nature held by any people determine all their institutions.”44 In this paper, of severely circumscribed compass, we are not able to detail the ways in which we might escape the tyrannical grip of a profane scientism and its various accomplices (industrialism, consumerism, “development,” “economic growth” and other such shibboleths) and so begin to free ourselves and our world from the catastrophic consequences of a collective blindness and a quite monstrous hubris (the two, of course, being intimately related). We must relinquish our preposterous and Luciferian ideas about “conquering” nature, and allow Mother Nature not only to heal herself but to heal us: only then can we hear the “timeless message of Nature” which “constitutes a spiritual viaticum of the first importance.”45 As Kenneth Cragg has so properly observed, ...nature is the first ground and constant test of the authentically religious temper–the temper which does not sacralize things in themselves nor desecrate them in soul-less using and consuming. Between the pagan and the secular, with their contrasted bondage and arrogance, lies the reverent ground of a right hallowing where things are well seen as being for men under God, seen for their poetry, mystery, order and serviceability in the cognizance of man, and for their quality in the glory of God.46 Readers interested in the ideas which have been adumbrated in this discussion are directed to the list of writings which follows and in which they will find more thorough expositions, from a traditional “point of view,” of some of the principles touched on here. What can be said, in 43. Abu Bakr Siraj Ed-Din The Book of Certainty New York: Samuel Weiser, 1974, p33. 44. Quoted in Cathedrals of the Spirit p223. 45. Frithjof Schuon, The Feathered Sun: Plains Indians in Art and Philosophy World Wisdom Books, Bloomington, 1990, p13. 46. The Mind of the Qur’an p148. 2 27 brief and in conclusion, is that the way forward must also be a way back. And, finally, let us never forget the truth of Black Elk’s words: Peace... comes within the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the Universe dwells Wakan-Tanka [the Great Spirit] and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.47 47. The Sacred Pipe p115. 28 2 Suggested Reading (a) Traditionalist Writers Joseph Epes Brown The Sacred Pipe Baltimore: Penguin, 1971. The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indians New York: Crossroad, 1982. Animals of the Soul Rockport: Element, 1997. Titus Burckhardt Mirror of the Intellect ed. William Stoddart, Cambridge: Quinta Essentia, 1987. Ananda Coomaraswamy Time and Eternity New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1993. Jean Cooper Taoism, the Way of the Mystic Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1972. Symbolism, the Universal Language Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1982. René Guénon Fundamental Symbols Cambridge: Quinta Essentia, 1995. The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times Baltimore: Penguin, 1972. Martin Lings Ancient Beliefs and Modern Superstitions London: Allen & Unwin, 1980. Seyyed Hossein Nasr Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man London: Allen & Unwin, 1976. Knowledge and the Sacred New York: Crossroad, 1981. Religion and the Order of Nature Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Seyyed Hossein Nasr & Katherine O’Brien (eds) In Quest of the Sacred: The Modern World in the Light of Tradition Oakton: Foundation for Traditional Studies, 1994. Whitall Perry The Widening Breach: Evolutionism in the Light of Cosmology Cambridge: Quinta Essentia, 1995. 2 29 Frithjof Schuon Light on the Ancient Worlds London: Perennial Books, 1965. Gnosis: Divine Wisdom London: Perennial Books, 1979. The Feathered Sun Bloomington: World Wisdom Books, 1990. Philip Sherrard The Rape of Nature Colombo: Sri Lanka Institute of Traditional Studies, 1987. Huston Smith Forgotten Truth New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Wolfgang Smith Cosmos and Transcendence La Salle: Sherwood Sugden & Co, 1984. (b) Other Recommended Sources Allan H. Badiner Dharma Gaia: A Harvest of Essays in Buddhism and Ecology Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1990. Wendell Berry Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community New York: Pantheon, 1993. Walter H. Capps (ed) Seeing with a Native Eye New York: Harper & Row, 1975. James Cowan Mysteries of the Dreaming Bridport: Prism, 1989. The Aborigine Tradition Shaftesbury: Element, 1993. Kenneth Cragg The Mind of the Qur’an London: Allen & Unwin, 1973. Mircea Eliade Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy Princeton: Bollingen Press, 1951. The Myth of the Eternal Return New York: Pantheon, 1954. The Sacred and the Profane New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1959. Myths, Dreams and Mysteries New York: Harper & Row, 1975. John Neihardt Black Elk Speaks London: Abacus, 1974. Kathleen Raine Defending Ancient Springs Cambridge: Golgonooza, 1985. Theodore Roszak Where the Wasteland Ends New York: Doubleday, 1972. 30 2 Roger Sworder Mining, Metallurgy and the Meaning of Life Sydney: Quaker Hill, 1995. Richard Tarnas The Passion of the Western Mind London: Pimlico, 1991
- [<em>The Corbin Trilogy</em>,  by Tom Cheetham](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/corbin-trilogy) - This trilogy of works centers on the metaphysical thought of the French Islamic scholar, Henry Corbin (1903–1978). A student of Scholasticism under Etienne Gilson, and a close associate of Louis Massignon (whose position he succeeded, as Director of Islamic Studies at the Sorbonne), Corbin was not only a pre?eminent theologian but also a mystical philosopher. Influenced by the German theological tradition of Boehme, Luther, Hamann, Heidegger, and Barth, among others, Corbin developed a philosophy of mystical hermeneutics, which drew greatly from Christian and Muslim mystics and philosophers who viewed reality phenomenologically, as an unveiling of the inner Light of transcendent Reality. A major figure (along with Jung, Eliade, and Scholem) at the Eranos conferences, Corbin spent many years living in the Muslim worldand wasregardedinthe Westasan authorityonmedievalMuslim 23 153 Review of Tom Cheetham’s “The Corbin Trilogy” – M.Ali Lakhani philosophy (particularly the teachings of Avicenna, Suhrawardi, and Ibn ‘Arabi). Also, as head of the Franco?Iranian Institute in Tehran, he was a specialist in Irano?Islamic studies (particularly Suhrawardi’s revival of Zoroastrian angelology), Persian Sufism (in particular, Mulla Sadra), and Shi’a theosophy (including Isma’ili gnosis and hermeneutics). Corbin’s legacy has been immense, ranging from his influence upon traditionalist metaphysicians or those with traditionalist leanings (notably, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Toshihiko Izutsu, William C. Chittick, Sachiko Murata, Hermann Landolt, Kathleen Raine and Philip Sherrard), and extending beyond into the fields of literature and psychology (his ideas have influenced, for example, the literary critic, Harold Bloom and the Jungian scholar, James Hillman). Dr. Cheetham is a scholar of Corbin, and a fellow of the Temenos Academy, which—through its journal and lectures devoted to the Arts of the Imagination, and to Perennial Philosophy, both arguably key aspects of Corbin’s thought—has promoted Corbin’s work for several decades. Cheetham also maintains an online blog on Corbin at “http:// henrycorbinproject.blogspot.com”. In The World Turned Inside Out, Cheetham has provided perhaps the best available introduction to Corbin’s thought for the general reader. The second and particularly the third volumes of this trilogy, Green Man, Earth Angel, and After Prophecy, respectively, are more interpretive works, exploring the relevance and significance of Corbin’s ideas for our lives and the issues that confront us in the modern world.Those volumes will be of especial interest to readers of Sacred Web, given their interpretive focus. In the comments that follow, we have chosen to review the works collectively, as a trilogy, rather than individually. For readers unfamiliar with Corbin’s writings, they might do well to read the books in the order they were written. For others who may be more familiar with Corbin’s ideas—and this review will attempt to provide the reader with an outline of the key ideas—and who wish to sample but one book in this trilogy, we would recommend the final volume which anthologizes Cheetham’s lectures for the Temenos Academy. In considering Corbin’s ideas, Cheetham remarks on the “astonishing variety of influences” that shaped them—“Christian theology, Heideggerian phenomenology, and Islamic mysticism fused with Zoroastrian angelology; all united by a deep reverence for what in Islam is called the Primordial Revelation: the book of nature.” Cheetham traces the early philosophical influences of Heidegger in Corbin’s hermeneutics and phenomenology, clarifying that unlike for Heidegger, whose quest for the “history of Being” remained situated entirely within the Western philosophical tradition, Corbin’s research extended beyond and came to be largely influenced by Irano?Islamic metaphysics, which led him in the direction of a transcendentally rooted understanding of “Being” as “Presence”—an understanding based on the reality of the “mundus imaginalis”, the realm of the Creative Imagination.The reality of the imaginal world (Cheetham states:“Corbin called it the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal world, to underscore the fact that it is not imaginary or unreal”) was central to Corbin’s worldview.This domain of reality was “a median and mediating power” between the sensible and the intellectual, the metaphysical threshold (“barzakh”) of transcendence and of immanence. By contrast, Heidegger (in George Steiner’s appraisal of him) based his metaphysics on an effort to view reality as immanence without transcendence. In Cheetham’s words,“Heidegger tried to erect a philosophy denying the need for the category of the Person and the transcendence implicit in that Being.” Corbin, however, regarded “Being” not as an escape from the particulars of mundane reality into the realm of abstraction, but as an opening into the “spiritual corporeity” of Divine Presence rooted in Personhood. Corbin’s true influences in this regard were the Sufi and Shi’ite metaphysicians about whom he later wrote, including in particular,Avicenna (981–1037),Suhrawardi (1155–1191),Ibn‘Arabi (1165–1240),and Mulla Sadra (c.1571–1640). Corbin was introduced to Suhrawardi’s works by Massignon, and the influence on him of this twelfth?century Persian mystic was seminal. Corbin later wrote: “Through my meeting with Suhrawardi, my spiritual destiny for the passage through this world was sealed. Platonism, expressed in terms of the Zoroastrian angelology of ancient Persia, illuminated the path I was seeking.” From Suhrawardi, the founder of the Illuminationist School of Persian mysticism, Corbin learned of the importance of the intermediary imaginal realm as the means of the visionary perception of the “sacral light” that was central to Zoroastrian faith and to the Abrahamic traditions.Thus in the Zoroastrian tradition, the Celestial Light of Ohrmazd and His six Archangels in Avestan cosmology, is opposed to the Darkness of Ahriman.The Light embodied for all created beings in their Fravarti or personal angel and soul’s guide, and illuminates the path of the soul’s personal embodiment of the Light through spiritual transformation. Similarly, the Light of God appears as the “Burning Bush” in Judaism, the apparitions of Gabriel to Mary and Muhammad, and as the symbolic “Light upon Light” of the Surah of Light in Islam.These are images of the divine theophany and of the soul’s destiny to actualize on earth the “Energy of sacral Light” through spiritual transformation. From the Muslim texts that he studied, Corbin learned how life could be viewed as a “dramaturgy”, an awakening of the soul through its encounter with its archetypal image in the “imago mundi”—with the personified presence of the soul’s Heavenly Twin, its Guiding Angel or Fravarti.The soul’s encounter with its “Angel” is to be understood here as its submission to the active Intelligence.The Angel is identified with such figures as the Paraclete in the Gospel of St. John, or Khidr in the Qur’an, with the Archangel Gabriel, and with the Logos or Angel Holy Spirit. Corbin was greatly influenced here not only by Suhrawardi’s revival of Mazdean angelology, but also by the Kubrawite phenomenology of lights and colors developed by the central Asian school of Sufism of Najm al?Din Kubra (1146–1220), and his followers Najmeddin Razi (d. 1256) and Alaoddawleh Semnani (1261–1336), as well as the illuminationist metaphysics (of illumination as the “intensification of being” and inner light) associated with the Persian, Mulla Sadra.This “imaginal” encounter with the Angel, with “the light of that Presence which is the ultimate source of all personification” formed the basis of the soul’s individuation, its ethical valorization and its harmonization with the world. Cheetham notes:“It is not too much to say that Corbin’s entire work revolves around the ontological priority of the individual. It is the Presence of the Angel that provides the conditions for the possibility of the experience of the Person.” It is only through our interiority and heliotropic orientation to the Angel Face that we can hope to unveil the theophanies of the soul and the world.The Angel is the inner Guide, the exegete, the Intellect, the “Khidr of your being.” It is also the hermeneutical principle or ta’wil, the opening to the Origin, unveiling the Divine Face that is uniquely and “imaginally” discernable by each visionary. Here, knowledge and being interpenetrate. How we see the world is dependent on the quality of our vision.What we perceive is dependent on how we choose to see. According to the doctrine that “like can only be known by like”, what is known corresponds to the mode of being of the knower: Light can only be perceived by light. We can come to know the hierarchies of being through a growth of consciousness—through dhikr or prayerful and contemplative remembrance, which is central to Corbin’s praxis of spiritual awareness and transformation. Cheetham remarks that for Corbin, “Prayer is the supreme form of the creative imagination, and as such is the ultimate exercise of human freedom.” It is through the discipline of dhikr or the intensification of spiritual awareness that we are enabled to ascend to the divine. Our growth in spiritual consciousness effects our alchemical transformation into an ontologically higher “mode of presence,”so that our growth in knowing corresponds to the intensification of our being as light. The mediate realm of “imaginal” archetypes and the symbolic significance of the“image”that corresponds to the visionary’s degree of receptivity are central to Corbin’s ideas.They are the basis of his theophanic worldview of creation as the “Face of God”, and of his doctrine of the Guiding Angel that is the soul’s heavenly counterpart and the means of its spiritual transformation into the“Body of Light.”It is in this context that one can understand Corbin’s critique of the official Church doctrine of the Incarnation by which Jesus is the hypostatic union of God and man, a divine person with two natures—fully human and fully God. Historically,the doctrine of the Logos reconciled Christian theology with Greek philosophy in respect of the possibility of the Supreme Being’s ability to relate personally to His creatures. But if the Logos was identified with Christ, it became necessary to consider the theological difference between the Father and the “human” personality of Christ as the Word of God.The Council of Nicea in 325 had rejected the Arian view that Christ, though the first among creatures, was not co?eternal with God, decreeing instead that Father and Son were of one substance—homoousis. In a further elaboration of this position, the Council of Chalcedon in 451 had decreed the official doctrine of Incarnation—that the Son was consubstantial with the Father,being“of two natures in one person” so that the divine and human were united substantially, yet by nature distinct. Corbin found the official doctrine of the Incarnation to be deeply flawed because it had reduced the theophanic significance of 23 157 Review of Tom Cheetham’s “The Corbin Trilogy” – M.Ali Lakhani the Incarnation to a mere doctrine, a dogma rather than a “dokema” or theophany. By allowing God to be seen as entering history and so into social and material reality,the Incarnation had effectively secularized the sacred and dissolved the transcendent God into the natural world. By adopting the viewpoint that Jesus was God, the Church had effectively compromised the metamorphic function of the Logos as a theophanic vision. Corbin preferred to regard the Incarnation in terms of a fusion of docetism (the view that Christ was an apparition of God) and early Ebionitism (the view that Christ was a Prophet, a human messenger of God). He emphasized that a thread of docetic angelology—that of the True Prophet and Guiding Angel—runs through each of the Abrahamic faiths and this was a key to his ecumenic regard for the monotheistic faiths as an Abrahamic Harmony that he termed “Harmonia Abrahamica.”Corbin’s docetic interpretation of the Incarnation eliminates any schism between matter and spirit, so that Christ’s reality is not based on a bifurcation of Christ’s dual nature but on the theophanic reality of his unique personhood, representing each human being’s potential for spiritual transformation and the realization of his or her own personhood.The Incarnation was the reality of the Word made flesh—not matter.The significance is that“flesh”is not impersonal or abstract (like matter) but is the concretely unique personified fragment of the Real Presence of God. Rightly understood, Corbin claimed that Christ was the Angel Holy Spirit, a theophanic vision and archetypal embodiment of Personhood,of the Real Presence of the Person—both“ensouled flesh and personal substance,”the imaginal reality and potential of each soul. Cheetham discusses how Corbin’s views share some similarity with those of the Catholic theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and how it also differs from Balthasar’s Trinitarian emphasis which it rejects. Balthasar interprets the Incarnation in terms of God’s self?giving (kenotic) love through Christ, who is the immanent and intimate aspect of God’s transcendent mystery. But while for Balthasar Christ is the absolute guarantor of objectivity (the only Son of the Father), for Corbin Christ is the Heavenly Twin who, in appears in various other guises, as the Soul of the World and is the source of all Presence. Christ is the Christos Angelos, the theophanic vision of God coming into contact with humanity only by transforming the latter. Cheetham summarizes:“Theophanic psychocosmology is based upon this transfiguration. In it ontology and 158 23 M.Ali Lakhani – Review of Tom Cheetham’s “The Corbin Trilogy” epistemology are united in a cosmogenesis of the individual.”The key to understanding this alchemical “transfiguration” is the role of the transfiguring presence of the Christic Image and its ability to ignite the soul of the seer. In the imaginal realm, thought is united with being and the mode of presence is dependent on the orientation of the soul because “whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver.” This “unveiling” of the soul of the self and the world is the hermeneutical counterpart to our orientation to the Divine Face. It is only by our receptivity to the Word that we can decode the true meaning of the cosmic Book—which includes ourself. By orienting ourselves to transcendence, by interpreting the world and our selves imaginally as manifestations of a greater reality, we are able to unveil the innermost Self that pervades all creation. For Corbin, the aim of hermeneutics, which he regarded as the proper function of phenomenology, was the recovery of the interiority of the text of the soul and the world. The aim is to unveil the Face of the Self, to recover the “Lost Speech”, the integral Word or Logos. But Corbin was clear that ta’wil, the hermeneutical orientation to the Origin or awwal,“is not theory; it is an initiation to vision.”And this vision is transformative. Knowledge is realizational: to know is also to be. Reality, in its corporeal intimacy cannot be properly reduced to an abstract idea, nor can its essential mystery be reduced to its outer surface or literal form. Rather, the world must transcend both abstraction and literalism and be perceived imaginally, symbolically, and participatively, as a continually renewing theophany of the unveiling of Presence so that each unveiling is in respect of a unique and individualized manifestation of the divine theophany that is the Face of God. Corbin explained that “the Divine Being is not fragmented, but wholly present in each instance, individualized in each theophany” because, as Ibn ‘Arabi taught,“Each being has as his God only his particular Lord, he cannot possibly have the Whole.”This “wholeness” (“holiness”) or “Presence” means that each being can, by choosing to see the Other in this participative mode, view the world conjunctively rather than disjunctively, through “a kind of reciprocal imaginative interaction, a sympathy between self and world.”This kind of engaged interpretive envisioning entails an imaginative sympathy between subject and object so that what we see in our clarified perception is the unveiling of the Presence of the Supreme Reality of the Divine Subject who manifests that continually renewing theophany within which we immanently participate and which transcends the disjunctive vision of our egoic subjectivity. Corbin’s epistemology is founded on the doctrine of participation and it is sympathy that is the foundation of his ethics. His hermeneutics engage our capacity for angelic vision, for the iconoclastic rendering of the idol as transparent to the light invested in it.This involves a way of seeing that Corbin speaks of in terms of the hermeneutics of“transmuting the idol into an icon.”To endow things with ontological presence, to see them in all their spiritual corporeity, one has to perceive them imaginally,with a participative sympathy.This involves breaking“through the mutual isolation of consciousness and its object, of thought and being,”writes Corbin,adding:“here phenomenology becomes ontology.”As Cheetham explains,“It is sympathy that is the prerequisite of ta’wil...It is the ability to open oneself to the presence of things and of persons.” This is what Corbin refers to as the“cognitive function of sympathy”or, adopting the terminology of Etienne Souriau,calls“the angelic function of a being.”What is at stake here is the recovery of the meaning of spirit as substance, not as dichotomies of mind and matter, but as the embodied Presence of body, mind, and being, poised here and now in what the poet Gary Snyder calls the “mythological present”—as a concrete reality that is a theophany opening into mystery.To open ourselves to such a Presence requires us to have “a sensate, imaginative sympathy” where images carry an ontological force, and where the natures of the world and the soul interpenetrate and so each can meet the “Other” in mutual Presence.As Cheetham notes,“This kind of attention is intensely relational because it is felt, it is sensuous, and it is embodied.” It is easy to understand why, for Corbin, prayer, love, and beauty would play a central role in spiritual transformation. He regarded prayer as the supreme act of the Creative Imagination, as one’s orientation to the Pole Star of transcendent Being. Thus it was “the expression of a mode of being” and the means by which Creator and Creature were irrevocably entwined in mutual sympathy. Prayer, thus understood, is the response of each soul to the prophetic summons to experience divine love and beauty through seeing the world as a theophany, through seeking the Angel Holy Spirit in our encounters with the Other, and through incarnating love with other persons whom we encounter not merely abstractly, through their personas, but as the iconic face of the Beloved, in the esoteric unity of Love, Lover and Beloved. For Corbin, beauty is the essential divine attribute and the source and reality of our love. To perceive this divine beauty, however, requires a quality of attention and perception that has an ethical foundation, one that is premised on the profound connections between ascesis and aesthetics, between renunciation and beauty. Cheetham uses this idea to provide a critique of modernity in respect of the loss of this dimension of perception, suggesting that is required to regain an appreciation of beauty in the world is a quality of detachment. To “refuse to become unconsciously ensnared by the allurements of a commercialized world... (t)o begin to be sensitive to the manifold effects of this impersonal world on our actions, thoughts, and emotions and so gain some distance from it is already an act of renunciation and of aesthetic discrimination.” [Though Cheetham uses the word “renunciation” in this quote, the better term might have been“detachment.”] But the detachment that pulls us away from things must be balanced by the sympathy that draws us to them. Aesthetics, Cheetham observes, is rooted in a cosmological synaesthesia:“All the beings of the world are connected within and among themselves by the vibrations of harmonic sympathy. Our place among them is not one of dominion, but of interconnection.”The imagination is synaesthetic, filled with harmonic sympathy:“When harmonic sympathy is fully in operation, then to speak is to be. Understanding something, we say we can make sense of it, and now it is clear that this making sense is not theoretical, but is primarily aesthetic, concrete, and sensuous.” It is the function of beauty to awaken us to the spiritually embodied realization of Presence:“When imagination and renunciation are wed, then all the world becomes sensuous and my individual world, my life, can make sense to me.The spiritual world is no longer abstract and distant, but alive and intensely real.” Cheetham laments,“The true meaning of the word substance has faded from our consciousness.The spirit is substantial. Understanding this can help reclaim a sense of the concrete significance of the individual.” In the second and third volumes of the Corbin trilogy, in particular, Cheetham considers Corbin’s ideas and their significance in providing a critique of modernism.The defining characteristic of modernism is its loss of a cosmological sense of wholeness, of a hierarchical continuum that includes the verticality of transcendence. Just eight months before his death, Corbin had written: “To confuse Being with being is the metaphysical catastrophe.” This “metaphysical catastrophe” has led, in Cheetham’s recounting of the implications to modernity of Corbin’s ideas, to “three great crises: a rupture between the individual and the Divine, a severing of the felt connection between human beings and the living earth, and a profound breakdown of long?held assumptions about the nature and function of language In traditional terminology, we are witnessing a collapse of the structures that make sense of the relations among God, Creation, Logos, and the human person.”These are respectively, the crises of the spirit, the environment, of the loss of meaning. Cheetham notes that a shift from a conjunctive to a disjunctive mode of perception occurred in Western Europe around the 12th century, resulting in a “withdrawal of participation”, a disharmony between man and nature, and the birth of a mechanistic cosmology based on abstract materialism.“It was Corbin’s contention that European civilization experienced a ‘metaphysical catastrophe’ as a result of what we might call the Great Disjunction.This was signaled by the final triumph of the Aristotelianism of Averroes over Platonic and neo?Platonic cosmology championed by Avicenna. To the defeat of that cosmology is coupled the disappearance of the anima mundi, the Soul of the World. The catastrophic event that gave rise to modernity is the loss of the soul of the world.” The loss of the imaginal realm has both materialized and abstracted reality, leading to the loss of the theophanic sense of Presence, the sense of the sacred. Cheetham considers at some length the attempts by modern psychology, particularly through the theories of Jung and his research into traditional alchemy, to recover this lost realm. He cites Corbin’s criticism of Jung that his theories were overly empirical and not grounded in sound metaphysics. Readers of this journal will know that traditionalist authors,notablyTitus Burckhardt,have criticized Jung’s conflation of the spirit and the psyche.This conflation is at the heart of Corbin’s critique. Cheetham focuses on Corbin’s criticism that Jung failed to transcend the realm of the psychic world, and so to properly distinguish between two kinds of metaphysical darkness: the demonic darkness of nihilism and the hypertrophic (Faustian or Nietzschean) self, and the mystical darkness of poverty that opens into the plenitude of theophanic light. In Corbin’s traditional metaphysics, there exists a higher consciousness than our ordinary consciousness, one that is intensely personal, in contrast to Jung’s undifferentiated consciousness that is “collective” and unable to transcend the impersonal laws of the natural world.This higher consciousness is signaled by the Black Light of fana’ (or egoic death), and associated in the spiritual journey with the flight into the Darkness of the Deus absconditus, the Hidden Treasure of the celebrated hadith (“I was a Hidden Treasure and yearned to be known, so I created the world in order to be known”). It precedes the GreenLightofbaqa’,oftheultimatetheophany,whichisassociatedwith pleroma of the Deus revelatus. Jung failed to distinguish between these two types of darkness. For Jung, good and evil were psychic projections that needed, as opposites, to be integrated within the self. In Jungian therapy, therefore, the dark side, represented by the psychic shadow of our struggle with material darkness, was an element to be integrated within the individuated self, not to be overcome or repressed. But as Corbin explained,only complementary elements could be integrated,not contradictory ones. God was Good, not evil, and therefore the demonic darkness of the Black Light of the psychic shadow was to be vanquished by the spiritual transformation of the self into the Body of Light (as the Illuminationists claimed), and not integrated (as Jung claimed).The task of putting on the Body of Light occurs by the simultaneous growth in spiritual consciousness and illumination of being, and represents for Corbin the path of spiritual ascent. Of this ascent, Cheetham observes that even though it involves purgation of darkness, the necessary self emptying (though not integrative in the Jungian sense) is a path to wholeness: “This ascension does involve increasing wholeness, since one does become more complete, more real, closer to God.To attain the full possibilities of human perfection human beings have to experience to some degree all the attributes of God. But the journey toward the Divine consists in overcoming that which is lower, not in integrating it to become whole.The lower is the less real; one includes it only by surpassing it.The wholeness to be attained is a wholeness of perfection, not a wholeness of inclusion.” In the end, the path to Light lies through Darkness: we can know only through our own unknowingness, and we can be born into Being only through our own mystical poverty. 23 163 Review of Tom Cheetham’s “The Corbin Trilogy” – M.Ali Lakhani The stance that is involved in spiritual growth, then, is one of selfdiscipline (ascesis), not indulgence, of sympathy (aesthetics), not anaesthetization, of love (caritas), not power. Cheetham is rightly critical of the lustful, desensitizing and power?driven forces that pit man against nature and that dominate the modern world. He writes:“...in so far as we live in a world dominated by the products of the human economy, oriented towards producing and gratifying human desires, we will suffer from a dangerous restriction of experience, thought, and expression, and of our capacities for love and relationship,lacking even the memory of the desire for transcendence...A degree of poverty is a prerequisite for the experience of the fullness of this world.This poverty is the result of letting go of a desperate grip upon the world. Creation unfolds only when power is renounced. For the things of this world grow opaque when we try to control and possess them.They withdraw into themselves and block our access to the riches at the roots of things.” Paradoxically, we must open into the darkness of the unknown in order to discover the Presence that we, and the world, are. Corbin presents an alternative vision of life grounded in the renunciation of power, in mystical poverty, freed from passions for control,“because everything is gratuitous—it is all a Gift.”This higher consciousness is the basis of a spiritual ecology that is implicit in Corbin’s ideas. Cheetham is critical of the materialistic scientism that overreaches, that enacts the creed that there is nothing in the universe that cannot, and should not, be unveiled, or that is inviolate. It secularizes and demystifies the world to the point that the soul becomes unmoored, and enters what Corbin terms its “vagabondage and perdition.”From Corbin’s traditional perspective,the soul and the world should not be pitted against each other, but should be seen as mirrors of each other, as microcosm and macrocosm within the same cosmos. In contrast to the technologies of modernistic science, which are grounded in the lustful desire for power and its ideological assumptions (“that knowledge is synonymous with power, and power is always good, and that knowledge must invariably be exercised by changing the world”), Cheetham advocates the development of countertechnologies in modernity to “help us reveal that everything we need is already at hand.”And it is to poetry and the project of recovering the Lost Speech that he turns to search for a solution. 164 23 M.Ali Lakhani – Review of Tom Cheetham’s “The Corbin Trilogy” At the heart of Cheetham’s critique of modernism is his contention that man has experienced a loss of meaning through his loss of the imaginal realm. Corbin correctly identifies the need for the application of a hermeneutical corrective to address this loss of meaning. In Islamic metaphysics, creation is divine speech, and all creatures are revealed “words of God.”The world is an ever?renewing theophany, made and unmade in each moment. For us to perceive the theophany afresh in each moment requires us to be engaged in a “perpetual hermeneutics” of continual openness to its ever?new Presence.This dialogue of inner and outer, the Adamic language of “naming,” is the Lost Speech that we need to recover. Meaning is to be sought through transmuting idols into icons, so that we can perceive Truth, in the constantly changing yet ever?present here and now, as Presence. But the modern world is in danger of becoming, in George Steiner’s celebrated description of the post?literate world,an“After?Word”,lacking the imagination to perceive “Real Presences.”The recovery of meaning in this world requires us to discover the primordial techniques of sympathetic awareness, a kind of therapeutic literacy that Ivan Illich describes as “an ontologically remedial technique.”We need to rediscover the power of language as symbolic, of its potential to imaginally awaken within us an awareness of our participation in, and harmony with, that synaesthetic substrate of reality in which spirit and substance are unified. Cheetham writes: “When harmonic sympathy is fully in operation, then to speak is to be. Understanding something, we say we can make sense of it, and now it is clear that this making sense is not theoretical, but is primarily aesthetic, concrete, and sensuous...When imagination and renunciation are wed, then all the world becomes sensuous and my individual world, my life, can make sense to me.The spiritual world is no longer abstract and distant, but alive and intensely real.The true meaning of the word substance has faded from our consciousness.The spirit is substantial. Understanding this can help reclaim a sense of the concrete significance of the individual.” The loss of the imaginal dimension in modernity is evident in the loss of its primordial poetic sympathy, which Cheetham calls “that forgotten language and the energies that would return us home to a world we dimly recall.”We can therefore define the urgent task of modernity as the need to recover the Lost Speech of the angels,or the recovery of the 23 165 Review of Tom Cheetham’s “The Corbin Trilogy” – M.Ali Lakhani poetic sensibility.The function of poiesis is, in this regard, to unveil for us the reality of that personified and qualitative and sensate Presence through language that is both concrete and resonant of transcendence. Cheetham views poets, therefore, as “the guardians of the person and of the soul of the world,” both inextricably linked so that “a violation of either is a violation of both.”He contrasts poets with scientists.While the latter would leave no room for mystery and wonder in their quest for abstract and literal Truth, Cheetham says this about poets:“They speak to us out of intimacy.They are the guardians of the inviolate individual, of the mystery of the Person.” But the responsibility to perform as poets rests with each of us, and it is a heavy responsibility for to lose our poetic sensibility would be to deface the soul and the world:“To the degree that the language of the imagination is lost, to that degree are people and all the elements of Creation de?personalized, turned into objects, into abstractions. The final result is Hell. The final result is a world without a Face.” Cheetham is wary at times of Corbin’s mysticism, of his “nostalgia for the Elsewhere and his desire for the Body of Light.” He prefers a more grounded counterpoint to his views. For this “coagulating” counterpoint to Corbin’s “sublimating” tendencies, Cheetham turns to the polymath thinker, Ivan Illich (1926–2002). He finds in Illich’s ideas a complementary but more developed sense of meaning and Presence that opens up a way into the Beyond through the deepest reality of the present. He discusses Illich’s dislike for the depersonalizing influences of institutions—including the Church—and of secularism in society, and his critique of Western culture’s attempts to (in Cheetham’s language) “institutionalize grace and the call that is implicit in the divine face of the other person.” For Illich, the Incarnation is central to Christian revelation. It represents the possibility of a profound continuity between “the eyes of the flesh” and the “eyes of fire” that forms the condition of the“ethical gaze.”Illich explores the medieval connections between optics and ethics, the view that how we discipline our seeing through ascesis can condition how we see.We need to look with eyes of inner light (or lumen), rather than be passive recipients of the light of external vision (lux).The secularization of images occurs through the loss of inner light or “in?sight”, and this has profound implications for moral conduct,leading to the“secularization of the Samaritan”and an outlook 166 23 M.Ali Lakhani – Review of Tom Cheetham’s “The Corbin Trilogy” that conditions our definition of the“neighbor”instead of allowing us to respond through a willingness to remain open and surprised by our faith, and an interiority that demolishes the constraints of our conditioning. The moral decline of modernism is marked by our loss of the openness and interiority of the ethical gaze, the vision of love, of our potential to perceive the iconic face of all creatures, and by the corresponding loss of our ability to“prolong the Incarnation”by incarnating our spirituality in personal relationships. The Corbin trilogy deserves a wide readership. Cheetham presents Corbin’s ideas accessibly, in a manner that will not deter the general reader who is interested in them.These ideas are important not only because Corbin is a seminal thinker whose influence has extended beyond the fields of his specialization, but also because of the profound implications of his ideas to the issues that confront us in the modern world. Cheetham interprets these ideas for his readers in a personally engaged and critical manner, drawing on related ideas from a wide variety of other thinkers, and demonstrating the connections between Corbin’s ideas and theirs in a way that will no doubt inspire the reader to explore their ideas and to seek a deeper meaning in their personal quests for Truth as Presence in their own lives.
- [<em>Frithjof Schuon on the Spiritual Life</em>, selected and edited by James Cutsinger](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/frithjof-schuon-on-spiritual-life) - Frithjof Schuon on the Spiritual Life Selected and edited by James S Cutsinger, Foreword by Philip Zaleski, Prayer Fashions Man: Frithjof Schuon on the Spiritual Life, World Wisdom, 2004. 270pp. Reviewed by Alvin Moore, Jr. When this book came to us for review we accepted it almost reflexively and without sufficiently considering the enormity of the task, because for us to review Frithjof Schuon would be like holding a candle to the sun. We shall not attempt a conventional review, therefore; our approach will be more tangential, using this Schuon anthology as reference for a few remarks that may make points that relate to those which Schuon makes. But we begin by simply calling attention to the publication of this extraordinary volume as well as by some observations on the ambience in which it appears, commenting briefly on the setting both in time and in its “qualitative locale”; and we shall make some remarks which bear upon the body of Schuon’s work as well as the works of René Guénon and Ananda Coomaraswamy. These three would have to figure very prominently in any unbiased intellectual history of the later modern world, for several reasons: they delivered a searing and irrefutable criticism of the deviation that, precisely, constitutes modernity; they showed not only that intelligence is by no means the sole prerogative of the natural sciences as some anti-traditional rhetoric would have it, but that naturalism itself is fundamentally flawed and even contradictory; and they reintroduced to the modern world the supremacy of genuine Intellectuality/Spirituality as well as the doctrine of non-dualism and its corollary, metaphysical realization. These ideas have been central to all of mankind’s great and enduring civilizations — mutatis mutandis, for the color of the water is the color of the receptacle as Ibn al-‘Arabi noted. In particular we shall call attention to Schuon’s specific teaching on the doctrine of non-dualism, for it seems to us that this doctrine is the attraction which westerners perceive in oriental doctrines, usually no doubt “through a glass darkly”; it is nevertheless a valid attraction because it offers glimmers, as part of the human patrimony, of teachings which are implicit if well-hidden in the orthodox forms of Christianity but which have come to be discountenanced and denied by Christianity at large – again a function of modernity. Some notion of the Absolute Infinite and non-dualism are innate in man or at leastinsomemenof each generation, even as there must be a few jivan muktas in each generation for so long as humanity endures . A personal anecdote may serve as an example of the seemingly fortuitous way in which this doctrine may spread in the conditions of the modern world. During a youthful wanderjahre we were traveling through the Atacama desert in northern Chile and at Antofagasta we met a Chilean Indian, a seeker, who asked us what we knew about the Hindu doctrine of Brahman. Our answer, unfortunately, had to be: “nothing”. Soon afterwards back in the States we took a temporary job in a telephone “boiler room”, and once again the subject of “Brahman” came up when one of our coworkers asked what we knew about the “theory of Brahman”. These two incidents were our introduction to the most profound idea which the human mind can entertain, an idea that has been developing with us ever since, over many decades. In Edmund Spenser’s words: Like as a ship, that through the ocean wide Directs her course unto one certain coast, It met of many a counter wind and tide, With which her wingéd speed is let and crossed, Yet making many a borde and many a bay, Still winneth way, nor hath her compass lost; Right so it fares with me in this long way, Whose course is often stayed, yet never is astray. Towards the end of this essay we shall briefly compare exoteric with esoteric conceptions of man’s final end; and we shall conclude with a few citations from Schuon’s book which will help round out this rough schema of what from one side is man’s Return to his Principle; while from the other, it is the release of the One from the bondage of creation/ manifestation. Treatment of the outward Procession, that is, man’s creation(or manifestation), is also tobe found passim inSchuon’sworks; but the Procession is necessarily assumed to be behind us when man is considered in his present distressed condition and when his chief concern must be the Return. As to readers themselves, let us say that we are not “preaching to the choir”, so much as addressing especially those from Christian or secular backgrounds who may be neophytes in traditional studies and for whom some additional orientation may be welcome. The anthologist of the present volume, Professor James S. Cutsinger, is the leading academic authority on Frithjof Schuon. Obviously he knows the Schuon oeuvre thoroughly and he has chosen the passages in this anthology wisely and well. Like the feathers of a bird’s wing, their “fit” serves a single overarching purpose. It is a given, of course, that Schuon’s vocation was to communicate; what is remarkable is that this sustained purpose is evident throughout his published writing which, however, wasitselfmostlyadhoc inexecution. This factisitself silent evidence of the inspired character of his published work which, along with that of Coomaraswamy and Guénon, testifies to a beneficent Providence which has not left itself without witness even in these terminal “dregs of time”. Another indicator of the quality of the writing of Coomaraswamy, Guénon, and especially Schuon, is its innascible character. The Arabic proverb, “He who knows ten, let him teach nine”, is indirectly applicable here; the best part in the writing of these three men remains unsaid. As for Schuon, on the evidence of his published work one cannot deny that he knew “the language of the birds”, which is to say that intellectually he functioned from the level of the transpersonal or angelic Intellect; or, in Christian terms, that he wrote with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Does this mean that Schuon was infallible in his every utterance? This is not our claim; for all we know, Schuon’s inspiration, like his writing, was also ad hoc. Our concern here is to call attention to the responsibility deriving from the fact that discrimination and discernment are innate in human intelligence; both are givens and are a part of what it means to be human. Manis responsible forthe proper use of all his talents, physical, mental, or intellectual, including the judgments he makes and the reception he gives to matters of substance that come before him. If someone is perceived to speak with intrinsic authority, it must be recognized that such authority can only be that of Truth itself for it cannot be the possession of an individual. Ironically, the branches of the Christian tradition which have embodied the most authoritarian structures — we refer specifically to Roman Catholicism and in a lesser degree to Orthodoxy — also enshrine Christ’s implicit counsel to his apostles to use their faculties of discernment when he asked: “What think ye of Christ?” (Matthew xxii, 42). In any event we believe that the primary agency in the mature work of Coomaraswamy, Guénon, and Schuon, was Providential in character and that the three were apostles, sent to us whose “cosmic moment” falls in these last times, in order to reawaken intellectually and spiritually some few in the modern world and help them find that “pearl of great price” that has been forgotten or lost. We have happily read this book from cover to cover, including the hitherto unpublished material in the Appendix, and have found nothing that seems incompatible with heavenly inspiration or with orthodox Christian doctrine, if this latter is not understood in the narrowest literal sense. Indeed, there is much in this volume that sheds precious light on Christianity itself. Nevertheless we bear in mind Schuon’s advisory that the esoterist rises above doctrinal limitations not by shattering them from without, but by transcending them from within. Mention of understanding Christian doctrine brings to mind Schuon’s statement to the effect that monotheism, whether Hebrew, Christian, or Islamic, cannot as such admit the doctrine of the Supreme Identity. As this issue touches on the implicit purpose of this book and on Schuon’s writing in general, we cite the full passage (p 81): In Monotheism religious dogmatism excludes non-dualistic formulations of union; no formulation can go against dogma, which is of necessity dualistic. Now this dualism, like that of the Vishnuites moreover, says that human nature is human nature and the divine Nature is the divine Nature, and nothing else. From the point of view of dogmatic language, non-dual union belongs to the inexpressible; it is as though, being unable to say that a plant is green, one said that at the same time it was yellow and blue, and neither one nor the other. Created nature assuredly remains what it is: no one had ever maintained that the created as such is transformed into the Uncreated. This must not be understood as implying that monotheists are invariably in an inferior position vis-à-vis the greater spiritual possibilities which pertain to man qua man; nor that Jews, Christians, and Muslims are somehow prohibited from entering fully into the Kingdom of God (which ultimately is God himself). Jews have the Kabbalah and Muslims have Sufism, both being institutional expressions of their respective esoterisms which, at their highest echelons, are non-dualist. The issue, then, is essentially a Christian matter; but Christianity was itself esoteric in its inception and still is in its orthodox forms, though the understanding of these forms has become exoteric – no doubt Providentially. A non-dualist perspective, therefore, is not intrinsically alien to Christianity even if, as Schuon says, it must be denied conditionally for the sake of dogmatic integrity and for the immediate good of the greater number. Among known Christians, St. Dionysius the Areopagite, John Scotus Eriugena, Meister Eckhart, Dante Alighieri, Angelus Silesius, among others, testify to the perennial appeal of non-dualism. Our initial task, then, is determined in part by the nature of these end times in which is prepared the return of all the world’s positive elements to their Alpha and Omega. The task is one of the recovery of lost or forgotten doctrine, of finding its proper setting within a Christian ambience, of penetrating dogma intellectually, of making the necessary accommodations and adjustments in a vertical sense; and, needless to say, of applying these findings within our lives. Incidentally, there is strong evidence that in medieval Latin Christianity the exoteric authorities recognized a certain place for esoterism. Eastern Christianity, deeply apophatic, has always been reluctant to define things too narrowly and has been more disposed to grant the inexpressible all its rights. Paradoxically, however, Latin Christianity has been more speculative (in the etymological sense) than the Christian East. If today Christians seem to have fewer possibilities for spiritual realization the want is not only in a lack of qualifications on the part of Christians themselves but also in the conditions in which we live, conditions which reflect our own chosen orientations and interior life. Life in the modern world, the manner of life we have collectively chosen and continue to choose, is deeply shaped by our passionate nature into which we have descended in the name of a false “freedom”, by an extroversion that has become our “second nature”, a view of the world and of human goals that has largely rejected the interior life, and an unending restlessness that is inimical to pursuit of the “one thing needful”. Yet it must not be overlooked that there are “qualitative determinations” of time and place which are not invariably the responsibility of this or that individual, though the individual inevitably inherits them, and to which the gifted individual may not be entirely subject. If no one could escape the dire conditions that afflict men of the kaliyuga, there would be no point in the somewhat covert (covert because it cannot be preached from the pulpit) re-introduction of esoterism into the modern world. In any case, no tradition is complete without offering in a manner appropriate to itself the full spectrum of spiritual possibilities. It is thus that we see the Divine Mercy at work in the achievements of Coomaraswamy, Guénon, and Schuon, each of them charged with the mission of reintroducing to the modern West essential elements of full traditional doctrine; and, with Schuon especially, the means of spiritual realization — esoterism in a word. Doctrine or theoria (from a root meaning “to see”, “to behold”) obviously constitutes the intellectual aspect of a tradition and it is mentioned here because René Guénon noted that the essentials of spiritual realization are adequate theory and concentration. Schuon’s statement of the same principle, matching Hindu apothegmata, was that one must distinguish between the Real and the unreal and concentrate upon the Real, implying the necessity of adequate theory. It was Schuon’s task to offer both theory and certain essential means of realization, chiefly invocatory prayer – whence this book. Schuon cites Eckhart’s statement that aliquid est in anima quod increatum et increabile, et hoc est intellectus (there is something in the soul which is uncreated and uncreatable, and this is the Intellect). And he says that Eckhart could easily retract this dictum because, unless understood elliptically, it is obviously erroneous as stating immanentism. He goes on to say that the statement “in reality implicitly affirms the created intellect as the vehicle of the uncreated Intellect, but it does not put this into words since spiritual vision is ‘vertical’ and ‘essential’, not ‘horizontal’and‘analogical’”(p82). Further, The essential [italics added] identity of manifested intelligence and principial Intelligence is necessary and metaphysically clear because the microcosmic subject cannot be of another essence than the absolute Subject, the Subject as such, the Self. There is only one single Subject; the rest is blindness....The monotheistic religions are objective perspectives; now it is not possible to set forth directly in ‘objective’ terms the ‘subjective’ truth of the essential identity between the objectivized subject and the pure Subject; the extinction of the microcosmic subject in the metacosmic Object is not strictly speaking a formula of identity, although the reality thus expressed is the same (pp 82, 83). Schuon’s remarks provide insights of great theoretical importance about our own nature and its parameters, about human consciousness, its origin and its virtually infinite scope – infinite not in its specifically human mode to be sure, but in its roots in the formless and Uncreated orders. “The rest is blindness”, Schuon writes, because every descending degree of creation/manifestation, from the highest angel to the least microscopic organism, marks a diminution of the Light of the Logos, the Divine Intellect that is the one “true light that enlightens every man coming into the world”, and not only every man but also every conscious being. There is “one Conscious in all consciousness”, one eternal Witnessofeverythingthatpassesthroughcreation. Therecognitionofthis essential kinship of human intelligence (or better, Intelligence in man) with principial Intelligence is obviously latent and quiescent in most men; in others, however, it is in various degrees of awakening, and if we are so fortunate as to be among the latter, we must nourish and tend to this awakening. St Gregory Palamas wrote: “It is because the Intellect is pre-eminent among our inner powers that our soul is deiform” (‘On Prayer and Purity of Heart, in the Philokalia). In his commentary on the Brahmasutra, Shankara said that “The nature of consciousness is indivisible, but those who see only dimly distinguish as if separately something perceived, the perceiver, and the perception”. If there is to be a world there must be movement away from the Principle, and this entails forgetfulness and a fall. The Upanishads tell us that “the Self-subsistent pierced the openings of the senses outwards; therefore a man looks outwards and not within himself ”. In our discrete existence we are distant from the Divine, but the Divine remains near us, “nearer to us than we are to ourselves”, with an immediacy that is the very condition of our existence. “Closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet”, He is the direct Agent not only of our existence from moment to moment but even in the very functioning of our faculties. Our task, then, is to become what we essentially are, which means “unbecoming” what we seem to be. Nothing created “becomes divine”; we are already liberated, but do not know it. But to repeat, aliquid est in anima quod increatus et increabile; the created must “unbecome”, “going back the way it came”. The ways and means for this Return are to be found in the orthodox traditions of mankind; it cannot be effected through our own designs or by isolated efforts, though a synergy of Divine grace and personal effort is necessary, always remembering that this synergy that must be deployed by us in ways congruent with the orthodox tradition to which we are called. Schuon magisterially sums up the profound doctrine of the Self in Chapter 10, “The Servant and Union”, the most articulate and highly concentrated exposition from a western writer known to us of non-dual union. The chapter has appeared in other books of Schuon but appropriately it is reproduced in full in the present work. We believe the reader could not find a more succinct and lucid exposition of the essentials of non-dual doctrine. At this point let us examine what is understood by salvation in exoteric Christian conceptions, for it will be seen that the classic exoteric notion of man’s finality differs vastly – infinitely so, one might almost say – from esoteric conceptions. Bear in mind, however that, as Schuon wrote, the individual as such can have no motive for going beyond the perfect happiness inherent in achieved salvation. Nevertheless, “many are called, but few are chosen” (Mt xx, 16); if man can look beyond paradisal bliss this is not as a human individual but because aliquid est in anima quod increatusetincreabile. InSt.ThomasAquinas’teachingandforwestern theology generally, man’s final state remains within the individual order which in the exoteric perspective is a finality notwithstanding that within this perspective the cycle of Procession and Return remains incomplete. Salvation understood exoterically is prolonged life in some extension of the human state. Liberation, on the contrary, implies an effective ontological identification with the ultimate Subject of all human beings, who is also the ultimate Subject of all creatures, of all the worlds, of all creation. Even within exoteric dogma, however, there are ambiguities; for example St. Thomas (who often seems to know much more than he says) mentions, though without elaboration, that certain men even in this life may be raised to the ranks of the highest angels, implying passage beyond form. There are differences, too, between classic Catholic and Orthodox conceptions. Deeply concerned to deny any existential continuity between the Divine and the human, the Catholic view is that man’s final end is indeed to behold God in the beatific vision. But in Catholic conceptions this contemplation is conceived as the entelechy of the individual even though the official position — up to Vatican II, at least – was that man must receive the lumen gloriae or Light of Glory, itself a created grace, in order to actualize this vision. In any event, in official Catholic theology there is no question of a passage beyond individuality or beyond the dualism intrinsic to the formal order. Though most Orthodox would agree with much of this, the issue does not admit of too precise comparison. Not only do the Orthodox eschew too fine definitions but they also avoid the tendency to systemization, and within their defined parameters one may find some range of views. Generally in Orthodox doctrine, theosis (deification) is understood as meaning that man, or something in man, is divinized in a real ontological participation in the Divine energies and attributes but without the loss of personal identity (which immediately suggests the question: “Who, then, am I?”). St. Gregory Palamas writes (Triads 3, I, 34) that “the deifying gift of the Spirit is not the superessential ousia of God but the deifying activity (?1?2?Á3?1±) [that is, the Divine Energies, the Logos].” We may note, in passing, that in Orthodox teaching the “superessential ousia” of God is imparticipable (consonant with all traditional teaching). As the Upanishads ask: “by what knowledge would one know the ultimate Knower?” And here we cite the words of Christ Logos: “No one cometh to the Father but by me” (John xiv, 6). Following St. Gregory certain Orthodox monastic circles accept that the hesychast way potentially realizes the unity of all mankind and even of all Nature, and that this same realization envisages a passage beyond the formal order, that is, beyond the limitations of individuality though not beyond personality. Again, who or what is the Person, who am I? If one accepts these Palamite and hesychast views as legitimate, this would seem to bring Orthodox positions nearer esoterism. In certain respects it does indeed seem that Orthodox positions are more nearly esoteric than are the positions of official Catholic theology; but we need to remember that esoterism itself can be compared to a sliding scale and that certain exoteric conceptions may be effectively esoteric for the profane. However that may be, one cannot say that, globally, Orthodoxy is esoteric. From the exterior evidence, it may be said that the realization Orthodoxy offers is incomplete. We have seen, nevertheless, that in the Orthodox view theosis means ontological participation in the Divine Energies,thatistosay,intheLogosorDivineIntellect. “IandmyFatherare One” (John x, 30). Let us recall, too, that all men are one man in Adam; and in St. Augustine’s words, all men are one man in Christ. For the rest, it is enough to refer to Schuon’s characterization: exoterism reflects the interests and ingrained biases of the human being in his individual condition. Orthodoxy falls within this characterization. On the other hand, esoterism views things as they are and this is its perennial appeal and strength. Man as an intelligent being desires to know. To know what? All there is to be known, but first and foremost and in virtue of the aliquid in anima quod increatus et increabile he desires to know himself, his most profound personal identity which is identity with his Principle. Only esoterism can respond in more than a schematic way to these concerns and, moreover, provide the contingent means for their full realization. In stating “No man cometh to the Father but by me”, Christ, while citing his own essential and irreplaceable rôle, also implies that coming to the Father is man’s final end. Ending these remarks we present a few additional citations, pivotal in character, which may round out this summary of the Goal of the sophia perennis: The normal content of the intelligence – that for which it is made – is the Absolute-Infinite; in a word, man is intelligence at once integral and transcendent, ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’, and the essential content of this intelligence is at the same time our deliverance: man is delivered by consciousness of the Absolute, his salvation being the remembrance of God....we are condemned to the Infinite (p. 70). The fundamental deviation of modernity could hardly be set in bolder contrast than by comparing contemporary “civilization” with this statement of the human norm. Modernity is the denial of this norm and thus the denial of humanity. The recognition of this deviation for what it is can tell us much about the nature of our times. Happiness is religion and character, faith and virtue. It is a fact that man cannot find happiness within his own limits; his very nature condemns him to surpass himself, and in surpassing himself to free himself....To know oneself is to remember That which is (p. 93). Again, this impeccable statement is the antithesis of modern perspectives which, in effect, bid man indulge himself, to make of this life a bed rather than a vessel. ...Spirituality stands in a sense between metaphysical truth and human virtue, or rather it has an absolute need of these two, though it can be reduced to neither (p. 95). The presence in our mind of metaphysical truth is by itself inoperative as far as our final ends are concerned (p. 95)....If metaphysics is sacred, this means that it cannot be presented as though it were only a profane philosophy sufficient unto itself, that is, not surpassing the sphere of mental operations. It is illogical and dangerous to talk of metaphysics without concerning oneself with the moral concomitants, the criteria of which are, for man, his behavior in relation to God and his neighbor (p. 97). Metaphysical knowledge is sacred. It is the property of sacred things to require of man all that he is (p. 250). Virtue is ‘moral’ – and therefore volitive – ‘truth’; it concerns not only action but the whole of life. The center of man cannot see as long as the periphery is blind. Virtue is the abolition of egoism. Why? Because the ego is error; it is a principle of illusion which falsifies the proportions of things with regard to both God and one’s neighbor. To know God with all that we are: the very infinity of the Object of knowledge requires the totality of the act of knowing, and this totality requires the essential virtues (p. 113). Intellection and virtue: everything is there (p. 116). Pure intelligence implies by definition the realization of its single Essence and consequently the forgetting – or surpassing – of the cosmic accidentality that is the thinking ego: intelligence ‘serves God’, one might say, by ‘becoming what it is’; it is ‘impious’ when it deliberately remains an individualized vision that is committed to nothing, that constitutes an end in itself and dispenses man from any obligation. Although intelligence is in itself contemplation and thus ‘non-acting’, it requires of man an inward act that is total, and this act is ‘love’ (p. 44). The human substance is only a veil. Nothing ‘returns’ to God except what ‘pre-exists’ in Him (p. 79).
- [<em>Music of the Sky, An Anthology of Spiritual Poetry</em>, edited by Patrick Laude & Barry McDonald](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/nectar-in-a-sieve) - Nectar in a Sieve Edited by Patrick Laude and Barry McDonald, Music of the Sky, An Anthology of Spiritual Poetry, World Wisdom Books, 2004 Reviewed by John Herlihy “It is in vain to hang them, they cannot die.” (A gypsy saying) Think of the romantic poets and Robert Burns comes to mind, whose love is “like a red, red rose that’s newly sprung in June”. Born of a flight of imaginative fancy, these dreamy images find their basis in sensuous facts, at a safe distance from the deep well of a latent and far more profound human experience. Sacred poetry, on the other hand, draws upon a supra-sensual wealth of symbolic images that abound in nature, allowing the sun, moon and stars—and the world of nature they drench their light upon—to send messages of extraordinary beauty and depth to the sensibility of the poet who stands and waits to become the transmitter of their rich, subtle mystery. As a medium of a deeper and more revelatory communication from the Divine to the human, the verses of spiritual poetry give expression to the eternity out of which they are born. In this sense, the poets themselves become a part of the eternity they drew upon; they cannot die. Indeed, they still live within this collection and continue to inspire people with a spiritual message that spans the generations and transcends time. People who pick up this newly published anthology of spiritual poetry and peruse its contents will be opening the door of their heart to an unexpected awakening. There is a poet in every one of us by virtue of the human capacity not only to respond to the symbolic language that poetry draws upon, but to feel the sudden inrush of some experience vaster than ourselves coming as though from another world and a higher self. As the compendium and conduit of a hidden message cast within beautiful linguistic forms and echoing the natural cadences of rhythm and rhyme whose harmonies trace their origin back to God, Music of the Sky lends wings to the reader and transports them farther and higher than they could ever imagine on their own. This rare collection gathers together under one celestial ceiling a diverse variety of soul songs, giving birth to a fearless, soaring progeny that reflects the beauty of the poet’s soul across a broad spectrum of spiritual traditions. The mysterious tone of the koto1 echoes an unearthly sound “from within my own breast”; our trifling human fears are “among the lilies fading”; my heart, taking any and every form, becomes “a pasture of gazelles” and a “pilgrim’s Kaaba”; we have within us the “singing flute that came from the sea”; we learn to die “in time”, while Time will die “in eternity”. Only in the ethereal realms of such mystical poetry can we become as Bedouin tent-makers in some desert clime where the body is “a tent” and the soul “a sultan from the eternal world”. The poet sings intuitively and wildly, turning the evanescence of misty clouds into flowers of the mind and heart. Why shouldn’t thoughts and impressions that are strange and beautiful and true to the poet resonate their harmonies within the soul of the reader so they too can participate in the sublime messages of nature? In compensation, perhaps nature’s peace will shine its mercy down upon all mortals and flow into their aspiring souls as sunshine flows into trees. The editors of this rare collection of poetic wisdom have gathered together a treasure trove of spiritual insight into a compilation of poems that reflect the outpourings of an open soul, poems for the ages that transcend their own boundaries as cool water flowing over the brim with their unique spiritual messages. The poems appear out of nowhere like a field of wild lilies, joyous and unruly, shouting insights into our sullen modern minds like magical incantations from another age for anyone and everyone to listen to and behold. The title itself is evocative of a higher order of consciousness and experience, linking the implicit music of verse with the harmonies and rhythms evidenced through the universe, while the image of the sky recalls the broad sweep of the Infinite contained within that plate of empyrean blue. The externalization of such 1 A kind of zither that has been used as one of the main chamber instruments of Japanese traditional music style. sublime thought through sound and word images can then become internalized as an inner harmony within the firmament of the human soul and spirit. Barry McDonald, an accomplished poet in his own right, opens the volume with some enlightening comments that underscore the importance of rhythm and meter in capturing the true import of prosodic verse. He puts these familiar poetic devices into perspective by tracing their origin back in time to the origin of the universe through a single, primordial ur-word. According to the Quran, it was through a primordial sound that God created the universe when He uttered the revelatory sound-word KUN (“be”), FA YAKOWN (and it becomes”), this being the original Logos that initiated the outpouring of the creation, what modern scientists today call the “initial singularity”. As the by-product of myriad sounds, harmony represents the beauty and unity that lie at the heart of the living creation as well as the heart of the living poem. Like the beating of the human heart, sound words associated with prosodic rhythms become the heartbeat of the poem. “If God is the fundamental unity allowing for all living things to exist in harmony, then, translated into the language of poetry, God is what makes all things rhyme.”2 From there, it is a small step to realize that the high energy and vibration generated through the “ordering principles” of spiritual poetry actually strike a tone within humans that set them ringing, bringing about the subtle realization of having been a living bell all one’s life “and never knew it until that moment when I had been lifted and struck.”3 Patrick Laude introduces the poems within this anthology with a combination of erudition and style. He lends background and perspective for this genre of traditional poetry, which may be less familiar to the average, modern-day reader. He calls poetry “the essence of language”; poets themselves he names “the keepers of the symbolic richness of words.” In addition to being a “means of communication” as well as a “form of selfexpression”, he highlights the role of spiritual poetry in particular as being “the way for transcendent Reality to manifest itself in and through words, images and music (p.6).” As such, he calls it “fundamentally 2 Music of the Sky (Bloomington, Ind.: World Wisdom Books, 2004), p. xiv. 3 Anne Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 34 polysemic”, implying that there is a vertical dimension to the verse that intersects the strictly horizontal form of communication like a sword blade from Heaven. Poetry has something to say that cannot truly be put into words, similar to the verses of revelation which contain levels of knowledge that cannot be contained by the form of the words alone; there is always hidden meaning belonging to some higher plane that will actually reveal itself on an individual basis to the receptive soul. As such, it is less subjective and more objective in the sense that the words and images of the poem convey a meaning that finds its source in the Divine Reality. In this sense, poetic recitation produces an uncanny emotion within the individual that Patrick Laude calls “an objective emotion”; an emotion insofar as a spiritual sentiment moves the heart and ‘objective’ insofar as the emotion is grounded in a divine archetype amounting to the “true nature” of a given phenomenon. He concludes his introductory remarks by noting that Music of the Sky is a modest vade mecum, which my dictionary tells me is “a useful thing that one constantly carries about;” but which my intuition suggests is like nectar passing through a sieve. Succinct and summative are the traditional symbols evoked in spiritual poetry that shake the cords of the heart and shatter the foundation of the soul, especially modernite souls of today made complacent and dull by the false promises that underpin the modern world. When a poet such as Rumi cries “We are the flute, our music is all thine; we are the mountains echoing only Thee”, we come to understand that we are not ourselves. There are elements in nature such as the wind whispering thru the pines or the echo of a distant flute that have qualities that remind us of the best of ourselves and have the power to transport us to other worlds by the very suggestion of their sounds. When we learn that “poor Yunus fills the earth and sky, and under every stone hides a Moses,” it reminds the unwary reader that we may be more than we make ourselves out to be, that there is a living presence within us that makes us what we are, that there is greatness awaiting discovery. The images abound, unrelenting and incisive, that for sheer splendor create a diversity of forms that unite under no true difference. What is the world but “moonlight reflected in dewdrops”; who is standing there “divinely dignified” but the solitary pine tree; the desires of a human life are reflected in the sockets of “his earthly lanthorn” and all life’s glory “unto ashes must”. Rain “whispers of reality” to an unheard ear; fog arrives “like a spring dream” and departs “like the morning clouds” and there is no way for us to own these things. Nature calls us to remembrance, sweetly and insistently, and then leaves us on our own with our own feeble perception. The collection contains a number of hidden perspectives built into its framework, like secret chambers comprising a sublime edifice, including the traditional, historical and human points of view. As a traditional document, these poems convey a perennial quality that transcends the boundaries of individual spiritual traditions. The source material for these poems serve the same function as the source material for the religions, highlighting beauty and truth as timeless signposts along the way of return to the Divinity and echoing sweet sentiments of devotion and love as they flow out of the mind and heart of the poet. The uplifting quality of these sacred sentiments rises above the parochial nature of individual religious traditions, mirroring the spirit of universality that lies behind the various spiritual traditions. As a historical link to the past, these poems span many centuries and a diverse range of personalities like a grand, mythic bridge. The reader has access to a broad range of spiritual emotions that cut across time frames and geographic cultures, creating a timeless quality to the material that transcends the strictly human norm. Like ghostly votive lamps illuminating the history of soul searching, these poems reflect the sense and sensibility of many different poets and their individual attempts to cast all the knowledge and love of the Divinity into a single metric flow that captures the essence of a feeling that is basically intuitive and often inexpressible. Here between two covers resides the likes of a Tagore and a Rumi. Every page becomes a subtle and unique taste of various poetic genres that offer their own rarefied and heightened experience. One page reveals a Bengali hymn, another becomes an encounter with a Zen prayer. There are song offerings and Red Indian chants, fragments, sermons and ritual orations. We see the “sun at midnight” and hear the “words of Lalla”. Unexpectedly, we come upon a few poignant verses from an African Prayer Book. As a purely human document, these are songs of the heart because they attempt to express the ineffable sentiments that emerge from some secret niche within the human being where the kingdom of God resides “within you”. As an individual expression of the poet’s most heart-felt yearning, it becomes the human kingdom with the power not only to imagine, but also to feel the knowledge of God as a living presence. A poet lies secreted within every one of us by virtue of the human capacity not only to see the inner reality, but also to internalize the inner meaning of that reality through symbolic language. In addition to the physical form of the book, we also have a piece of the heavens, come down to us in the form of heart songs of the poets and spiritual masters of a former time, revisited during these post-modern times as votive candles in the deepening dusk of the present era. In a sense, these poems open the heart to a rude awakening of what we have become, conveying a nostalgia for higher consciousness and a sense of loss of the Presence that people once enjoyed during more traditional times. The mystic poet is a person with the power to quicken the heart because his own heart has awakened to a higher zone of pure feeling. He traverses whole realms of experience of which other people only dream. Many of the poems in this collection are extraordinarily short, concise as a Japanese koan and sharp as a knife-blade. Indeed, who can say that a poem need be long when in fact there was once a time when every word was itself a kind of poem. The poets gathered here are sacred imagemakers one and all. In cloaking depth emotions in symbolic imagery, they come one step nearer to perceiving something more than any other person who has passed the same way. They look out into the world of nature and see that between human nature and earthly nature there is one interlocking thread binding them as a single unity. In highlighting the archetypal meaning of the symbol, the poet does not give entrance into a land of hidden meaning; instead, the sacred symbols of nature and the meaning they contain enter us, lending of their mystery and grace to become the persons we once were in principle and are still meant to be in fact. They are poems written from one heart to another with no intermediaries or boundaries, creating a place where people can roam freely by virtue of their participation in the landscape of the poem itself. On our own, we do not sufficiently address ourselves to the clues and signals that life has to offer, not only in terms of life’s implicit mystery, but also in terms of its hidden disclosure. Our work and our efforts, our politics and our prejudices, our false morality and our pseudo truths, our shallow imaginations and our empty satisfactions will all go unsung across the generations because they are unworthy of our true attentions and unfit as the stuff of our heart’s desire. Images of the old master sitting, “a rock, in Zen” and the desire to witness “in huts and on journeys the great day that dawns” are specters of the eternal because they contain an eternal ethos that lives forever as truth and comes down into the realm of the earthly as a sweet remembrance of a higher order. According to one sublime poem, we are but “lattices” in the niche of time “through which the One Light shines.” Few men and women ever perceive these things on their own; they rely on the largeness of the poet’s mind that sees the archetypes of a grand order reflected in the symbolic images of nature and humankind. We cannot escape the world; not many people want to these days. But we can take leave of the world for a few moments through the rarefied perceptions conveyed by these seed-words of the soul, representing an outpouring from the sacred ground of one heart, followed by an inpouring into the sacred ground of another soul. The magnificent beauty of the creation complements the sublime miracle of consciousness. Within Nature, the voice of thunder peels across the firmament, the sound of the wind whispers through the pine trees, the dawn mist creeps silently through the valley, night and day chronicle the procession of time. The features of the Divinity outlined within the phenomenal world are etched upon the mind of the true poet as mental icons that convey a meaning that can never be fully expressed in words. Whenever snow falls or birds fly, whenever the river flows into the sea, whenever the seasons change or twilight descends into darkness, the poet captures these images in seed-words of beauty and light as a remembrance of an omni-present order of Reality that lifts us up and takes us away, out into the open sky, where the vision of the one Reality has freedom to roam and the sound of the eternal music can send forth its celestial harmonies until they come down to earth once again and find their way into human ears.
- [Returning to the Essential, <em>Selected Writings of Jean Bies</em>](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/returning-to-the-essential) - Returning to the Essential Introduction by Patrick Laude, Returning to the Essential: Selected Writings of Jean Biès, World Wisdom, 2004. 270pp. Reviewed by Alvin Moore, Jr. Some years ago we were preparing for American publication a book by a European traditionalist author when the need arose to consult our betters regarding certain points in the text. The answer came down that the book was probably not worth our attention. Our respectful response was that few men come to instant perfection; that most must struggle long and hard towards this goal, and that as long as this is true there will be some place for the works of authors who enjoy less than the highest degrees of inspiration but whose minds are nearer our own. It has been said that the world does not need more than one Eckhart or Shankara — to which one could certainly add the names of Ibn al-‘Arabi and Nagarjuna. But we do need many who themselves are more familiar with such intellectual giants and with traditionalist thinking generally than we are, and who can lead us to better comprehension of these teachings. Jean Biès is such a man and we are not denigrating him to say that he is not a Guénon, a Coomaraswamy, or a Schuon; indeed, he would be the last to claim for himself a rank that is not his own. But he is a perspicacious and articulate writer of more than average intelligence and he has obviously given much thought to the matters he writes about. Biès was born in 1933 in Bordeaux in southwestern France but spent much of his youth and received his undergraduate education in Algeria where he first encountered a viable Islam. He pursued doctoral studies in the classics at both the University of Algiers and the Sorbonne, and went on to teach at the University of Pau in the French Pyrenees and to write, mostly essays and poetry. He has traveled widely, not from boredom or idle curiosity, but in the pursuit of spiritual understanding. He is another of those men whose lives have been marked indelibly by an encounter with the works of René Guénon, an encounter which for Biès occurred in 1951, the year of Guénon’s death. As a student our author had already discerned that what was being imparted to him in his formal studies were conventional conceptions and not the living truth of things. In the autobiographical first part of this work, he tells of “God’s bookshop” and the woman proprietor named Tarini with whom he formed a friendship while still an adolescent. She permitted him to mine her collection for all manner of works and he “read pell-mell the Tibetans, the Hindus, the Persians, Taoist wise men, Zen poets, all the spiritual writings one would expect to find on the shelves of the One who is the real author”. Tarini greatly abetted the young Biès’ questioning mind, not with an agenda of her own but simply in benevolent response to a gifted young person’s open and inquiring intelligence. The young author and teacher-to-be was thus encouraged and confirmed in his approach to a world of ideas far wider and deeper than that commonly accessible to those who consider themselves educated. Biès does not say explicitly that he is Christian, but many of his statements imply this as does the manner in which he speaks about Christian doctrine and the amount of attention he gives to this and to Christian usages. But his is not a conventional Christian outlook, whether Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant. And this occasions an important observation: in these last times there is a kind of natural movement of a few intelligent minds – seldom with aid from, and usually in spite of, the exoteric authorities — towards an understanding in-depth of Christian doctrine that benefits from the light of the more accessible profundities of other Traditions. This naturally fosters an unwillingness to accept the received constraints of an exoterism that is often narrow, myopic, and even wooden, constraints increasingly perceived as simply irrelevant. Yet the fundamental formal elements of Christianity are recognized by this inchoate elite as God-given, and the Church in its various orthodox branches is recognized as legitimate custodian and conservator of the essentials of the Christian Tradition. Church leaders would do well to take note of this development because of its possibly great significance for the Church: for paradoxically, it could herald a more potent Christianity. In any event the unquestioning acceptance of parochial shortsightedness continues to diminish as a consequence of these last times wherein everything is juxtaposed as never before, and when there is an inundation of information of every kind, including much admirable material amidst a plethora of rubbish. In any event, there are men such as Biès whose Christian faith synthesizes some familiarity with universal doctrine found in the Upanishads, in elements of the Buddhist canon, even in the Tao-te-king and the Holy Qur’an, not in a syncretistic manner but in the recognition of principles that are common to all traditions but expressedaccordingtothegeniusofeach. Faithsuchasthiscannotbe forced back into the narrow mold of a “common sense” understanding of the Christian mythos – a word, incidentally, that is intended to signify the highest possibilities of articulation, that which borders on the inexpressible. Willy-nilly, there is a quasi-natural, or better, “naturally supernatural”, movement towards esoterism. Biès personifies this movement. In the lines that follow we will try to elaborate on passages where, as it seems to us, some comment may contribute to greater understanding of what Biès says; or, where it seems advisable, to criticize what he says. We hope in this way to convey something of the character and merits of the book. In the chapter, “Evenings at La Fragnière”, he writes of a woman older than himself, Thyra, a crypto-Buddhist, by whom he was influenced. He tells of her interesting conviction (with which he apparently agrees) “...that there is no absolute separation between life and death...our ancestors play a part in this life”. This affirmation could as well be Taoist, for Lao-tzu wrote that “there is no difference between the livingandthe dead;both areone channelof vitality”. Inother timesand locales, or with a more adequate traditional anthropology, such sound conceptions of man’s psychic or subtle nature would be much more accessible, could shed much light on human relations, on the individual’s post-mortem destiny, on “ancestor worship”, as well as on the erroneous notions of “reincarnation”. There does seem to be a far greater awareness of psychic or subtle life among older families and in older and more stable cultures. It is we moderns with our highly exaggerated nominalism, we who are far advanced in materialist “solidification”, for whom the separation between the living and the dead seems especially stark and who conceive of death as an utter finality. We also learn that Thyra used the Bardo Thödol, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Whatever the degree of her penetration of Buddhism – and it seems to us improbable that this could have been especially profound on the part of a European living in the Valais, far from any Buddhist ambience – her case stands as an example of westerners neglecting their own traditions in favor of the exotic which doubtless seem to offer greater possibilities than commonplace Christianity, but which also offer far greater pitfalls for the unwary. Such people ignore the traditional form best suited totheircharacteraswesterners. Themajor branchesofChristianity have always had their prayers for the dead. In Latin Christianity (as it existed prior to Vatican II) each of the canonical hours closed with a remembrance of the dead. There was the Requiem Mass, obviously consisting of prayers for the deceased; and following the Mass for the actual day of burial there were Masses for the third, seventh, and thirtieth days after interment, plus anniversary Masses. The old Roman Requiem Mass reminded us that vita mutatur, non tollitur, “life is changed, not taken away”. For those deemed already worthy to stand before God, the Roman Church considered the day of their death as their dies natalis or day of birth into a life infinitely better than the present. What is death on the one side is ineluctably birth on the other, though we are told that “a great gulf is fixed” between them. There is nevertheless a positive lesson to be learned from the Bardo Thödol: namely, the importance of the dying person’s state of mind – something Biès reminds us that all healthy traditions have stressed. We moderns, however, seek above all to avoid pain and even discomfort and prefer to die in drugged oblivion, at risk to our life outre tombe. “As ye are found, so shall you be lead away”, an eastern liturgy tells us. And a widely used theme in medieval popular art was the contest between the archangel St Michael and the Devil for the soul of the dying. The chapter “Debacle of a Thought” contains a section that merits quoting at some length because of its great importance for western man’s self-understanding. Biès writes (pp 69, 70) that Aristotle: deals with metaphysics and Platonic ‘ideas’. He adheres to the existence of a God who is the motor of the universe, entirely ‘substance’ in actuality, thorough and perfect; but he formulates a theory of the concept that is no longer metaphysical but logical. His ’realism’ is that of sensory objects, refusing to separate the essence from the thing itself. He brings metaphysics back to ontology; and the entire history of Western metaphysics will be marked, preventing it henceforth – barring exceptions – from belonging to philosophia perennis. This reduction brought about an abstract and theoretical conception of knowledge, resulting in modern intellectualism, unknown to any ‘experience’. God becomes a Principle separated from the world (before completely disappearing from the human horizon and human concerns). Thomas Aquinas will study this same separation that Descartes will definitively confirm. Rational understanding will replace metaphysical intuition. In Bies’ words is found an essential key to the fatal divergence of western intellectuality, not only from its own roots but also from that of the intellectuality of other major civilizations of the world. Some years ago the Patriarch of the Antiochian Orthodox Church, whose See is at Damascus, publicly and forcibly stated that Christians are as entirely monotheist as are Muslims. Biès, for his part, has some precious insights into and observations on the doctrine of the Trinity. The popular Christian prejudice that the Persons of the Trinity are discrete individuals is as fully erroneous as the popular Muslim prejudice that Christians are tritheists. Biès, referring to teachings of Sts. Basil the Great and Maximus the Confessor, states that the three in the Trinity “...is not a number: the divine Persons are not added up, they exist in each other. There is a circulation of Unity, perichoresis, wherein each Person only exists by its relationship to the others”, which renders clearer St Thomas Aquinas’ teaching that the Persons of the Trinity are pure relationships. It has also been taught that the Trinity is an “arrangement of God”, a kind of “theodicy” in view of the perspectives of this world, and particularly in view of the Incarnation. Biès’ arguments are reinforced by the statement of another contemporary Orthodox hierarch to the effect that the Persons of the Trinity are “faces” turned towards or “voices” addressed to believers. This brings to mind Meister Eckhart’s statement that even if there were a hundred persons in the Godhead, there would still be only one God, as well as the Kabbalist doctrine of the ten uncreated Sephiroth, which doctrine in no manner compromises the Divine Unity. God is undoubtedly simple, but his simplicity is infinitely rich. It is reflected, for example, in the Divine Names of St Dionysius, the “divine Qualities” of Sufism, as well as in Palamite theology’s “uncreated Energies” which constitute the unique Origin and End of every existent thing. Biès does not neglect what today would be labeled as “psychology”, and much of what he says merits respect and attention. But more caution is needed when he writes that “...they [the Eastern doctrines] will show us that the ‘I’ is only an everchanging, elusive, evanescent and unreal aggregate composed of habits, faculties, dispositions and tendencies without fixedness”. This characterization of the ‘I’ has only a limited validity, applicable to man’s psychophysical nature, that is, the corporeal and subtle elements in human nature. This is true insofar as it refers to the empirical ego, to what is conventionally accepted as one’s “personal identity” in this life, but it is definitely not true of the personality and is a dangerous ellipsis if understood as descriptive of perduring human nature. If it were true, the dissolution of the body would herald either immediate liberation or annihilation and the statement of Lao-tzu cited above would make no sense whatever; nor would traditional teachings on the post-mortem destiny of the soul. We could learn from the earlier Christian and notably Pauline conceptions of human nature: that man consists of corpus, anima, et Spiritus — body, soul, and Spirit. These categories: gross, subtle, and formless, correspond to the three main categories of the created order, the macrocosm; for man is a microcosm, a miniature cosmos. As a near contemporary German cardinal put it: “Man consists of body, soul, and Holy Spirit”. In any event, it is “the Spirit that giveth life; the flesh [ie, body and soul, the gross and subtle elements in the human composite] profiteth nothing” (John vi, 63). It follows, then, that in traditional anthropology (and all traditions are in agreement, mutatis mutandis) any remotely adequate understanding of man must consider not only his corporeal and subtle elements, but also the formless(or angelic)and Principialstates. Maninhis creatednatureis threefold, but in toto, he is at least fourfold. In the Vedanta, which offers a complete anthropological doctrine (see René Guénon’s Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta), individuality extends far beyond man’s corporeal modality. And in Christianity the journey inwards from the body to the formless realm within (to the Kingdom of God) described by Dante in the Purgatorio, extends through many modalities and degrees of the individual state all the way up to the Earthly Paradise. Only with enfranchisement into the Earthly Paradise, the term of the Lesser Mysteries, can the redeemed pass beyond form which characterizes individuality as such. These things are worth mention because adequate theory is an essential prerequisite to spiritual realization, and if one’s readers are to be well served they must be advised not only of beginning and end but of the intermediate states as well, which are often very complex. At this point let us note that Biès cites two suspect authors who at the 156 14 Alvin Moore, Jr. – Review of Biès’ “Returning to the Essential” very least completely lack any traditional pedigree: Carl Jung, and Alan Watts, neither of whom adhered to any specific tradition which is a sine qua non for anyone who would speak with any authority of spiritual things, and both of whom were at best dilettantes in traditional matters. He also cites a third dubious authority: Sri Aurobindo Ghose, the Teilhard de Chardin of Hinduism. There seems to be no doubt that Sri Aurobindo was the beneficiary of some degree of realization, but it appears that his writings may have been “doctored” by some in his entourage in order to bring them into line with modern notions of “evolutionary progress”, notions which are completely antithetical to genuine metaphysics in which ultimately all things must be viewed in perfect simultaneity, thus rendering evolution completely null and void intellectually. Biès’ Christian sympathies are evident in his lucid chapter on iconography. “The icon sanctifies the gaze of the one who looks at it.... Free from... sensualism, it inaugurates the ‘fasting of the eyes’.... As a support for meditation it stablizes and brings order to ‘the mental and psychic currents’”; and Biès reminds us that “man becomes what he contemplates”. He writes also on deification, reminding us of a favored but elliptical dictum of the Greek fathers: “God became man that man might become God”, a statement seldom mentioned in these last times and even less often understood and given its due. Biès underlines the quasiabsolute distinction between deification and divinization; in connection with the latter we may recall that when Lucifer sought to be “like unto God” he became Satan. Divinization is the apotheosis of the ego, of an illusion, of an ephemera; it implies separation. Deification, on the other hand, involves a thoroughgoing renunciation of self (denegat seipsum is advice given all who would follow Christ), of the ego, an utter vacare Deo; it involves communion and virtual identification. Another brief citation is in order here; it is too important to ignore though too axiomatic to need comment. Biès asks rhetorically (pp 196, 197): Do we really need to point out that with the contingent world being the reflection of the ‘Order from above’, the rejection of this ‘Order’ – because man is free to conform to it or dismiss it – can only lead to the destruction of the reflection itself without affecting the ‘Order’ at all? The only solution is in accepting this obvious fact and rediscovering this ‘Order’.... [the] return to Unity is an obvious return to the Essential. And it is this return to the Essential that will make it possible for the Essential to return. The final chapters of the book are devoted to esoterism, especially Christian esoterism and the Primordial Tradition. The author articulates many insights that will be precious for those who seek to deepen their understanding of the Christian tradition – which understanding, as we have said before, can frequently benefit from collateral light from other traditions. After citing the testimonies of St. Justin Martyr, Origen, St. Ireneus, St. Maximus the Confessor, and Nicolas of Cusa (and there are numerous others), all to the effect that the Word is common to all, Biès writes that: If St. Paul wants us to refuse the messages that do not come from Christ, it is not because they are all necessarily untrue, but because the message of Christ, as much by its content as by its expression, is the most adapted to the Westerners of the time and their descendents. Yet in a kind of irony of these last times we find that participation in our own tradition is often rendered easier and more compelling by an increased understanding of other traditions. This is truer today than ever before: on the one hand because of the decay of Christianity; on the other and by way of Providential compensations in the form of extraChristian conceptions that are more ample both in breadth and in depth. But this is not all: if the contents of the several traditional forms themselves differ, as Biès mentions, this is because the infinite richness of the Uncreated cannot be exhausted by any one Credo. The elements of this or that Credo, however, do not stand alone in splendid isolation; they, too, reflect realities; they too have referents and exist because of these referents; and the referents themselves point to the One. It is analogous to the spokes of a wheel which converge as they approach the hub, but are at their maximum separation at the outer rim. In these last times, when we approach a final discrimination, perhaps we will discover that our real friends are not so much where we have thought and our real enemies are not where we have feared. As for this translation itself, it is adequate but one gets the impression that it was done in haste or that the task had grown wearisome to the translator – which, if so, is perfectly understandable. In any event, the English text could profit from review and revision in order to iron out a number of unwieldy renderings and clarify minor uncertainties. We did not find any passages, however, that suggest real confusion or infidelity to meanings, though we have not seen the French text. Throughout the translation the two rather awkward terms esotericism and exotericism are used rather than the more widely current, apt, and more sonorous esoterism and exoterism. We recommend the book, though it would be well if the reader could approach it from a background of some familiarity with the major traditional writers.
- [The Goal of Islamic Philosophy: Reflections on the Works of Afdal al-Din Kashani](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/goal-of-islamic-philosophy) - The Goal of Islamic Philosophy: Reflections on the Works of Afdal al-Din Kashani by William C. Chittick Afdal al-Din Kashani, commonly called Baba Afzal, has remained almost unknown to historians of Islamic philosophy.1 He flourished toward the end of the twelfth century, and the most likely date of his death is 1214. This means that he was a contemporary of Averroes, Ibn Arabi, and the philosopher Suhrawardi. It also means that he had been dead a hundred years before his compatriot, Abd al-Razzaq Kashani, composed his well-known commentary on Ibn Arabi’s Fusus al-hikam. Little is known about Baba Afzal’s life. We do know that toward the end of it—and perhaps much earlier—he was living in Maraq, a village about thirty-five kilometers from Kashan. The sparsely populated valley, now dominated by the dome of his tomb, still looks like an ideal location for a philosopher to retire from the preoccupations of the world. However, Baba Afzal was by no means a hermit, since his letters attest to the fact that he had a number of children and many students. The people in Maraq consider him to have been a saint, and their picture of him is confirmed by local histories of Kashan written before modern times. Moreover, the affectionate title Baba, that is, “Papa,” was often given to Sufi teachers. Nonetheless, there is no evidence in his writings for affiliation 1. Seyyed Hossein Nasr introduced him to the English-speaking world in his article, Afzal al-Din Kashani and the Philosophical World of Khwaja Nasir al-Din Tusi, in M. E. Marmura (ed.), Islamic Theology and Philosophy: Studies in Honor of George F. Hourani (Albany: SUNY Press, 1983), pp. 249-64; reprinted in Nasr, The Islamic Intellectual Tradition in Persia (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1996), pp. 189-206. For a thorough study of his life, works, and teachings, along with translations of about half his writings, see Chittick, The Heart of Islamic Philosophy: The Quest for Self-Knowledge in the Teachings of Afdal al-Dîn Kâshânî (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 5 17 with any Sufi teachers or specifically Sufi schools of thought. Rather he appears as a pure philosopher in the Greco-Islamic style. Baba Afzal was not a prolific author by the scholarly standards of the time. Nonetheless, his collected Persian works fill a printed volume of 750 pages. Six of his works are longish philosophical treatises, including one on the science of logic. Three more are Persian translations of Arabic works thought to be translated originally from Greek—two by Aristotle and one by Hermes. Seven are substantial letters to students. In addition, there are about fifty short treatises, essays, and paragraphs, and about two hundred quatrains as well as a handful of other poems. Another four hundred quatrains are attributed to him in a separate edition of his Diwan. As the author of quatrains, he can be compared with a famous earlier philosopher, Umar Khayyam. In short, Baba Afzal left behind a considerable corpus of prose writings, and these are written in finely crafted Persian. Why then is he not better known? The main reason, of course, is that he wrote his works in Persian and not in Arabic. Western historians of Islamic philosophy have considered Persian works to be rather peripheral to the tradition, and in this they are not mistaken. Even in modern Iran, a country that celebrates its philosophers, Baba Afzal is little remembered. To the general public, he is more likely to be recognized as a poet than as a philosopher. For those who have studied the history of Persian literature, he is known as a great master of philosophical prose. Among scholars trained in the traditional methods— those who have learned their philosophy in the madrasahs—Baba Afzal is almost totally forgotten. This is because the traditional philosophical canon largely excludes works in the Persian language. Baba Afzal was by no means the only philosopher to write in Persian, but for the most part, the Persian works of great figures like Avicenna, Suhrawardi, and Mulla Sadra are minor parts of their corpus. When philosophers did write in Persian, they wanted to reach an audience that did not include, in the first intention, the ulama or other philosophers, all of whom knew Arabic. Given that philosophy was considered the most difficult and sophisticated of the disciplines, the general understanding was that anyone with enough intellectual preparation to study philosophy would have a thorough grounding in the other sciences, all of which were studied mainly in Arabic. By definition, a budding philosopher would be one of the ulama, at least in the broad sense of this word, according to which it denotes “those who have knowledge.” Students of traditional philosophy in the madrasahs rarely study Persian works, and they also have little interest in the history of philosophy per se, because philosophy for them is a living intellectual discipline. As a result, Baba Afzal has disappeared from their horizon. Moreover, it seems that he was largely ignored by the philosophers who came after him. Mulla Sadra, for example, was well informed about the philosophers of the past, but apparently he does not mention him by name. However, this does not mean that Sadra had not read Baba Afzal’s works. We do know that he had studied at least one of them carefully, because he rewrote Jawidan-nama in Arabic with the title Iksir al-‘arifin. Sadra does not claim that the work is his own—even though most of it is in fact his own expansion of the text—because he says at the beginning that he has taken its discussions from the “folk of God” (ahl Allah). Enough details have been given about Baba Afzal’s life and writings. Let me now turn to certain peculiarities of his works that will help clarify why I think that his philosophical position is emblematic of traditional Islamic philosophy. But in order to lead up to this issue, we need to ask a basic question: Why did Baba Afzal write in Persian and not in Arabic? The answer is certainly not that his Arabic was inadequate to the task. We know for certain that he wrote one, and probably two, of his long works first in Arabic, and that he then translated them into Persian. His translations of works from the Arabic corpus of Greek writers are some of the most accurate examples of translation from Arabic to Persian that I have ever seen, including modern translations, and their literary quality makes them masterpieces of Persian prose. So, Baba Afzal certainly knew Arabic very well, and he was also familiar with the Arabic writings of his predecessors. However, we do not know which works he had studied, nor indeed which philosophers he had read, because he never mentions any names—except Aristotle and Hermes. Moreover, as far as I have been able to tell, he does not borrow from any of the earlier philosophers by rewriting their discussions in Persian. The distinguished Iranian historian, Abbas Zaryab, goes so far as to claim that Baba Afzal “follows a new road in the formulation of questions, method of argumentation, and the presentation of philosophical views, a road that distinguishes him from the earlier and later philosophers.” This “new road” is determined at least partly by Baba Afzal’s decision to write in Persian rather than Arabic. So again, we come back to the question of why he chose to do so. There are several factors at work here, but I think the most important is simply this: He was a teacher and had a specific audience that he was addressing. His primary concern in life was to help his students learn philosophy, and few of them were members of the ulama class. Hence they did not have sufficient training in the philosophical sciences to understand works written in Arabic. By saying that Baba Afzal was a teacher, I do not mean to imply that he was associated with any of the institutions of Islamic learning. His students would have come to his house in the village of Maraq. Presumably they stayed for weeks or months at a time. It would have taken them at least a full day just to come to Maraq from Kashan. In Maraq they devoted their time to learning philosophy from Baba Afzal. There were no academic careers waiting for them, no promotions in their chosen professions. They came purely for the sake of “philosophy” itself, that is, “the love of wisdom.” They came to Baba Afzal because they recognized in him not just a philosopher, but more than anything else, a man of wisdom. As historians of philosophy know, the word philosophy has largely lost its ancient meaning. It is well to remember Pierre Hadot’s insistence that philosophy used to be a “way of life,” not an academic discipline or a theoretical construct. Baba Afzal is one of the Muslim philosophers whose teachings match Hadot’s descriptions of philosophy as a spiritual quest. Philosophers like Baba Afzal were spiritual guides, and their concern was to lead their students to full human perfection. So, Baba Afzal departed from scholarly convention by writing in Persian, and he did so for the sake of people who would not ordinarily have been considered qualified to study philosophy. In order to understand his motives, we need to have a clear idea of what philosophers like him were doing. What was he trying to teach to his students? The philosophical tradition offered a number of standard definitions for the word “philosophy,” and most of these refer to two sides of the philosophical quest—the theoretical and the practical. It is not enough for someone who loves wisdom to concentrate on theoretical learning. Seekers must also concentrate on the practical side of the soul. In other words, the goal was to achieve knowledge of the way things are, and, along with that knowledge, a praxis that would accord with the knowledge. “Ethics” was an important branch of philosophy not only for theoretical reasons, but also for practical reasons. One could not become a true philosopher without being a virtuous human being. The discussion of ethics allowed students to understand how to conceptualize the practical perfections of the soul. But it also set down guidelines for proper activity. No one could claim to understand the science of ethics if he were not ethical. To know the definitions of the cardinal virtues—wisdom, continence, courage, and justice—without possessing them is a sure mark of a failed philosopher. And notice that “wisdom” (hikma), which is commonly treated as a synonym of the word “philosophy” (falsafa), is itself a virtue. It is, in other words, a deeply rooted quality of the soul that needs to be acquired through self-discipline. In Islamic terms then, “philosophy” is not only “love of wisdom” (hubb al-hikma), it is also wisdom itself. Whatever it is called, it demands ethical and moral perfection along with theoretical and intellectual perfection. Indeed, the philosophers maintained that it is impossible to achieve either kind of perfection in its fullness without achieving the other kind as well. The reason for this is obvious—the human self is not a disembodied intellect, even though, in its full perfection, it disengages itself from all worldly attachments. Human existence in this world demands that the practical, embodied side of the soul accord fully with the nature of things. This can only happen when the individual interacts appropriately with other individuals, with society, and with the universe itself. The standards of this appropriate behavior are described in the science of ethics as the “virtues” (fada’il) or the “praiseworthy habitudes” (malakat hamida) that need to be permanently acquired by the human self. (In the Sufi tradition, the same sort of discussion was carried out in terms of the “stations” [maqamat] on the path to God.) For the philosophers, then, achieving wisdom was the goal, and to do this they had to dedicate their lives to it. Even if we separate the theoretical goal from the practical goal, we still find that the theoretical goal entailed rigorous practice. The basic objective was to train the mind to think correctly with the ultimate aim of achieving a correct vision of things. People do not easily learn how to think correctly, and Baba Afzal on occasion complains of the difficulty of working with students who have picked up bad habits of thought by studying the normal scholarly disciplines. Baba Afzal wrote his treatise on logic to provide the “scale” (mizan) of proper thinking. But, learning the definitions of concepts and how to differentiate between correct and incorrect syllogisms is not the same as learning how to think properly. One still has to employ the scale of logic constantly in one’s life, because people are nothing if not conscious beings with the power of thought and reflection. They can only live up to their own nature if they train their minds to think correctly at all times, and this is a rigorous discipline that Baba Afzal regularly encourages his students to follow. There is a second important reason why Baba Afzal chose to write in Persian, closely connected to the first, but perhaps more interesting philosophically. This is the difference between the Arabic and the Persian languages. Persian speakers familiar with philosophical texts in Arabic who read Baba Afzal in Persian are struck by the remarkable clarity of his writings. There are important linguistic reasons for this, and Baba Afzal was fully aware of them. One of the basic difficulties faced by Persian speakers in philosophical works, whether they are written in Arabic or Persian, is the abstractness of the vocabulary. Most of the Arabic technical terms were already known to Persian speakers, though perhaps not in their technical senses. However, like Latin and Greek words in English, Arabic words tend to have a pedantic sound to them, and invariably they are more abstract than the Persian equivalents. The abstract terms may be more precise for purposes of scientific inquiry, but this precision removes them from the domain of the real world, where boundaries are always fuzzy. If a philosopher is striving to express reality itself, abstract precision may not be the best route. Baba Afzal is fully aware of the disadvantages of abstract terms, and he tries to avoid these disadvantages in two basic ways. First, he unfolds the laconic style of the philosophers, who mostly wrote for colleagues and advanced students. He develops his arguments rigorously, but he also writes them out in more detail than would be normal in Arabic. Second, although he often mentions the Arabic technical terms, he also uses Persian equivalents from everyday speech. The advantage of Persian over Arabic is that readers will have a better sense of the concreteness of the idea and not be drawn into abstractions. They will, as it were, feel the meaning of the words in the gut, and they will not need to stop and ask about what the words mean. The concrete and graphic nature of the Persian vocabulary prevents students from being drawn away from the real and present meaning found at the depth of their embodied souls. In short, Baba Afzal’s Persian prose has the effect of bringing philosophy out of the realm of abstractions and presenting it as a lively enterprise that students can engage with in everyday terms. Let me cite an example of how Baba Afzal employs Persian terminology to clarify what is at issue in Arabic words. You may have noticed that I said that the philosopher is striving to achieve a correct “vision” of the way things are. I do not mean the word “vision” metaphorically. This vision is commonly called the “theoretical” perfection of the soul. The Arabic word is nazar, which was adopted into the Persian vocabulary very early. In both Persian and Arabic, it means look, gaze, vision, consideration, theory, speculation. But, in Persian, there is something abstract about the term, if only because it has no Persian root and tends to be used in bookish contexts. Baba Afzal translates the word into Persian as binish or “seeing,” which is the verbal noun from the everyday Persian word meaning “to see.” This word has a down-to-earth concreteness that few loan words can have, because it refers to an act designated by the most commonplace of words. Now, if nazar is attributed to the mind, a Persian speaker thinks of an abstraction, like we do when we think of “theory” in English. But if binish is attributed to the mind, a Persian speaker is forced to think of the mind as another kind of eye. When Baba Afzal translates the Arabic expression ‘aql nazari (“theoretical intellect”) as khirad-i bina (“seeing intelligence”), the reader has a very different feel for what the enterprise of philosophy is all about. It pertains to the real world of seeing, not the abstract world of theorizing, contemplating, speculating, and supposing. By his use of this expression, Baba Afzal is able to tell us that the philosopher is trying to see the real nature of himself and the world. 5 23 Given that Baba Afzal considered philosophy a way of life, and given that he used the Persian language as a tool to train his students to live this way of life, we still need to ask why students would come all the way to Maraq to learn philosophy. More specifically, what exactly was philosophy’s goal? Here Baba Afzal is extraordinarily direct, much more so than most of the other Muslim philosophers, who tend to be rather long-winded. They never tire of analyzing texts and problems, but they rarely focus squarely and insistently on the purpose of the philosophical quest. Baba Afzal, in contrast, does not like to beat around the bush. He goes directly to the heart of the issue, and for him the issue is that voiced in the Delphic maxim, “Know thyself.” He explains repeatedly, with a great variety of direct and relatively simple arguments, that he is trying to aid his students in the quest for wisdom that must animate all philosophy worthy of the name, and that true wisdom remains inaccessible to those who do not know who they are. Those who investigate and learn things that fail to throw light on their own self-understanding are wasting their time. For Baba Afzal then, the basic philosophical question is “Who am I?” Or, in other terms, “What does it mean to be human?” His answer is that the true substance of a human self, or a human soul, is intelligence, and that the proper object of intelligence’s scrutiny is itself. Intelligence is fully achieved only when the knower, the known object, and the act of knowing have come to be one. This, for Baba Afzal, is tawhid—the first principle of Islamic faith, a word that is normally understood to mean “asserting the unity of God.” In Baba Afzal’s view, no one can grasp the unity of God who has not himself achieved the unity of soul. When it is reached, the intellect that knows is identical with the object known. Baba Afzal calls this self-knowing intellect the “radiance” (furugh) of the Divine Essence, and he tells us that this radiance can never cease to shine. Baba Afzal’s basic positions on knowledge, existence, and human becoming are not strange to the philosophical tradition. One can argue that his viewpoint is largely the same as that already expressed in the translations of Neoplatonic works, in various works of Hermetic provenance, in the writings of the Ikhwan al-Safa, and in the works of Peripatetic philosophers such as Avicenna. There are, of course, many differences of detail, but the general themes expounded by Baba Afzal are reflected in much of Islamic philosophy. What is interesting and attractive about him is not so much his philosophical stance per se, but rather the manner in which he explicates it for those who are not trained in the technical language of the Islamic sciences. A good example of Baba Afzal’s mode of argumentation is found in a treatise that he calls Rah-anjam-nama, “The Book of the Road’s End.” He is discussing a question that is utterly basic to the philosophical tradition—wujud, a word that is normally translated as “existence” or “being.” Although the concept and reality of wujud are central to Baba Afzal’s philosophizing, he had no interest in many of the issues that it raised for other philosophers. For example, he does not consider God per se a proper object of philosophical investigation, so he does not discuss the First as wajib al-wujud, the “Necessary in existence.” For him, wujud can only be discussed in terms of everything other than God, that is, the universe and all that it contains. In talking about wujud, Baba Afzal looks first at the word itself. In Arabic, it does not simply mean “to exist.” It also means “to find.” If we are to understand what wujud is all about, we need to think of it in terms of both “being” and “finding.” Here Baba Afzal uses two Persian words—hasti, a gerund from the “to be” verb, and yaft, a gerund from the verb yaftan, meaning “to find.” He also employs yaftan as a synonym for Arabic idrak or “perception.” And he uses the gerund from yaftan’s active participle, yabandagi or “finderness,” in the same meaning as the words “awareness” (agahi), “consciousness” (ba-khabari), and “knowledge” (Persian danish, Arabic ‘ilm). If wujud means both being and finding, or both existence and awareness, in what sense may we talk about things having wujud? Here Baba Afzal says that everyone recognizes two basic levels of wujud, those designated by the two meanings of the word. We have things that are there and that do not find, and we have things that perceive the things that are there. Obviously, the things that perceive have both finding and being, so they stand on a higher level of existence than unaware things. These two levels of wujud can be subdivided according to potentiality (quwwat) and actuality (fi‘l). Then we have “potential being,” like a tree in a seed, or a table in a tree. On the next level we have “actual being,” like the tree itself or the table itself. The third level is “potential finding,” which belongs to the soul or self. The soul has actual being, but it also has the capacity to find, to know, and to be aware of the things around it. Finally, the highest level of existence, “actual finding,” belongs to the intellect (Arabic ‘aql) or intelligence (Persian khirad), which is the human soul that has turned its resources to the task of knowing itself and others and has reached the full actuality of its own selfhood. At first sight, this way of looking at things leaves us with something like the Cartesian cogito, because it means that to know is to be. However, a formula does not make a philosophy, and a given position needs to be judged by what it means for those who hold it. In Baba Afzal’s case, to say that knowing is being means that the truly actualized knower—who is none but the intellect within us—has achieved eternal being as the radiance of God. Such a knower exists by his own essence, not by means of something other than his essence. Things that exist in the first three levels of wujud exist by means of something other than themselves, so existence does not belong to them. They are not fully conscious, so they do not truly exist. Knowing is the essential being of self, and truly to know is truly to be. That which knows by essence possesses the fullness of existence and consciousness, and it possesses them forever, because awareness is its very selfhood and reality. Such a being has brought all four levels of existence to fruition. Baba Afzal’s way of picturing the unity of existence and consciousness stresses a point that constantly surfaces in Islamic philosophical writings— that human knowledge and awareness can never be disengaged from being and existence, and that the human self can never be detached from the reality of the outside world. For Baba Afzal and, I would maintain, for the whole philosophical tradition, this point is practically self-evident. It means that the fullness of reality and actuality is also the fullness of consciousness, and that whatever is more conscious and more aware is more real. The more fully things exist, the more fully they know, and the more fully they know, the fuller is their reality and actuality. Aristotelian hylomorphism was understood in these same terms. The forms or ideas pertain to the domain of intelligence, and full awareness of the forms can only come through full actualization of human consciousness. Matter per se is dead and unintelligible, whereas the forms are alive through the life of the intelligence that knows them. To understand the world, we need to achieve a sufficient degree of self-awareness and self-actualization, and this task cannot be accomplished by focusing on the forms embedded in matter. To strive to understand and manipulate the embodied forms is to disperse and scatter the intelligence and to abandon true selfhood. The human task is to learn how to detach and disengage the forms from their localization in things. We need to learn how to perceive the forms in themselves, for they are the realities of the self and the things. We can only perceive them for what they are in the world of self-awareness. This self-awareness transcends all the individual limitations that prevent human egos from a true vision of things, and it allows people to live in the world in exactly the manner that the realities require. By way of a general conclusion, let me suggest some of the historical implications of the unity of existence and consciousness as discussed by the Muslim philosophers. Certainly, the goal of the philosophical tradition that is epitomized by Baba Afzal is to know oneself and the world in terms of the First Real, the Absolute Truth that brought the universe into existence, and then to act in accordance with what this knowledge demands. This is precisely “wisdom,” which embraces the theoretical and practical sides of the human self. But what sets this vision totally apart from modern thought and puts it squarely at the center of a human project whose permutations can be seen in all the great pre-modern civilizations is the focus on what might best be called “anthropocosmism”—to use the evocative expression that Tu Weiming employs to describe the Confucian world view. The dominant perspective in the Islamic philosophical tradition pictures human beings in terms of the unity of the human world and the natural world. There is no place to drive a wedge between humans and cosmos. In the final analysis, the natural world is the externalization of the true human self, and the human self is the internalization of the realm of nature. In Baba Afzal’s terms, this is because the human world embraces all four levels of existence—potential and actual being and finding—and the natural world is simply the external presence of the three lower levels. Human beings and the whole universe are intimately intertwined, and they face each other like two great mirrors. The quest for wisdom can only succeed if the natural world is recognized as equivalent to one’s own self. In the same way, one must see the whole human race as the external manifestation of all the potencies of the human soul. Only in these terms is it possible to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” Islamic philosophy never put into practice all the “scientific” insights that were present among its great masters and that have so often been admired by Western historians. Many of these historians, and even more so the modern-day Muslims who have followed in their footsteps, have lamented the “decadence” that prevented Islam from pursuing the “progressive” course of the early philosopher-scientists. Instead, they remark, these advances were carried over into Latin, and then they were instrumental in the development of philosophy and science in the West, which in turn led to the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. However, to claim that the Muslims failed to capitalize on the insights of the early thinkers is simply to acknowledge that the Islamic intellectual tradition remained true to itself. It held and continued to hold that human beings and the world must never be driven apart—in the Cartesian or Kantian manners, for example. There could be no justification for the objectification and reification of the natural world—for considering it as an “object” or a mere “thing” with no divine and human rights. Down into the nineteenth century, Muslim intellectuals continued to look upon the cosmos as a realm of reality inseparable from the human self. Any transgression of the natural world betrays human nature, and to “rape the earth” in the modern manner could only be the rape of the human soul and the surrender of the claim to human status. The Enlightenment project of instrumental rationality depended for its success on the bifurcation of the human and the cosmic, for only then could the world be seen as a great collection of inanimate objects that people are free to manipulate and control as they wish. The net result has been a whole culture that sees itself alien to the natural realm and that drives people to search ever more desperately for unspoiled “nature.” The existential angst of so many modern thinkers, who see themselves beleaguered by a hostile universe, is utterly inconceivable within the Islamic intellectual tradition, where the world is nothing if not a nurturing womb. It is not without significance that Islamic philosophy has largely been moribund in most of the Islamic world for the past century, just as intellectual Sufism—which developed a parallel anthropocosmic vision—has been the least prevalent of the many forms of Sufism in modern times. In place of these traditions, Muslim intellectuals, who nowadays are most commonly trained as doctors and engineers, are typically ruled by modern Western ideologies. Those intellectuals who have clung to their own traditions have for the most part specialized in Shariah (Islamic law), which has nothing to say about the nature of God, the cosmos, and the human soul. And a large number of those who have tried to revive an Islamic intellectual tradition that would not simply be warmed-over scientism or political ideology have done so by appealing to the school of Kalam (dogmatic theology), which asserts a radical divine transcendence that precludes any sort of anthropocosmic vision. Hence Kalam leaves the door open to treat the universe as an object to be manipulated. Modern Muslim intellectuals intuitively recognize in Kalam the one theological method that will allow them to justify their abandonment of most of their own intellectual tradition and their adoption of scientism, ideology, and technology in its place. The vast majority of modern-day Muslim intellectuals, like most of their counterparts in the West, have considered science and technology absolutely desirable for the sake of human progress and happiness. They raise no questions about the alienation from the world and God that scientistic thinking inevitably brings down upon a culture—the flattening of intellectual horizons that takes for granted an anthropocentrism without a transcendent God or a living cosmos. Few have seen that scientistic thinking is largely responsible for negating every human possibility beyond the mundane in the name of an “inevitable” development—“inevitable” simply because it can be done, and because nothing can stop technology’s juggernaut. Fortunately, however, there is much to be hopeful about in the modern world, not least the fact that more and more people are recognizing that something important has been lost. The recognition of loss is the necessary precondition for gain.
- [Sacrifice and the Preservation of the Enviroment in the Native American Belief](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/sacrifice-and-preservation) - James Larking “It is only transformation from within that can have an effect on the exterior world, both of man and his environment. To know who we are and where we come from are keys to successful living. It is only in modern times that people have asked for the ‘meaning of life’. Countless spiritually
- [Remarks on Esoterism in the Works of Frithjof Schuon](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/remarks-on-esoterism) - Remarks on Esoterism in the works of Frithjof Schuon by Patrick Laude In esoterism there are two principles which may be actualized sporadically and at different levels, but always in a partial and contained manner: the first is that fundamentally, there is only one religion with various forms, for humanity is one and the spirit is one; the second principle is that man bears everything within himself, potentially at least, by reason of the immanence of the one Truth. (Frithjof Schuon: In the Face of the Absolute, 1989) Introduction The definition and scope of esoterism remains a much-debated issue in traditional circles as is clearly apparent from a variety of reactions to Frithjof Schuon’s presentation of religio perennis.1 Our intention in writing this note is to highlight a few fundamental points that may have been in part obscured as a result of simplifying emphases or pious exaggerations prompted by the opportune or expedient demands of the particular contexts in which they were made. We will therefore limit ourselves to produce, in a manner as brief and simple as possible, a kind of summary of the main ideas presented by Schuon on the topic of esoterism, 1. Let us hasten to say that we do not share the view according to which Schuon’s direct heritage has by now divided between two “camps,” one labelled “traditionalist” and the other “primordialist.” Such alarming simplifications may be prompted by praiseworthy intentions of intellectual clarity and zeal for the House of the Lord, but in actuality the layout is much more nuanced and less schizomorphic than it would appear to some. We much prefer to speak, as Schuon himself did in some of his correspondence, of two “poles” or rather two “emphases” that should not in principle be mutually exclusive. We do not know of any genuine “primordialist” eager to dispense with the essential traditional framework and we have not heard of any “traditionalist” intent on rejecting the idea of an esoteric and universal core common to all traditions. SACRED WEB 4 57 both in his published works and in some of his unpublished texts. In this summary we do not claim to be exhaustive, our primary objective being merely to encourage our readers to refer directly to Schuon’s own writings on the matter. It goes without saying that in such subtle matters one may emphasize, for a variety of reasons, some aspects of the message at the expense of others. In any event, a doctrinal exposition will be partly systematic and partly indeterminate, the latter allowing for a plurality of perspectives of its meaning.2 As it appears upon reading some of his private writings, Schuon was perfectly aware of and quite agreeable to the spectrum of legitimate understandings and interpretations to which his essential message might give rise, while being no less explicit about the scope of what he personally considered to be his integral perspective. Defining “Esoterism”: Doctrine and Method A first important aspect of the issue at hand lies in the fact that esoterism may be defined either in its doctrinal aspect or in its methodical dimension, the former concerning Truth as it is perceived by intelligence, while the latter deals with the Way as it is lived by the soul and the will. In its most direct doctrinal expression, esoterism amounts to a fundamental discernment between the absolute and infinite Reality on the one hand, and relative realities on the other. Considered in its absoluteness, Reality is identified as Beyond-Being, as that which lies beyond all determinations and relations—and has therefore nothing to do with Creation as such. By contrast, when considered in its dimension of infinitude, Reality is the All-Possibility and as such the Principle that “makes possible” all further determinations and manifestations. There is only one Reality, which means that Reality alone “is,” and that consequently all realities “are” only in virtue of their “participation” in Reality: these are the two faces exclusive and inclusive of Truth. This is esoterism when it is reduced to its essential doctrine which is none other than the universal doctrine of Unity —“at-tawhîdu wâhidun”—and which all wisdoms and all religions express in a more or less direct way within the sacred means 2. “(...) Every traditional doctrine has an aspect of system and an aspect of indeterminacy; this latter appears in the variety of orthodox perspectives, hence also in the plurality of systems, such as may appear in the writings of one and the same author, above all in the esoteric field.” Frithjof Schuon, Language of the Self, World Wisdom Books, 1999, p.12. 58 SACRED WEB 4 and constraints of their formal languages.3 The notion of Beyond-Being (Sur-Etre) is closely connected, in the esoteric perspective, to that of Mâyâ. The latter can be defined as Universal Relativity, which means that it ranges from God as Creator at its summit—in so far as He is “relative” to His Creation and therefore only “relatively absolute”—to the least of corporeal manifestations. Moreover, these two key-concepts, unknown or rejected by exoterism, presuppose the at once epistemological and ontological reality of the Intellect, for only the supra-personal Intellect transcends the relationship between God and man since it is essentially identified with the Divine Subject itself, Atmâ. Operatively or methodically, esoterism is defined by Schuon as the most inclusive or integral concentration on the most exclusive Reality: “the Unicity of the Object demands the totality of the subject.” The modes of this concentration, which are at once interiorizing and assimilating, may vary in their “sacramental” or “technical” components but they all amount to an awakening and a deepening of the consciousness or the “remembrance” of Reality—through meditation, contemplation, invocation, and orison. Esoterism and Religion Given the essentiality of esoterism, the question must be raised: “Is esoterism independent from the religion within which it manifests itself?” To this question, a totally logical and consistent reader of Schuon’s writings can only answer with a proximate “no” upon which an indisputable “yes” must however ultimately prevail.4 In the esoteric and gnostic perspective defined by Schuon, Revelation, Religion and Tradition must be considered as necessary compo- 3. “Thus esoterism as such is metaphysics, to which is necessarily joined an appropriate method of realization. But the esoterism of a particular religion—of a particular exoterism precisely—tends to adapt itself to this religion and thereby enter into theological, psychological and legalistic meanders foreign to its nature, while preserving in its secret center its authentic and plenary nature, but for which it would not be what it is.” Frithjof Schuon, Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism, Bloomington: 1986, p.115. 4. “(...) this nucleus (the esoteric nucleus), however, is not in any sense a part, even an inner part, of the exoterism, but represents, on the contrary, a quasi-independent “dimension” in relation to the latter.” Frithjof Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, Wheaton-Madras-London: 1993, Pp.9-10. SACRED WEB 4 59 nents of the spiritual path in at least two senses: first, as “objective supernatural” elements and as such occasional means of awakening of the “subjective supernatural” element, the Intellect; and second, as providing sacred symbols, rites and other God-given spiritual “guarantees” and protections, or means of salvation and deliverance. As far as the first aspect is concerned, the need for an upaya or the formal framework of a tradition is however “accidental” and not “essential,” which means that the Intellect, and the Sanâtana Dharma or religio perennis as language of the Intellect, is independent from any “extrinsic objections”5 arising from the traditional world. It also means, with respect to the operative dimension, that the esoteric understanding of sacred symbols and the concomitant practice of rites may, in some cases, involve a reduction of the latter to their essential components—which are, as such, the most direct methodical vehicles of the religio perennis—and to their quintessential sacramental core, the definition of this quintessence depending upon specific circumstances and contexts. In other words, the Law is sacred and cannot simply and lightly be dispensed with in the name of esoterism, but the genuinely esoteric outlook necessarily implies an understanding and a practice of the exoteric system that may—and even must—reduce its formal complexity to a measure of essential simplicity. This principle prompted a traditionalist esoterist such as Titus Burckhardt to write that a true master “surely will (...) Reduce traditional form to its essential elements.”6 In doing so, esoterism does not start from the liter- 5. “The ‘subjective supernatural’ has need—‘accidentally’ and not ‘essentially’—of the ‘objective supernatural’, but once it is thus ‘awakened to itself’ by what corresponds to it outside of us, no extrinsic objection can concern it further.” Frithjof Schuon, Gnosis, Divine Wisdom, Bedfont: 1990, p.32. 6. “A master whose spiritual outlook is limited by a particular formal or traditional framework is not a complete master (although a true master may in practice be unfamiliar with traditions other than his own); and a master who rejects all forms is a false master (although a true master may reduce traditional form to its essential elements, and he surely will.)” Titus Burckhardt, “A Letter on Spiritual Method,” Mirror of the Intellect, Albany, p. 252. 7. “We could say, simplifying a little, that exoterism puts the form—the credo—above the essence—Universal Truth—and accepts the latter only as a function of the former; the form, through its divine origin, is here the criterion of the essence. Esoterism, on the contrary, puts the essence above the form and only accepts the latter as a function of the former; for esoterism, and in accordance with the real hierarchy of values, the essence is the criterion of the form; the one and universal Truth is the criterion of the various religious forms of the Truth.” Frithjof Schuon, Esoterism as Principle and as Way, Bedfont: 1990, P.37. 60 SACRED WEB 4 ality of the formal Law to adapt its outlook to it,7 but rather unfolds from an understanding of the nature of things and the essential finality of the Law in order to “live the Law” both as a protective framework and as a support for contemplation. The possibility of misunderstanding and abuse of quintessential esoterism lies in its very nature, which is—according to Schuon—extrinsically precarious.8 This precariousness stems precisely from the subtlety of the esoteric outlook, particularly with respect to the relationship between form and essence: the form “is” and “is not” the essence. The form prolongs the essence but it may also veil it. The essence transcends the form but it also “manifests” itself through it. In any case, the possibility of abuses or misunderstandings does not invalidate the reality, legitimacy and necessity of esoterism, any more than the abuses of literal formalism and fanaticism invalidate religion as a sacred way. Subjective and expedient reactions to real or imaginary abuses have no bearing upon the objective reality of gnosis and its intrinsic independence from formal religion. To claim that quintessential esoterism is a dangerous perspective because it is not formally discernable within the human context of its manifestation is either a truism, in the absence of the required qualifications, or amounts to denying the very possibility of the manifestation of the Spirit since “the Light shineth in the darkness and the darkness comprehended it not.”9 With respect to the relationship between esoterism and exoterism, Schuon has repeatedly asserted that it can and must be viewed from two stand-points: that of continuity, following which esoterism appears as the inner core of a tradition; and that of discontinuity, according to which esoterism transcends exoterism and may even stand in opposition to it: 8. “The paradox of esoterism is that on the one hand ‘men do not light a candle and put it under a bushel’, while on the other hand ‘give not what is sacred to dogs’; between these two expressions lies the ‘light that shineth in the darkness, but the darkness comprehended it not’. There are fluctuations here which no one can prevent and which are the ransom of contingency.” Frithjof Schuon, Esoterism as Principle and as Way, Bedfont: 1990, p.19. 9. When speaking about esoterism, if one were to be wary of all possible misconstructions of one’s words, one should as well remain silent. Moreover, one all too easily forgets that esoterism does not address everybody. It has no intrinsic reason to adapt its views and language to the lowest common exoteric denominator, this being said with no elitist pretension whatsoever, for sanctity does not belong to any group or perspective. SACRED WEB 4 61 “If you would have the kernel, you must break the husk,”10 according to Meister Eckhart’s formula often quoted by Schuon. Exoterism as a formal system is a practically necessary framework for the manifestation of esoterism which befalls upon the former as the mistletoe on an oak, or as the rain falling from the sky to the earth, and the wind which “bloweth where it listeth,”11 but exoterism, to the extent that it emphasizes a voluntaristic and individualistic piety and its emotional—or worse political—identification with a given tradition, cannot be truly and fully compatible with esoterism as Schuon has defined it and as René Guénon has understood it. Religio Perennis Schuon has referred several times to the one and only “sub-jacent” religion that he sometimes designated as religio perennis. This must not be misinterpreted as meaning that religio perennis is a new religion with new rites and new means of salvation—for religio perennis, since it is essential and primordial by definition, has certainly nothing “new” about it, and it cannot exteriorize itself as a religion, that is, as an exclusive system of forms, without contradicting its very nature. It may however integrate forms which are directly inspired from above or borrowed from other spiritual climates and which may have no direct, formal relation with the traditional framework which is its abode, as has happened many times in the history of mysticism when new forms inspired by Heaven or by a given cultural ambience became new ceremonial or ritual vehicles of spiritual blessing. For example, what is more formally different from exoteric Islam than the dances of the Mevlevis? In any case, the profundity and essentiality of esoterism may give rise to spiritual and formal manifestations of an exceptional character that are the very evidence of 10. 11. 62 “ ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth,’ and because of its universality shatters forms, though it must needs clothe itself in a form while on the formal plane.” Frithjof Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, Wheaton-Madras-London: 1993, p.32. “Esoterism, in fact, is not an unpredictable doctrine that can only be discovered, should the occasion arise, by means of detailed researches; what is mysterious in esoterism is its dimension of depth, its particular developments and its practical consequences, but not its starting-points, which coincide with the fundamental symbols of the religion in question; moreover its continuity is not exclusively ‘horizontal’ as is that of exoterism; it is also ‘vertical,’(...) “ In “The Supreme Commandment” in The Essential Writings of Frithjof Schuon, edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Element, 1991, p.227. SACRED WEB 4 its transcendent nature and that one should therefore welcome with awe and gratitude. This kind of spiritual and methodical istithnâ (an “exception” in the “traditional syntax” as it were) brings with it the “shock” of a transcendent gift which is, so to speak, offered by God in a direct manner and thus challenges our all too human biases and conventional comforts. Such a direct offering is also no doubt connected with the fact that the nature of a plenary esoteric master12 is akin to that of prophecy, albeit obviously not in the sense of a law-giving mission.13 Esoterism and Hermeneutic Possibility Against the notion of quintessential esoterism, it has been objected that the limitations of the human creature make it impossible for us to reach a direct perception of the essence and that all that can therefore be attained is an obscure perception of esoterism through “semantic presence.”14 In other words, this philosophical line of reasoning aims at establishing that pure esoterism is never more than the hermeneutic horizon of an intuition which is always dependent upon revealed forms, and particularly upon the tradition that is ours. In response to this objection, it is first of all necessary to draw a distinction between the universal Intellect and the limitations of human nature, for one can only “know” God by God, which amounts to saying 12. In this connection, it may be useful to recall that the first step of discernment entails awareness of the qualitative spiritual gap that lies between the master and the disciple. The disciple’s discernment manifests a priori in a surrender to the master in all that pertains to spiritual life for, as Ghazali put it: “The disciple must cling to his shaikh as a blind man on the edge of a river clings to his leader, confiding himself to him entirely, opposing him in no matter whatsoever, and binding himself to follow him absolutely. Let him know that the advantage he gains from the error of his shaikh, if he should err, is greater than the advantage he gains from his own rightness, if he should be right.” (quoted by H.A.R. Gibb in Mohammedanism, NY, 1955, p. 117). Moreover, one should also keep in mind that it is difficult, if not impossible, for the disciple to determine the inner significance of his master’s behavior given that “the ethical trace of a spiritual degree is all the more subtle as the degree is more lofty and the incommensurability between the Reality contemplated and the human receptacle more profound.” (Titus Burckhardt, Introduction to Sufism, San Fransisco, 1995, p. 88). 13. “(...) Esoteric mastery is related to prophecy, without for all that departing from the framework of the mother-religion.” Frithjof Schuon, Esoterism as Principle and as Way, Perennial Books, 1981, pp.152-3. 14. Jean Borella, Esotérisme guénonien et mystère chrétien, Paris: 1997, p.50. 15. “(...)esoterismresidesnotonlyinthechoiceofideas,butalsointhemannerofenvisaging things.” Frithjof Schuon, Esoterism as Principle and as Way, Bedfont: 1990, p.9. SACRED WEB 4 63 that God alone knows himself through man and through Creation. This is not to say however that “pure” esoterism should be ultimately identified with God, as some have suggested. Esoterism is a particular perspective15—neither an object nor a subject properly speaking, but the perspective of the Intellect in relation to the nature of things. Without this perspective, which is none other than the religio perennis, religion would be somewhat unintelligible, in the sense that there would be no way of understanding what any particular religion is all about without a “decisive intuition”16 of Religion as such. The religious literality of a given form would remain ineffective were it not for the “anamnesis” that pertains—most often partially or obscurely—to the Intellect. This does not mean however that religio perennis can be reduced to the status of a mere mental abstraction of an “intellectual” nature17—as some of its malcontents have argued—for it essentially implies a spiritual and existential conformity to Reality, or a moral and aesthetic assimilation of the “message” of the nature of things. As Schuon often reminded us: to know is to be. Esoterism is the perspective and language of wisdom in which being and knowing coincide. That is the reason why, on the plane of doctrinal exposition, pure esoterism cannot be limited by the conceptual expressions that accounts for its reality. Conclusion Esoterism has often been defined by Schuon as aiming at perfect objectivity;18 this objectivity has also been defined by him as a conformity to 16. 17. 64 “Of course,theobjectofthedecisiveintuitionisnottheextrinsiclimitationsofreligions the overaccentuations, narrownesses and ostracisms but their intrinsic and therefore universal truths...” Frithjof Schuon, In the Face of the Absolute, Bloomington: 1989, p.15 “To return to what was said above about the understanding of ideas, a theoretical notion may be compared to the view of an object. Just as this view does not reveal all possible aspects, or in other words, the integral nature of the object, the perfect knowledge of which would be nothing less than identity with it, so a theoretical notion does not itself correspond to the integral truth, of which it necessarily suggests only one aspects, essential or otherwise. (...) As for a speculative and therefore intellectually unlimited conception, this may be compared to the sum of all possible views of the object in question, views that presuppose in the subject a power of displacement or an ability to alter his view-point, hence a certain mode of identity with the dimensions of space, which themselves effectually reveal the integral nature of the object, at least with respect to its form, which is all that is in question in the example given.” Frithjof Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, WheatonMadras-London: 1993, p.5. SACRED WEB 4 the nature of things. While remaining perfectly sensitive to the spiritual wealth of tradition as the repository of truth and beauty, to morality as the beauty of the soul (rather than juridically and voluntaristically inclined moralism) and to rules of social conduct (normatively speaking and without concessions to conventional narrowness) inasmuch as these constitute vehicles of formal approximation of the True, the Good and the Beautiful, esoterism is that which understands and treats phenomena by considering their intrinsic meaning or their archetypes. Esoterism may therefore be defined, in conclusion, as the science of the fundamental intuitions of the Real. 18. “Esoterism,by its interpretations,its revelations and its interiorizing and essentializing operations, tends to realize pure and direct objectivity; this is the reason for its existence.” Frithjof Schuon, Esoterism as Principle and as Way, Bedfont: 1990, p.15.
- [Nature, Man and God](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/nature-man-and-god) - Nature, Man and God by Alvin Moore, Jr. When I was in the Principle and Ground of Godhead, no one asked me where I was going or what I was doing; there was no one to ask. On my return to the Principle and Ground of Godhead, where I am formless, my breaking through will be far nobler than my going forth; no one will ask me whence I came or whither I went, no one missed me. There, God-as-Other passes away. Meister Eckhart In these words Meister Eckhart enunciates a truth fundamental alike to Christianity and to all orthodox traditions: namely, the Procession and Return of creatures, indeed of all creation or manifestation (essentially equivalent terms), from and to the Godhead. Eckhart speaks of both Procession and Return, and the one is the necessary corollary of the other. But Return is even more essential than Procession from the human perspective, for it defines the human entelechy. In the Genesis creation account we read that “God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good.” God desires to diffuse His goodness, truth and beauty. But the words of an hadith qudsi (a saying of the Prophet Muhammad in which God speaks in the first person) are even more fundamental as regards man’s nature and ultimate identity: “I was a hidden treasure and I desired to be known.” God wishes to know Himself from the standpoint of creatures. Man’s gnosis is God—“that awesome Prior”—knowing Himself in us, a knowing that is the consummation of the Return. For “he who knows God becomes God”; only God can know God, it being impossible that finite subject could know Infinite Object. SACRED WEB 2 51 Now the Return is all too often ignored, misconceived, or inadequately conceived. On a popular level the religions take our present life as the norm for man’s posthumous states, though not without reason. Exoterically speaking, the Semitic monotheisms do not look beyond certain postmortem prolongations of the human state and tend to confuse these prolongations with the whole of salvation and immortality. Nevertheless, these extensions remain within the parameters of individual manifestation and are far, one might say “infinitely far,” from true immortality and the fullness of salvation. It has been said that “liberation is for the gods,” and that “liberation is not of the individual, but from individuality.” In contrast to popular monotheism, certain more metaphysical traditions, Hinduism and Buddhism notably, include for those who are qualified the express aim of liberation not only from individuality but from the very cosmos. In Christianity especially, effective esoterism whose concern was precisely these things, has been all but dead since the Renaissance. We would like to think, however, that a revival of esoterism within Christianity may be possible as we approach the term of this present cycle, the end of this world. Our intention in this essay, Deo juvante, is to offer certain major and more accessible elements of a world view that is a very viable alternative to the sterile horizons of secular humanism in which so many of our fellows are imprisoned, without even suspecting that near at hand there may be means of escape. Very likely there will be some who, preferring New Age illusions, will say “no religion, please,” in response to such overtures. In the human psyche there is rancor and bitterness towards the Divine which effectively blocks high purposes and upward movement. There is also an inertia relating to new concepts and unfamiliar ways of thinking. In our remarks we shall speak from a perspective superior to confessional parameters, but certainly not superior to religion as such. All orthodox religions begin as initiatives of Heaven towards mankind, or particular segments of mankind. All are true insofar as they are orthodox, that is, insofar as they are faithful to their own internal criteria for integrity. A given religion is incumbent upon those to whom it is addressed and no man can disdain Heaven’s initiatives with impunity. No man can maintain a saving equilibrium in this life, especially not in these last times, without Heaven’s aid. And certainly no man can find his way out of the cosmic labyrinth without the favour and as- 52 SACRED WEB 2 sistance of Heaven. The great revelations and the traditions flowing from them have an essential role not only in man’s liberation from the cosmos, from Nature in her totality, but also in man’s well-being within the cosmos; though these roles are not always precisely as popularly conceived. Before going further, it will be helpful to state in broad lines what we can understand by the word nature, which derives from the Latin natura and which itself derives from natus, to be born. Nature implies coming to be and passing away, motion, development. In current usage, the primary meanings of nature are: the external world and its phenomena, from greatest to least, as these are manifested to man’s sensory awareness—and this is the notion of nature that is often sentimentalized; second, the sum of processes, causes and effects, whether evident or hidden, in the world considered as external to man; and third, the essential properties or characteristics of persons or things which determine what they are, the manner of their existence, and how they act or are acted upon. In the opening epigraph Eckhart states the Principle of Procession and Return, though he does not explicitly state the subject. Although this subject encompasses all creation, essentially the subject is man: not man as individual, but man in the fullness of his nature which is infinitely more than the flesh with which we are so familiar. The true subject of Procession and Return is human nature which, transcending individuality, “has nothing to do with time.” To develop these themes further, we turn to the ninth century Irish scholar, John Scot Eriugena (c. 810 c. 877) who with Eckhart (1260 1327) is at the summit of western Christian intellectuality. Eriugena bridged the “Greek East and the Latin West” and was deeply nourished by the Greek Fathers, especially Sts. Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor. We turn to his major work, On the Division of Nature (De divisione naturae) for a schema grand enough to situate man in his cosmic and extra-cosmic ambience. Eriugena uses the word nature in the most comprehensive manner conceivable, including in its bounds as he says “all that is and all that is not,” in other words all degrees in the “great chain of being” and also THAT which transcends Being. His division of Nature as set forth in his De divisione naturae is fourfold: the uncreated nature that creates; the created nature that creates; the created nature that does not create; SACRED WEB 2 53 and the uncreated nature that does not create. We shall comment on each of these divisions and endeavour to show how man, human nature, is involved in each of them. The first division of nature in Eriugena’s schema is that nature which creates all that is created, or by which is manifested all that appears however and wherever it appears. In the monotheistic perspective this is God as Creator and Divine Person, the level of Pure Being or the “relative Absolute” to use the apt phrase of Frithjof Schuon. This is also the level of the Divine Intellect, the Logos or Word. Note that though we speak of “levels” in Divinity, God is preeminently One—an affirmation in no way vitiating Christian Trinitarian doctrine. Pure Being was the supreme concern of Latin Christianity, at least officially and as it flowered in medieval Scolasticism. Whatever the reason for this limitation, Latin Christianity and its derivative Protestantism had not the habit of looking more deeply into the Divine than the ontological level, though this does not mean that in the West there were none who did so—for example Eriugena, Eckhart and Boehme. For its part the Christian East retained the concept of plenary Non-Being or Beyond Being, making the necessary distinctions between the imparticipable Divine Essence and the participable Divine Energies. Pure Being, at the level of the Energies, is the first determination of the Godhead in view of creation/ manifestation. In Scholastic idiom, it is the “place of possibilities”; it is the Archetype of archetypes, Form of all forms. It is that creative nature whose idiosyncrasy is eternal creation. In this ultimate sense redemption, which includes lawgiving, is no less implicit as eternal divine act than is creation; and conformity to one’s given law is a necessary premise for salvation. From the perspective of the Eternal, creation/manifestation and redemption are totally simultaneous. René Guénon could thus say that he who cannot escape from the standpoint of temporal succession, so as to see all things in their absolute simultaneity, is incapable of the least conception in metaphysics. And Frithjof Schuon observed that “esoterism (the primary concern of which is metaphysics) looks to the nature of things and not primarily to our human eschatology; it views the Universe not merely from the human standpoint but from the ‘standpoint’ of God.” The recognition of these truths and their presence in ones ideas concerning the Divine are salient distinctions between the metaphysical and theological modes of thought. Metaphysic alone is free 54 SACRED WEB 2 of the dilemmas and inconsequences which characterize certain areas of theology, notably theodicy. And as much first rate theology is readily available (as well as much second and third rate material), and as the question is a perennial one that troubles people even today, we think it appropriate to confine our further remarks relating to Eriugena’s first division of Nature to theodicy. To the ever recurring question: “If God is all good and all powerful, whence evil?,” theology offers no fully satisfactory response. Traditional (not academic) metaphysics has axiomatic data lacking to theology (indeed, theology is a demarcation or limitation of metaphysics). Examples are the distinction between the Relative and the Absolute in divinis; the doctrine of Universal Possibility; degrees of reality and maya or hijab (veil); cosmic rhythms and cycles; the equivalence of knowing and being; and especially the nature of consciousness and intelligence and man’s ultimate identity. But specific to theodicy: on pain of contradiction, Universal Possibility must include the possibility of its own denial. In the nature of things, however, this denial can be realized only as a tendency or direction; obviously, pure nothingness cannot be created or manifested, or explicitly realized. The world is not God and cannot share in the divine perfections in a divine manner. Creation means remotion from the Divine, and the greater the removal the greater the ontic impoverishment, which privations may be experienced as evil at the individual level. But evil is parasitic; not only does it have no existence in its own right, it is in no way symmetrical with God even if one might think differently in times such as our own. Frithjof Schuon, who has carried theodicy to the highest levels of possible expression, affirms that there are, as it were, two wills in the Divine. In the Absolute there is the will to creation/manifestation as such, which necessarily implies all the diminution and indigence to which fallen creation and men as fallen creatures are subject and which they experience as evil in whatever degree. These are givens which man has no choice but to accept. The other Divine will is more narrowly focused within particular worlds, and adapted to their structure, circumstances and conditions and reaching into particular lives (“not one sparrow shall fall to the ground without your Father”). There are also the divine initiatives towards mankind, already mentioned; these are the great Revelations and the religious traditions flow- SACRED WEB 2 55 ing from them which include a Law appropriate to each tradition and which extend to nuances for each creature, all this being an expression of the will to redeem. This is the orbit of Pure Being, the Divine Person (note, however, that Person can be metaphysically transposed so that it coincides with the Self) with Whom one has an obligation to form a relationship; and grief to him who spurns this possibility. Frithjof Schuon has specified that though one can relate to the Divine Person, one cannot realize Him; but that one cannot objectively relate to the Self, the Ultimate Subject, but one can realize It, at Heaven’s good pleasure needless to say. Against what may appear as a kind of cosmic ruthlessness, it must be affirmed that there is Mercy at the heart of things, all contrary appearances notwithstanding. All traditions, each in its appropriate manner, make this same affirmation. In summary, God the Uncreate, is necessary Being. He is not subject to the category of existence; though the structures of our language almost compel us to say, “God exists,” we do so only by extension. We must say simply HE IS. All else, from angels to gnats, are contingent and entirely dependent upon Another for existence, life, consciousness and intelligence, at whatever levels of their participation. The obvious lesson for men here is the need for self-knowledge: to recognize our own contingency, that we possess neither our own being nor our existence, and in consequence to take the first steps towards the fundamental and indispensable virtue of humility. The second division of Nature, following Eriugena’s schema, is that nature which is created and which also creates. This is the realm of the Divine Archetypes, seminal reasons or exemplary causes of things, apart from which nothing could possibly be existentiated. The archetypes are eternally present in the Divine Intellect; “fused but not confused,” they are coeval with the Logos (the Divine Intellect); as the number one, analogously, potentially contains all other numbers. The Greek roots of the word archetype suggest the notions of “forge” or “mint,” and provide precious insight into the act of creation. ?????????, archetypon, means “pattern” or “model”; “arche” meaning “first” or “original,” and “typos” meanings “impression” or “stamp.” If from the human perspective, the archetypes seem indefinitely numerous, nevertheless ontologically they are one with and not distinct from the Divine Substance. As with the 56 SACRED WEB 2 angelic states, we cannot grasp the archetypes discursively, though there is this difference as regards the angels: on missions to men, angels (who are of the created order) are perceptible to men; whereas by definition the archetypes are uncreate. One may wonder why Eriugena adopted this as second category in his De divisione naturae, given that the archetypes as divine ideas and exemplary causes, are intrinsic to the Divine Intellect. Perhaps it was to emphasize the doctrine of exemplarism: that all that exists (exist=“stand forth” or “appear,” implying desire), however it exists, and through all its permutations, derives from and participates in the Principal order and is entirely dependent upon this order, apart from which there could only be non-existence in the privative sense, that is, pure nothingness. In any case, we can say the archetypes are created only in the sense that, intrinsic to the Logos, they proceed forth in the eternal generation of the Logos. The priority of the Divine Intellect or Logos is a logical and not an ontological priority. Let us note also that the Divine Intellect, the creative Principle, is not diminished by the eternal act of creation, but is as a Fountain, simultaneously “fontal and inflowing.” The causative mode of the Divine Archetypes is an exemplary causality; they are One in principle, but multiple (metaphysically transposing this word) in relation to what is existentiated in the created order. We must digress briefly to consider the so-called Jungian archetypes, currently so much in fashion; for the word archetype is another of those that have been hijacked to serve subversive ends. Out of simple regard for truth, Jungian archetypes should never be confused with the infinitely superior Divine Archetypes of which they are but grotesque and sinister parodies reflected in the “nether waters” of the subtle or psychic realm. Genuine archetypes are sources of “being and knowledge,” in the words of Titus Burckhardt. An example is Dante vis-a-vis Beatrice. Dante was drawn to Beatrice because she represented his archetype in divinis. Man approaches genuine archetypes through rigorous and intelligent discipline, purification, and concentration which open onto high intellection or gnosis; not by slackening and sinking beneath the human entelechy. Jung held that his “archetypes” are eidolons outside the spatiotemporal order. It hardly need be added that his notions of “non-spatial” and “non-temporal” are really quite limited and restricted to the psychic realm, and no more than a caricature of metaphysical transcendence. Jung limited his interest and studies to the psychic or subtle realm, in- SACRED WEB 2 57 deed to the inferior registers of this realm. The subtle order is vast—it is frequently compared to an ocean—and its upper degrees are far superior to our common experience. In its lower registers, however, it is par excellence the realm of deceit, malice, illusion and fleeting change, the phenomena of which were aptly characterized by Dante as “lying waves.” Jung’s “archetypes,” instead of being sources of knowledge and being, are often forces of madness and dissolution. We should note that these distinctions are particularly critical for our contemporaries who, wrongly believing that all that is not material is spiritual, all too often fail to discriminate between the psychic and the properly spiritual which is necessarily beyond form. Eriugena’s third division of Nature is that nature which is created and which does not create. This is the world of this present life; the world of phenomena, both corporeal and subtle or psychic; the world of energies manifested from something beyond our ken. “You have seen the kettle of thought boiling,” said Rumi; “what of the fire?” This third division is that of the permutation of the elements, of generation and corruption, of coming to be and passing away; of earth, atmosphere, and sky; of the rhythmic seasons and inexhaustibly variegated life forms; in short, of nature as the word is most commonly used. This earth, our temporary abode, is indeed beautiful, especially when not despoiled by the hand of arrogant men; or when it has been long and lovingly tended for generations, as can be seen in parts of Asia and Europe and even North America. Most traditional symbols are drawn from this natural order, so there is obviously an epiphanic or theophanic aspect intrinsic to it. Profane man, however, looks upon nature as a rapist might look on a potential victim. The vision of the innocent stands in sharp contrast; one among many of these was Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich who could say: when I... was a child, every leaf, every tiny flower, was a book which I could read. I perceived the beauty and signification of color and form; but when I spoke of it, my hearers only laughed at me. I could entertain myself with everything that I met in the fields. I understood everything. I could even see into flowers and animals... Indeed, “God saw everything that He had made and, behold, it was very good.” Nevertheless, there are fundamental ambiguities in our own 58 SACRED WEB 2 existence and in that of nature. “Cursed is the ground for thy sake,” God said to Adam: In sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life... in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread until thou return into the ground, for out of it thou was taken... dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return. Man’s central state is implicit in this pronouncement: it is because of man’s misdeeds that the earth is accursed. This relationship between man and earth is intrinsic to man’s existential situation. The ecological crisis, or crises—for there are many—have grown dramatically more acute with man’s increasing numbers which are themselves made possible by ever increasing industrial activity—which activity entails further consequential damage to the natural habitat. Ancient man saw the phenomena of nature as theophanies, or at least as expressions of noetic energies. Modern man sees only appearances, brute facts and what immediately affects the senses. Ancient man, understanding first principles, knew that nothing comes from nothing, and that nothing acts upon itself. Modern man believes that water can be poured from an empty bucket. Ancient man believed that intelligence always has priority. Modern man, reversing the natural and necessary order of things, believes he can trace intelligence to biological, chemical or even physical causes; he is oblivious to the contradiction inherent in the notion that intelligence is in final analysis the product of unintelligence and unconsciousness. Ancient man saw his origins either in an eponymous demigod ancestor, in his high gods, or ultimately in a divine First Principle. Modern man imagines his origins in subhuman life forms and ultimately in unconscious matter (itself an illusory notion). In appetitedriven exercises of self-delusion, modern man wants to believe that all life, all consciousness, all intelligence are the products of blind forces. Ancient man believed not only that he should think with the gods but that there are Heaven-given norms for thinking and for behavior. Modern man, incredibly myopic, nominalistic, and never far from solipsism, believes his consciousness and faculties are uniquely his own to use as he pleases and that he can do whatever he pleases without adverse consequences. In modern man, extroversion and introversion take on new meaning; man is extroverted by definition and by nature; but never be- SACRED WEB 2 59 fore has extroversion been pushed to such reckless extremes, and never before has introversion ended in such short-sighted morbidity. Quos Deus vult perdere prius dementat. Toxic waste sites and all such abuses of nature mirror the condition of man’s soul, the qualitative condition of which inevitably resonates in humanity’s natural habitat; for nature is an extension of and dependent upon the creature who is midmost and omphalic in this world. Man no longer understands or wants to understand his own constitution—what can it mean for a new college graduate to be told that man consists of body, soul and spirit?—and thus he does not understand his own constitution or his vocation as man. Hence he no longer fulfils his Heavengiven function of vicar or khalifah for this world which is his temporary abode. He exacerbates the very cosmogonic process by turning his back on his Principle and pushing centrifugal sensory experience to extremes. There result an accelerating fragility and instability in all his works and activities as he moves in seeming helplessness towards the periphery of his world, all of which is only too evident to those who have “eyes to see.” Man cannot escape the Heaven-set boundaries of his faculties. Already in 1842, Tennyson in his capacity as modernist and sentimental Victorian wrote a poem named after its central character, Ulysses. In it, he extolled the terminal exploits of the elderly Ulysses and his aged companions. But of the same episode, Dante, one of the last European jivan mukthas, in his great Commedia had Ulysses, now dead and in one of the lower pits of Hell, utter these words: We joyed, but soon our joy was turned to grief: for a tempest arose from the new land, and struck the forepart of our ship. Three times it made her whirl round with all the waters; at the fourth, the poop rose up and the prow went down, as pleased Another, till the sea was closed above us. O voi, che avete gl’intelleti sani, mirate la dottrina che s’asconde sotto il velame degli versi strani.* * (O ye who have sane intellects for guide, consider well the doctrines that for cloak beneath the strangeness of the verses hide. Inferno IX, 61-63.) 60 SACRED WEB 2 Neither man’s destiny and certainly not his final Destination are confined within this world. Our intelligence and will, all our nobler faculties are cut to a finer cloth, shaped to a divine measure. But we have attempted to deny our better parts and erect an unprincipled civilization, or one erected on pseudo-principles; one having no reference either to our Origin, our Destination, or to our own more profound nature. Now we are reaping the consequences of our reckless hubris. As with Ulysses and his companions, the Sea is about to close over us and all we have sought to build. But there is a way of egress as there has always been, though it is neither to the right nor to the left, but upwards. Great hope remains at least for those who happily are in the process of finding right belief and right orientation—seldom an easy but never an impossible task. Indeed, this terminal phase of the human cycle has remarkable compensations, chiefly of the intellectual order, which in certain respects make the task before us easier than ever before. Never before has so much illumination of the Heaven-given traditions been so easily accessible, though to be sure much of it is set amidst a deluge of misinformation and rubbish. Nevertheless, to men of good will the Gospels advise: “Ask and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened to you.” There remains Eriugena’s fourth division of Nature: that Nature which is uncreated and which does not create, for it does not enter into relationship with anything created. It is absolutely all-inclusive; and all that is, all that exists, is entirely dependent upon It. This is the Principle and Ground of Godhead of which Eckhart said: the Godhead gave all things up to God... The gift of the Father is the positive existence of all creatures in the Person of His Son... [the Godhead] is as poor, as naked and as idle as though It were not; It has not, wills not, wants not, gets not... the Godhead is as void as though It were not. This is the Absolute, plenary Non-Being or Beyond Being, Reality so inconceivably exalted that Pure Being is limitation by comparison— though strictly speaking comparison is impossible. This is the Brahmanirguna of Hindu doctrine, Parinirvana of Buddhism, the Dhat of Sufism, the Ein-Sof of certain Kabbalist schools, and the unknowable and imparticipable Essence of Palamite theology. As said previously, SACRED WEB 2 61 this is the Prior of Pure Being, and from Being proceed all existence and all existences in an eternal and inexhaustible creative act. Man can enter into relationship with God but not with the Godhead, and though he can realize the Godhead there is an unfathomable abyss between the human person and the Divine Person. This marks another vital distinction between the exoteric perspective which, by and large, is that of the religions, and the esoteric perspective which envisions realization of identity with the Godhead as man’s ultimate Destination and as the fullness of salvation. It is true that very little can be said of the Godhead except that HE IS, and even this affirmation must be drastically qualified. We say the Godhead “is” Beyond-Being, or “is” plenary Non-Being; but we know all the while that “words fall back” in their inadequacy and that negative language, “not thus, not so,” “not this, not this,” brings us nearer the ineffable and unutterable Truth. The Godhead, nevertheless, is what all creatures, especially man and his analogous central-state beings, desire above all else. This is implicit in Christ’s words: “No man cometh to the Father but by Me”; and elsewhere in the Gospels where, for example, the Apostle Philip says to Jesus: “Lord, show us the Father and it sufficeth.” And the Upanishads tell us that It is not for the sake of the bride that the bride is dear; it is for the sake of the Self that the bride is dear. It is not for the sake of the son that the son is dear; it is for the sake of the Self that the son is dear. We close this brief survey with a return to Eriugena’s third division of Nature: our world, that of man or human nature as we presently know it. In earlier ages, it was commonly held that man is composed of body, soul and Spirit—corpus, anima, Spiritus (though for Spirit we can read both created and uncreated Intellect). From this it can be seen that in a manner man recapitulates in his own being all elements of creation/ manifestation, the “three worlds” of traditional doctrine; and not only the “three worlds,” but as well what lies beyond the “three worlds.” Man’s position in creation brings with it great privileges but also commensurate responsibilities. The human state is where we find ourselves and is thus the starting point for any degree of realization we may accomplish— with Heaven’s aid, to be sure. The human state “hard to obtain” and what we make of our brief sojourn here will determine our post-mortem 62 SACRED WEB 2 destiny, for life does not end with the dissolution of the body. In the opening epigraph Eckhart spoke of the Procession and Return and implicitly of the degrees of reality, the “great chain of being.” Man’s Procession is not as an individual; individuality commences with the subtle order. We must conceive of the centrifugal flight that defines creation/ manifestation as movement through degrees of diminishing reality with remotion from the Divine and passage towards nothingness. Contrariwise the Return implies increasing ontic increments and burgeoning enfranchisement into the actual, the real, as the being remounts “the great chain of being,” retracing the steps of manifestation. If “the Kingdom of God is for none but the thoroughly dead,” it is because one must die to one’s present degree of reality before being enfranchised into that immediately superior. This is true for each discrete degree as also for creation in its totality. It is in the nature of things that men should be saved, for image must return to its Archetype. The Return can be accomplished happily or in misery, depending on ones entanglements. If salvation seems a doubtful possibility, this may result from the qualitatively degraded nature of our times; but one should not forget that there is Mercy at the heart of things. But salvation in the sense of prolonged life in one of the posthumous extensions of the human state, or a sojourn of long duration in one of the Paradises is not to be confused with final liberation—which in no way implies that deferred liberation and the stations through which the soul may thus pass are not most desirable. Though the intelligent creature chooses salvation, he cannot “choose” liberation because of the absence of reciprocity between the Absolute and the contingent. “You have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you,” said Christ. If liberation is a possibility it is because, as Eckhart and Eriugena and numerous others affirm, there is in man something that is “uncreated and uncreatable.” This primeval and essential link to the Godhead is the secret of the nobility of humanity, of man’s vocation, and of his ultimate identity. When man proceeds forth, his better part (though of course the Divine is impartite) remains within and “at home”; this is his Divine Archetype, and “all that is in God is God.” If the individual does not “choose” liberation, there is nevertheless the apocatastasis, the ultimate reintegration of all creation and all elements of creation into their Divine Source. “When” will this occur? The question cannot be answered; it is essentially meaningless because, as said above, there is no reciprocity of relationship between the contingent and the Absolute. In any case, our final realization already is in the eternal Now where all possibilities are simultaneously present. Finally, and lest acquaintance with man’s high destiny lead to psychic inflation, let it be remembered that, in words of Muhyi-ud-Din Ibn ‘Arabi, “the servant remains the servant and the Lord remains the Lord.” Nihil habeo quod non accepi, we have nothing we have not received: first of all and obviously, from Heaven; then via Ananda Coomaraswamy, René Guénon, and Frithjof Schuon, especially the last named. We strongly recommend the written work of these “three wise men” of the twentieth century whose respective roles in these end times have been not only Providential and restorative but also eloquent testimony, not only that God is not dead, but rather that He is the Primal Reality. All that exists, exists by some measure of derivative reality received from the One. And all that exists, considered solely in and of itself, amounts to so many nullities. Or in the Vedantin idiom: “God is true, the world is a lie.”
- [Mysticism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/stoddart-mysticism) - Mysticism* by William Stoddart Except by those who reject it or are ignorant of it entirely, it is generally understood that mysticism claims to be concerned with “Ultimate Reality.” The relationship in question is mostly taken to be of an “experiential” kind, and the phrase “mystical experience” is often used—the assumed object of the experience being, precisely, “Ultimate Reality,” which is allegedly transcendent and hidden in regard to our ordinary senses. This mystical experience is held to be “incommunicable” and, particularly when doubt is cast on the alleged object of the experience, it is often said to be, in a pejorative sense, purely subjective. Nevertheless, it would generally be admitted that, as well as “mystical experience,” there is, also “mystical doctrine.” There is thus at least something that can be communicated (for this is what doctrine means), and at the same time something that is “objective,” for whatever can be transmitted must needs be objective, even should the object in question prove to be illusory. The subjective as such cannot be transmitted1, but its object can—at least in conceptual terms. To say: “I have experienced something * This is a revised version of an article which first appeared in The Unanimous Tradition, a limited edition edited by Ranjit Fernando and published by The Sri Lanka Institute of Traditional Studies, Colombo, in 1991. The Unanimous Tradition is a compendium containing contributions from several leading traditionalist authors, including Frithjof Schuon and Titus Burckhardt. 1. In modern subjectivism, what is expressed is only a subject that is already relative, namely the passional, sentimental and imaginative ego; in order to express itself, it necessarily makes use of objective elements which it chooses arbitrarily, while separating itself arrogantly and foolishly from objective reality. The “purely subjective,” in the modern world, can only announce its presence by gasps and howls, and this is the very definition of modern “avant-garde” poetry. indescribable and incommunicable” is already a description and a communication. As such it can be considered objectively by a third party and, depending on the adequacy of the description, the sensitivity of the hearer and the reality of the object, it can even stir within him a responsive chord. This means that in favorable circumstances it can, to a greater or lesser degree, stimulate in the hearer a similar intuition or “experience.” The assumed object of both “mystical experience” and “mystical doctrine” is Ultimate Reality. Mystical doctrine may call this the One, the Absolute, the Infinite, the Supreme Self, the Supreme Being, or some other name, and mystical experience is deemed to be union therewith, to whatever degree and in whatever mode. With this end in view, one also speaks of the “mystical way” or the “mystical path.” This is the process of “unification” with the One, the Supreme Self, or the Supreme Being—all of these being names given to Ultimate Reality. From all of this, it clearly emerges that mysticism or mystical experience has two poles, namely mystical doctrine and the mystical way or path. Thus in mysticism, as in other spheres, it is a question of doctrine and method, or theory and practice. These twin elements of mysticism will be examined in detail in the course of this essay. The validity and justifiability of mysticism, let it be said right away, depend on the validity and justifiability of its object. If this be a reality, the experience is valid and, in the manner described, capable of being communicated to, and evoked in, a third party. *** As is often done, I have spoken of mysticism in a manner that might give the impression that mysticism is an independent entity capable of existing in a vacuum. Such an impression would be false, however, since in practice mysticism only makes its appearance within the framework of one or other of the revealed religions. Indeed it would be true to say that mysticism constitutes the inward or spiritual dimension of every religion. Mysticism is esoterism, while the outward religious framework is the respective exoterism. The exoterism is for all, but the corresponding esoterism is only for those who feel a call thereto. Esoterism, unlike exoterism, cannot be imposed. It is strictly a matter of vocation. It has been said that “all paths lead to the same summit.” In this sym- 66 SACRED WEB 2 bol, the variety of religions is represented by the multiplicity of starting-points around the circumferential base of a cone or mountain. The radial, upward, pathways are the mystical paths. The oneness of mysticism is a reality only at the point that is the summit. The pathways are many, but their goal is one. As they approach this goal, the various pathways more and more resemble one another, but only at the Summit do they coincide. Until then, in spite of resemblances and analogies, they remain separate, and indeed each path is imbued with a distinctive perfume or color—Islamic mysticism is clearly not Christian mysticism— but at the Summit these various colors are (still speaking symbolically) reintegrated into the uncolored Light. Islamic mysticism and Christian mysticism are one only in God. It is this point of “uncolored Light,” where the different religions come together, that is the basis of the philosophia perennis or religio perennis. This is the supra-formal, divine truth which is the source of each religion, and which each religion incorporates. The heart of each exoterism is its corresponding esoterism, and the heart of each esoterism is the religio perennis—or esoterism in the pure state. In all the religions, the goal of mysticism is God, who may also be given such names as the One, the Absolute, the Infinite, the Supreme Self, the Supreme Being2. In sapiential or “theosophic” mysticism, the goal is said to be the Truth, conceived as a living Reality capable of being experienced. Mysticism thus has three components: the doctrine concerning God or Ultimate Reality (“mystical doctrine”), “oneness” with God or Ultimate Reality (“mystical experience”), and the movement that leads from the former to the latter (“the mystical path”). In other words: the doctrine of Unity, the experience of Union, and the path of Unification. Mystical doctrine is one and the same as metaphysics or mystical theology. Mystical experience, when present in a total or at least sufficient degree, is salvation or liberation. And the purpose of the mystical path is “spiritual realization,” i.e., the progression from outward to inward, from belief to vision, or (in scholastic terms) from Potency to Act. 2. This also includes the “non-theistic” religion of Buddhism, since here too Ultimate Reality, variously referred to in different contexts as Dharma (“Law”), Âtmâ (“Self”), Nirvâna (“Extinction”) or Bodhi (“Knowledge”), is seen as transcendent and absolute. SACRED WEB 2 67 *** Many people are familiar with the three fundamental modes of spiritual realization proclaimed by Hinduism: karma-marga (the “Way of Action”), bhakti-marga (the “Way of Love”), and jñâna-marga (the “Way of Knowledge”). These correspond to the three degrees or dimensions of Sufism: makhâfa (“Fear”), mahabba (“Love”), and ma’rifa (“Knowledge” or “Gnosis”)3. Strictly speaking, it is only bhakti and jñâna (i.e. mahabba and ma’rifa) that constitute mysticism: mysticism is either a way of Love, a way of Knowledge, or a combination of both. One will recall the occasion in the life of Christ when he was received in the house of the sisters Martha and Mary. What has come to be known in Christianity as the “Way of Martha” is paralleled by the Hindu karma-marga, the way of religious observance and good works. The contemplative or mystical way, on the other hand, is the “Way of Mary,” which comprises two modes, namely, bhakti-marga (the “Way of Love”) and jñâna-marga (the “Way of Knowledge”). Karma as such is purely exoteric, but it is important to stress that there is always a karmic component within both bhakti and jñâna. The Way of Love and the Way of Knowledge both necessarily contain an element of Fear or conformity. Likewise, the Way of Knowledge invariably contains within it the reality of Love. As for the Way of Love, which is composed of faith and devotion, it contains an indirect element of jñâna in the form of dogmatic and speculative theology. This element lies in the intellectual speculation as such, not in its object, the latter being limited by definition4, failing which it would not be a question of bhakti, but of jñâna. In spite of the presence in each Way of elements of the two others, the three Ways karma, bhakti and jñâna (or makhâfa, mahabba and ma’rifa) represent three specific and easily distinguishable modes of religious aspiration. 3. 4. 68 As for the question as to which of these paths a given devotee adheres to, This word is used purely etymologically, and does not hark back to the current, in the early history of Christianity, known as “gnosticism.” “Gnosis,” from the Greek, is the only adequate English rendering for the Sanskrit jñâna (with which in fact it is cognate) and the Arabic ma’rifa. In the “Way of Love” (bhakti or mahabba), God is envisaged at the level of “Being” (which has as consequence that the Lord and the worshiper always remain distinct). In the Way of Knowledge (jñâna or ma’rifa), on the other hand, God is envisaged at the level of “Beyond-Being” or “Essence.” SACRED WEB 2 it is overwhelmingly a matter of temperament and vocation. It is a case where the Way chooses the individual and not the individual the Way. Historically speaking, Christian mysticism has been characterized in the main by the “Way of Love,” whereas Hindu mysticism and Islamic mysticism comprise both the “Way of Love” and the “Way of Knowledge.” The language of the “Way of Love” has a remarkably similar ring in whichever mysticism it crops up, but the more jñanic formulations of Hinduism and the more “gnostic” formulations of Sufism tend to strike a foreign note in the ears of those who are familiar only with Christian, or at any rate bhaktic, forms of spirituality.5 *** The goal of religion, in all its varieties, is salvation. What, then, is the difference between exoterism and esoterism? Exoterism is formalistic, but faith and devotion can give it depth. Esoterism is “deep”— supra-formal—by definition, and is the apanage only of those with the relevant vocation. Here, forms are transcended, in that they are seen as symbolic expressions of the essence. In esoterism too, faith is essential, but here it has the meaning of sincerity and total commitment—effort towards “realization.” Metaphysically, the difference between exoterism and esoterism (between formalism and sapiential mysticism) lies in how the final Goal is envisaged: in exoterism (and in bhaktic esoterism), God is envisaged at the level of “Being” (the Creator and the Judge): no matter how deep, how sublime, the exoterist’s fervor, Lord and worshiper always remain distinct. In jñânic esoterism, on the other hand, God is envisaged at the level of “Beyond-Being” (the Divine Essence). At this level, it is perceived that Lord and worshiper (the latter known to be created in the image of the former) share a common essence, and this opens up the possibility of ultimate Divine Union. *** Reference was made earlier to “subjective” and “objective,” and it may be useful to indicate precisely whence these two concepts derive. The 5. Those who, by way of exception, have manifested the “Way of Knowledge” in Christianity include such great figures as Dionysius the Areopagite, Meister Eckhart, Albertus Magnus and Angelus Silesius. It is precisely the works of jñânins such as these that have tended to cause ripples in the generally bhaktic climate of Christianity. SACRED WEB 2 69 most direct key in this regard is the Hindu appellation for the Divinity: Sat-Chit-Ânanda. This expression is usually translated as “Being-Consciousness-Bliss.” This is accurate, and enables one to see that “Being” is the Divine Object (God Transcendent or Ultimate Reality), “Consciousness” is the Divine Subject (God Immanent or the Supreme Self), while “Bliss”—the harmonious coming-together of the two— is Divine Union. The most fundamental translation therefore of Sat-Chit-Ânanda is “Object-Subject-Union.” This is the model, or origin, of all possible objects and subjects, and of the longing of the latter for the former6. This trinitarian aspect of the Divinity is universal, and is found in all religions. In Christianity it is the central dogma: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. The analogy between the Christian Trinity and “Being-Consciousness-Bliss” can be seen from certain doctrinal expositions of the Greek Fathers and also from St. Augustine’s designation of the Christian Trinity as “Being-Wisdom-Life.” In Islam, although it is above all the religion of strict monotheism, certain Sufi formulations evoke the selfsame trinitarian aspect of the Divinity. Reference will be made later to the question of spiritual realization, but in Sufism this is essentially mediated by the invocation (dhikr) of the Name of God. In this connection it is said that God is not only That which is invoked (Madhkûr), but also That within us which invokes (Dhâkir), and even the invocation itself, since, in the last analysis, this is none other than the internal Act (Dhikr) of God7. We thus have the ternary Madhkûr-Dhâkir-Dhikr (“Invoked-Invoker-Invocation”), which is yet another form of the basic ternary “Object-Subject-Union.” This cardinal relationship is the very essence of the theory and practice of mysticism, for this “Union” in divinis is the prefiguration of and pattern for the union of man with God8. Hindu, Christian and Sufi doctrine coincide in elucidating just why this is so. 6. Sat-Chit-Ânanda may also be interpreted as “Known-Knower-Knowledge” or “Beloved-Lover-Love.” 7. That this Divine Act should pass through man is the mystery of salvation. 8. It will easily be seen that it is also the prefiguration of every other union under the 70 SACRED WEB 2 sun, for example, conjugal union. *** One of the most significant characteristics of mystical doctrine stemming from several of the great religions—and made explicit, for example, in the treatises of jñânic or gnostic mystics such as Shankara, Eckhart and Ibn ‘Arabî—is the distinction made, within God Himself, between God and the Godhead, between “Being” and “Essence,” or between “Being” and “Beyond-Being”9. In ordinary theological doctrine, the fundamental distinction is between God and man, or between the Uncreated and the created. Mystical or esoteric doctrine, on the other hand, makes a distinction within each of these two terms. Thus, within the Uncreated (viewed as “Essence” or “Beyond-Being”), there is already a prefiguration of creation, and this is God as “Being.” “Beyond-Being” is the principle of “Being,” and God as Being (the immediate Creator of the world) is the principle of existence or creation. Within creation—itself relative—there is also a distinction to be made, for within creation there is a reflection of the Uncreated (the Absolute) in the form of Truth and Virtue, Symbol and Sacrament, Prophet or Redeemer. Once again mystical doctrine renders explicit the reality of mystical union, for it is by uniting himself with the “created” Symbol or Sacrament (for example, in truth, in beauty, in virtue, in the Eucharist, or in the Invocation of a Divine Name), that the mystic realizes his union with (or reintegration into) the uncreated Divinity. Only through the sacramental perfecting of the created, can one reach the Uncreated. This is what is meant in Christianity by “the imitation of Christ,” or in Islam by the observance of the Sunna. This exposition is taken from the writings of Frithjof Schuon10, who has explained how “Being” (the prefiguration of the relative in the Absolute) is the uncreated Logos, whereas the reflection of the Absolute in the relative (namely: truth, beauty, virtue, Prophet, Savior) is the created Logos. Without this “bridge” (the Logos with its created and uncreated aspects), no contact whatsoever between created and Uncreated, between man and God, would be possible11: the gulf between the two 9. The same distinction is also made by St. Gregory Palamas in his doctrine of the Divine Essence and the Divine Energies. 10. See especially Esoterism as Principle and as Way (Perennial Books, London, 1980). 11. The error of deism is precisely that it has no concept of the role of the Logos and envisages no such bridge. SACRED WEB 2 71 would be unbridgeable. This would be “dualism,” not “Non-Dualism” (or Advaita, to use the term from Shankaran metaphysics), and the very opposite of mysticism. The doctrine of the Logos, and its cardinal relevance to the mystical path, can be summarized in diagrammatic form as follows: God (the Uncreated) man (the created) “Beyond-Being” (Divine Essence, Supra-Personal God) “Being” (Personal God, Creator, Judge) UNCREATED LOGOS man as Prophet or Avatara, man in so far as he personifies truth and virtue, “Universal Man” CREATED LOGOS fallen, individual man “bridge” Within each religion, the Founder is the personification of the Logos, and his role as such is always made explicit. Christ said: “No man cometh to the Father but by me.” The Prophet Mohammed said: “He that hath seen me, hath seen God.” The Buddha said: “He who sees the Dharma sees me, and he who sees me sees the Dharma.” Mystical union is realized only through the Logos. This brings us directly to the three classical “stages” (maqâmât in Arabic) recognized by all mysticisms: I. Purification (or purgation), II. Perfection (or Illumination), and III. Union. The second stage, “Perfection,” corresponds precisely to the aspirant’s assimilation to the created Logos. In Christianity, this takes the form of the “imitation of Christ” and in Islam, the observance—inward and symbolically total—of the “Wont of the Prophet” (Sunna). Prayers such 72 SACRED WEB 2 as the “Hail Mary” (Ave Maria) in Catholicism and the “Blessing on the Prophet” (salât ‘alâ ‘n-Nabî) in Islam, which contain the names of the created Logos (Jesus and Muhammad respectively), are instrumental to the end in view. *** As we have seen, mysticism includes both mystical doctrine and mystical experience. Mystical experience is the inward and unitive “realization” of the doctrine. This is the domain of spiritual method. In Hinduism spiritual method is represented by yoga—not the physical exercises derived from hatha-yoga now widely experimented with in the West, but raja-yoga, the “royal art” of contemplation and union. If, in Hinduism, the veda (knowledge) is the scientia sacra, then yoga (union) is the corresponding ars sacra or operatio sacra. Here the saying of the Medieval French architect Jean Mignot applies with fullest force: ars sine scientiâ nihil. One cannot meaningfully or effectively practice anything, if one does not know what one is doing. Above all, one cannot practice a spiritual method except on the basis of previously comprehended spiritual doctrine which is both the motivation and the paradigm for the spiritual work to be undertaken. If doctrine without method is hypocrisy or sterility, then method without doctrine means going astray, and sometimes dangerously. This makes clear why doctrine must be “orthodox”—that is, in essential conformity with the subtle contours of truth. Here it must be noted that pseudo-doctrine, born of nothing more than human invention, is one of the most powerful causes of going astray. These points have to be stressed, because in the present age many of those attracted by mysticism are eager at all costs for “experience”— without caring to ask themselves: experience of what—and without the safeguards either of conforming to the discipline of a religious tradition or of receiving permission and guidance from a spiritual authority. It is precisely this illegitimate wresting of method from doctrine that is harmful. The more real and effective the spiritual method appropriated, the more dangerous it can be for the appropriator. There are many recorded cases of psychological and spiritual damage resulting from the unauthorized use (i.e., the profanation) of religious rites and sacraments. In the past, it was the opposite fault that was most likely: to know the truth, but—through weakness, passion, or pride—to fail to put it into practice; in other words, it was a question of hypocrisy, and not the SACRED WEB 2 73 heresy—most commonly in the shape of a “false sincerity”—characteristic of modern times. How typical of the age we live in that, here as elsewhere, it stands on its head! The new shortcoming is infinitely worse than the earlier one. It is forgotten that every “quest” inevitably has an object and, whether one cares to recall it or not, the object of a mystical or spiritual quest is Ultimate Reality or God. With such an object one cannot trifle with impunity. Yoga is the way or method of union with God, through a dedicated concentration on Him. A particularly direct form of this is (in Hindu terms) japa-yoga, which involves the enduring invocation of a mantra (a Divine Name or a formula containing a Divine Name). Mutatis mutandis, this spiritual method plays a central role in all mysticisms. In Mahayâna Buddhism, for example, it occurs in the form of the Tibetan Mani and the Japanese Nembutsu. In Islam, nothing is more enjoined on the spiritual aspirant than dhikr Allâh, the “remembrance of God” through the invocation of His Name. In Hesychasm (the mysticism of Eastern Christianity), invocation of the Divine Name takes the form of the “Prayer of Jesus,” a practice vividly described in The Way of a Russian Pilgrim12. The analogous method in Western Christianity is the cult of the Holy Name. This flourished in the Middle Ages, and was also preached with poignancy and single-mindedness in the fifteenth century by St. Bernardino of Siena: “Everything that God has created for the salvation of the world is hidden in the Name of Jesus.” The practice was revived, in the form of the invocation Jesu-Maria, in the revelations made to Sister Consolata, an Italian Capuchin nun, in the earlier part of this century.13 This method of concentrating on a revealed Divine Name indicates clearly that mysticism is the very opposite of giving free rein to man’s unregenerate subjectivity. In fact, it is the exposing of his unregenerate subjectivity to the normative and transforming influence of the revealed Object, the Sacrament or Symbol of the religion in question. It was in 12. The Way of a Pilgrim, S.P.C.K., London, 1954. 13. Jesus appeals to the world, Alba House (Society of St. Paul), Staten Island NY 10314, 1971. 14. This synthesis of the dual aspect of realization or method is taken from the writings 74 of Frithjof Schuon. See especially Eye of the Heart (World Wisdom Books, Bloomington, Indiana, 1997), chapter “Microcosm and Symbol.” SACRED WEB 2 this respect that St. Paul could say: “Not I, but Christ in me.” At the same time, and even more esoterically, it is the exposing of our paltry egoism, seen in turn as an “object,” to the withering and yet quickening influence of the divine Subject, the immanent Self.14 This possibility is envisaged in Islam in the hadîth qudsî (a “Divine saying” from the mouth of the Prophet): “I (God) am the hearing whereby he (the slave) heareth.”15 The vehicle of both processes is the Invocation of a Divine Name (which is both Subject and Object), within a strictly traditional and orthodox framework, and with the authorization of an authentic spiritual master. In this domain, there is no room for curiosity and experiment. *** In the mysticisms of several religions, the soul’s quest for God is symbolized in terms of the mutual longing of the lover and the beloved. St. John of the Cross, for example, makes use of this symbolism in his mystical poetry, from which the following verses are quoted: Oh noche que guiaste Oh noche amable más que el alborada: Oh noche que juntaste Amado con amada Amada en el Amado transformada! O night that led’st me thus! O night more winsome than the rising sun! O night that madest us, Lover and lov’d as one, Lover transformed in lov’d, love’s journey done!16 Descubre tu presencia, Y máteme tu vista y hermosura; Mira que la dolencia 15. AsimilarthoughtisechoedinthewordsofSt.TheresaofÁvila:“Christhasnobody now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours; yours are the eyes through which is to look out Christ’s compassion on the world; yours are the feet on which he is to go about doing good, and yours are the hands with which he is to bless us now.” 16. Translated by Professor E. Allison Peers SACRED WEB 2 75 De amor que no se cura Sino con la presencia y la figura. Reveal your presence clearly And kill me with the beauty you discover, For pains acquired so dearly From love, cannot recover Save only through the presence of the lover.17 As a child of the 16th century, St. John of the Cross sought to convey his “subjective” experiences rather than objective doctrine, as the mystics of a few centuries earlier had done. And yet he never wavered from the Divine Object of all mystical striving. At the practical level, in an instruction for aspirants, he said, for example: “All goodness is a loan from God.” The soul’s subjectivity is uncertain; only the objective reality, that comes from beyond it, is absolutely certain. *** Mysticism was earlier defined as the inward or spiritual dimension contained within every religion—each religion being understood as a separate and specific Divine Revelation. Religion comprises a “periphery” and a “center,” in other words, an exoterism and an esoterism. The exoterism is the providential expression or vehicle of the esoterism within it, and the esoterism is the supra-formal essence of the corresponding exoterism. This is why mysticism or esoterism—erroneously regarded by some as “unorthodox”—can in no way subvert the religious formalism of which it is the sap. On the other hand, “essence” so far transcends “form,” that inevitably it sometimes “breaks” it. Conflicts have at times occurred between the purest mysticism and the respective exoteric authority; the cases of Meister Eckhart in medieval Christendom and Al-Hallâj in Islam—the one leading to condemnation and the other to martyrdom—provide striking examples. Nevertheless Eckhart enunciated this shattering of forms in a positive way when he said: “If thou wouldst reach the kernel, thou must break the shell.” It is hardly necessary to add that such a “transcending” 17. Translated by Roy Campbell of forms is at the very antipodes of heresy, which is a crude violation of the forms of a religion at their own level. Forms can be transcended only “from above” (or “from within”). To violate—or even simply to neglect—forms “from below” (or “from without”) is the very opposite of transcending them. Outwardly man must observe traditional forms as perfectly as possible. This is required for the aspirant’s assimilation to the created Logos, as has been explained above. Man can only offer to God—and so transcend—what he has perfected. Mysticism is the reality of man’s love for God and man’s union with God. It is a hymn to Subjectivity, a hymn to Objectivity, a hymn to Joy or Union—these three Divine Hypostases being one. It has been stressed how, contrary to certain appearances and contrary to a commonly heard opinion, mysticism is always a flowering within an orthodox framework. But, since mysticism transcends forms “from above” (or “from within”), mysticism knows no bounds. Its essence is one with the Absolute and the Infinite. Let us therefore give the last word to Jalâl ad-Dîn Rûmî, one of the greatest mystics of Islam and one of the greatest mystical poets of all time: “I am neither Christian nor Jew nor Parsi nor Moslem. I am neither of the East nor of the West, neither of the land nor of the sea... I have put aside duality and have seen that the two worlds are one. I seek the One, I know the One, I see the One, I invoke the One. He is the First, He is the Last, He is the Outward, He is the Inward.”
- [Putting on the Form of the Gods: Sacramental Theurgy in Neoplatonism](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/putting-on-the-form-of-the-gods) - Putting on the Form of the Gods: Sacramental Theurgy in Neoplatonism by Algis Uzdavinys “All of theurgy has two aspects,” says Iamblichus in his famous treatise De mysteriis Aegyptiorum, Chaldaeorum, Assyriorum1. One is that it is a rite conducted by men, which preserves our natural order in the universe; the other is that it is empowered by divine symbols 2 and is raised up on high through them and joined to the gods and proceeds harmoniously toward the fulfilment of their purposes. This latter aspect can rightly be called “putting on the form of the gods” 3. When Iamblichus speaks about “the form of the gods,” one ought to remember that the gods, both as the principles of manifested reality and administrators of theurgic reintegration, can be equated with arithmoi—a sort of aggregation of Pythagorean metaphysical numbers that stand as the graceful transcendent masters and models for the entire manifestation of the lower beings. As Proclus asserts, the gods are nothing but the primordial and self-sufficient principles of beings4, so that theology is a science of these principles5, or rather the exegesis of intellectual substance6. The aim of our article is not to discuss the metaphysical principles 1. The title given by Marsilio Ficino. The actual Greek title of this work probably is Abamo ?nos didaskalou pros ten Porphuriou pros Anebo epistolen apokrisis kai ton en aute ?n apore ?mato ?n luseis: “résponse d’Abamon, son professeur, a la lettre adressée par Porphyre à Anébon et solutions des questions qu’elle soulève.” See H.D.Saffrey Abamon, pseudonyme de Jamblique.Philomathes. Studies and Essays in the Humanities in memory of Philip Merlan, The Hague, 1971, pp.227-239 2. (tois theisis sunthemasi) 3. (to to ?n theo ?n sche ?ma peritithesthai: De myst.184.1-8) 4. (tas protistas archas ton onton kai autarkestatas theous apokalousi) 5. (kai theologian te ?n touton episte ?men: In Plat.Theol.I.3.13.6-8) 6. (te ?s noeras ousias exe ?ge ?sin: ibid., I.3.13.4-5) SACRED WEB 5 107 themselves (be they called simply archai or designated as divine Names and Attributes), but to investigate what theurgy means in a strictly Neoplatonic sense and as viewed in certain broader contexts, including contemporary ones. Frithjof Schuon, for instance, tries to introduce the term “theurgy” in the universally understood religious sense as a vehicle of barakah and irradiation of the sacred. We are told that it is natural for man... to make use of sensory supports towards the progress of his spirit or the equilibrium of his soul. These supports are either artistic, and so symbolistic and aesthetic, or theurgic; in the latter case their function is to act as the vehicle of benefic, protective, and sanctifying forces; the two types can moreover be combined.7 The author here tacitly follows the tradition of Iamblichus and seems to accept the remark of Jean Trouillard who defines theurgy as “un symbolisme opératoire destiné à éveiller la presence divine” and adds: “la théurgie n’est pas la magie.”8 Schuon makes the same distinction when he explains: we say theurgy, and not magic, given that the forces that act in this case have their raison d’etre and their essential source in Divine Grace and not in human art.9 Neoplatonic theurgy employed ritual in order to reveal the vestiges of a divine presence and subordinate man to the divine will—precisely the opposite of sorcery (goe ?teia), as most leading contemporary scholars observe. Therefore if, for Iamblichus, philosophy as a human art meant the demonstration of truths through intellectual discourse, theurgy, however, neither demonstrated nor proved but rather lifted the soul directly into the divine and was initiated through the power of the gods themselves. As a consequence, one cannot avoid suspecting that theurgic kle ?sis, invocation, is in some respect analogous to dhikr in Islamic mysticism. In the most general (or even metaphorical) sense, theurgy is proximate to sacred art and both macrocosmic and microcosmic liturgy. Thus, despite the differences in meaning by various thinkers on such concepts as ‘substance’ and ‘essence’, one should agree with Schuon’s assertion as follows: 7. 8. 9. Every sacred symbol is an “enlightening form” that invites to a “liberating rite”; Frithjof Schuon The Function of Relics in Esoterism as Principle and as Way, trans.W.Stoddart, Perennial Books, 1990, p.205 Jean Trouillard L’Un et l’âme selon Proclos, Les Belles Lettres, Paris, 1972, pp.171-189 Frithjof Schuon The Function of Relics, p. 205 108 SACRED WEB 5 the “form” reveals the Essence to us, whereas the “rite” leads back to the Substance; to the Substance we are, the only one that is. All this concerns on the one hand sacred art, “liturgy”, and on the other hand the beauties of nature.10 No wonder that J.Trouillard equates theurgy with Christian sacramentalism, emphasizing their common principles, including similar notions of Divine grace, since, according to Iamblichus, “the tokens (sunthemata) themselves, by themselves, effect their own work”11. The general idea of theurgy requires perceiving the world as “a fabric of theophanies”12 and imagining, in one sense or another, the multi-dimensional dialectical game between the One (to hen) and many, along with a providential kind of love (ero ?s pronoe ?tikos) by which the higher causes contain and care for their effects. Laurence J. Rosán goes so far as to equate the theurgic operation with a kind of “aesthetic technique” by which the mystical experience is initiated. By meditating on sacred symbols and uttering mysterious divine names, the Neoplatonic sages (such as Proclus, for instance) used to concentrate on the unity of some thing or idea, and after the sense of unity was grasped, tried to transfer this intuition of oneness to one’s own self and its relationship with the One Reality. But Rosán too hastily concludes (as if following the Aristotelian procedure of extracting the ‘higher’ from the ‘lower’) that: All that the term “theurgy” or “theosophy” should denote, strictly speaking, is this aesthetic technique of obtaining a feeling of unity from sensory perceptions of material or meditation on evocative ideas.13 He further speculates that “whatever the actual content of Proclus’ mystical experience as such, it must have been pervaded by the memory of having made these aesthetic and religiously theurgic efforts,” including visual aesthetic contemplations of nature, similar to the Taoist or Zen aesthetics, and also what might be called “mantric” meditations on divine names and “mandalic” concentrations on symbols.14 But Rosan 10. Frithjof Schuon The Liberating Passage in The Play of Masks, World Wisdom Books, Bloomington, 1992, p.88 11. (De myst.II.11) 12. FrithjofSchuonRootsoftheHumanCondition,WorldWisdomBooks,Bloomington, 1991, p.56 13. Laurence J.Rosán Proclus and the Tejobindu Upanisad.Neoplatonism and Indian Thought, ed. by R.Baine Harris, Norfolk, Virginia, 1982, p.48 14. Laurence J.Rosán, ibid., p.48 SACRED WEB 5 109 appears not to appreciate that theurgy cannot be reduced to a sort of “aesthetic exercise,” since, according to Neoplatonists themselves, in theurgy the soul exchanges her life in the world of generation for another which is divine and immortal, not simply in a metaphorical sense. Theurgy itself was ineffable, like the gods who worked through it: it was not a human response to the call of the divine but was the divine call itself, manifest in the hieratic rites. The sacred (hiera), perfect (teleia), and godlike objects only provided a “complete and pure receptacle” for the god15. When Dionysius the Areopagite, who in many respects faithfully follows his Neoplatonic masters, describes the Christian sacraments as theurgic mysteries16, he without hesitation introduces Christ as the principle (arche ?) and essence (ousia) “of every theurgy”17. Despite various shades of the term theourgia, originally it appeared in the Middle Platonic milieu, and later on was adopted by certain Neoplatonists and used as a synonym for “hieratic art” (hieratike ? techne ?) understood as a sacramental means for the ascent of the soul. The sacramental world-view, far from standing in opposition to the intellectual rigor of Neoplatonic dialectic or contemplation, should be regarded as the matrix of their intellectual tradition. Though, according to Iamblichus, “intellectual understanding does not connect theurgists with divine beings” (oude gar he ? ennoia sunaptei tois theois theourgois: De myst.96.13), theurgy cannot be reduced either to “a manifesto of irrationalism”18 nor a one-sided mysticism which denies corporeality altogether. The term theourgia most probably was coined by a certain Julianus who lived under Marcus Aurelius, the son of the elder Julianus, a “Chaldean philosopher,” according to Suidas. The adjective “Chaldean” here means simply “a master of occult sciences.” The theological or Platonic oracles (ta logia), the scattered fragments of which were collected by Western scholars under the title of “Chaldean Oracles”and even described as “die Bibel der Neuplatoniker,” are theoparadota, i.e. received from the gods. They were edited in hexameter verses by the younger Julianus, who himself, as the Byzantine writer Psellus asserts, has been 15. (De myst.V.23.) 16. (ta theourga musteria: Epist.9.1.) 17. (Eccl.Hier.1.1.) 18. E.R.Dodds Appendix II: Theurgy in The Greeks and the Irrational, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1984, p.287: ‘The De mysteriis is a manifesto of irrationalism, an assertion that the road to salvation is found not in reason but in ritual.” 110 SACRED WEB 5 in touch (sustasis) with the soul of Plato through archangelic intermediary. According to the scornful and sarcastic remark of a renowned modern scholar regarding these verses, their diction is so bizarre and bombastic, their thought so obscure and incoherent, as to suggest rather the trance utterances of modern “spirit guides” than the deliberate efforts of a forger.19 Though the origin of the strictly Neoplatonic theurgy cannot be connected exclusively with these philosophical oracles in which some genuine elements of both Iranian and Mesopotamian traditions can be detected under the surface of their Platonic terminology, it seems clear that the nouns theourgia and theourgos were coined after the pattern of theologia and theologos: as the theologians talked about the gods (they are hoi theia legontes), so the theurgists not only traced the descent of the divine into matter but, through the unutterable symbols, which are god-sent and comprehended only by the gods, ensured the soul’s purification and return to the divine realm. The souls of the genuine theurgists are said to derive from the angelic world. Since theurgy presupposes the active participation of the gods themselves, it can be characterized as “divine action” understood, first of all, as the action of the Divine on behalf of men. Theurgy as a sacramental praxis is aimed at the purification and salvation of the soul (tes psuche ?s so ?te ?rion: De myst.I.12). The soul is conducted upward by the gods through the countless intermediaries: angels, daimons and specifically Chaldean spiritual entities such as the Iynges, Connectors (sunocheis) and Teletarchs. These various entities for the most part function as diverse aspects of the noetic cosmos or the world of Ideas. The Iynges, for instance, understood in the Middle-Platonic fashion as the Thoughts or Ideas of the Father, are actually magical or sacramental names (voces mysticae) sent forth by God to communicate with the theurgists. The mystic rays of the divine Sun flow down toward earth and mingle with the rays of the rising soul of the theurgist. Though our present knowledge about secret theurgic rites and initiations is at best incomplete and sometimes close to nothing, it seems that theurgy ritually imitated the laws of cosmogony and was based, at least in some respect, on the archaic notions of sumpatheia and philia. The universal 19. E.R. Dodds, ibid., p.284 SACRED WEB 5 111 sympathy assumes a direct correspondence between a given deity and its symbolic representations in the animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdom. Theurgy accepts the idea of the divine help (boe ?theia) and conjunction or contact (sustasis) with the gods who are initially without form (atupo ?ta) but who take on various shapes in order to become visible to human sight: descending into pure receptacles or manifesting themselves as luminous apparitions. The technical terms for these self-manifestations such as autopton agalma and autopton phasmasin are mentioned in the extent fragments of the Chaldean Oracles (fr.101 and 142). Hierocles observes that initiation into theurgical mysteries worked on the same principle as purification in mathematical analysis (In Carmen aureum 26.116.21 ff). Therefore Shaw argues that the “reference to the ????????? which exists throughout the cosmos does not explain theurgy, because the power of theurgy is rooted in the gods, who utterly transcended the sympathies of which they are the ?????.”20 However, the transcendence of the gods or henads does not prevent the analogies to be discovered everywhere in accordance with the famous dictum (repeated often by Numenius and Proclus): panta en pasin: “all things are in all things.” By the means of metaphysical exegesis even the language of agriculture may be blended with the language of mysteries. Proclus attests that his master Syrianus conceived the rites of the sacrifice offered up by the Homeric Achilles at the funeral pile of Patroclus (Illiad.XXIII.192f) as an imitation of the soul’s immortalization, performed by the theurgists21. According to this explanation, Achilles’ invocation to the winds proceeds from his intention that the subtle vehicle (ochema) of Patroclus’ soul should be cleansed and restituted to its native order, being drawn upwards. Thus Syrianus regards Achilles as the prototype of the theurgical officiant and Patroclus as that of the aspirant who is to be initiated into the mysteries and his soul separated by certain “sacred methods” (heirais methodois). Patroclus laid out upon the pyre resembles the initiate who has undergone a symbolic death and burial, while Achilles represents the priest or master of the initiation. As Shaw meticulously pointed out: 20. Gregory Shaw Theurgy: Rituals of Unification in the Neoplatonism of Iamblichus.Traditio, vol.XLI, Fordham University Press, New York, 1985, p.25 21. (tou Achilleo ?s pragmateia mimeitai ton para tois theourgois te ?s psuche ?s apathanatismon: In Remp.I.152.7) 112 SACRED WEB 5 Theurgic rites transformed the soul from being its own idol, in an inverted attitude of self interest, into an icon of the divine, with its very corporeality, changed into a vehicle of transcendence.22 Being a sort of junction in the cosmogonic process of creative irradiation as well as a sort of veil in a sanctuary-or-agalma-like cosmos (agalma means not simply “image,” but “animated hieratic statue”), the soul embraces the entire spectrum of demiurgical seeds or universal reasons (logoi), as it extends them into manifestation. The soul participates in perfecting the divine descent by assisting to transform the manifest chaos into cosmos, and thus aids the gods in the creation and salvation of the world. Therefore “the soul’s ascent and salvation is necessarily the salvation of the world.”23 The Platonic paideia understood as a process of recollection by means of contemplation (moving from the sensible objects to the intelligible Forms) is rendered into the set of sacramental rites and cosmic liturgy that embraces all degrees of the manifested reality and becomes a sort of hieratic education which culminates in a mystical vision and theurgic union. The sense of divine beauty and unity is crucial in both cases. The real or imagined anagogical ascent is conducted by the singing of sacred hymns, the uttering of perfect (teleia) and true (ale ?thine) prayers, and supported by material, intermediary and noetic symbols (sunthe ?mata). We are told in the Chaldean Oracles that: the Paternal Intellect has sown symbols throughout the cosmos (sumbola gar patrikos noos espeiren kata kosmon), [the Intellect] which thinks the intelligibles. And [these intelligibles] are called inexpressible beauties.24 In the Middle Platonic and Chaldean context these symbols are equated both with the thoughts of the Paternal Intellect and the potencies of Eros holding together the parts of the universe. They presuppose the fundamental triad of faith (pistis), truth (ale ?theia) and love (ero ?s). Faith gives contact with divine goodness, truth supports wisdom (sophia) and love reveals divine beauty. Therefore Proclus asserts: Everything is saved by these means and joined to the original causes, some things through erotic madness. others through divine philosophy, others again through theurgic power (dia te ?s theourgike ?s dunameo ?s), which is greater than all human 22. Gregory Shaw, ibid., p.21 23. Gregory Shaw, ibid., p.14 24. (fr.108, Proclus In Crat.20.31-21.2) SACRED WEB 5 113 temperance and knowledge (sophrosunes kai episte ?me ?s), gathering together the benefits of prophecy and the purifying forces of effective ritual and absolutely all the activities of divine inspiration.25 The elevating (anago ?gon) force of interior five-fold prayer awakens the hidden divine tokens (sunthe ?mata) of the gods in the depth of the soul and leads to the union (henosis) with them. The gods themselves are understood as henads or the first principles of being, life and intelligence. The term anago ?ge ? itself goes back to Plato, who used variants of the verb anagein to describe both the ascent of certain heroes from Hades to Olympus (Rep.VII.521c) as well as the leading up of the soul through dialectical reasoning (Rep.VII.533d). For Plotinus anago ?ge ? means a contemplative process which assures the increasing degrees of intellectual purification. For ‘all the theurgists’ (hoi hieratikoi pantes), who are no less than ‘true athletes of the Fire’ (De myst.92.13-14), the leading up of the soul is not simply dialectical ascent supported by pure contemplation, but a sacramental or ritual event: the ineffable mystagogy (he arrhe ?te mustagogia) which includes a sort of mystical arithmology and produces various degrees of illumination based on the concept of a luminous solar body (augoeides soma) able to receive the divine light. Since the sun ‘measures all things’ and is ‘analogous to the One’ (Procl.InParm.1045.69), the sunthe ?ma of sun as a symbol of the noetic fire constitutes one of the central mystery of Neoplatonic theurgy. As in Iranian Sufism of Najm Razi, the capacity to perceive the noetic light (to noe ?ton pho ?s) partly depends on invocation (dhikr in Sufism) which consist in reciting “names without meaning” (ta asema onomata), sounds that are both sunthe ?mata and agalmata—“des statues que sont les noms divins,” according to Saffrey,26 thus imitating the Demiurge in creation. Nevertheless, despite the apparent distinction between operations of hieratike ? techne ? and philosophical contemplation, the two cannot be separated. Though theurgy deals with the unutterable symbols and the unspeakable acts (erga) which are beyond all understanding (huper pasan noe ?sin: De myst.II.11.96-97), it does not reject or even reduce the weight of the rational thinking which constitutes a considerable aspect 25. (In Plat. Theol.I.25.112.25-113.10 Saffrey-Westerink) 26. H.D.Saffrey Nouveaux liens objectifs entre le Pseudo-Denys et Proclus.Revue des Sciences philosophiques et theologiques, 63, 1979, p.6 114 SACRED WEB 5 of the soul’s experience. In some respect theurgy is an outgrowth of the Neoplatonic dialectic and negative theology as well as of the metaphysical exegesis of certain texts of Plato made in accord with the archaic mythology of mysteries (teletai). Trouillard, for instance, uses Plato’s myth of the procession of the gods in the Phaedrus in order to reveal the cosmological structure in which Neoplatonic theurgy works. He rejects the common contemporary hypothesis about the duality of ways in Neoplatonism, namely, “rational” and “irrational” (the latter is usually condemned as “une décadence” or as “bewitching hocus-pocus” practitioned by certain “solemn triflers”), and regards the later Hellenic Neoplatonism as one integral spiritual path which leads from moral purifications and dialectical demonstrations to contemplation and finally to theurgy which enables the unio mystica.27 Even the sequence and arrangement of the selected texts, that ought to be studied with the guidance of a master, are anagogical and imitate the ascent through the seven grades of virtue, namely, natural (phusikai), ethical (ethikai), civic (politikai), purificatory (kathartikai), theoretic (theoretikai), paradigmatic (paradeigmatikai) and hieratic (hieratikai) virtues. The last set of aretai come into being in the godlike (theoeides) elements of the soul and are proper to the One. The supreme holiness is no less than the supreme union with the ultimate divine Principle which is beyond-Being. Despite the well-known passage from Damascius’ commentary on Plato’s Phaedo which contrasts “those who honor philosophy more highly as Porphyry and Plotinus” and others who “honor more highly the hieratic art (hieratike ?)”28 as do Iamblichus, Syrianus, and Proclus, the underlying similarities in Plotinus’, Iamblichus’, and Proclus’ approach to mystical union suggest that their differences are more semantic (or differences in degree, mode, and style) than substantive. All of them emphasize that (notwithstanding occasionally different premises, methods, and exercises) the union (henosis) of the soul with the divine was caused and produced entirely by the divine. In sharp contrast to modern scholars who prefer to regard the use of sacramental theurgy as “an enlightened type of sorcery” (Cumont), as “the corruption of Platonic rationalism with Oriental superstition” (Dodds) 27. See his chapter La théurgie in L’Un et l’âme selon Proclos, Les Belles Lettres, Paris, 1972, pp.171-189 28. (In Phaed.II.1.172.1-3) SACRED WEB 5 115 or as a lower alternative to rational philosophy, within the texts of Neoplatonism itself, the recognition and acceptance of the external and internal telestike ? or theurgy was much more the norm than a deviation from it. For Iamblichus and Proclus theurgy was no less than culmination or rather ‘transcendental’ prolongation of philosophy and rational dialectic. The soul cannot ascend to the One by its own discursive power, since all levels of manifestation must be integrated and reverted upon their supreme source which, while presiding above intellect, nevertheless is represented by certain transcendent henads at every level of being. Though “every god is above Being, above Life, and above Intelligence,”29 “the procession of all things existent and all cosmic orders of existents extends as far as do the orders of gods”30. The tendency to marginalize theurgy reflects the tendency to interpret ancient philosophy as a progressive one-way movement from muthos to logos that means the passage from naive “irrational superstitions” to the light of “rationality.” It reflects, as Shaw pointed out, a post-Enlightenment prejudice that ritual behavior exhibits a more “primitive” and “lower” stage in man’s evolution than “pure” thought31 In the context of such ‘anti-ritualistic’ prejudices, Saffrey speaks of “le mirage de la théurgie”32 and asserts that “Plotinus alone appears as a heroic exception (un exception héroique) to this general crazy infatuation.”33 We prefer the view of Peter Kingsley that the Neoplatonists simply revitalized “a centuries-old tradition” of dry and one-sided rationalism34 by returning (through henological analysis, which images and words transforms into icons and allows the unifying and deifying experience to occur) to the heart of perennial wisdom as the origin of Hellenic or other therapeutic philosophy, understood as the living praxis and a set of spiritual exercises aimed at transformation of all aspects of man. The 29. (huperousios esti kai huperzo ?os kai hupernous: Proclus Elements of Theology 115) 30. (to ?n theo ?n diataxeis: ibid.144) 31. GregoryShawTheurgy:RitualsofUnificationintheNeoplatonismofIamblichus,p.9 32. H.D.Saffrey La théurgie comme pénétration d’eléments extra-rationnels dans la philosophie grecque tradive.Wissenschaftliche & auberwissenschaftliche Rationalität. Referate und Texte des 4 Internationalem Humanistischen Symposiums 1978, Athènes, 1981, p.168 33. H.D.Saffrey Les néoplatoniciens et les oracles chaldaiques.Revue des Études Augustiniennes, 27, 1981, p.225 34. PeterKingsleyAncientPhilosophy,Mystery,andMagic.EmpedoclesandPythagorean Tradition, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995, p. 304 116 SACRED WEB 5 end of life, according to the famous passage of Plato’s Theaetetus 176 bc, is homoiosis theo—“likeness to God,” which is to be attained by various means, including theurgy. The late Hellenic philosophers far from falling for the anti-intellectualist craze, realized the limits and aporias of any human discourse: at last, there is no ‘One’ to reach, because this word itself is merely a supreme sunthe ?ma of the Ineffable. They were afraid that merely rational and mental ascent to the One in some respect may turn to be a discursive fantasy. Therefore they took inspiration not merely from propositional logic, but from the theological oracles of the Platonizing circle of Juliani and ancient Egyptian and Assyrian wisdom as well as from the types of love that had sustained Orphics and early Pythagoreans. The abuses and misunderstandings of theurgy have no bearing upon it as an operative and esoteric kernel of the late Hellenic philosophy and religion the sacramental techne ? which was too easily but inevitably condemned by the Christian exoteric theologians and too easily accepted and discredited by some modern and pre-modern occult circles. It is evident that the Neoplatonic theurgy proper cannot be revived and used in our times even if our knowledge concerning its ritual operations and underlying mythological and metaphysical premises would be more profound. But one ought to remember that Neoplatonism (which itself is understood a sort of mystical monotheism by Kenney35) far from being merely a “pagan superstition” or a narrow-minded “rationalism” appeals to revelation and divine inspiration as the source of its wisdom. Both the living tradition (paradosis) and initiation are indispensable for the Neoplatonic theurgy which cannot be regarded apart from ancient Hellenic cosmology and physiology and the higher forms of sophisticated spiritual hermeneutics. Marinus attests36 that Proclus received the whole theurgic science from Asclepigeneia, the daughter of Syrianus’ master Plutarch of Athens. In addition to his strictly Aristotelian and Platonic philosophical education, we are told that Proclus learned “all of Hellenic and non-Hellenic theology and also that truth which had been hidden in the form of myths.37 He praised not only the Greek gods but, 35. SeeJohnPeter KenneyMystical Monotheism.AStudy inAncient Platonic Theology, Brown University Press, Hanover & London, 1991 36. (Vita Procli XXVIII) 37. (ibid.XXII) SACRED WEB 5 117 among others, even those honored by the Arabs and Egyptians, and he claimed that it befitted the philosopher to observe the rites not only of any one city or of a few nations, but to be “the hierophant of the whole cosmos in common.”38 We are told by Eunapius that Sosipatra, the mother of the Neoplatonic holy man Antoninus—and a brilliant theurgical philosopher in her own right, was initiated into Chaldean mysteries by two old men who appeared as angeloi thus confirming the Homeric verses that “gods, looking like strangers from abroad, assuming all kinds of shapes, wander through the cities” (Od.XVII.485-86). The old men, carrying voluminous purses and dressed in leathern garments, took the girl, and “no one found out into what mysteries they initiated her” and “whether they were heroes or daimons or belonged to some race even more divine.”39 Several decades ago Henry Corbin sought to re-establish the term theourgia and find its equivalents within the Islamic Platonism of Iran. While discussing such terms as hikmat ila ?h ??ya (divine wisdom), hakim mota’allih and hakim ila ?hi (divine sage), Corbin argued that they should be rendered by their Neoplatonic equivalents, namely, theosophia and theosophos recpectively. Now, if the word ta’alloh covers the same ground of connotations as does ‘theurgy’ in the late Hellenic Neoplatonism, the word mota’allih could be understood as “le sage théurge, ou le hiératique.”40 “Aussi bien le hiératique,” writes Corbin, “est-il une catégorie qui encandre toute la vision sohrawardienne du monde, où chaque espèce est la théurgie, l’oeuvre hiératique de son Ange.”41 Corbin goes to suggest that the Suhrawardian terms sanam and tilism might be rendered as “icon” and “theurgy” respectively. Since the word talisman may be an Arabic transformation of Greek telesma (initiation), it seems that the Neoplatonic term sunthe ?ma stands more close to the meaning of tilism than “theurgy” which itself cannot be equated to some particular objects or tokens (be they natural or artificial) of both microcosmic 38. (koine ? hierophante ?s tou holou kosmou: ibid.XIX) 39. Eunapius Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists, pp.466-69 Boissonade. Cited from Georg Luck Arcana Mundi. Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds, A Collection of Ancient Texts, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore & London, 1992, pp.157-159 40. Henry Corbin En Islam iranien. Aspects spirituels et philosophiques, tome II: Sohrawardi et les Platoniciens de Perse, Gallimard, Paris, 1971, pp.41-42 41. Henry Corbin, ibid., p. 92 118 SACRED WEB 5 and macrocosmic telestike ?. Nevertheless, Corbin writes: “Car l’espèce corporelle est comme une ombre, une projection, une icone (sanam) de son Ange, une théurgie (tilism, grec telesma) opérée par lui dans le barzakh qui par soi-même est mort et nuit absolue.”42 In this respect we should bear in mind that long before the Suhrawardian school rose up in Syria and Iran, the Hellenic transmitters of theological oracles in the Second and Third centuries had already mythologized the world of Platonic Ideas and interpreted them as hierarchically ordered spiritual entities, angels included. Therefore when Corbin argues that the Persian Platonists interpreted Platonic Ideas in terms of Zoroastrian angelology,43 this practice partly reflects the age old Chaldean tradition. The term ‘Chaldean’ had come to denote the blending of Iranian and Mesopotamian traditions which occurred chiefly as a result of Cyrus’ conquest of Babylon,44 but in the late Roman empire it simply meant an adept of occult sciences, astrology and magic, sometomes a charlatan, and a master of theurgical anagoge (inductio), whatever one’s origin, whether it be Syrian, Greek, or Roman. The traces of theurgic legacy could be traced in such esoteric works as Ghayat alHakim (Aim of the Sages) and Kitab al-Filaha al-nabatiya (Nabatean Agriculture, which deals not with the agriculture, but with the hidden properties of natural things). Therefore no wonder that in her investigation of the Harranian Sabians, as the source of certain doctrines inherited by the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwan al-Safa), Tamara M.Green mentions “the performance of theurgic ritual, but shaped within the framework of earlier Mesopotamian religion.”45 Given its various shades of meaning, the term ‘theurgy’ can be used in broader contexts than the strictly Neoplatonic one. The term was legitimatized within the sophia perennis school, witness Schuon’s exploration of “aesthetic and theurgic phenomenology.”46 Through the writings 42. Henry Corbin, ibid.,p. 111 43. Henry Corbin, ibid., p.25 44. See Peter Kingsley Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic, p.539 45. TamaraM.Green TheCity ofthe Moon God.Religious Traditions of Harran,E.J.Brill, Leiden, 1992, p.207 46. FrithjofSchuon Esoterism asPrincipleandasWay,PerennialBooks1990,p.177-225. On p.219 the author argues: ‘Theurgic phenomenology not only includes sacred symbols, supports of heavenly currents and subjective graces, but also and even above all, rites in which man actively cooperates with a saving theurgy.” SACRED WEB 5 119 of Pseudo-Dionysius this term entered into the Christian discourse. In looser and less restrictive but not an altogether metaphorical sense, we can still speak of theurgy not as a type of wonder-working (thaumatourgia), but as divine acts (theia erga) and divine grace (barakah, in Sufi terms), which deepen our remembrance (anamnesis) and serves for elevation (anagoge) through forms of sacred art, the relics of holy men and even the marvels of nature.
- [The Light of Traditional Faith Amid the Shadowlands of Modernity](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/light-of-traditional-faith) - The Light of Traditional Faith Amid the Shadowlands of Modernity by John Ahmed Herlihy From the invisible He made all things visible, Himself being invisible. (2 Enoch, XLVIII. 5) For such (the faithful), He has written faith in their hearts and strengthened them with a spirit from Himself. (Quran, 58: 22) Perhaps nothing highlights more effectively the vast chasm that exists between the traditional and modern worldviews than the irrevocable differences that exist between the traditional and modern understanding of the concept of faith. A faith that can move mountains in the traditional world is considered to be blind, naïve and sentimental in the modern world. A faith that unites sacred sentiment with the essential knowledge of God in the traditional world is considered merely a blind assent or a whimsical desire in the modern world. In today’s anti-spiritual environment, a prevailing faith in the validity of a surprising number of scientific principles remains unacknowledged by the scientific establishment. It refuses to admit to the nebulous nature of the “ultimate ground” of its first premises and insists on the pretence that nothing is true until proven with the human mind and bodily senses. How is it possible that the light of faith can mean so much to traditional man and so little to modern man? Perhaps nothing defines more clearly the role of faith in the modern world than the important role faith plays in both the realization of the traditional knowledge and in the pursuit and acquisition of today’s scientific knowledge. The modern, scientific elite deny outright the efficacy—indeed the legitimacy—of a traditional faith without realizing that they in fact rely on the instinct of faith to initiate a thought process that will lead to the kind of knowledge they desire to uncover. Faith must inevitably be the starting point in any thinking process that sinks its roots into an accepted knowledge, whether it be traditional or modern, spiritual or scientific, thereby drawing upon a “kind” of faith to acquire a “kind” of knowledge. Whatever his worldview, therefore, the concept of faith is a powerpack of implications for modern man that cannot be ignored unless he wishes to deceive himself. Can it be that even within the modern framework, a “kind” of faith exists to commence and move forward the thought processes of modern science in its pursuit of a knowledge of reality, even if that faith is not recognized for what it is? One of the many dilemmas facing modern man, and perhaps one that effectively highlights the perennial mystery that continues to underscore his entire existence, lies in the fact that he no longer knows the meaning of a traditional faith. Indeed, since the concept of faith during these times has been reduced to the level of a blind wish or a vague and sentimental aspiration, people no longer realize that the face of faith, as portrayed within the various spiritual traditions through the millennia, has many profiles and conveys, in addition to the knowledge of God, many sacred emotions that are both revealing and intimate. Initially, faith exists as a natural predisposition within man to explain the unexplainable and to bridge the chasm that exists between the sheer physicality of man and the phenomenal world on the one hand and the invisibility of God and the spiritual world on the other. As part of his nature, the human being is never without some kernel of faith that eventually reveals the secret disposition of his inner self. In view of the crucial mystery that exists concerning the origin and true nature of man and the universe, faith manifests itself firstly as a purely abstract idea, a desire, a premonition that seizes the mind of man in order to confront the barrier of inscrutable mystery he faces with its broad avenue of possibility and hope. There arises in the mind the prospect of moving across the isthmus between known and unknown worlds in order to experience the reality as a truth and not just as a speculation. Faith implies a choice and the believer chooses yes to the knowledge of the Absolute Reality and to the love of the Supreme Being that is expressed in sacred Revelation, revealed through the symbolic messages of Nature, and personified within man himself. 34 SACRED WEB 2 The face of faith shines as an initial spark of light that can illuminate the inner consciousness of man with the knowledge of God, partly because the knowledge of God resolves the mystery that surrounds the origin and true nature of both man and the universe, and partly as an antidote to the darkness and uncertainty that the life of “this world” embodies when it is understood to be an independent reality of its own. What begins as a presentiment and grows into a flame of light, ultimately becomes a conviction in which we commit ourselves to the principles of a sacred and essential knowledge that defines for us the reality of things. Our imagination alone cannot reconcile the invisible and the visible, the metaphysical and the physical, the Creator and the creation. It is only through the illumination of the light of faith that the mind, heart and soul can see the divine qualities of the visible, the physical, and the creation by acknowledging the inner reality of things that are veiled and embedded within the invisible, the metaphysical and the Creator. Faith commences as a fundamental assertion to believe in a Divine Reality. Then, it stakes its claim within the mind and heart by setting forth a desire for a complete knowledge of the reality that expresses a certainty and projects a truth. As such, faith is free of the constraints of the dogma and form contained in religion and lives as a purely personal and intimate condition of mind and heart. Faith establishes an attitude of mind that serves as the foundation and backdrop of a person’s active life, lending meaning and purpose to all that life contains. Man can face the existential reality of the world with the armour of a faith that predisposes him to the knowledge of God and to the efficacy of His guidance and mercy. Faith reveals its knowledge in relation to the level of predisposition of the person to incorporate this faith into his or her life as an existential reality. As such, faith becomes a profile of all that is mysterious in life and gives definition to the divine mystery that lies at the heart of earthly existence. Modern man, in contrast to traditional man, expresses a profound ambivalence toward the concept of faith. He rejects the traditional faith of his ancestors by calling it blind, sentimental, and childish and he considers faith a psychological impulse merely reflective of the fear of the unknown. The true meaning of faith, its power to “move mountains” and its significance as a gateway to a transcending, metaphysical knowledge, escapes him. He doesn’t realize, for example, that faith serves as SACRED WEB 2 35 the instinctive motivation in the pursuit of a knowledge that can transcend worlds, that a fundamental faith forms the lodestone of all encounters with authentic knowledge, whether it be ancient, traditional, modern, or scientific, and that faith draws its energy from a Source that is the Origin and Final End of all knowledge. Behind the open face of faith lies the instinctive human impulse to reveal itself as either a spontaneous, holy affirmation or inner impulse without a conscious origin. The pursuit and acquisition of knowledge begins as a fundamental faith that draws on the intelligence1 and the holy sentiments of the heart because He has written faith in their hearts and grows into a certainty because He has strengthened them with a spirit from Himself (58:22). The knowledge of faith allows traditional man to see the invisible through the visible, rather than deny the Invisible solely on the evidence of the visible. *** The traditional worldview portrays faith as an instinct that transcends the limitations of “this world” by accepting a framework of knowledge and initiating an attitude of mind that gives shape and coloration to the entire thinking process. As such, faith has traditionally been recognized as the point of departure in the pursuit of a knowledge of self and the world that can be experienced as a reality, indeed as the Reality, even though it is invisible and cannot be “seen.” In order to come to terms with the “unseen reality” that is the true reality, the impulse of faith has always aided traditional man to accept a body of knowledge that has descended from above, from across the waters, from beyond the horizon, a knowledge that comes to mankind as a divine revelation, a knowledge that represents the actual word of the Divinity, a knowledge with the power to enlighten and save. Faith’s desire constitutes the first step in a journey of discovery and fulfillment that is based on the knowledge of God. As such, it is a gateway into the frontiers of sacred knowledge and an open door to conscious spiritual experience. In contrast, the modern, scientifically-based worldview displays an ambivalent if not paradoxical attitude toward the mystery of faith, am- 1. According to a number of religious traditions, and Islam in particular, the “seat” of intelligence lies in the heart and not in the cerebral faculties of the brain, as in the modern conception. 36 SACRED WEB 2 bivalent because it also relies on a faith of sorts to proceed with its investigation, and paradoxical because faith assumes a belief in the unseen and that is precisely what the scientific mind sets out to disprove. The modern scientific establishment denies faith’s power and efficacy while at the same time its very raison d’etre relies on a faith that has the ability to leap across unbreachable divides in the pursuit of knowledge. Yet, the question arises: What kind of knowledge? Is the answer a speculative knowledge based on observation, experimentation and precise mathematical formulae or a metaphysical knowledge based on revelation, the symbols of nature and the faculty of the human intellect to process that knowledge? Is it a knowledge based on human reason or a knowledge accessed through a transcending faith? At the heart of the secularist worldview lies the doctrine that there is no reality but the physical reality and that there is no absolute truth beyond what can be quantified and objectified by human reason and the corporeal senses. This is a primary example of a modern-day faith that every scientist asserts in the pursuit of the scientific mandate, because to assert that nothing exists except a physical reality is purely arbitrary, theoretical and, ultimately, imaginary. In such a worldview, there is no place for the aspirations of a traditional faith that is prepared to cross frontiers, explore profound wildernesses, and leap across the isthmus between alien worlds in order to come to terms with the truth and the reality that underlies all existence. In such a worldview, based on what amounts to an empty faith in the validity of speculative truths, there can be no omniscient Divinity, no absolute Reality, and no ultimate Truth to which traditional faith can lay claim. The difference between the role of traditional faith and a modern faith in scientific principles lies in their respective points of departure. Both starting-points are equally characterized by an unwavering faith in the validity of their beliefs and assumptions and both equally employ the human mind in making deductions from these starting-points. The kind of faith that characterizes the pursuit of knowledge during the modern era, however, is embedded in the scientific premises and hypotheses that jump-start the entire scientific pursuit of knowledge, while the faith of the traditional world is not only the point of departure in man’s pursuit of knowledge of the reality, it virtually defines all human spirituality. Without an instinctive and motivating faith in the unseen reality and SACRED WEB 2 37 without a firm belief in higher levels of consciousness and spiritual experience, there can be no knowledge of God, no spiritual path, no sacred disciplines such as prayer and meditation, no true virtue and ultimately no transcendence. Faith presupposes a body of preliminary assumptions that amount to being assertions, whether they are metaphysical or merely physical and scientific, concerning the reality of Truth and the true nature of Reality. The faith embodied in these assumptions commences a line of thought that produces all kinds of deductions and leads toward a certain kind of knowledge that is in keeping with the original preliminary assumptions. The faith of both worldviews represents a leap of mind, and a willingness and an affirmation of what one believes to be the categorical imperative of the mind, whether that be the Transcendent Reality or a purely physical reality. Beyond the initial leap of mind that bridges the distance between two alien worlds lies the framework of one’s thinking, including the choices one brings to bear in the pursuit of a particularized type of knowledge and the examination of its evidence. Ultimately, each worldview determines the conclusions that are reached as a result of the constructs of its faith. The traditional mind relies on a firm faith in the Transcendent Reality that overlays the entire manifested creation as an Imminent Reality and provides the seamless whole to a vast universe of infinite possibility as an Infinite Reality. As exemplary and definitive professions of faith, the credo in unum deum of Christianity and the la ilaha illa ‘Llah of Islam articulate in words the essence of the Absolute Truth and announce the impending reality of the Divine Presence. What distinguishes traditional faith and defines its parameters is the belief in the unseen reality of the abiding Spirit, an inner, spiritual dimension that empowers all aspects of the phenomenal world and substantiates it with the inner dimension of the spirit. Faith turns the initial willingness to believe into a reality of the mind. At the heart of faith’s imperative lies the truth that man cannot encounter the Divinity directly. Traditional man did not face the mys- 2. The veil between man and God is absolute, therefore man will not see God, any more than Moses could see God, and Moses was a prophet. “Oh Lord,” Moses said to God when he reached the appointed place, “show Thyself to me, that I may look upon Thee.” But God replied: “By no means canst thou see Me (directly)” (7:143). 38 SACRED WEB 2 tery implicit within the phenomenal world of the cosmos any more directly than he faced God directly and/or expected to see the face of the Divine Countenance (al-Wajh).2 Traditional knowledge has come to mankind indirectly through enlightened messengers, through revelation, through nature, through symbols, and through human introspection3, and not directly between the Divine Being and human being. Traditional man’s understanding was synthetic rather than analytic, based on a synthesis of the knowledge that was made available to him, not any knowledge of course, but the essential knowledge that unifies and saves. God teaches man through Revelation, Nature and Man4 and this creates the condition through which a symbolic and analogical understanding of the true nature of the reality is possible. Modern science too is based on articles of faith. Contrary to the popular perception that science is based solely on observation, experimentation and clear reasoning leading to logical conclusions, the scientific mind relies on none other than a kind of faith in substantiating its working principles. It commences its journey in search of the truth through a leap of mind that is characteristic of faith, into abstract and theoretical areas of thought that would other wise be inaccessible. The primordial truths of modern scientific thought, namely its assumptions, theories, and hypotheses, are not subject to the rigors of empirical or experimental verification. They are abstract, arbitrary and purely hypothetical points of departure that lead the way in a particular line of reasoning. There are any number of such articles of faith that are taken as axiomatic within the scientific community and are simply not challenged by the “establishment” at the risk of being ostracized. They include the belief that the structure of reality is purely mathematical, an assumption that constitutes virtually the cornerstone of the credo of the modern scientific worldview. They also include the abstract assumption and hypothetical search for unity underlining the phenomenal universe that completely belies empirical or experimental verification. When asked what proof there was that nature possessed unity, Einstein replied C’est un 3. “Know thyself in order to know God.” (Saying of the Prophet [hadith]). 4. According to the Quran, there are three basic sources of knowledge. “Soon We will show them Our signs on the horizon and within themselves until it becomes clear to them that this is the Truth” (Quran 41:53). SACRED WEB 2 39 acte de foi. Indeed, the very fact that scientists rely exclusively on either empirical evidence or mathematical formulae in order to identify an objective reality is itself a purely hypothetical assumption. Is sense data the definitive medium to obtain objectivity? Are the principles of mathematics the sole criterion that can discriminate between what is true and what is false? The modern mentality may “believe” in sense data and mathematics, but what is the basis of this “faith” and what is the source of its objectivity? In spite of the high “visibility” of the phenomenal world and the provability of the mate rial world, modern man still has no clear sense of the true nature of reality; therefore he has no idea of the true nature and consequences of his actions in such a mysterious and enigmatic world. Because the fundamental mystery of creation refuses to give up its elemental secrets or betray its mystique, a sense of certainty will continue to elude modern man unless he can achieve both authenticity and certainty through a transcending faith in a body of God-revealed knowledge. The modern scientific elite, who are the high priests of the modern world and who alone have power to speak ex cathedra on such questions as the nature of reality and the origin of mankind, have established the fundamental criteria through which modern man understands the nature of reality and the human beings who inhabit that reality. They alone have the right to form the fundamental interrogatives that make up the parameters of the scientific inquiry. In the scientific worldview, man is regarded as an autonomous entity within the universe. He exists as it were apart from God and apart from any kind of force that could be characterized as spiritual, other-worldly, or beatitudinal. He has not been created by God and he will not return to God, in contradiction to the simple yet eloquent Quranic verse We come from God and to Him we shall return (2: 152). He is thought of as being nothing more than an in dividual and finite creature that has his moment in time and will eventually disappear back into the energy of the cosmos, nothing more. He enjoys a faculty called reason, a faculty that is most notably cut off from both Revelation and the Intellect which belongs to the supra-human level of reality that science denies, yet he believes that his reason somehow illuminates the human mind through a light of its own making. His reason is his god because it is regarded as the sole instrument that can navigate its way through the sea of univer- 40 SACRED WEB 2 sal mystery and that can lead him to a destination he knows not where. Anything that transcends the faculty of human reason is treated quite simply as non-verifiable knowledge or worse, as the sub-product of an over-ripe and misguided imagination.5 The modern scientific worldview asserts that life, consciousness, and self-awareness are nothing but manifestations of complex arrangements of inanimate particles that have evolved in a fortuitous way to result in the phenomenon of homo sapiens. Modern science proclaims the existence of the phenomenal world that constitutes a universe which is a world unto itself and an independent reality of its own that can be studied and known in an ultimate sense, without any reference to a higher order of reality and without cognizance of a universal Creator. Space, time, matter, motion and energy establish the parameters of the physical world and thus are expressed and believed-in realities that are independent of any higher order of being and are cut off from the power and influence of a Supreme Being. The physical world is portrayed as a mechanical world that is the subject of mathematization and quantification. Anything within nature that does not fall within that rubric and is in essence non-quantifiable is irrelevant to the study of modern science. Faith in the veracity of these suppositions serves as the lodestar for modern civilization and a guiding light for the evolving, modern worldview. *** “Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed.” This sacred saying of Christ has as much relevance today as it once had two thousand years ago. Perhaps we will find that the role of faith in the modern world is similar to the role of faith in the traditional world, at least from the spiritual point of view. Faith in the modern world can still provide the means of activating the spiritual emotions and bridging the 5. There are some scientists who would like to reduce man to his lowest common denominator and render him not much more profound than a simple, well-oiled machine. The biologist, Richard Dawkins, an aggressive opponent of “evolutionary tales”, has suggested in his book The Selfish Gene that we can think of ourselves as “survival machines”, invented through evolutionary tinkering by ancient replicators, snippets of DNA. In speaking of “genes”, Dawkins has written: “Now they swarm in huge colonies safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence.” SACRED WEB 2 41 gap that otherwise exists between the mind and the will, between our knowledge of the truth and what we are willing to act upon. More over, faith initiates a process of inner inquiry that offers a vision into the true nature of reality and permits people to develop and appreciate a sense of the sacred in all aspects of life. Faith flows like a river through the being of the faithful person. It transcends both time and place by placing man within his own center and situating him within the eternal moment. Faith has the capacity to lift the veil of the Divine Mystery, to enliven the sacred traditions, and to overlay the symbolic image of the human being with a projection of the perfected be ing that he is destined to become. As the point of departure for all spirituality, faith is both a knowledge and a belief. As knowledge, faith represents a modality of mind—an intuition if you will—that can awaken human spirituality by acknowledging the existence of an Absolute Being as the Origin and Source of everything in existence, including the human being who brings to faith his living consciousness. Faith as a basic intuition represents a knowledge of a doctrine whose implicit blessing is the certitude that what one believes is the absolute truth. As a belief, faith represents a modality of will that activates man’s free will to believe in God, a Divinity who has created, sustains, and will ultimately save or damn the human soul. As such, faith contains a power that transcends form, a power that can formalize the abstract into a clear image of the Divine, a power that can link outer and inner worlds like a bridge, and a power that can be a veil to protect as well as a key to unlock the dam of spiritual forces that lies at the center of man’s being. Because faith amounts to being a human intuition based on knowledge of the Divine and a desire to turn toward God, man’s faith has the potential to become a force that can “move mountains,” that permits the faithful to manifest inner realities through visible actions, that reduces the great impasse that exists between matter and spirit to a modern myth, and that shatters the mirror of all earthly illusions and actually begins the process referred to earlier as “lifting the veil” of all cosmic myster- 6. “The veil is a notion which evokes the idea of mystery, because it hides from view something that is either too sacred or too intimate; but it also enfolds a mystery within its own nature when it becomes the symbol of universal veiling” (Frithjof Schuon, Esoterism as Principle and as Way, p. 47). 42 SACRED WEB 2 ies.6 Ultimately, faith has the power to raise the human soul onto the plane of realization of immanent and eternal realities. Faith has become once again a force too powerful to be denied by the “modern” men and women of our time and its significance and implications are too subtle to be summarily rejected or ignored by modern sophisticates. Faith within the context of the modern world can no longer simply be labelled as merely psychological or blind and dismissed by those who deny faith’s possibilities as appropriate only for children, sentimentalists, arcane spiritualists and possibly fools, as though the perennial faith of millions from time immemorial could be passed off by more mature modern minds as a human need to believe in fairy tales. Faithless men and women of this age have the tendency to explain faith’s dynamic range as being mere childishness or sentimentalism of people with no desire to “think,” but that “thinking” people have no need of, as if the cerebral thinking of modern times could replace faith’s depth and reach. When faith isn’t passed off as a thoughtless sentimentality, then it is labelled as “blind,” a pejorative word intended to imply that faith is nothing more than a sightless vision, or the infamous “believing without seeing” scorned by the scientific community, founded on the basis of a human psychology that needs faith to explain the unknown nature of reality. Simple human psychology suggests, however, that man does need faith, not as a childish alternative to a frightened and unsophisticated psyche, but rather as a pragmatic approach to the unknown, in which the individual overlays his thoughts, emotions, and sentiments, his actions, goals and purpose in life with the power of the knowledge of God that accompanies faith. The secret of faith, however, lies beyond the “thinking” mind. Men and women of all times and places are faced with a number of unknown factors that demand of the thinking mind a faith either in the existence of a Supreme Intelligence who creates, guides, and sustains their lives or a faith in some credible alternative, what in modern times would amount to a belief in the verity of an evolutionary process that originates somewhere—anywhere—and proceeds along a path of natural selection and survival of the fittest that ultimately promises a human progress that will eventually bring modern man to a superhuman condition, if not an enlightened state of being. The modern day alternative to faith is nothing short of a faith in reli- SACRED WEB 2 43 gion’s counterpart: a faith in modern science that is based on human reason rather than divine revelation. People during these times cannot escape the impulse of a faith in something—anything—since the unknown factors that continue to haunt modern man force people to retain a faith, if not in God, then in the evolutionary process for example, for neither are provable according to the demands of scientific scrutiny and both require faith with its implicit leap of mind and its broad demands on the imagination. With regard to such an initiating faith, the theory of evolution is no different from religion, as much as modern scientists hate to admit it. In fact, modern man’s commitment to faith can actually be reduced to the level of lowest “incredibility.” For example, is it more incredible to believe in God as Divine Being and the Supreme Intelligence than to believe in an evolutionary process in which the human body actually evolved after a complex progression of chance and accidental factors that began with atoms that combined to form a complex grouping of molecules that ultimately became a living cell that built itself into a thinking creature with a consciousness of self? Is it more incredible to believe that man is made in the image of God with a human consciousness of self, a consciousness that can be raised to a height of purity of mind with a pristine clarity that forms the basis of a potential sublimity? Isn’t it more incredible that man’s consciousness has somehow derived from matter and that it is a sophisticated, refined or somehow highly evolved form of matter? Perhaps modern man should approach the mystery of faith from the possibilities inherent in these levels of incredibility in order to cross the barrier than continues to exist between faith and disbelief. Only then will he be able to arrive at a satisfactory answer to the contem porary challenge to the efficacy of traditional faith, a challenge that proposes the unbelievable and unreal hypotheses that the higher has evolved from the lower, that consciousness has emerged out of the elements, that life has burst forth spontaneously from matter, and that matter itself could serve as the benchmark and basis of all reality. *** At the heart of this exacting dialectic concerning faith and its implications lies the absolute barrier that exists between matter and spirit,7 a 44 SACRED WEB 2 barrier needless to say that eventually must be faced by everyone, if people want to articulate to themselves what they believe to be both meaningful and real within the reality of their own existence. The relationship between matter and spirit, between the outer world and the inner world, is virtually transcendental, and cannot be explained fully with words, much less in terms that are purely scientific, rational, and thus non-transcendental. The relationship between matter and spirit lies at the core of man’s human dilemma in adequately coming to terms with his understanding of “reality” as such, not as he understands it within his own limited perception, but reality as it is manifested in the cosmic realm, namely as the Absolute Truth. Matter and spirit are the two dynamic imperatives of life; they shape man’s understanding and affect his experience of reality. These two great modalities of earthly existence play on us like the bow on a violin to produce the andante or largo movement of a great soulful sonata, a melody that cannot be fully described but that is heard and experienced throughout the course of life. Both matter and spirit contain their own mystery, and neither one is ever fully revealed to us as the basis of our lives or as an explanation of reality until they are played out on the strings of our being to become real experiences and truly felt realities. We are condemned to know them only in part and through their consequences on us. The complete significance of matter and spirit forever escapes us.8 Even now, as we enter the new millennium and following a century that has witnessed incredible advances in both science and technology, it is still almost impossible to clarify the distinctions between outer and inner worlds. Even the most rational scientist today doesn’t exclude the possibility of a complete theory of knowledge that would transcend the 7. “...The Origin of the Universe is not inert and unconscious matter, but a spiritual Substance which...finally produces matter by causing it to emerge from a more subtle substance, but one which is already remote from principial Substance. It will be objected that there is no proof of this, to which we reply...that there are infinitely fewer proofs for this inconceivable absurdity, evolutionism, which has the miracle of consciousness springing from a heap of earth or pebbles, metaphorically speaking” (Frithjof Schuon, From the Divine to the Human, p. 6). 8. The more physicists explore the inner sanctum of quantum mechanics, the more they realize how intangible and mysterious that realm really is, further compounding nature's secrets rather than revealing her truths through the medium of matter. SACRED WEB 2 45 purely physical world of matter with the macrocosmic application of some higher law as yet unknown to us. Perhaps the shift back to a focus on the realms of the spirit has already begun to the extent that it is naive now to think solely in physical terms and foolhardy not to leave a crack in the door of perception that leads back toward the unknown mystery of the Spirit.9 *** Faith is the formal bridge between totally unbreachable worlds: between matter and spirit, body and soul, outer and inner modalities, earthly and celestial realities. As such, faith brings together these two antithetic realities and makes possible the meeting of man and God. Firstly, faith strikes down the absolute barrier that exists between matter and spirit with its wand of inspiration and insight. Through a body of revealed knowledge to inspire the mind and through a holy yearning of the heart to activate that knowledge, faith bridges the vast distance that separates man from the Sublime. The sacred intuition of faith permits an under standing of unity to be possible between the world of form and the world of spirit, each realm influencing the other in an interactive and harmonious blending of earthly and celestial realities. Because of faith, the physicality of the world of matter does not pre-empt man’s perception of reality with its dense materiality; instead the phenomenal world can serve as a symbol of a high knowledge and visualize for mankind a higher reality. Faith allows the believer to understand, if not actually see, the forces of spirit at work within matter. The world of nature is the prime example of form virtually glowing with spirit. Secondly, faith bridges the great divide that exists between man and God and between man and his own soul. This divide exists on existential levels in which man understands himself to be a living being without explanation and a fragmented being who is equally a mysterious as well as a physical reality. It is as if man projects two personalities out of himself, an outer self personified in the ego that responds to the demands of his body and his immediate environment. The second personality lies further within the individual and runs as a deep undercurrent that emerges 9. A recently published book by John Horgan, titled The End of Science (Broadway Books, NY, 1996), actually speculates upon the possibility that science may have reached the limit of its inquiry in its search for “absolute knowledge.” 46 SACRED WEB 2 at moments in life when he can discard his worldly presumptions and preconceived attitudes for a spiritual intuition that projects the best of his inner self into the outer world of people and forms. Thirdly, as a bridge to inner worlds, faith sets in motion a movement of the spirit that must be activated as part of the spiritual challenge of our time, otherwise it will lie dormant deep within modern man and never surface to illuminate the mind and heart. Through a traditional faith made contemporary by virtue of its timely aspiration, a process of spirituality can begin once again that can make faith a coloration of the soul in which the believer prepares himself, stands firm, opens his being, and puts himself on the line as it were for the discovery of that which cannot be explained in words; but which can create a music of the spirit, a bow on strings, that can articulate for the individual the greatest truth of which he is capable. Faith permits, indeed begins, a dialogue between oneself and the Divine Being, whether He be identified as the Hindu Brahma, the Christian God, the Jewish Jehovah, the Islamic Name of Allah or the Great Spirit of the North American Indians, permitting a clarity of mind, a melting of the heart and an opening of the soul toward the Spirit through the music of one’s own being. Finally, through faith, man assents to his insignificance in the face of the Absolute Being. Based on revelation and activated through his intuition, faith is above all the humble acknowledgement to ourselves and to other members of society of our place within the cosmic design of the Divine Savior. We need faith as a compensation to the unknown mystery and as the key to the compensating knowledge of the unseen reality. Perhaps the time has come, as we terminate the second millennium and face the new demands on mankind that will be inevitable in the 21st century, to abandon our earthly pretensions and adopt once again the humble attitude of faith as the necessary prelude to unknown realms of knowledge and as the “instinctive motive” in activating a life of contemporary spirituality. We need to approach one another as human beings once again. We need to abandon the superficial mask of our false, modern persona that now “believes” in a process of evolution that actually separates people from each other with its philosophy of “survival of the fittest,” instead of bringing them together with a unified and credible worldview. We need to find a deeper expression of self that is based on the eternal verities SACRED WEB 2 47 and modelled by the great prophets, saints and mystics of recorded history, an expression of spirituality that makes the invisible visible by virtue of the heart and soul invested in humanity. Perhaps we can meet each other once again, not based on a superficial knowledge of matter and form, but on the basis of a faith in a knowledge that transcends the physical plane to reveal mysteries man would not otherwise have access to. Perhaps we can meet each other out of a knowledge that we have truly experienced and suffered and come to realize, a knowledge that inspires a human commitment to transcend our limitations in ways that only faith in the knowledge of God permits. If faith is to survive in the modern world as a spiritual force that is a viable option for contemporary man, several important factors need to be realized. Firstly, contemporary man must abandon his preconceived notions about faith, notions that have accumulated over the centuries and have now solidified into an attitude toward faith that is both negative and counterproductive, as well as misleading. Secondly, with regard to the dynamic spiritual force that faith contains, man must become once again a tabula rasa, in which all his mental projections, preconceived opinions, and unwarranted prejudices can be abandoned for the motivating impulse of faith, whose power and insight can unlock inner doors of perception and higher levels of awareness that modern man has never dreamed possible, much less experienced. Finally, he must realize who he is in his essence: not the pygmy of his true self that now constitutes the portrait of modern man, but the human “image” of the Supreme Being and the homo spiritualis portrayed in sacred scripture. A faith based on the revelatory knowledge of God can become the vehicle of a legitimate interaction among people because it communicates not only facts and statistics, but also part of the essence of the person who passes it on, and because it conveys a sublime and absolute truth that far exceeds the implications of the physical world of matter. Such a faith would represent a knowledge that contains the fragrance of primordial meaning that once existed at the heart of the world as an original faith and that still lies dormant somewhere near the horizon of our time. Needless to say, there can be no spirituality without faith, modern, contemporary, traditional or otherwise. Faith can be modern insofar as it exists during these times and takes into account the dynamic range of 48 SACRED WEB 2 the 20th century mentality. Faith can be traditional when it is based on a revealed knowledge, which alone has the orthodoxy and the divine power to enlighten and save, and when it is contextualized within the orthodoxy of an authentic religious tradition. Our sacred duty during these times is to activate the revealed knowledge of the religions with the spiritual forces that exist within man himself through his intuition of God and his faith in the power to transcend his own limitations with that knowledge. A formal, traditional religion can become once again a living contemporary religion, just as traditional man can become a contemporary traditional man, with a heightened consciousness and a firm will power made possible through the light of faith and the orthodoxy of the religious traditions. Man can activate the spiritual forces contained within religion in order to humanize the face of religion through his own spirituality; similarly, religion can activate the spiritual forces contained within man in order to spiritualize the face of man with the knowledge of God and with the faith to internalize that knowledge as a living experience.
- [The Vedanta (Audio)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-vedanta-audio) - Frithjof Schuon From the book Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, published by World Wisdom Books. “Shankara is like a colourless glass which allows the rays of light to pass through it intact… Sages are instruments for the crystallizing of the pure Light; they are anything but inventors of systems. It is intellection that determines everything;
- [Matheson Trust <em>Hear!</em> Project](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/matheson-trust-hear-project) - To improve accessibility and further our objectives by making use of contemporary technologies, the Matheson Trust Hear! project is converting scholarly texts and other texts of interest into audio mp3 format. The present page gives a centralised point of access to this growing section of our audio library. “The Symbolist Mind”, from The Feathered Sun,
- [Of the Cross (Audio)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/of-the-cross-audio) - by Frithjof Schuon, from the book Gnosis: Divine Wisdom, by World Wisdom Books. “The Word made flesh is the Truth that has in a way become matter, but at the same time a matter transfigured and new-minted, a matter which is burning light, transforming and delivering.” Of the Cross Click here to download – 13:50 (13.3MB)
- [Cosmology, Ecology and Sacred Architecture](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/cosmology-ecology-architecture) - Seyyed Hossein Nasr This two part lecture on the sacred sciences of cosmology, ecology, and architecture was presented by Professor Nasr at the University of Minnesota in May, 1992. Republished with kind permission from Serious Seekers. In this lecture Professor Nasr explains how in traditional worldviews these three sacred disciplines unfold and interrelate in an organic
- [The Minbar: Symbol of Verticality and of Elevation](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/minbar-symbol) - The Minbar: Symbol of Verticality and of Elevation by Naima Chikhaoui Revised, translated and edited by Fatima Jane Casewit The Sacred Space of the Mosque The mosque is the symbol of the living faith of Islam: its religiosity, faithinGod andinHisall-powerfulness. This sacredspaceisareflection of deep belief in the divine word. It is also the place of the offering of prayer andofallthe rites andritualsof Islam. Tothese symbolic elements must be added the components of the sacred space of the mosque: the minaret, the prayer hall with its mihrâb (prayer niche) and the minbar, or pulpit. Thesearethe ritual supportsofthe sanctity ofthemosque. Each of these elements has its own function in the sacred order. The prayer hall is the place of piety and of devotion. The minaret and the minbar represent elevation towards Heaven for the call to prayer or for ritual supplication and/or for the ritual “sermon” or the khutba.1 The divine word is either “proclaimed aloud”, or it is silent prayer. To reach God Most High one must either rise, or else prostrate. The centre of centres can only be God, and the mosque is situated in the centre of space, the more elevated spaces being symbolically nearer toGod. Thus,in Islamictraditionthe Kaa’ba,thecentre oftheworld,is, symbolically, the most elevated place on earth, symbolising the centre of Heaven. All mosques areconsidered equivalents orcopiesofthe Kaa’ba. Centrality and elevation, therefore, are two major aspects of the sanctity of the space of the mosque. Mystical and spiritual communication 1 “Within the mosque, the pulpit may be considered as an extension of the minaret..., both in virtue of its elevation and because it is the domain of truth.” Lings, Martin, Symbol and Archetype: A Study of the Meaning of Existence, Quinta Essentia, 1991, pp. 123-124. (translator’s addition). 14 93 takes place in a sacred “centre”. This communication is expressed through religious rites, rites of “ascension”, revealing the process of elevation towards Heaven, of the worship of God. In the Muslim religion, various ritual symbols assist the believer on his/ herpathto Paradise. Theritual prayer,orthe“rising”towardstheKaa’ba, or the pilgrimage, are amongst the most well known forms. All of these rites express but one desire, to “rediscover” God, to regain the lost Paradise. The rites involve sacred wordswhichtranslatethe “nostalgia for Paradise” and the love of God. Simply stated, these words use the paths laid out by the religion for access to Heaven. The Minbar as Ritual Furniture One of the supports for this sacred word is the minbar, or the preaching pulpit, the form of which is unique to the Muslim religion. The minbar transmits the word of God, the wise and just words, through the raised voice of the imam, the preacher. The use of the minbar has its origins in the early years of Islam and has remained linked to the ritual of the khutba, sermon, and of the ritual supplication of the Amir Al Mou’minin, the prince of the faithful, and of his good, believing subjects. The tradition is closely linked to speech, and especially to the communication between God and His faithful servants. As mentioned above, all prayers or ritual speech are ascension towards God, and the minbar is the sacred object most adapted to this function of elevation towards Heaven. TarikWalydescribestheminbarasanintermediarybetweenthe material and the spiritual worlds. The minbar is our earthly expression of the integration between the material and the spiritual. Itisthefeatureinmosquearchitecturetowhichthebelieverturnswhenheneeds toreachoutmentallythroughhumanthought. Thusthemihrâbandtheminbarhave been two integral parts of Islamic belief which have deviated from all previous elements, as they couple religion with the world.2 Symbolism and Features of the Minbar What are the features and the symbolism of the minbar which contribute to this function of elevation from the material to the spiritual? Revealing its etymological relationship to loftiness, the word minbar 2 Waly, Tarek, In Quest of the Path: To “The One” in Mosque Architecture, Beit Al Quran Publications, Bahrain, 1993, p. 82 (translator’s addition) 94 14 comes from the root n b r, which means to “be high” or “lofty”. The verb nabara is used for everything that is raised, and in its original significanceitmeanstomarkwithagutturalstop.(hamza) Thenabrfor the Arabs meant to raise the voice, and a man who was known as a nabaar was an eloquent man, clear, lucid and probing. The minbar is the chair of the one who preaches the sermon. It is thus named for its raised position. The designation of the minbar as a pedestal or elevated support is linkedtothehistoryofthepreachingchair,orpulpit,itself. Thekhatîb, or preacher, addressing the believers, remained standing or sitting on topofit. ThistraditionwasfollowedbytheProphetMohammed(saws). A place was reserved for him in the mosque of Medina, usually near a palm treewhichwasusedasacolumnforthemosque.3 Thetrunkofthepalm tree was subsequently cut, forming an elevated seat on which the Prophet sat amidst the faithful. Elevation and loftiness, therefore, has always defined this piece of furniture. The height of the preaching pulpit can range from 3.5 m to 3.86m which is the height of the famous minbar of the Kutubiyya mosque in Marrakesh.4 The preferred building material used in pulpits is wood. The minbar of the Prophet was also called a’wadd, wood in Arabic, referring to the material from which it was built. Wood was used because itisalightmaterial,makingtheminbareasytomovearound. Thereare other minbars ( pl. manabir) in the Islamic world that have been built with various materials such as marble, stone,5 even iron.6 The chair usuallyconsistsofaback,acanopy,avoicecarrier,andastairway. Thestairway isthemostsymbolicelementoftheminbar. Itvariesfromseventonine steps in height. It is said that the Prophet’s pulpit was made up of only two steps.7 3 Encyclopédie de l’Islam, 1986, p. 74-75 4 The orientalist literature related to the minbar in Islam reports that the mosque of Samara had a minbar which was 3.90 m high. 5 The oldest manabir (pl. of minbar) were all in wood. Those in marble or in stone seem tobecommonduringtheOttomanperiod. TheNorthAfricanmanabiraregenerally made of wood. In East Africa, many more manabir are found made of stone. 6 During the Umayyad era, a minbar was often built with iron. 7 This is the minbar of the Prophet placed on a pedestal of six degrees in the mosque of Medina. DuringtheProphet’stime,thisminbaronlyhadtwostepsandaseat. AbuBakr, OmarandOthmanuseditinthesameway. Mu’awayaddedsixstepstoit. 14 95 The minbar, or pulpit, has always been the object of great care and aesthetic refinement. The decoration of the side walls of the minbar range from geometric, naturalistic and floral patterns to arabesque. The delicacy of the arcades that decorate the entrance bear witness to the value and importance of this ritual and liturgical piece of furniture. The location of the minbar in the sacred space of the mosque is as important as its loftiness and height. The minbar is generally situated against the qibla wall, (the direction of Mecca), in the central part of the prayer room, to the right of the mihrâb (the niche indicating the qibla) a centre in a centre. A small room or a large niche is reserved for the minbar,anditisonlybroughtoutforthekhutba(sermon). Itoftenrests on two small wheels, allowing it to be pulled.8 Mobile manabir seem to be rare, but the splendid minbar of the Kutubiyya mosque in Marrakesh is proof of their existence. With all the details and the various elements that go into it, the minbar isoneofthemostimportantelementsofthemosque. Althoughitvaries in style and decoration from one Islamic country to another, or from one historical era to another, the minbar remains the same in its function anditsliturgy,aswellasinitssymbolism,allovertheIslamicworld. Itis this vertical symbolism and liturgy which reveal at once the profound “function” of the minbar. The History of the Function of the Minbar The history of the tradition of the minbar reveals its original “double” function, being the proclamation of either a religious or a political speech. The unity of this function resides in a desire and a will to “cry aloud” a speechofJustice,ofloveoftheTruth. Thisspeechwasalwaysandstillis a sermon about the place of God, the Infinitely Just, and a supplication for His mercy and for His compassion. The traditional Islamic sermon is a purely objective formulation of doctrine and of law basedontheQur’anandthesayingsoftheProphet. Thepreacherbecomesthemouthpiece of these two sources, his subjectivity being as it were extinguished, the more so since the pulpit is so constructed that his face is hidden from most of the congregation.9 8 This type is particular to the Maghreb where the manabir were mobile and movable. The minbar of the Kaa’ba was on wheels which allowed it to be pushed from its storage area in the Makam Ibrahim to the Kaa’ba for the Friday sermon. 9 Lings, Martin, Symbol and Archetype: A Study of the Meaning of Existence, Quinta Essentia, 1991, pp. 123-124 96 14 The minbar was firstly the seat of the Prophet in his function as Sahib ArRisâlah, the Messenger, and the Spokesman of God on Earth, to whom thesacredtextwasrevealed. TheProphet(saws)wouldsitonhisminbar to address the community, to show them the right path that leads to Paradise,thewayofthebeliever. Hewouldalsosharewiththecommunity the great decisions related to jihad, holy war, for the Muslim Umma (community) united around the Haqq, the Truth, the supreme and just word of God. Following the example of the Prophet (saws), the great rulers of Islam subsequentlyusedtheminbartoaddressthecommunity. Thistradition lasted until the khutba, or sermon, was restricted to religious exhortations, and then the minbar became the pulpit of the preacher, the raised pulpit, from which the beautiful words are pronounced, words calling for devotion and worship of God. The function of the minbar is, therefore, essentially religious, and it is because of this that the minbar is foundallovertheMuslimworld. Thiscommonfunctionisreinforcedby the same symbolism and liturgy expressed by the minbar. What meanings and symbolism does the minbar represent and how is it used for rituals? Being an integral part of the mosque, the minbar is a sacredobject,orpieceofliturgicalfurniture. Itbelongstoasacredspace which is not tread upon except with bare feet, marking off the profane spacefromthesacred. Butthe“perceptivespace”occupiedbytheminbar isveryspecial. Itscentrallocationandraisedpositionallowittodominateandtocapturetheglanceandattentionofallthoseassembled. This is emphasised by the raised voice of the preacher. This particular “perceptive space” condenses a representative symbolism that takes its meaning from the element of elevation. The height of the minbar is marked bythepresenceofastaircase. Theelevationoftenexpressedbyaladder orstairwayisoneofthemostancientdesignsofascension.10 Thisdesign is always linked to the symbolism of verticality, a sign of purity and of height. Theraisedminbaristhereforeasymbolofthespiritual“verticality” and of metaphysical completion. A sacred and elevated piece of 10 “The ladder thus puts before us a very complete symbolism: it can be likened to a vertical bridge rising throughout the worlds and making it possible to traverse their whole hierarchy by passing from rung to rung; and at the same time the rungs are the worlds themselves, that is, the different levels or degrees of universal Existence.” René Guénon, Fundamental Symbols, The Universal Language of Sacred Science, QuintaEssentia, Cambridge, 1995 (translator’s edition) 14 97 furniture, it permits one to take on this verticality for oneself, towards “height”, leading to light. Height and Light This aspiration and thrust towards height and light respond to both a spiritual and psychological tendency, based on the complimentarity of thepatternofelevationandthevisualarchetypeoflight. Itisthishuman aspirationwhichisattheoriginofdynamicimagesofascension. Moreover, the primordiality of the vertical image can be added to the upright position and the accompanying psychological tendency that is unique to human beings. Only a minbar, or a ladder, rising towards the Elevated and the Almighty, can reach verticality synonymous with purity and the supreme goal. The minbar, in its symbolism of verticality, can be added to other significant rituals of ascension in other civilizations. The ceremonial staircase, the initiatic ladder, the arduous ascent, the cosmic tree,11 and of course the elevated kaa’ba are a few examples of this symbolism of verticality. The symbols of ascension, of which one is the minbar, mark a spiritual verticality that can only be obtained by rising towards Heaven above the platitudes of the flesh and of profane space. In the spiritual life, the believer is called upon to move from one world to another. When the preacher mounts the minbar, he stands up straight and leans on his sceptre and proclaims the “holy” word, addressed in the name of God. Hiswordstranscendthespaceofthislowerworldandgodirectly to the celestial space. It is not only a question of a change in space, but as M. Eliade remarks, it is even a question of changing one’s mode of being: 11 ...the staircase is the bearer of an extremely rich symbolism, without ceasing to be perfectly coherent: it explicitly shows the rupture in level which makes possible the passage from one mode of being to another.12 The Khatîb, or Preacher The preacher, a man of great faith, raises his voice carrying the word of The Prophet stood next to a tree or next to the trunk of a palm tree. The tree is related to the symbolism of life, to the unceasing evolution and ascension towards Heaven. Thetreealsoconveysallthesymbolismofverticality. Thetreealwayscapturesthelight of the sky. Eliade, M. Images et Symboles, Tel/Gallimard, Paris, 1980, p. 63 98 14 1 2 The pulpit (Minbar), viewed from the side of a staircase passage. God, the Infinitely Just and Almighty. He lives a moment of unity with the divine word which he communicates to other believers, calling on them to worship God and to spread His message on earth. In Arab culture, upon hearing a prayer, one says “from your mouth to the gate of Heaven.” The spiritual and psychological aspiration of the preacher for purity, as a spokesman of a group of believers, is therefore prefigured in the loftiness of the minbar, rising up through the seven or nine steps, symbols of the seven divine heavens.”13 1 3 For an in-depth explanation of symbolism see Symbol and Archetype, A Study of the Meaning of Existence, by Martin Lings, Quinta Essentia, Cambridge, 1991 (translator’s note) 14 99 The tradition of Al Khataba, or delivering sermons, actually predates Islam. Butthereisa cleardifference between AlKhataba ofthe ancient Arabs andthatwhich developedinthe Islamicera. Duringthetimeofthe Jâhilîyah, the pre-Islamic era, the khatîb was the spokesman of the tribe. He stood beside the poet and defended the tribe against other enemies. The duty of the khatîb demanded a perfect mastery of the Arabic language and a clear and correct pronunciation of the letters and of the words. The khatîb expressed himself in prose, often in the form of rhymed prose,or saja’a,andrarelyused poeticverses. Thekhatîbwas known to be a courageous man who was at once a horseman and fighter. With the event of Islam, the khutba, or sermon, became exclusively a religious and/or political speech addressed to Muslims inside the mosque. The ancient custom of mufâkhirah14 or intertribal boasting and vain glory, was abandoned and replaced by a religious sermon, and later of coursebythe panegyricofthecaliphs, defendersofIslam. Itwasduring the Abbasid period that the khutba, the sermon, became purely religious. It took place in Medina, on a Friday, and in only one mosque. By elevating the khatîb, the minbar accomplishes its profound functionand permitsthewordof Godtoriseinaverticaldirection. If“allof spiritual life is expressed by an ascent” the place of the minbar in sacredness and ascension is primal. The Symbolism of the Steps In the person of the khatîb, the word of the Truth, Al Haqq, ascends the steps of the minbar just as the souls of the just ascend up a ladder towardsHeaven. WasnottheNight AscensionoftheProphetMohamed (Mi‘râj) anascentupa celestial ladder? Thestepsofthe minbararealso significant of this process of ascension. As a general rule steps are of odd numbers: 3, 7, 9, and 11. Muslim mysticism speaks of three levels and states that the initiate must attain in order to be united with Al-Haqq, the Truth or Allah: the level of purification, then of illumination, and finally Unity. The tradition of the three steps respects the practice of the Prophet (saws). Manabir with 11 steps, 1 4 The Mufâkhirah carried the meaning of spurring the populace to war. The Qurayshî tribes practiced it with fervour, boasting of their honour, nobility and power through poems. The main objective of this almost ritual practice was collective exaltation. See Encyclopédie de l’Islam, vol. VIII, pp. 311-312. 100 14 fairly rare, remain faithful to the notion of rupture and of passage. Ten steps open up a new way to the 11th which is the “passage”. The three, seven or nine steps are an expression of totality, of achievement. These latter numbers have ritual value, and they therefore symbolise the crowning of efforts and a tendency towards “the final Truth.” Seven and nine express the celestial spheres or the seven or nine heavens, through which it is necessary to cross in order to reach Divine light. Once the seven steps are crossed, one arrives at the eighth level which is that of equilibrium and justice. Eight stepsare rarelyusedin manabir. Other meanings found in Islamic esoterism concerning the numbers 7 and 9 are the seven or nine senses or subtle centres of man (the seven intelligences) which allow ascension towards Heaven. In other words, the seven spiritual states exist in a hierarchy that makes possible the passage from earth to Heaven.15 The supreme function of the minbar, therefore, is to be a bond and an intermediary between earth and Heaven. The minbar provides elevation for the word or promise of Paradise, of pardon, and of love of God. The elevation isfurnishedby stepswhichare symbolicintheirnumber. This function, accomplished by a piece of ritual furniture, is accomplished by a man who is central in Muslim liturgy, the khatîb and/or the imam. It is worth noting that the khatîb only ascends as far as the middle step on the minbar, not to the top, and always remains standing as he preaches as an act of devotion and submission to the Prophet (saws).16 The Khutba The khutba then became a religious rite for Fridays, the feast of Al Fitr (marking the end of the sacred month of Ramadan) and the feast of Al Adha, (the feast of the sacrifice) a khutba is also usually given at the time of a koussouf (eclipse) and for the prayer of alistikssa (prayer for rain). However, when necessary, the khutba often remained linked to politics. The decrees and the great political decisions, until a late date, took effect following their pronouncement from the top of the minbar. The khutba was normally restricted to the ceremonial occasion of the 15 The 7 circumambulations or the 7 ritual gestures appear often in Islamic liturgy: 7 circumambulations of the Kaa’ba, the 7 visits or Ziyârât of a saint, etc. 16 From a photographic display accompanying the Kutubiyya minbar in Marrakesh (translator’s addition). 14 101 1 7 18 19 20 Al Djahiz, Al Bayân wa Tâbi‘în, Librairie Nouvelle, Beirut, Volume I, 1968, p. 58 Ibid. Ibid. White used in vestments is part of Islamic tradition of sacred rites and space. The white worn on the pilgrimage is symbolic of purity and a return to primordiality. Friday prayer but its ritual always remained the same. In pronouncing the khutba, or sermon, the khatîb has retained his main symbolic accessories, which, in addition to the minbar includes the ceremonial baton. These are honorific accessories, symbols of power and authority. The common features of these two objects – Al ‘Uudan – the sceptre and the minbar, are wood and verticality. In response to the mockery that the Persians made about the use of the sceptre, Al Djahiz17 mentions the qualities marking the nobility of wood and of the use of sceptre. He also mentions the symbolism of power and strength. Honorific Accessories of the Khatib and his Khutba The wooden sword and the sceptre, or the baton, have since Roman times, been a sign of authority and of divine justice. The sceptre is also a symbol of pure verticality. Thus, the sceptre of the khatîb should not contain any defect (Al Djahiz). The verticality of the sceptre or of the woodenswordisalsolinkedtothe symbolismofpower. Itfitswiththe elevation of the minbar, because “elevation and power are in effect synonyms.”18 Another element can be added to these attributes, which Al Djahiz calls “the mechanism of the word”19 or the voice. The raised voice of the preacher preaches and proclaims the “word” of God and of divine justice. The ritual of the khutba is not complete without the respect given to the khatîb’s dress. According to Al Ghazali, the clothes of the khatîb should be white. White20 is another sign of purity, of transparence and of light. These various elements making up the ritual and its meaning are also a source of authority and of sovereignty for the khatîb. Does one not touch the clothing of the khatîb in search of baraka (spiritual radiance)? The khatîb who climbs up the minbar in a white robe, holding the baton in his right hand, crosses a sacred space par excellence and pronounces a stirring religious sermon. A khutba that does not begin with gratitude towards God or tahmid is, for the ancient khutaba’, an “amputated” or mutilated (batra) sermon. A sermon without Koranic 102 14 verses and without a reminder of the Prophet (saws) is considered “ugly” or “hideous”.21 The Islamic khutba, therefore, is a ritual of prayer and of worship of God. The Friday prayer assembling a large number of the faithful and celebrated in all the mosques expresses this love and the begging of forgiveness on the part of the believers. This bursting out of faith is expressed in noble and sacred words, the communion of the faithful, andtheir communicationwiththeAlmighty. Onlytheminbar,soaring toward Heaven, is capable of conveying this “mystical” and metaphysical aspiration of Muslims in the name of the khatib, the perpetual servant of God. It is also for all these reasons that the minbar has always been the subjectof special veneration. Doesonenotcaressthe minbarinpursuit of baraka, spiritual radiance? Women sometimes hang small pieces of cloth on the back of the minbar as supports for personal prayer, to take advantage of this baraka. It is therefore not surprising that the minbar has preserved its primordial place in Islamic liturgy and in the sacred space of the mosque. The great sanctity of the minbar is drawn from this sacred centre, which is the mosque. Within the sanctuary of the mosque, the supreme function of the minbar is the ascension towards the Almighty. The Sublime Minbar of the Kutubiyya Mosque in Marrakesh Beginning in the lifetime of the Prophet Mohammed (saws) the minbar becameafundamentalpart ofthe sacredspaceofthemosque. Muslims throughout the ages have spared no effort and exploited the utmost creativity to embellish their manabir. One of the most exquisite examples of this piece of liturgical furniture is the minbar of the Kutubiyya Mosque in Marrakesh. This magnificent piece is considered one of the most accomplished works of Islamic art. In all its splendour and decorative beauty, this famous minbar reflects the apogee of the power of the Almoravid andAlmohad dynasties,aswellastheir religiousfervour. Both dynasties devoted themselves to the defence of religion as a noble duty andasa solidbasis oftheirreligiouspower. TheminbaroftheKutubiyya mosque is a prime example of the ascending and lofty symbol proclaim- 2 1 Al Djahiz, Al Bayân wa Tibyin, Librairie Nouvelle, Beirut. 14 103 ing great faith in God.22 In addition to its decoration, which continually draws the viewer inward, the great peculiarity of this minbar is the probable rare and ingenious mechanism which accompanied it. This wooden masterpiece was built by an Andalusian builder in Cordoba named Al-Hajj Ya’is between approximately 1139 and 1142 CE. It was commissioned and constructed during the reign of Ali ibn Yousef ibn Tasfin (reigned 1106-1143) during the Almoravid dynasty, and was meant for the Sultan Ali’s mosque in the capital of the empire. When completed, the minbar was shipped in parts to Marrakesh and assembled for theSultan’s mosque. However,ashorttimelater,in1147,‘AbdAlMu’min defeated the Almoravids and conquered Marrakesh and immediately built a new mosque, the present Kutubiyya, on the site of Ali’s palace. The minbar was moved into this mosque and was used for eight centuries until it was removed for restoration in the mid 1990s. Besides its rich decoration, the other striking feature of this piece was that it functioned mechanically like the maqsoura (wall separating the sultan from the congregation) and the Qur’an stand in the same mosque. This elevated seat is a remarkable witness to the mastery of mobile mechanisms of the 12th century. The minbar, standing on wooden wheels, silently and automatically slid from its lodge to the prayer room. This was done at the same time as the walls of the maqsoura rose from the floor by means of the same mechanical system.23 A system of counterweights and ropes, hidden in a depression located in front of the door of the closet where the minbar was kept, were used. This industrious and flexible mechanism incited awe in the faithful and drew the attention of the great historians and poets. Describing the maqsoura, Abu Bakr b. Mujbar al-Himyari al-Fihri, said: It surrounds those who are in its centre Like a wall amongst the walls, And at the same time it escapes their looks Like a secret among secrets24 22 “Within the mosque, the pulpit may be considered as an extension of the minaret...in virtue of its elevation and because it is the domain of truth.” (Lings, Martin, Symbol and Archetype: A Study of the Meaning of Existence, QuintaEssentia, 1991, pp. 123-124) (translator’s addition). 23 “It was done with a system of cables, pulleys and tambourines, lifted by a counter weight” Deverdun, G. Marrakech des Origines à 1912, pp. 176-177 24 Excerpt from the Hulal and Mouchia, Meunié J. and Terass, H., Recherches archéologiques à Marrakesh, 1952 p. 47 104 14 The dimensionsoftheminbarofthe Kutubiyyaarealsoimpressive. It measures 3.86 metres high, is .87 metres wide and 3.46 metres deep, and is among the highest of the manabir, if not the highest. It is also the minbar which brings together the most sophisticated and varied of decorative techniques known in the Muslim world. This HispanoMoorish pulpit exhibits the peak of Arab-Muslim ornamentation. It integrates techniques of ivory inlay work and precious woods, of floral mosaic inlayworkandsculpted calligraphic decoration. Theinlaywork of red and yellow sandal-wood, of ebony, of ivory, and of aloe, accentuates its splendour. A chronicler of the Almoravid and Almohad dynasties described this sublime piece as “a monumental minbar...of perfect accomplishment.”25 In addition to its aesthetic and decorative value, the calligraphy has a verystrongritualvalue. InIslamictradition,varioustextsandwritingare usually inscribed into manabir, on the walls of the mosque and on the mihrâb, three sacred spaces/objects which express the spiritual functions of the minbar and their relation to the sacred space of the mosque. The minbar, a sacred ladder, placed in the sacred centre, is a symbolical meansbywhichpraiseandprayerreachtoHeaven. Thejustwordrises to Heaven by the degrees of the minbar just as the souls of the righteous will be raised up on a celestial ladder under the gaze of the Prophet Mohammed (saws). Sacred words reach beyond this world. The various formulae of prayer are inscribed on the minbar through faith in the value of the sacred word and the spiritual height symbolised by liturgical furni- ture. The minbar of the Kutubiyya mosque is no exception to this tradi- tion. TheprayersandversesfromtheQur’anengravedontothispieceof liturgical furniture summarise the sacredness and the solemnity of this majestic pulpit: 2 5 Lo! Your Lord is Allah Who created the heavens and the earth in six Days, then mounted He theThrone. Hecovereththenightandtheday,whichisinhastetofollowit,andhathmade thesunandthemoonandthestarssubservientbyHiscommand. Hisverilyisallcreation andcommandment. BlessedbeAllah,theLordoftheWorlds! (Qur’an 7:54 – “The Heights”) From the pictoral history of the Kutubiyya minbar on display in the Badia’ Palace, Marrakesh (translator’s note). 14 105 Allah!ThereisoGodsaveHim,theAlive,theEternal. Neitherslumbernorsleepovertaketh Him. UntoHimbelongethwhatsoeverisintheheavensandwhatsoeverisintheearth. Whoishethat intercedeth withHimsaveby Hisleave? He knoweth thatwhichisfrontof them and that which is behind them, while they encompass nothing of His knowledge save whatHewill. His Throne includeththeheavensandtheearth,andHeis never wearyof preserving them. He is the Sublime, the Tremendous. (Qur’an 2:255 – “The Throne Verse” in “The Cow”)26 An inscription on top of the back rest reads: “This minbar was made in the city of Cordoba, may God protect it, for this venerated congregational mosque, may God make it endure with the world of Islam.”27 The minbar has been beautifully restored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Ministry of Cultural Affairs of Morocco, thankstoagrantofferedbyMs.PattiCadbyBirch. Theoriginalminbar, with an accompanying photographic exhibition and history, is on display in the Badia’ Palace in Marrakesh. 2 6 2 7 Detail of the minbar from the Kutubiyya Mosque in Marrakesh. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall translation of the Qur’an, Festival of Islam publication, London, 1976 (translator’s addition). Taken from photographic display of the restoration process of the minbar in the Badia’ Palace, Marrakesh (translator’s addition). 106 14 Bibliography Al Djahiz, Al Bayan wa Tabyin, Beirut, 1968 (3 volumes) Chevalier, J., Gheerbrant, A. Dictionnaire des Symboles, Paris 1982 Deverdun, G. Marrakech des origins à 1912, vol. 1, Rabat 1952 Durand, G. Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire, Paris 1984 Eliade, M., Images et symbols, Paris 1980 Eliade, M., Le Mythe de l’éternel retour, Paris, 1969 Eliade, M., Traité d’histoire des religions, Paris 1975 Leiden,E.,Brill,J.,Encyclopédiedel’Islam,t.IV,VII,Paris1983 Mélanges d’histoire et d’archéologie de l’Occcident musulman. Hommage à G. Marçais, t. I, Alger, 1957 Meunié, J., Terrasse, H., Recherches archéologiques à Marrakech, Paris 1952 Sauvaget, J. “Le minbar de la koutoubia de Marrakech”, dans Hespéris, 3ème-4ème tr. 1949, pp. 313 – 319 Translator’s Bibliography Lings, Martin, Symbol and Archetype: A Study of the Meaning of Existence, QuintEssentia, Cambridge, U.K., 1991 Waly, Tarek, In Quest of the Path: To “The One” in Mosque Architecture, Beit Al Quran Publiations, Bahrain, 1993 Guénon, René, Fundamental Symbols, The Universal Language of Sacred Science, QuintaEssentia, Cambridge, UK, 1995
- [Elephant Hunting Song (Mbuti)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/elephant-hunting-song-mbuti) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection This complex polyphony by the pygmies of the Ituri forest (Democratic Republic of the Congo) is an appeal to “Mother” and “Father” Forest, which responds by enabling contact with the Spirit-world, thus granting success to its children in the Elephant hunt. The Mbuti nomads, as Pygmy peoples
- [Haka of Wairangi (Maori)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/haka-of-wairangi-maori) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection The haka is chanted before a battle not only to frighten the enemy but to make the performer himself more fearless. The final portion of a haka composed by one of the most famous fighting chieftains, triumphant after eluding his enemies, is heard at every Maori gathering:
- [Huachipaire Eshuva Prayer (Peru)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/huachipaire-eshuva-prayers) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection The Huachipaire are an indigenous group speaking the Harakmbut language and living in Peru's southern Amazon tropical forest. The Eshuva songs are learned directly from the forest’s animals, and are sung to summon nature spirits to help to alleviate illness or promote well-being. These chants are “like
- [Grinding Song (Benin)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/grinding-song-benin) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection Millet flour mixed with water is in Fur language called “bora fatta” (“milk white”, i.e. mother’s milk) and is used as a blessing on several ritual occasions like circumcision, rain rituals, war rituals, treatment of diseases, weddings. The Sanskrit name of the pestle is vajra, meaning also
- [This World Is Very Alive (Apache Song)](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/this-world-is-very-alive-apache) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection Performed by Philip Cassadore, this is a song of Silas John, much revered Apache elder and seer, who taught it to Philip's father, Chief Broken Arrow, many years ago. Its words refer to the planet earth spinning about the sun, but has a symbolic meaning of all
- [The Kiowa Story of the Flute](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/the-kiowa-story-of-the-flute) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection Belo Cozad (1864–1950), a legendary Kiowa flute player, explains in this recording (before the section presented here) how the wooden flute song that he plays was obtained from an ancestor who learned it from a spirit. The Kiowa are reputed to be the bravest, most courageous and
- [Divine Pedagogy as Skilful Means: Theological Pluralism in the Early Church](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/divine-pedagogy) - Damien Casey This article explores possible Christian theological contexts for the Buddhist notion of upaya (skilful means), looking for analogues and thus going to “the heart of the matter of religion itself”. Click here to view the PDF Originally published in the Patristica, journal of the Japanese Society for Patristic Studies Supplementary Volume 3 (2011).
- [<em>Majma‘ al-Bahrayn</em> by Dara Shikoh](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/majma-al-bahrayn) - Dara Shikoh (1615-1659) This work by Prince Dara Shikoh is one of the earliest to explicitly try to make sense of the diversity of religions by plumbing their depths. Its author, a Sufi Muslim prince, derived much instruction on the Upanishads directly from Hindu sages, ultimately referring to this latter work as “an ocean of
- [<em>Kalam Allah</em> in Islam and in Christianity](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/kalam-allah) - Joseph L. Cumming A working paper elucidating the key Arabic expression kalam Allah, considering its Semitic parentage and the implications for our understanding of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation of the logos (Verbum caro). So the Gospel asserts that God’s kalam became manifest to us as flesh (tajalla lana basharan)—i.e. that God revealed himself
- [Concerning Prayer: A Platonic Perspective](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/concerning-prayer) - Concerning Prayer Proclus, Iamblichus and Hierocles “All who in the least degree participate of temperance always invoke divinity in the impulse to every undertaking, whether it be small or great.” I. All beings are the progeny of the Gods, by whom they are produced without a medium, and in whom they are firmly established. For the progression of things which perpetually subsist, and cohere from permanent causes, is not alone perfected by a certain continuation, but immediately subsists from the Gods, from whence all things are generated, however distant they may be from the divinities. And this is no less true, even though asserted of matter itself. For a divine nature is not absent from any thing, but is equally present to all things. Hence though you should assume the last of beings, in these also you will find divinity. For The One is every where; and in consequence of its absolute dominion, every thing receives its nature and coherence from the Gods. As all things however proceed, so likewise, they are not separated from the Gods, but radically abide in them, as the causes and sustainers of their existence. For where can they recede, since the Gods primarily comprehend all things in their embrace? For whatever is placed as separate from the Gods has not any kind of subsistence. But all beings are contained by the Gods and reside in their natures, after the manner of a circular comprehension. Hence, by a wonderful mode of subsistence, all things proceed, and yet are not, nor indeed can be separated from the Gods; because all offspring when torn from their parents, immediately recur to the immense vastness of non-entity. But in a certain respect they are established in them; and in short, proceed in themselves, but abide in the Gods. Since however, having proceeded, it is requisite that they should be converted and return, imitating the evolution into light, and conversion of the Gods to their cause, in order that these being arranged conformably to the perfective triad, may again be contained by the Gods and the first unities, - hence they receive from them a certain secondary perfection, by which they may be able to convert themselves to the goodness of the divinities, in order that being at first rooted in, they may again through conversion be established in them, forming a certain circle, which originates from and terminates in the Gods. 1 All things therefore, both abide in, and convert themselves to the Gods, receiving this power from the divinities, together with twofold impressions according to essence; the one, that they may abide there, but the other that, having proceeded, they may convert themselves [to their causes]. And these things we may survey not only in souls, but also in inanimate natures. For what else ingenerates in these a sympathy with other powers, but the symbols which they are allotted by nature, some of which are allied to this, but others to that series of Gods? For nature being supernally suspended from the Gods, and distributed from their orders, inserts also in bodies impressions of their alliance to the divinities. In some indeed, inserting solar, but in others lunar impressions, and in others again, the symbol of some other God. And these indeed, convert themselves to the Gods; some, as to the Gods simply, but others as to particular Gods; nature thus perfecting her progeny according to different peculiarities of the divinities. The Demiurgus of the universe therefore, by a much greater priority, impressed these symbols in souls, by which they might be able to abide in themselves, and again convert themselves to the sources of their being. And through the symbol of unity indeed he conferred on them stability; but through intellect, he imparted to them the power of conversion. But to this conversion prayer is of the greatest utility. For it attracts to itself the beneficence of the Gods, through those ineffable symbols which the father of souls has disseminated in them.1 It likewise unites those who pray with those to whom prayer is addressed; conjoins the intellect of the Gods with the words of those who pray; excites the will of those who perfectly comprehend good to the abundant communication of it; is the fabricator of divine persuasion; and establishes in the Gods all that we possess. To a perfect and true prayer however, there is required in the first place, a knowledge of all the divine orders to which he who prays approaches. For no one will accede to the Gods in a proper manner, unless he has a knowledge of their peculiarities. Hence also the oracle admonishes, that a fire-heated conception has the first order in sacred worship.2 But in the second place, there is required a conformation of our life with that which is divine; and this accompanied with all purity, chastity, discipline, and order, through which our concerns being introduced to the Gods, we shall attract their beneficence, and our souls will become subject to them. 1 Chald. Oracl. 95 2 Chald. Oracl. 139 ?2 In the third place, contact is necessary, according to which we touch the divine essence with the summit of our soul, and verge to a union with it. But there is yet farther required, an approximating adhesion: for thus the oracle calls it, when he says, the mortal approximating to fire will possess a light from the Gods.3 For this imparts to us a greater communion with, and a more manifest participation of the light of the Gods. In the last place, union succeeds establishing the one of the soul in The One of the Gods, and causing our energy to become one with divine energy; according to which we are no longer ourselves, but are absorbed as it were in the Gods, abiding in divine light, and circularly comprehended by it. And this is the best end of true prayer, in order that the conversion of the soul may be conjoined with its permanency, and that every thing which proceeds from The One of the Gods, may again be established in The One, and the light which is in us may be comprehended in the light of the Gods. Prayer therefore, is no small part of the whole ascent of souls. Nor is he who possesses virtue superior to the want of the good which proceeds from prayer; but on the contrary the ascent of the soul is effected through it, and together with this, piety to the Gods, which is the summit of virtue. Nor in short, ought any other to pray than he who is transcendently good, as the Athenian guest [in Plato] says. For to such a one, converse with the Gods becomes most efficacious to the attainment of a happy life. But the contrary is naturally adapted to befall the vicious.4 For it is not lawful for the pure to be touched by the impure.5 Hence, it is necessary that he who generously enters on the exercise of prayer, should render the Gods propitious to him, and should excite in himself conceptions full of intellectual light. For the favor and benignity of more exalted beings, is the most effectual incentive to their communication with our natures. And it is requisite to continue without intermission in the worship of divinity. For [according to the oracle] the rapid6 Gods perfect the mortal constantly employed in prayer.7 It is also necessary to observe a stable order in the performance of divine works; to exert those virtues which purify and elevate the soul from 3 § Chald. Oracl. 121, 126 4 cf. Laws IV, 716d. 5 cf. Phædo 67b. 6 i.e. The intelligible Gods. 7 Chald. Oracl. fr. 140. ?3 generation, together with faith, truth, and love;8 to preserve this triad and hope of good, this immutable reception of divine light, and segregation from every other pursuit, that thus becoming alone, we may associate with solitary deity, and not endeavour to conjoin ourselves with multitude to The One. For he who attempts this, effects the very contrary, and separates himself from the Gods. For as it is not lawful in conjunction with non-entity to associate with being; so neither is it possible with multitude to be conjoined with The One. Such therefore are the particulars which ought first to be known concerning prayer; viz. that the essence of it congregates and binds souls to the Gods, or rather, that it unites all secondary to primary natures. For as the great Theodorus says, all things pray except the FIRST. The perfection however of prayer, beginning from more common goods, ends in divine union, and gradually accustoms the soul to divine light. But its efficacious energy both replenishes us with good, and causes our concerns to be common with those of the Gods. With respect to the causes of prayer too, we may infer, that so far as they are effective, they are the efficacious powers of the Gods, converting and calling upwards the soul to the Gods themselves. But that so far as they are final or perfective, they are the immaculate goods of the soul, which they derive as the fruits of being established in the Gods. That so far also as they are paradigmatical, they are the primordial causes of beings, which proceed from The Good, and are united to it, according to one ineffable union. But that so far as they are formal, they assimilate souls to the Gods, and give perfection to the whole of their life. And that so far as they are material, they are the impressions or symbols inserted by the Demiurgus in the essences of souls, in order that they may be excited to a reminiscence of the Gods who produced them, and whatever else exists. Moreover, we may likewise define the modes of prayer which are various, according to the genera and species of the Gods. For prayer is either demiurgic, or cathartic, or vivific. And the demiurgic is such as that which is offered for the sake of showers and winds. For the demiurgi are the causes of the generation of these. And the prayers of the Athenians for winds procuring serenity of weather are addressed to these Gods. But the cathartic prayer is that which is offered for the purpose of averting diseases originating from pestilence, and other contagious distempers; such as we have written in our temples. And the vivific prayer is that with which we worship the Gods, who are the causes of vivification, on account of the origin and maturity of fruits. ?8 Chald. Oracl. fr. 46 4 Hence prayers are of a perfective nature, because they elevate us to these orders of the Gods. And he who considers such prayers in a different manner, fails in properly apprehending the nature and efficacy of prayer. But again, with reference to the things for which we pray; those prayers, which regard the salvation of the soul; obtain the first place; those which pertain to the good temperament of the body, the second; and those rank in the third place, which are offered for the sake of external concerns. And lastly, with respect to the division of the times in which we offer up prayers, it is either according to the seasons of the year, or the centres of the solar revolution; or we establish multiform prayers according to other such-like conceptions. *** II. Prayers are not to be directed to the Gods, as if they were passive, and could be moved by supplications: for the divine irradiation which takes place through the exercise of prayer, operates spontaneously, and is far remote from all material attraction; since it becomes apparent through divine energy and perfection; and as much excels the voluntary motion of our nature, as the divine will of The Good surpasses our election. Through this volition, the Gods, who are perfectly benevolent and merciful, pour their light without any parsimony on the supplicating priests, whose souls they call upwards to their own divine natures; impart to them a union with themselves, and accustom their souls, even while bound in body, to separate themselves from its dark embrace, and to be led back by an ineffable energy to their eternal and intelligible original. Indeed it is evident that the safety of the soul depends on such divine operations. For while the soul contemplates divine visions, it acquires another life, employs a different energy, and may be considered, with the greatest propriety, as no longer ranking in the order of man. For it often lays aside its own proper life, and changes it for the most blessed energy of the Gods. But if an ascent to the Gods, through the ministry of prayer, confers on the priests purity from passion, freedom from the bonds of generation, and a union with a divine principle, how can there be any thing passive in the efficacy of prayer? For invocation does not draw down the pure and impassive Gods to us who are passive and impure; but, on the contrary, renders us who are become through generation impure and passive, immutable and pure. But neither do invocations conjoin, through passion, the priests with the Divinities, but afford an indissoluble communion of connection, through that 5 friendship which binds all things in union and consent. Nor do invocations incline the intellect of the Gods towards men, as the term seems to imply; but, according to the decisions of truth, they render the will of men properly disposed to receive the participations of the Gods; leading it upwards, and connecting it with the Divinities by the sweetest and most alluring persuasion. And on this account the sacred names of the Gods, and other divine symbols, from their anagogic nature, are able to connect invocations with the Gods themselves. That which in our nature is divine, intellectual, and one, or (as you may be willing to call it) intelligible, is perfectly excited by prayer from its dormant state; and when excited, vehemently seeks that which is similar to itself, and becomes copulated to its own perfection. But if it should seem incredible that incorporeal natures can be capable of hearing sounds, and it is urged, that for this purpose the sense of hearing is requisite, that they may understand our supplications; such objectors are unacquainted with the excellency of primary causes, which consists in both knowing and comprehending in themselves at once the universality of things. The Gods, therefore, do not receive prayers in themselves through any corporeal powers or organs, but rather contain in themselves the effects of pious invocations; and especially of such as though sacred cultivation are consecrated and united to the Gods: for, in this case, a divine nature is evidently present with itself, and does not apprehend the conceptions of prayers as different from its own. Nor are supplications to be considered as foreign from the purity of intellect: but since the Gods excel us both in power, purity, and all other advantages, we shall act in the most opportune manner, by invoking them with the most vehement supplications. For a consciousness of our own nothingness, when we compare ourselves with the Gods, naturally leads us to the exercise of prayer. But through the benefits resulting from supplication we are in a short time brought back to the object of supplication; acquire its similitude from intimate converse; and gradually obtain divine perfection, instead of our own imbecility and imperfection. Indeed he who considers, that sacred prayers are sent to men from the Gods themselves; that they are certain symbols of the divine natures; and that they are only known to the Gods, with whom in a certain respect they possess an equal power; I say, he who considers all this, cannot any longer believe that supplications are of a sensible nature, and that they are not very justly 6 esteemed intellectual and divine: and must acknowledge it to be impossible that any passion should belong to things the purity of which the most worthy manners of men cannot easily equal. Nor ought we to be disturbed by the objection which urges, that material things are frequently offered in supplications; and this as if the Gods possessed a sensitive and animal nature. For, indeed, if the offering consisted solely of corporeal and composite powers, and such as are only accommodated to organical purposes, the objection would have some weight: but since they participate of incorporeal forms, certain proportions, and more simple measures; in this alone the correspondence and connection of offerings with the Gods ought to be regarded. For, whenever any affinity of similitude is present, whether greater or less, it is sufficient to the connection of which we are now discoursing: since there is nothing which approaches to a kindred alliance with the Gods, though in the smallest degree, to which the Gods are not immediately present and united. A connection, therefore, as much as is possible, subsists between prayers and the Gods: at the same time prayers do not regard the Divinities as if they were of a sensitive or animal nature; but they consider them as they are in reality, and according to the divine forms which their essences contain. *** . . . . ???’ ????? ??’ ???ov ??o???v ????????vo? ???????. i.e. "Betake yourself to the work, having implored the Gods to bring it to perfection." III. The verse briefly describes all that contributes to the acquisition of good, viz. the self-moved nature of the soul, and the co-operation of Divinity. For, though the election of things beautiful9 is in our power, yet, as we possess our freedom of the will from Divinity, we are perfectly indigent of his co- operating with and perfecting the things which we have chosen. For our endeavour appears to be similar to a hand extended to the reception of things beautiful; but that which is imparted by Divinity is the supplier and the fountain of the gift of good. And the former, indeed, is naturally adapted 9 By things beautiful, with Platonic writers, every thing excellent and good is included. – Taylor 7 ? to discover things beautiful; but the latter to unfold them to him by whom they are rightly explored. But prayer is the medium between two boundaries, viz. between investigation by us, and that which is imparted by Divinity, properly adhering to the cause which leads us into existence, and perfects us in well- being. For how can any one receive well-being unless Divinity imparts it? And how can Divinity, who is naturally adapted to give, give to him who does not ask, though his impulses arise from the freedom of his will? That we may not, therefore, pray only in words, but may also corroborate this by deeds; and that we may not confide only in our own energy, but may also beseech Divinity to co-operate with our deeds, and may conjoin prayer to action, as form to matter; and, in short, that we may pray for what we do, and do that for which we pray, the verse conjoining these two, says, "Betake yourself to the work, having implored the Gods to bring it to perfection." For neither is it proper alone to engage with alacrity in beautiful actions, as if it were in our power to perform them with rectitude, without the co- operation of Divinity; nor yet should we be satisfied with the words of mere prayer while we contribute nothing to the acquisition of the things which we request. For thus we shall either pursue atheistical virtue (if I may be allowed so to speak) or unenergetic prayer; of which the former, being deprived of Divinity, takes away the essence of virtue; and the latter, being sluggish, dissolves the efficacy of prayer. For how can any thing be beautiful which is not performed according to the divine rule? And how is it possible that what is done according to this should not entirely require the co-operation of Divinity to its subsistence? For virtue is the image of Divinity in the rational soul; but every image requires its paradigm, in order to its generation, nor is that which it possesses sufficient, unless it looks to that from the similitude to which it possesses the beautiful. It is proper, therefore, that those should pray who hasten to energetic virtue, and having prayed, that they should endeavour to possess it. It is likewise requisite that they should do this, looking to that which is divine and splendid, and should extend themselves to philosophy, adhering at the same time in a becoming manner to the first cause of good. For that tetractys,10 the fountain of perennial nature, is not only the eternal cause of being to all things, but likewise of well-being, expanding proper good through the whole world, like undecaying and intellectual light. 10 This tetractys which is the same as the Phanes of Orpheus, and the ???o??ov, or animal itself, of Plato, first subsists at the extremity of the intelligible order, and is thence participated by Jupiter, the fabricator of the universe. See the Introduction to the Timæus. - Taylor. ?8 But the soul, when she properly adheres to this light, and purifies herself like an eye to acuteness of vision, by an attention to things beautiful, is excited to prayer; and again, from the plenitude of prayer she extends her endeavours, conjoining actions to words, and by divine conferences giving stability to worthy deeds. And discovering some things, and being illuminated in others, she endeavours to effect what she prays for, and prays for that which she endeavours to effect. And such indeed is the union of endeavour and prayer. *** I. Proclus, Commentary on The Timaeus of Plato, II, 64D-66A (1, 209-212) II. Iamblichus, On the Mysteries, I, xii & xv, 46 ff. III.Hierocles, Commentary on The Golden Verses, XXI, Translated, with notes, by Thomas Taylor
- [Acceptance as a Door of Mercy: <em>Rida</em> in Islamic Spirituality](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/acceptance-rida) - “Allah tasketh not a soul beyond its scope. (L? yukallifu All?h nafsan ill? wus?ah?) For it (is only) that which it hath earned, and against it (only) that which it hath deserved. Our Lord! Condemn us not if we forget, or miss the mark! Our Lord! Lay not on us such a burden as thou didst lay on those before us! Our Lord! Impose not on us that which we have not the strength to bear! Pardon us, absolve us and have mercy on us, Thou, our Protector, and give us victory over the disbelieving folk.” (2:286, trans. Pickthall) The Qur’?n teaches its readers that God does not impose upon the soul what is beyond its “capacity” or its “breadth” or “scope” (wus?ah?). This is prima facie an enigmatic statement when considering how human beings have often been unable, throughout history, to sustain the blows of fate in keeping with a sense of faith. The hardships of existence have made many, especially in the modern world, feel overburdened with the weight of life and its trials, or overwhelmed by the power of inner and outer adversities, to the point of calling into question the very reality of God. Whereas many traditional religious paths tended to consider those hardships as either intrinsic concomitances of cosmic existence, or testing grounds for higher realms, contemporary mankind, since the advent of modernity, has rather taken the position that they constitute a primary stumbling block in any theodicy. Voltaire’s “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster”, in which the French philosopher takes the 1755 Lisbon earthquake as a major objection to the justice and goodness of the Supreme Being is, in this respect, a most eloquent case in point. The term wus?ah?, which could literally be translated by “her width” derives from the same Arabic root as that of the Divine Name al-W?si?, the Abundant, the One Whose Capacity is Without Limits, the All-Encompassing. Several verses from the Qur’?n include derivations from this same root, among which “My Mercy encompasses (wasi?at) all things” (7:156) and “He encompasses (wasi?a) everything in His knowledge” (20:98). As mentioned by Ghaz?l?1 in his commentary of the Divine Names, we might see that, although the name al-W?si? remains the prerogative of God, mankind is not unable 1In his commentary on the ninety-nine Names of God, al-Ghaz?l? makes the point that al-W?si? is the Infinite that knows no bounds: “If one were to contemplate His beneficence and blessings, (one would know that) there is no limit to His object-of-power.” Even though the Name al-W?si? can only be attributed to God in truth, it can be said of man, according to Ghaz?l?, that “if his knowledge is extensive, then he is a w?si? in proportion to the capacity of his knowledge; and if his character has expanded to the point that the fear of poverty, the irritation of those about him who are envious, the victory of greed and other attributes of this nature do not harass him, then he is a w?si? (in both knowledge and character), even though all of that has its limitation.” Ninety-nine Names of God in Islam, A translation of the major portion of Al-Ghaz?l?’s al-Maqsad al-Asn?, Robert Charles Stade (Daystar Press, Ibadan, Nigeria: 1970) p. 88. to deserve the predicate of w?si? inasmuch as it has the ability to open itself to the Divine vastness. Along the same lines, another verse from the Qur’?n connects God’s consideration of the wus’a of man with the Book of Destiny—kit?b, in asserting that no human will be wronged by it (23:62). Here again, the proportionality between human capacity and Divine decree is clearly asserted, and cuts short any attempt at “accusing” God of injustice, as it were. Considering this Quranic emphasis on the just proportion between Divine existentiation and human scope, it may come as a surprise that the Qur’?n adds the prayer “Our Lord do not bring upon us what we do not have the power to bear.” Does not the need for such a prayer contradict the very principle that has been asserted above? This imploration becomes quite intelligible, however, when considering the gap between the metaphysical and spiritual principle enunciated by the Qur’?n and the moral maturity or self-understanding of the soul. In other words, although the soul knows, theoretically, that God cannot overburden it, practically it must pray to Him that He would not do so. This invocation opens the channels of grace and inner relief by contact with the source of All-Powerfulness. Prayer is, in that sense, less a request than a means of realization through the request. It amounts to coming to realize concretely that one has indeed the capacity to bear with what He has sent upon one, a capacity that is, it must be noted, ultimately none but His, since it coincides with His Wisdom and Foreknowledge. In other words, it is through what God imposes upon it that the soul comes to know its real capacity in God and only in God, by contrast with what it imagined its own wus’a to be for lack of self-knowledge. Thus, the rigor of destiny is a way through which one’s limited awareness of God and oneself in God, as it were, is deepened and expanded. The Qur’?n, by taking the form of a prayer, teaches human beings a way to realize how much more they are when they turn to God, and “die” to themselves in Him, than in their ordinary and self-reliant ego. This realization does not come without suffering, however, because it draws the soul—sometimes abruptly and violently, away from its usual, natural self-satisfaction in order to open it up to a wider and deeper region of satisfaction that it was a priori reticent to embrace. In the Quranic view of reality, this process is as rigorous as death, but its full and sincere acceptance is a central door to Mercy. Few would deny that today’s world is rife with tensions and conflicts, and therefore in dire need of acceptance and mercy. No doubt, conflicts have rarely, if ever, been absent from human history, but the last decades have impressed upon most observers a sense of moral urgency in the face of violent ethnic and ideological clashes and acute forms of polarization that are not without evoking the climate of dissolution associated by René Guénon with what he conceived as the final stages of a process of civilizational entropy.2 It is not difficult to read in this explosive dissolution the sure sign that what may have remained of a sense of unity and harmony has been broken, and that some measure of ontological reconciliation has to be brought back to the fore if mankind is to heal and flourish. One of the theses of this essay is that religion could be defined as a potential response to this tragic predicament in so far as it is fully understood as a program and a practice of acceptance of reality and other human beings through 2Cf. The Crisis of the Modern World (Sophia Perennis: 2004) was first published in 1927, and The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times (Sophia Perennis: 2004) in 1945. surrender to the Divine. In fact, there is no axial religion3 that does not start from the premise that “something is rotten in the Kingdom of Denmark,” to make use of Hamlet’s suggestive expression: mankind has lost its connection with the Principle of its being and disharmony has ensued. This state of affairs, that religion aims at remedying, may be deemed to result from a sense of radical “otherness”, of separation between I and God, I and others, I and nature, symbolized, in the Bible, by the loss of the blissful proximity and unity of terrestrial paradise. In this essay, we propose to show that the concept of ri??, or acceptance, particularly as it has been conceptualized and practiced in Islam and Sufism, can be considered as both the means and the end of our recognition of God and other human beings in so far as it amounts to a profound acceptance of “other-than-ourselves” and “other-than-our-will.” As Frederick Mathewson Denny put it in his Introduction to Islam: “All true religion is ‘surrender’ to God and, thus, Islam in the generic sense.”4 Within the religious fold of Islam, Sufism is moreover particularly keen on emphasizing the central role of ri?? as a central ethico-spiritual means of verification, assimilation and realization of the metaphysical principles of the creed.5 The Quranic ideas of Divine ri?? and ri?w?n provide both the transcendent model and the infinite foundation of this concept of acceptance: “Allah promiseth to the believers, men and women, Gardens underneath which rivers flow, wherein they will abide—blessed dwellings in Gardens of Eden. And—greater (far)!—acceptance from Allah (ri?w?n). That is the supreme triumph (fawz).” (9:72) The principle that God “accepts” mankind is foundational in Islam, and it is moreover the pre-requisite for any understanding of the meaning of ri?? as a human virtue. The Divine ri?? is, in Islam, a divine “yes” that opens a space of free-will within which humans may choose between “yes” and “no.” For better or for worse our world is particularly prone to make use of the word “no” as a means of affirmation of its progressive and anti-essentialist Weltanschaaung. Indeed, today’s world could be characterized as a “no” to the limitations that are felt to prevent human self-realization. From genetic engineering to interstellar exploration the prospect of modern mankind is to push back the limits of the concept of nature and traditional definitions of humanness. This is why modern mankind tends to be distrustful of the concepts of “reality” and “essence,” or the idea of things “as they are.” Such concepts are deemed to foster passivity, arbitrariness and even oppression. Feminism,6 anti-racism and 3One may refer here to the categories used by John Hick in his An Interpretation of Religion (New Haven and London: 1989). Axial religions, of which Karl Jaspers saw the emergence between the 8th to the 3rd centuries BC, emerged when “significant human individuals appeared through whose insights (...) human awareness was immensely enlarged and developed, and a movement began from archaic religion to the religions of salvation or liberation.” Hick, p. 29. 4Pearson Prentice, 2006, p.58. 5“It can be said that the Sufis were the ones to have developed the assertion that the knowledge of the religion cannot be separated from its spiritual-ethical practice. Their methodology is characterised by practical application (isti?m?l) of the verses of the Quran and the Sunnah. Although other Muslim scholars in other disciplines have touched upon this matter, it was the Sufis who developed a deeper understanding of the various practical ethical and spiritual dimensions of attributes such as repentance (tawbah), piety (wara’), trust (tawakkul) and contentment (ri??).” Ethical Personalism, Cheikh Mbacke Gueye (Ed.), Ontos Verlag, 2011, p. 73. 6“To varying degrees the essentialist hold of biological, psychological and social (to name but three) universals and structures on the construction of identity has been loosened under the influence of poststructuralist critiques and reformulations.” (The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, J. K. Gibson-Graham, First University of Minnesota Press, 2006, p. 24). ? other types of progressive discourses are particularly bent on questioning essentialism, which they associate with conservative or reactionary socio-political stands or premises. Thus, for example, in the context of anti-racist discourse, we read that “while anti- essentialism is a reflexive tendency, an attempt to question taken-for-granted categories and experiences, essentialism leads away from reflexivity; it is a tendency that tries to close down political debate and sustain existing notions and labels.” 7 It could even be said, going a step further, that both modernity and the post-modern condition that has emerged in its wake can be considered as denials that there is a way “things are.” Whether they rejoice in it or not, few people would deny that modernity has been primarily defined as a rejection of tradition conceived as a “static” concept of reality, while striving to substitute for it a “dynamic” one based on becoming and progress. Thus, the Roman Catholic Church itself, heretofore a jealous guardian of a traditional and dogmatic delimitation of the human predicament, came to highlight and applaud, in the Preface of its Pastoral Constitution of the Council Vatican II that “the human race has passed from a rather static concept of reality to a more dynamic, evolutionary one.”8 This statement alludes to the fact that the entrance into modernity, with the advent of the European Renaissance, entailed a substitution of “becoming” for “being:” The 18th-century Enlightenment was in many ways an intensification of this move, and as such paved the way for profound and irreversible political and cultural changes. History replaced truth, or rather has become synonymous with it. Hegelian dialectics and the Marxist materialistic narrative were the two main figures of this promotion of history to the rank of highest criterion of truth and reality, while Darwinian evolutionism provided a scientific hypothesis that has functioned, by and large, as the ideological and imaginary foundation of the modern paradigm. Such founding ideas as individual freedom, democratic empowerment, the pursuit of happiness and ownership over one’s life and destiny have shaped a new concept of humanity that is radically at odds with holistic and pre-modern models.9 There is no stable and definitive concept of reality which would hamper human development and imprison mankind under arbitrary or authoritarian principles of status quo. Post-modern trends have gone a step further in this demolition of “being” by rejecting any definiteness or permanence of meaning. The meaning of things is always postponed, in the making, and there is therefore nothing we can consider as meaningful of the real or the true. Modernity, and all the more so post- modernity, say “no” to “being” in the name of “becoming” understood not as “something that happens to being” but rather as an utter dismissal of being. 10 In other words, being is never present nor given since it is fundamentally negated by “fissure” and “delay.” Not only have we no way to know what is anymore, but in fact nothing is in any definite sense of word. Islam, for its part, has been defined by the Prophet as consisting in ways of acting, the 7Alastair Bonnett, Anti-Racism, Routledge, New York, 2000, p.142. 8Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, promulgated by His Holiness Pope Paul VI on December 7, 1965, article 5. 9For an enlightening analysis of this contrast see, for example, Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective, University of Chicago Press, 1992. 10 Thus, Christoph Cox has characterized Derrida’s différance as “the operation of differing which at one and the same time both fissures and retards presence.” Nietzsche Naturalism and Interpretation (University of California Press: 1999), p. 203. ? first of which being a witnessing of Being, the confession of faith, ash-shah?dah. In the famous ?ad?th of Gabriel11 the very first element in the definition of Islam is the shah?dah. Nothing summarizes Islam more aptly and succinctly than the first shah?dah, “no god but God,” since it encapsulates the central doctrine of Unity, or “unification”, taw??d. Now this unification is neither a negation of the possibility of change nor the repudiation of diversity and becoming as such. In this sense, Islam does not say “no” to becoming as such, but to the erection of becoming into being. In the four words of the first shah?dah, l? il?ha ill’All?h—no divinity except/if not the Divinity, we recognize a negation which is either compounded and radicalized or turned into a conditional affirmation. In the first case, which is the most immediately obvious, the il?ha that stands for any god, any divinity, or any being or idea claiming divine or worshipable status, is negated by the istithn?, the exclusive exception of All?h. There is no true being except God. In addition, another layer of meaning appears as soon as we understand ill? as a literal in-l?, or “if not.” “No real being if not Divine Being” sounds now like a conditional affirmation of creatures on the basis of Divine Being. In other words we derive from the shah?dah both that there is no reality but God and that there is no real being without God. God is the only true Being, al-?aqq, without which, or without whom, no being would be endowed with any reality, nor any meaning. Islam does not separate the meaning of the relative as such from that of the Absolute as such. What it denies is b??il, vanity, insubstantiality, inexistence, nothingness; what it affirms is the Unconditional Being that is the conditio sine qua non of all beings. Islam affirms God, the Absolute, and recognizes everything else within the context of this affirmation. This is another way of saying that God “accepts” creatures to the extent that they are not separated nor isolated from Divine Being, Meaning and Consciousness. Islam is a “yes” underlying a “no” or it is a “no” culminating into a “yes.” In this essay we would like to meditate on the notion and practice of ri?? as one of the most meaningful and representative of Islamic virtues, and as the epitome of the “yes” that Islamic spirituality, as well as—mutatis mutandis—Christian spirituality and religious spirituality in general, can and must foster as a constructive, charitable and merciful response and alternative to the modern and post-modern “no.” 11“While we were one day sitting with the Messenger of God, there appeared before us a man dressed in extremely white clothes and with very black hair. No traces of journeying were visible on him, and none of us knew him. He sat down close by the Prophet (...) and said, ‘O Muhammad! Inform me about Islam.’ Said the Messenger of God, ‘Islam is that you should testify that there is no deity save God and that Muhammad is His Messenger, that you should perform ?al?h (ritual prayer), pay the zak?h, fast during Ramadan, and perform Hajj (pilgrimage) to the House (the Ka?bah at Makkah), if you can find a way to it (or find the means for making the journey to it).’ Said he (the man), ‘You have spoken truly.’ “We were astonished at his thus questioning him and telling him that he was right, but he went on to say, ‘Inform me about ?m?n (faith).’ He (the Messenger of God) answered, ‘It is that you believe in Allah and His angels and His Books and His Messengers and in the Last Day, and in fate (qadr), both in its good and in its evil aspects.’ He said, ‘You have spoken truly.’ “Then he (the man) said, ‘Inform me about I?s?n.’ He (the Messenger of Allah) answered, ‘It is that you should worship God as though you could see Him, for though you cannot see Him yet He sees you.’ He said, ‘Inform me about the Hour.’ He (the Messenger of God) said, ‘About that the one questioned knows no more than the questioner.’ So he said, ‘Well, inform me about the signs thereof (i.e. of its coming).’ Said he, ‘They are that the slave-girl will give birth to her mistress, that you will see the barefooted ones, the naked, the destitute, the herdsmen of the sheep (competing with each other) in raising lofty buildings.’ Thereupon the man went off. “I waited a while, and then he (the Messenger of God) said, ‘O ?Umar, do you know who that questioner was?’ I replied, ‘God and His Messenger know better.’ He said, ‘That was Jibril. He came to teach you your religion.’” [Muslim] ? Before we approach the specifically Islamic denotations and connotations of the term it is meaningful to note that the concept of ri?? is most often translated into English as “acceptance” or “satisfaction.” It must be stressed that these two translations already point to different spiritual degrees. To accept does not necessarily mean satisfaction, even while satisfaction seems to imply acceptance. One may all too easily accept something out of passivity, indifference or conformity. Indeed, it is to be feared, in this connection, that the most usual understanding of the contemporary concept of “tolerance” does not go beyond this relatively superficial way of “accepting.” This appears in the way one may tolerate an evil without for that reason attaching any positive value to this form of acceptance. There is, however, in the Latin etymology of the verb “to accept,” accipere, a sense of receiving that points to more positive associations, particularly by suggesting a certain inner receptivity that is akin to the ability to welcome. Such a meaning takes us closer to the positive denotations of ri?? as an ability to receive within oneself and to embrace. Still, the concept of acceptance does not tell us explicitly about the spiritual and moral foundations of this ability to accept, to receive and to welcome. Such foundations appear in a clearer light when one considers the translation of ri?? by satisfaction. The Latin prefix satis is in reality an adverb that means “enough.” Satisfaction comes with a sense of fullness, a sense of plenitude that does not require anything more, and is perfectly contented in itself, or in the enjoyment of its object. Thus, satisfaction in God is, on an immediate level, a response to the human tendency toward insatiability. It is therefore related to a sense of being “fed” by God. In the Qur’?n this is epitomized by Maryam’s being satisfied by, and nurtured with, the divine nourishment, al-Rizq: “Whenever Zachariah went into the sanctuary where she was, he found that she had food. He said: O Mary! Whence cometh unto thee this (food)? She answered: It is from All?h. Allah giveth without stint to whom He will.” (3:37) In Christianity alike, the utter acceptance of the Word by Mary, akin to spiritual obedience (???ah), has been equated with the perfection of the human soul. “Let it be done, according to your Word” (Luke 1:38) says Mary when receiving the visitation of the Angel. The Immaculate Conception is the supernatural pinnacle, and in a way the transcendent “archetype,” of this perfect receptivity to, acceptance of, and satiety with God’s Word. From a human point of view, spiritual satisfaction is none other than the ultimate object of all quests. All humans aim at a perfect plenitude of being and happiness, whether they do so in a misguided manner or not. They seek a sense of fulfillment that would be the meaningful culmination of human life, one that is “bi-ghayri ?is?b,” or “without measure, or account.” (Qur’?n, 3:37) Hence the question put, in different ways, by religious traditions of the world: what may bring this fullness of satisfaction to human beings, and free them from their constricting, wretched sense of incompleteness? The answers certainly vary in forms and ways, but the common grounds of meaning are, at least, two: nothing on this level of terrestrial reality can give access to full satisfaction, and it is only in transcendence—whether we understand by this word another plane of reality or a different level of perception of the same reality, as Maryam’s total tabt?l,12 or utter dedication to prayer, that satis, the “enough” that is a synonym of plenitude, can be reached and experienced. When coming to the meaning of the Arabic word ri?? in the Islamic tradition, three 12“So remember the name of thy Lord and devote thyself with a complete devotion (tabt?lan).” (Qur’?n, 73:8) ? points must be stressed as starting themes of meditation. First, ri?? can be given positive or negative denotations and connotations depending on whether it is understood as ri?? with God or ri?? with oneself, ri?? an-nafs. Secondly, ri?? pertains both to mankind and to God, there is a human ri?? and a divine ri??; and thirdly, as we will see, ri?? is the highest finality of the human vocation, and also in a certain sense the highest fulfillment of the Divine Nature. The two latter points are, in fact, intimately connected, as we hope will become evident in what follows. The first point, although perhaps obvious to many, is not without importance as it denotes a basic distinction between a human attitude of self-contentment that shuns any sense of transcendence, and one that finds its abode in nothing but a reality higher than itself. The Algerian Sufi Shaykh A?mad al-‘Alaw? told his agnostic friend Dr. Carret, “To be one of us and to see the Truth, you lack the desire to raise your Spirit above yourself. And that is irremediable.”13 Ri?? an-nafs is, in that sense, incompatible with the kind of self-transcendence that gives access to the Spirit, it is a satisfaction with too little, a psychological or moral comfort that shies away from self-transcendence out of an ill-inspired sense of egotistical preservation. It is the self-satisfaction chastised by the Qur’?n when it refers to him who “sees himself as independent,” (an ra’ahu astaghn?) (96:8). But the ri?? under discussion is not self- satisfaction, it is a ri?? founded on God-consciousness, the spiritual virtue of ri??. What strikes one about this positive ri??—and it is our second point, is that, among all virtues recorded and commented upon in spiritual manuals, it is probably the one that reveals the highest degree of reciprocity between God and mankind, the term ri?? being attributable to the human as well as to the Divine, albeit with a different inflection of meaning in each case. “God is satisfied with them, and they are satisfied with Him” (5:119): this verse applies to the highest reward in the Hereafter, as in the current passage, but also by extension to the highest experience in this world, as will appear more clearly in what follows. Commenting upon this Quranic verse, the 11th century Sufi Hujw?r?, in his classical treatise Kashf al-Ma?j?b—the Unveiling of the Hidden, highlights the two meanings of ri?? as “the satisfaction of God with man” and the “satisfaction of man with God.”14 By contrast with other virtues that tend to be either positive modes of participation in the Divine or complementary ways of relating to it, the concept of ri?? applies to both the human and the Divine while doing so in quite distinct ways. Whereas, for example, the virtue of generosity may be conceived as a participation in divine generosity, or to put it in more Islamic terms, as an exchange of qualities, tabaddul al-?if?t, in the sense that the human soul becomes clothed with the Divine Quality— mankind being endowed, if only provisionally, with the Divine Attributes of generosity, human ri??, by contrast, is not ultimately identifiable with God’s ri??. On the other hand, while the poverty of the human being, faqr, is like the receptive complement of the richness of God, the Rich, al-Ghan?,15 mankind’s ri?? cannot be truly considered the negative complement of God’s ri??, since they are both positive and not lacking, as it were. There are virtues that result primarily from similarity and analogy, or immanence, like generosity, and others mainly from difference and abstraction, or transcendence, like humility, but ri?? appears to be connected to both dimensions. It is in some ways like a 13Martin Lings, A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth-Century (Islamic Texts Society: 1993), p.28. 14‘Al? bin ‘Uthm?n Al-Hujw?r?, Kashf al-Ma?j?b, (Zaki: Lahore, 2002), p.177. 15“All?h is the Rich, and ye are the poor.” (47:40) ? threshold, or an “isthmus”—a barzakh, between transcendence and immanence, a point of junction, as it were, between the salty and the sweet seas referred to in the Quranic surah of the Cave. Paradoxically, the spiritual texture of ri?? is made of proximity in distance, and identity in difference and separation. Humans are separated from God but they somehow unite with Him by accepting the distance that this relationship entails. As we will see, in ri?? the human meets with the Divine in a sort of reciprocal fulfillment. This is no doubt why the 8th century Sufi ‘Abd al-W??id ibn Zayd could say that “satisfaction is the greatest door of God and Paradise on earth.”16 In the classical tradition of Sufism, or ta?awwuf, ri?? is most directly connected to the human response to destiny as manifestation of the Divine Will. As most virtues, it can be actualized on different degrees ranging from the elementary moral quality of the ordinary believers (?aw?mm) to a spiritual extinction in God’s Will which is the virtue of the “elite of the elite” (khaw??? al-khaw???) Thus, the 18th century Moroccan Shaykh Ibn ‘Aj?ba defined ri??17 as the virtue that allows one to encounter vicissitudes with a “smiling face” or with joy (sur?r) in the heart. It is quite clear that such a virtue, at least on such an elevated level of manifestation, amounts to a direct, immediate and spontaneous sense of the Divine Presence in everything. The immediate and reflex-like nature of ri?? appears in contradistinction with tawakkul (reliance on God) and tasl?m (tranquillity) since it manifests “at the very time of the descent of the divine decree,” al-ri?? yakun ?inda al-naz?l, whereas tawakkul and tasl?m tend to be more prospective and open-ended. This character of immediate assent also differentiates ri?? from mere patience, ?abr, as illustrated by the hierarchy of virtues inherent to ?Umar ibn al-Khattab’s advice: “All goodness lies in satisfaction. Be satisfied, if you can; if not, then endure patiently.”18 Hujw?r? gives further metaphysical depth and expansion to the description of the virtue of ri?? by specifying that “human satisfaction is equanimity toward Fate, whether it withholds or bestows, and spiritual steadfastness (istiq?ma) in regarding events, whether they be the manifestation of Divine Beauty (jam?l) or of Divine Majesty (jal?l), so that it is all one to a man whether he is consumed in the fire of wrath or illuminated by the light of mercy, because both wrath and mercy are evidences of God, and whatever proceeds from God is good in His eyes.”19 The Persian Sufi adds that the spiritual function of ri?? is to purge the heart from “thoughts relating to other than God and free it from the bonds of tribulation.” Thus, these two passages indicate that ri?? is central to the process of taw??d, that is “unification” in both senses of a recognition of Unity within multiplicity— and even in divergences and oppositions, and a centering of all human faculties upon God’s oneness. Acceptance leads one to understand that everything is “unified” in God’s Will, that everything comes from Him and is, essentially, Himself, as it helps one unify one’s faculties in surrendering to His Will. In other words, ri?? makes taw??d a concrete, existential reality, for to write that rigor and mercy are “all one” to the spiritual traveler means that he or she recognizes them from the point of view of their originating in the One, indeed of being dimensions or aspects of the One. To the extent that destiny, especially in its rigorous blows, is among all human experiences that which tends to lead 16Al-Qushayr?’s Epistle on Sufism, Ab?’l Q?sim al-Qushayr?, translated by Alexander Knysh (Garnet Publishing, 2007), p. 207. 17 L’Ascension du regard vers les réalités du Soufisme, Kit?b Mi?r?j al-Ta?awwuf (AlBouraq, Paris: 2010), p. 84. 18Qushayr?, p.209. 19Hujw?r?, p.177. ? humans to fall into multiplicity and disintegration, it makes sense that any encounter with the hard edges of existence may also be a major challenge to transcend oneself through divine grace. This self-transcendence in and by ri?? is not to be misunderstood, however, as any sort of de-humanization or “disensitized” indifference. In point of fact, when quoting Ab? ‘Al? al-Daqq?q, Qushayr? makes it quite plain that ri?? does not amount to an absence of suffering from the rigor of the decrees but rather a concrete awareness that these decrees and their effects on the body and the soul flow from God, and must therefore be accepted as expressions of His Reality: “satisfaction is not that you remain immune to affliction; it is that you do not oppose (divine) judgment and decree.”20 As for the spontaneity of ri??, it introduces us to the idea of the immediacy of grace—since no mediated human efforts would seem to be strong enough to produce it—while being at the same time connected to the notion of waqt, or destiny as it manifests itself in the particular moment of time that weighs upon us. Some Sufis, for this very reason, claim that the adab, or spiritual adequateness or courtesy, of the waqt of the rigour of destiny is ri??. In this sense, ri?? is a welcoming of the waqt.21 Inasmuch as it is independent of the mere sequence of human efforts, the association of ri?? and waqt brings the power of grace to the fore. In actuality, the classical argument as to whether ri?? is to be considered a state or a station directly stem from these considerations. Traditionally, the station (maq?m) tends indeed to be defined by Sufi writers in terms of human effort and acquisition, as well as in the form of stages and a sense of permanence, whereas the state (??l), by contrast, lies on the side of grace, uniqueness and temporariness. In his Kashf al-Ma?j?b, Hujw?r? specifies, for example, that “ ‘station’ belongs to the category of acts, ‘state’ to the category of gifts.”22 It is precisely on the basis of this distinction that classical Sufism gave rise to a debate as to the nature of ri??. On one side of the debate, the 9th century Baghdad? Shaykh Mu??sib? defended the principle that ri?? is a ??l, and not a maq?m. This is because, according to Fu?ayl quoted by Hujw?r?, “he who is satisfied does not desire any higher stage.”23 Moreover Mu??sib? calls satisfaction the quiescence (suk?n) and tranquility of the heart at God’s decrees, and these are “not qualities acquired by Man, but are Divine gifts.”24 In this view, when left to his own natural abilities the human soul is quite unable to acquiesce to the decrees of rigor. By contrast with the school of Baghdad, the Sufis of Khurasan tended to consider ri?? as a station, in fact as the summit and perfection of the station of trust in God. It is remarkable that two of the most important classical commentators and classificators of the 11th century, Hujw?r? and Qushayr?, proposed a more balanced interpretation that provides a manner of synthesis between Baghdadi and Khurasanian views. For Hujw?r?: “satisfaction is the end of the ‘stations’ and the beginning of the ‘states’.”25 Its beginning rests with effort and acquisition, its end with divine bestowing. This is also the point of view adopted by Qushayr? in his Ris?lah when he states that “at the beginning of the Path, the servant acquires satisfaction, so it is a station, while in the end it becomes 20Qushayr?, p.207. 21Al-Nur? said: “He who does not observe the rules of proper behavior in his mystical moment (waqt), his moment will turn into spite (maqt).”p. 296. 22Hujw?r?, p.181. 23Hujw?r?, p.179. 24Hujw?r?, p.180. 25Hujw?r?, p.182. ? a state, and, therefore, can no longer be acquired.”26 So once again, ri?? reveals both a human and a divine side: ri?? is like a barzakh, an isthmus between two incommensurable domains. This intermediary status of ri?? is, moreover, illustrated by the reflections of the 11th century Persian Sufi Abdullah Al-Ans?r?, in his Abodes of the Travelers toward the Real (Man?zil al-s?’ir?n il? al ?aqq), where he defines ri?? as “pausing willingly where God has us stop, without asking for a position ahead or behind, without any attempt at obtaining more, and no desire to change one’s state.”27 At this juncture ri?? could be compared to an effort toward no effort, a progress toward no progress, and as such an intermediary zone between the proceeding through stations and the bestowing of a state. The perfection of ri?? would imply the recognition that the traveler is ultimately not the real agent, nor the real cause of his or her own traveling. This purifies the path from that which, in his effort, would still be mixed with an individualistic desire of progress or a subtle spiritual ambition. In this context of surrender and abandonment, ri?? evokes, more generally, the overall spirit and climate, or barakah, of Islam, the practice of which the contemporary philosopher Frithjof Schuon has suggestively referred to as a paradox of “repose in effort”:28 This repose is abandonment to God’s Will, whatever might be the degree and depth of its source and actualization. It is in reference to those stages of spiritual realization that An??r?, in the typical fashion of classical Sufi manuals, distinguishes three levels of ri??. The first, elementary, stage is that of believers who zealously reject any object of worship other than God. On this level, ri?? preserves the theocentric nature of mankind and society, thereby preventing them from letting worldliness and terrestrial gods or “associates” alter the purity of worship, or ikhl??. It might be proposed that our world could find in this dimension of ri?? a way to address the excesses, hybristic ambitions and delusory vanities of contemporary mankind, whether it remains outwardly religious or not. To the extent that one has identified with these centrifugal tendencies one has succumbed to a radical forgetfulness of the shah?dah, for the Islamic tradition teaches, in a ?ad?th, that were the entire universe of manifestation placed on one side of a scale and the shah?dah on the other, the testimony of faith would infinitely outweigh “heavens” and “earths.”29 Further, An??r? defines the second stage of ri?? (that of al-kh?ss) as one in which “one is satisfied with God in all that He has decreed.” Significantly, one of the three criteria of the realization of this stage of ri?? is the “cessation of all quarreling with fellow humans.”30 In other words, this level of ri??, which is the most widely recognized and most often mentioned in Sufi treatises, entails the abandonment of any individual pretentions to change the heart of others through debates, criticism or, a fortiori, forceful and violent behavior. Here again, the lessons for today are most relevant in sight of occurrences of presumptuous and aggressive religious self-righteousness. Finally, the third level of ri?? (that of khaw??? al-khaw???) is the “satisfaction with the very satisfaction of God.” This stage is none other than the 26Qushayr?, p.206. 27In Chemin de Dieu—Trois traités spirituels, trans. Serge de Laugier de Beaurecueil, (Paris, Sindbad: 1997), p. 181. 28“The practice of Isl?m, at whatever level, is to repose in effort.” Understanding Islam (World Wisdom: 2011), p. 52. 29“If the seven Heavens and those who dwell in them other than Me and the seven Earths are put into one pan (of the scale) and L?-il?ha-ill-All?h is put into the other; L?-il?ha-ill-All?h would be heavier.” [Ibn Hibban and Hakim] 30An??r?, p.181. ? practical expression of the recognition of God’s exclusive being, which is the essence of the Sufi doctrine of wa?dat al-wuj?d, expressed among others by Ghaz?l? in his Mishk?t al-anw?r –The Niche of Lights: «Laysa fi-l’wuj?d illa’Ll?h», “There is none in existence save God.”31 This very subtle, and easily misinterpreted doctrine, amounts to the realization of the inexistence of any ultimate and essential “distinctions”. It is the recognition of, and the identification with, the Light through the whole range of its radiation and obfuscations. In that ultimate sense, ri?? amounts to a concrete realization of taw??d, the exclusive and inclusive “unification” of everything in God. The metaphysics of ri??, or the metaphysics implied by its realization, is indeed one of inclusion through exclusion. Taw??d has found, in some schools of Sufism, a most consistent expression in the doctrine of wa?dat al-wuj?d that draws from the Unicity of the Real the exclusiveness of its Reality, while opening thereby onto a deeper inclusiveness. In keeping with this inspiration, we read in the following lines by Sachiko Murata a suggestive synthesis of Sufi views of the Unicity of Reality: “There is none but the Real. Everything else is unreal, evanescent, non existence. However the divine beauty, mercy, and good pleasure (ri??) look at the other and affirm it. God is similar to all things and present in them.”32 This means, in other words, that God accepts our “otherness,” our being different from Him through his ri??, and excludes our “otherness” or separation through His wrath to the extent that we are not “satisfied” with Him. Therefore, satisfaction is, on the part of God, both a dimension of His essential and intrinsic Mercy and, secondarily, a function of His response to our recognition of this Mercy. By accepting “us” God gives us “being” in Him, and our “satisfied” response to this gift “fulfills”, if one may say so, His satifaction. As Murata puts it, commenting on Ibn ‘Arab?, “at every instant wrath destroys the others, and at every instant mercy recreates them,” and since mercy prevails over wrath, or is more real, continuity prevails over discontinuity, and immanence over transcendence. Without the divine ri?? there would be no existence, and no mankind. Thus ri?? is not only, nor primarily, a response to our abiding by God’s Will, it is indeed the very precondition of our being. This divine acceptance is acceptance of “other than Itself” or “other than God” on the part of the Divine Self; it is none other than the acceptance of multiplicity on the part of Divine Unity. The Qur’?n is quite explicit about the divinely willed nature of terrestrial and human diversity: “O mankind! Lo! We have created you male and female, and have made you nations and tribes that ye may know one another.” (49:13) The Divine Unity manifests itself through its affirmation of multiplicity, differences, alternations and complementarities. This diversity is affirmed because it increases, as it were, the self- knowledge of God through the theophanic multiplicity of the vehicles of knowledge; and this also reveals important implications in the realm of human interactions and relationships. Diversity can be a way toward Unity inasmuch as it invites us to seek and realize its ultimate message. Thus, in the domain of the relationships among religious communities, the Qur’?n suggests a commonality of faith and a striving for the Truth 31“The gnostics, after having ascended to the heaven of reality, agree that they see nothing in existence save the One, the Real.” Mishk?t al-Anw?r—The Niche of Lights, trans. David Buchman (Brigham Young University Press: 1998), pp. 16–17. 32The Tao of Islam (State University of New York Press: 1992), p.94. 11 ? within the context of differences: “For each We have appointed a divine law and a traced- out way. Had Allah willed He could have made you one community. But that He may try you by that which He hath given you (He hath made you as ye are). So vie one with another in good works. Unto Allah ye will all return, and He will then inform you of that wherein ye differ.” (5:48) The diversity of mankind is therefore not only founded in God’s desire to see human beings know each other, but also in His invitation to them to perfect themselves through differences. Differences, far from being inherently conflicting, mean increased knowledge and a greater attentiveness to the Divine Will, hence a recognition of Unity within, and by means of, diversity. If one were to wonder why the Divine would in any way favor this reciprocal knowledge, and this God-knowledge through emulation, it might be enough to say that Sufis have meditated upon this fact as a reflection of the limitlessness of God’s Essence in the and through Divine Self-disclosures, tajalliy?t. In the words of the oft-quoted ?ad?th that is so central to the Sufi understanding of the world of creation, God as “Hidden Treasure” wanted to be known and this knowledge,33 inasmuch as it is an exteriorization of Himself, could not occur but through the manifestation of his infinity in an analytic and differentiated mode, which is like the reverse side of His Unity. Secondly this multiplicity is not only one of being, but also one of knowledge: this means that multiplicity has to be perceived in and through the polarity of subject and object. The myriad of modes and manifestations of knowledge presupposes the polarity between subject and object. Thirdly, the knowing subjects themselves, and human beings first among them, can and must take each other as objects of knowledge. This makes up a world in which an infinite number of mirrors reflect each other, while reflecting the Divine Face. If one were to ask what acceptance and contentment have to do with this projection, multiplication and polarization that proceeds from God’s Essence and return to it, an answer would lie in mankind’s ability—but also sometimes failure, to be “accepting” of the world and human beings in their difference from self, not only as a more or less reluctant or conventional tolerance, but as a recognition of the Divine transcendence in them. In knowing others human beings know both God and themselves. They recognize in the other the face of God and at the same time what they are themselves, albeit in a different mode. Finally, the question must be raised of the ultimate meaning of a divine “acceptance” and a divine “satisfaction” since, with regard to satisfaction, God is necessarily satisfied in the sense of being perfect, while with respect to acceptance, His infinite mercy is by definition intrinsically accepting. What can it mean for God to be “accepting” of man, and to be “satisfied” with humans? On an immediate and literal level we can easily understand that acceptance and satisfaction on the part of God must be responses to good thoughts, good behavior and good actions on the part of human beings. This is the conventional, anthropomorphic, religious concept of the good: God is satisfied with humans when they do His Will. But does it mean that something could be added to God that would be absent without us “satisfying” Him? Not so, claims the tradition, for the Perfect God of monotheism does not lack anything. The anthropomorphism of the expression of “satisfaction” may therefore veil us from the highest metaphysical meaning of divine satisfaction. The “satisfaction” of God is the fulfillment of his Will toward us, and this Will is expressed in the aforementioned ?ad?th “I was a Hidden Treasure and I wanted 33Murata, p.61. ? to be known so I created the world.” The “satisfaction” of God consists in being known, that is in being known by other than Himself, creation being none other than a way for God to be known as an object, or as the supreme Object, since He already knows himself essentially as a Subject. Given that mankind was taught all the names of creation,34 it can know God in all its wealth of manifestation, and it can also know Him as the principle of manifestation. In other words mankind can know God both as the Outer, the Manifest, al- ??hir, and as the Inner, the Hidden, al-B??in. However, the way mankind knows the Inner is different from the way it knows the Outer. The Hidden can only be known subjectively, as the mysterious root or essence of our being, an essence that transcends our limited individuality qua individuality while being “nearer to him (man) than his jugular vein.” (50:16) This intimate, essential, subjective Unity is no more beautifully expressed than in the question put by the 13th century Andalusian Sufi Shushtar?: “man an?, ya an?, illa an?? (who am I, oh I, if not I)?”35 As for al-??hir, He can be known through the myriad of qualities that humans experience on a daily basis, and which are nothing but the distant reflections of His Names and Attributes. For Sufis, when a human being reaches the pinnacle of this two-fold knowledge of God and recognizes Unity in Multiplicity and Multiplicity in Unity, he fulfills the very purpose of creation in the most active and perfect way. This is the highest degree of satisfaction in God because it has fulfilled the plenitude of God’s being and the fullness of man’s being. This satisfaction is higher than the garden because it touches upon the very Essence of God, His Infinity and His Perfection. In the Divine ri?w?n the perfection of the human vocation meets with the perfection of the Divine Essence. Herein human beings are totally encompassed by the Divine Satisfaction in a way that may be thought to absorb their limitations into the Divine Limitlessness. This makes it plain why the Divine Satisfaction is also Divine Acceptance: it is a kind of welcoming of human beings into the fold of the Divine, as it were, thereby greatly exceeding any other possible reward: Allah promiseth to the believers, men and women, Gardens underneath which rivers flow, wherein they will abide—blessed dwellings in Gardens of Eden. And—greater (far)!—acceptance from Allah. That is the supreme triumph. (9:72) As we have already mentioned, the Qur’?n asserts that the spiritual destiny of the human soul consists in “returning to (her) your Lord, satisfied and accepted.” (89:27- 28.) According to A?mad Ibn ‘Aj?bah, the “divine satisfaction” or ri?w?n is the desire (shawq) of the elite (kh???), which transcends the desire for the garden, al-jannah.36 This is the ultimate finality and meaning of humankind, and therein the whole cycle of existence formed by the “arch of descent” (qaws al-nuz?l) and the “arch of ascent” (qaws al-su’?d) comes to completion. This is the final abode of the “pacified soul” (an- nafs al-mu?ma’innah), who is both r??iyah and mar?iyyah. In this fulfillment, the active and passive aspects of satisfaction and acceptance converge, highlighting the highest 34“And He taught Adam all the names, then showed them to the angels, saying: Inform Me of the names of these, if ye are truthful.” (2:31) 35Quoted in Martin Lings, Sufi Poems: A Mediaeval Anthology, The Islamic Texts Society, 2004, p.89. 36Although there is an even higher desire, that of ?a?rah ?ay?nahu, “the glorious vision of the Lord”. Cf. Kit?b Mi’r?j al-Ta?awwuf il? ?aq?’iq al-Ta?awwuf—L’Ascension du regard vers les réalités du Soufisme, trans. Jean-Louis Michon, Paris: Albouraq, p. 104. ? coincidence between the Divine creative intent and the human perfection: “God is satisfied with them, and they are satisfied with Him” (5:119) Likewise, in his Meccan Illuminations, Ibn ‘Arab? beautifully suggests the supereminence of Divine ri?? in his account of the vision of God’s Face when, having been made witnesses of the Divine Face through the lifting of the Veil, the elect are asked by God “Is there anything else for you (that you still desire) after this?” To which they reply: “O our Lord, what thing could yet remain...?” before hearing the final Divine response: “But there is something more for you... My everlasting Contentment (ri??’?) with you all (...)”37 As we have come to understand it through our examination of its levels and modes of reality through Sufi sources, ri?? is contentment in God and with God, and therefore contentment with one’s destiny as willed by God. Rid? is acceptance of the Divine Other and, consequently, acceptance of what is other, different and foreign to us, or that which is independent from, and even contrary to, our individual will. The most fruitful lesson of Sufi wisdom is, in this respect, that it is by accepting otherness that we become “ourselves” in God. Acceptance is a knowledge of self and God, of God in oneself and the self in God, a door to His Mercy through the recognition of the transcendence of His purposes. It is also, thereby, an acceptance of others, and even more so, a love of others for being God’s witnesses in our life: “Love God and your neighbor as yourself.” In its highest reaches and in any conducive context, ri?? may equally translate into an acceptance of other faiths on the basis of one’s own,38 not out of relativism, indifference, cynicism or tepidness. Rid? is the grace of the recognition that alterity is none other than identity, and the fulfilling satisfaction therein. Thus, metaphysically, ri?? is a coincidence of opposites, the height of taw??d; morally, it means humility and forgiveness; religiously, it amounts not merely to a facile tolerance but to a knowledge of Unity in diversity and diversity in Unity, a recognition that Reality transcends all limited point of views, in keeping with the Islamic epistemological coda “and God knows best”, wa All?hu a?lam. Copyright Patrick Laude, 2013. 37James Morris insightfully specifies that even though such terms as ri?? and ri?w?n are “often translated as divine “satisfaction” or “contentment”, (...) obviously such approximate English expressions are utterly inadequate in this context.” (The Reflective Heart. Discovering Intelligence in Ibn ‘Arabi’s Meccan Illuminations, note 123, p. 347) 38 “One understands the other by substituting oneself mentally for the other, by entering in the ‘composition of the place’ of the other, by reflecting in oneself the mental structure, the system of thought, of the other.” Our translation of Louis Massignon, “Un nouveau sacral”, Ecrits Mémorables, I, Robert Laffont, Paris, 2009, 349.
- [Seeing God Everywhere: Traversing the Spiritual Path](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/seeing-god-everywhere) - Reza Shah-Kazemi A talk given in Sidney, November 2011. With thanks to the Australian Centre for Sufism and Irfanic Studies for organising the talk and sharing this video. Running Time: 1:20:40
- [Forgiveness, Reconciliation and Justice](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/volf-forgiveness) - It is not what the mainstream sociologists who followed in the footsteps of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emil Durkheim were predicting over the past century or so, but it happened. Instead of slowly withering away or lodging itself quietly into the privacy of worshipers’ hearts, religion has emerged as an important player on the national and international scenes. It is too early to tell how permanent this resurgence of religion will be. The processes of secularization may well continue, though not so much in the older sense of the increasing loss of religious observance, but in the newer sense of the diminishing influence of religion in contemporary societies. Be the fate of secularization in the contemporary societies as it may, presently religion is well and alive on the public scene, so much so that a collection of essays with the title Religion, the Missing Dimension of Statecraft can become obligatory reading for diplomats in many countries, 1 This paper was originally given at J. F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and at London School of Economics. I want to than audiences at both places for their helpful comments. ? 2 Western and non-Western, and that despite the fact that it bears all the marks of an initial effort to push at the boundaries of a discipline.2 In the public perception, the reassertion of religion as a political factor has not been for the good. It seems that gods have mainly terror on their mind, as the title of Mark Jurgensmeyer’s book on the global rise of religious violence suggests.3 In the Western cultural milieu the contemporary coupling of religion and violence feeds most decisively on the memories of the wars that plagued Europe from the 1560s to the 1650s and in which religion was “the burning motivation, the one that inspired fanatical devotion and the most vicious hatred.”4 It was these wars that contributed a great deal to the emergence of secularizing modernity. As Stephen Toulmin has argued in Cosmopolis, modernity did not emerge, as often claimed, simply as a result of its protagonists’ endeavor to dispel the darkness of tradition and superstition with the light of philosophical and scientific reason. It is not accidental that Descartes “discovered” the one correct method to acquire knowledge in a time when “over much of the continent ..., people had a fair chance of having their throats cut and their houses burned down by strangers who merely disliked their religion.”5 A new way of establishing truth “that was independent of, and neutral between, particular religious loyalties” seemed an attractive Special thanks in is place to my research assistant, Ivica Novakovic. 2 Douglas Johnston and Cynthia Sampson, Religion, the Missing Dimension of Statecraft (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 3 Terror in the Mind of God. The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 4 Scott R. Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred. Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1999), 2. See Ronald Asch, The Thirty Years War. The Holy Roman Empire and Europe, 1618-48 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997). 5 Steven Toulmin, Cosmopolis. The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990), 17. ? 3 alternative to war fueled by dogmatic claims.6 As was the case with their Enlightenment forebears, many of our contemporaries see in religion a pernicious social ill that needs to be treated rather than a medicine from which cure is expected. The resurgence of religion seems to go hand in hand with the resurgence of religiously legitimized violence. Hence it is necessary to weaken, neutralize, or eliminate religion as a factor in public life. In this essay I want to contest the claim that the Christian faith, as one of the major world religions, predominantly fosters violence, and to argue, instead, that it should be seen as a contributor to more peaceful social environments. I will not argue that the Christian faith was not and is not often employed to foster violence. Obviously, such an argument cannot be plausibly made; not only have Christians committed atrocities and other lesser forms of violence but they have also drawn on religious beliefs to justify them.7 Neither will I argue that the Christian faith has been historically less associated with violence than other major religions; I am not at all sure that this is the case. Rather, I will argue that at least when it comes to Christianity, the cure against religiously induced or legitimized violence is not less religion, but, in a carefully qualified sense, more religion. Put differently, the more we reduce Christian faith to vague religiosity or conceive of it as exclusively a private affair of individuals, the worse off we will be; and inversely, the more we nurture it as an ongoing tradition that by its intrinsic content shapes behavior and by the domain of its regulative reach touches public sphere, the 6 Toulmin, 70. 7 For a survay see Gottfried Maron, “Frieden und Krieg. Ein Blick in die Theologie- und Kirchengeschichte,” in: Glaubenskriege in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, Ed. Peter Herrmann (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1996), 17-35. See also Karlheinz Deschner, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, 6 Vol. (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rohwolt, 1986ff) and a response to his work H. R. Seeliger (ed.), Kriminalizierung des Christentums? Karlheinz Deschners Kirchengeschichte auf dem Pruefstand (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1993). ? 4 better off we will be. “Thick” practice of the Christian faith will help reduce violence and shape a culture of peace. I will first offer some general remarks on the relation between Christian faith and violence, and then, in the main body of the paper, attempt to show that at Christianity’s heart, and not just at its margins, lie important resources for creating a culture of peace. Before I proceed, one comment about the focus of my exploration and two disclaimers are in place. First, the focus. I cannot offer here a perspective on the entire complex of issues that relate to the reassertion of religion as political factor on national and international scenes. For instance, I leave such crucial issues aside, like the question whether in international relations a shift has taken place toward religiously driven conflicts and, if so, what are the dynamics characteristic of security action on behalf of religion.8 Instead of looking at religion as an object of securitization, I am exploring dimensions of the impact a particular religion—the Christian faith—should have upon the security action taken in defense of any object and upon the way in which relations between the parties after such action are negotiated. And now the disclaimers. First, by concentrating on religious resources I am neither excluding other resources nor suggesting that they are less important. “Shared democracy,” “interdependence,” and “dense international organization network,” for instance, are crucial, as Bruce Russett has argued,9 echoing major themes of Kant’s essay 8 See “In Defense of Religion: Sacred Referent objects for securitization,” 9 Bruce Russett, “A neo-Kantian perspective: democracy, interdependence, and international organizations in building security communities,” in: Security Communities. Eds. Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 368-394; see also Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace. Principles for a Post-Cold War World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). ? 5 “Eternal Peace.”10 Second, by concentrating on the resources of the Christian faith I am not claiming that other religions are by nature violent or even that Christianity owns the comparative advantage. I merely want to argue, by exploring the religion I know best, that, contrary to the opinion of many academics, politicians, and of the general public religion can be associated with the very opposite of the violence-inducing passions. 1. Christian Faith and Violence In the past, scholars have argued in a variety of ways that the Christian faith fosters violence. I will concentrate here only on two types of arguments that, in my opinion, go to the heart of the matter. Other arguments, such as the one based on the combination of divine omnipotence, omniscience, and implacable justice—the omnipotent God, who sees everything, wills the punishment of every transgression—will take care of themselves, if adequate response is given to the two kinds of arguments I address here. The first type of argument claims that religions are by nature violent, and that the Christian faith, being a religion, is also by nature violent.11 In his book Prey into Hunter Maurice Bloch has, for instance, argued that the “irreducible core of the ritual process” 10 Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace. Transl. Lewis White Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957) 11 Juergensmeyer’s Terror in the Mind of God rests on such a belief. One central reason why violence has accompanied religion’s renewed political presence, he argues, has to do with “the nature of religious imagination, which always has had the propensity to absolutize and to project images of cosmic war” (242). Of course, cosmic war is waged for the sake of peace, so that precisely as a phenomenon at whose core lies cosmic war “religion has been order restoring and life affirming” (159). But if it is not to be violent, religion cannot be left to itself; it “needs the temper of rationality and fair play that Enlightenment values give to civil society” (243). ? 6 involves “a marked element of violence or ... of [a] conquest ... of the here and now by the transcendental.”12 He explains, In the first part of the ritual the here and now is simply left behind by the move towards the transcendental. This initial movement represents the transcendental as supremely desirable and the here and now as of no value. The return is different. In the return the transcendental is not left behind but continues to be attached to those who made the initial move in its direction; its value is not negated. Secondly, the return to the here and now is really a conquest of the here and now by the transcendental.13 It is this violent return from the transcendental sphere, Bloch continues, that explains “the often-noted fact that religion so easily furnishes an idiom of expansionist violence to people in a whole range of societies, an idiom which, under certain circumstances, becomes a legitimation for actual violence.”14 Let us assume that Bloch has analyzed the core of the ritual process correctly. The question still remains whether one should look at the core of the ritual process, stripped of the texture as well as of the larger context that a concrete religion gives it, in order to understand the relation of religions to violence. Here is a thought experiment. Imagine that the first part of the ritual—the leaving of the here and now by the move toward the transcendental—were understood by a religion as the death of the self to her own self- centered desires and as her entry into a transcendental space of harmonious peace. And suppose that the second part of the ritual consisted in the conquest of the here and now by 12 Maurice Bloch, Prey into Hunter. The Politics of Religious Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992), 4-5. ? 7 the transcendental precisely as understood in this peaceful way. If this were how the formal structure of ritual were filled in materially, would such a religion serve as “a legitimation of actual violence”? Would not the “conquest,” if successful, be precisely the victory of “transcendental” peace over the violence of the here and now? As you are most certainly aware, such a religion need not be imagined as hypothetically existing. For what I have asked you to imagine is precisely how the Christian faith understands itself.15 It will foster violence in a way Bloch suggests only when its notion of the “transcendental” is stripped of its proper content and then infused with the values of the “here and now” around which the conflict rages. One could object that any conquest of the here and now by the transcendental involves violence. But if non-coercive victory of peace over violence is itself seen as implicated in violence, then one may well wonder whether the notion of violence has been hopelessly muddled. Other scholars, like Regina Schwartz in her book The Curse of Cain, try to explain the Christian faith’s complicity in violence by pointing not to the general features of the Christian faith as religion, but to one of its characteristic components. Along with Judaism and Islam, Christianity is a monotheistic religion, and therefore, Schwartz argues, an exclusive religion that divides people into “us,” who know the one true God, and “them,” who do not. Such monotheistic exclusivity, which imports the category of 13 Bloch, 5. 14 Bloch, 6. 15 Bloch engages the Christian faith directly, and envisages a possibility of it not underwriting violence. But in his account such a possibility is predicated on a “refusal of the second phase of rebounding violence, that is, a refusal of the conquest of external vitality which is therefore ultimately a refusal to continue with earthly life” (pp. 90-91). St. Paul’s Christianity, he believes, is an example of such a refusal—or rather, an example of a half-hearted refusal since, Paul also undertook “prudent organization of a well-organized church firmly embedded in the continuing practical and political world” (94). On my reading, St. Paul’s Christianity is not an example of refusal of conquest of the here and now, but of the kind of conquest for which non-violence is constitutive; communities of faith were meant to instantiate precisely such conquest. ? 8 universal “truth” into the religious sphere, is bound to have a violent legacy, the argument goes.16 “We,” the faithful, have on our side the true God who is against “them,” the infidels and renegades.17 But is the divine oneness necessarily violent? Is any notion of divine oneness violent? Does not, for instance, universalism, which is implied by divine oneness, work also against the tendency to divide people into “us” and “them”? More significantly, would not a pressure be exerted against self-enclosed and exclusive identities if the monotheism in question were of a Trinitarian kind?18 Let me explicate this last rhetorical question.19 One of the socially most important aspects of the doctrine of the Trinity concerns the conceptualization of identities. To believe that the one God is the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, is to believe that the identity of the “Father” cannot be understood apart from the “Son” and the “Spirit.” To be the divine “Father” is from the start to have one’s identity defined by another and therefore not to be undifferentiated and self- enclosed. Moreover, the divine persons as non-self-enclosed identities are understood by Christians to form a perfect communion of love; the persons give themselves to each other and receive themselves from each other in love. It would be difficult, so it seems to me, to argue that such monotheism fosters violence. Instead, in Bloch’s terminology, it grounds peace here and now in the transcendental peacefulness of the divine being. The 16 Jakov Jukic sees the heart of monotheism’s exclusivity precisely in the insertion of the question of truth into the religious domain which the belief in the one God inescapably makes. To believe in one God means to believe in one true God. The claim to truth in religious domain has immediate consequence in the public realm (Lica i Maske Svetoga. Ogledi iz drustvene religiologije [Zagreb: Krscanska sadasnjost, 1997, 242f). 17 Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997). 18 For a critique of Schwartz along these lines see Miroslav Volf, “Jehovah on Trial,” Christianity Today (April 27, 1998), 32-35. 19 For the following see Miroslav Volf, “’Trinity is Our Social Program’. [?]. ? 9 argument for inherent violence of monotheism works only if one reduces the thick religious description of God to naked oneness and then postulates such abstract oneness to be of decisive social significance. Again, my point is not that the Christian faith has not been used to legitimize violence, or that there are no elements in the Christian faith on which such misuses build. It is rather that at the heart the Christian faith is peace creating and peace sustaining so that such misuse is less likely to happen when people have deep and informed commitments to the faith, commitments with robust cognitive and moral content—at least when these commitments stem from historic Christian beliefs rather than being recast arbitrarily by leaders of short-lived and oppressive communities. Strip religious commitments of all cognitive and moral content and reduce faith to a cultural resource endowed with a diffuse aura of the sacred, and you are likely to get religiously inspired or legitimized violence. Nurture people in the tradition and educate them about it, and if you get militants, they will be militants for peace. As R. Scott Appelby argued recently in his book The Ambivalence of the Sacred, contrary to the misconception popular in some academic and political circles, religious people play a positive role in the world of human conflicts and contribute to peace not when they “moderate their religion or marginalize their deeply held, vividly symbolized, and often highly particular beliefs,” but rather “when they remain religious actors.”20 There are two main ways in which religions contribute to the violence between the conflicting parties: (1) by assuring the combatants of the (absolute) rightness of their 20 Appleby, 16. ? 10 cause and the correlative (absolute) evil of their enemies21 and (2) by sacralizing communal identity of one party and correlative demonizing of others.22 In hope of showing that the Christian faith puts pressure on its mature and informed practitioners not to act out of persuasion in the absolute rightness of their cause, I will explore the nexus of issues around the questions of forgiveness, reconciliation, and justice which lie at the heart of what this faith is about. As the example of South Africa with its “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” paradigmatically attests, these issues are particularly relevant to the post-conflict situations. An argument similar to the one I make here about religion and absolute rightness of one party in conflict could be made in relation to sacralization of communal identities, though I will not pursue that argument here.23 In the following I will first discard two wrongheaded ways to relate forgiveness, reconciliation, and justice, and then argue for an alternative. 2. Cheap Reconciliation The first wrongheaded way to relate justice to forgiveness and reconciliation goes under the name of “cheap reconciliation.” It attained prominence in theological circles through the Kairos Document, written by theologians critical of the South African regime before the dismantling of apartheid. They coined the term in analogy to the notion of “cheap grace”—which designates the readiness to receive love from God with no sense of obligation toward one’s neighbors. Significantly, the term “cheap grace” was coined 21 So, for instance, Juergensmeyer, 242. 22 So, for example, Sells, Bridge Betrayed. 23 See Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace. A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996). ? 11 by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a theologian who for religious reasons participated in the resistance against the Nazi regime.24 The drafters of the Kairos Document set up the context for understanding what they mean by “cheap reconciliation” as follows: In our situation in South Africa today it would be totally unchristian to plead for reconciliation and peace before the present injustices have been removed. Any such plea plays into the hands of the oppressor by trying to persuade those of us who are oppressed to accept our oppression and to become reconciled to the intolerable crimes that are committed against us. That is not Christian reconciliation, it is sin. It is asking us to become accomplices in our own oppression, to become servants of the devil. No reconciliation is possible in South Africa without justice.25 As I will argue shortly, I am not persuaded that reconciliation should be pursued only after the injustices have been removed but rather believe that struggle against injustices is part of the more fundamental pursuit of reconciliation. But if we put this temporal sequencing of justice and reconciliation aside for a moment, the critique of cheap reconciliation that emerges from the text is clear. Cheap reconciliation sets “justice” and “peace” against each other as alternatives. To pursue cheap reconciliation means to give up on the struggle for freedom, to renounce the pursuit of justice, to put up with oppression. 24 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: MacMillan, 1963 [1937]), 45-47, 59. 25 The Kairos Document. Challenge to the Church. A theological comment on the political crisis in South Africa. (Braamfontein: Skotaville Publishers/Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1986), Art 3.1. ? 12 If I am not mistaken, some such usage of the term “reconciliation” predominates in public discourse today. One speaks of “national reconciliation” and expects from it “collective healing” and greater “political unity” or fears that behind it lurk organic notions of the social “body” and the centralization of power. Stripped of its moral content, reconciliation is contrasted so starkly with “justice” that one has to weigh the relative values of “justice” and “unity” in order to assess to what extent the sacrifice of justice can be morally acceptable and politically desirable in order to achieve political unity. To advocate cheap reconciliation clearly means to betray those who suffer injustice, deception, and violence. Though the Christian faith has been all too often employed to advocate such reconciliation—indeed, the Kairos Document as a critique of “cheap reconciliation” was directed against theology of the pro-apartheid churches—such a concept of reconciliation really amounts to a betrayal of the Christian faith. It is almost universally recognized by theologians and church leaders today that the prophetic denunciation of injustice has a prominent place in the Christian faith. This prophetic strand cannot be removed without gravely distorting Christianity. The struggle against injustice is inscribed in the very character of the Christian faith. Hence an adequate notion of reconciliation must include justice as its constitutive element. And yet it is precisely here that watchfulness is needed. For the imperative of justice, severed from the overarching framework of grace within which it is properly situated and from the obligation to non-violence, underlies much of the Christian faith’s misuse for religiously legitimizing violence. 13 In the context of cheap reconciliation, forgiveness is best described as acting toward the perpetrator “as if their sin were not there.”26 The offense has happened—or one party thinks that it has happened—but the injured party treats the offender as if it had not. At the popular level, one is told simply to shrug one’s shoulders and say, “Oh, never mind.” This “never mind” exculpates the offender even from “moral reproach.” In The Genealogy of Morals Friedrich Nietzsche advocated a version of “as-if- not” attitude toward transgression. He suggested it in the context of the opposition between “slave morality” and “noble morality.” The first, which operates along the axis of “good-evil,” is reactive in the sense that it is shaped by the situation with respect to which it defines human conduct; the second is purely positive, existing in sovereign disregard of the situation. In the process of this distinction, Nietzsche advocates an attitude toward transgression untouched by concerns for justice as desert. He writes, To be unable to take his enemies, his misfortunes and even his misdeeds seriously for long - that is the sign of strong, rounded natures with superabundance of a power which is flexible, formative, healing and can make one forget (a good example from the modern world is Mirabeou, who had no recall for the insult and slights directed at him and who would not forgive, simply because he - forgot.) A man like this shakes from him, with one shrug, many worms which would have burrowed into another man; here and here alone is it possible, assuming that this is possible at all on earth - truly to ‘love your neighbour.27 26 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory. Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 411. 27 Friedrich Nietzsche, On Genealogy of Morals. Transl. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 23-24; Part 1, Section 10. ? 14 Such sovereign disregard for injuries from others demands extraordinary strength, almost that of an Uebermensch and a person with sensibilities nurtured by the culture of late modernity may be tempted to reject Nietzsche’s proposal simply on that count. This, however, may be less an argument against Nietzsche than against the weakness of the victims of offenses. At least for those who, unlike Nietzsche, think that moral concerns are legitimate, the crucial question is whether the “as-if-not” attitude toward transgression is morally acceptable. The answer is arguably “No.” It is morally wrong to treat a murderer “as if” he had not committed the murder—or at least it is wrong to do so until some important things have happened, for example, until the murder has been named as murder and the murderer has distanced himself from the deed. One may also suggest that disregard for justice as desert entails the abdication of responsibility for the transformation of the perpetrator and the world at large. For it is hard to imagine how one could induce offenders to change without at least implicitly morally reproaching their deeds. Significantly, Nietzsche himself never described the “as-if-not” attitude as forgiveness. Mirabeau, his example of the “virtuous,” could not forgive because he had forgotten! Because forgiveness is conceptually tied to justice as desert, Nietzsche had little positive to say about it and tended to replace it with “forgetting.”28 Nietsche rejected forgiveness precisely because he saw rightly its positive relation to justice. Forgiveness is 28 See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Transl. Marion Faber (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 110, Aphorism 217. In Human, All Too Human Nietzsche argued for the impossibility of forgiveness by tying it to (1) the knowledge of the evil-doer about what he or she is doing and (2) to the right of the offended or of the third party “to accuse and to punish.” Since the evil-doer can never fully know what he or she is doing and since we do not have the right to accuse and to punish, Nietzsche argued, forgiveness is impossible. So clearly, for Nietzsche forgiveness presupposes the framework of justice. ? 15 more than just “the overcoming of anger and resentment.”29 It always entails foregoing a rightful claim against someone who has in some way harmed or offended us. Such a foregoing of a rightful claim makes forgiveness unjust and precisely thereby prevents forgiveness to fall outside of concern for justice. The concern for justice is integral to forgiveness and reconciliation. But what is the precise relation between justice on the one hand and forgiveness and reconciliation on the other? 3. First Justice, Then Reconciliation One way of relating positively justice to reconciliation is to suggest that the process of reconciliation can begin only after injustice has been removed. This, as I noted earlier, seems to be the position of the Kairos Document, which so rightly denounced “cheap reconciliation.” But is this “first justice, then reconciliation” stance plausible? There are major problems with it. First and most fundamentally, the “first justice, then reconciliation” stance is impossible to carry out. All accounts of what is “just” are to some extent relative to a particular person or group and are invariably contested by that person’s or group’s rivals. In any conflict with prolonged history, each party sees itself as the victim and perceives its rival as the perpetrator, and has good reasons for reading the situation that way. 29 So Jeffrie G. Murphy, “Forgiveness and Resentment,” Forgiveness and Mercy, ed. Jeffrie G. Murphy and Jean Hampton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 14-34, 24. Pamela Hieronymi’s response to a prevalent claim that forgiveness is primarily a matter of manipulating oneself out of resentment is to the point: “Ridding one’s self of resentment by taking a specially-designed pill, for example, would not count as forgiveness” (“Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research [forthcoming], 2). ? 16 Even more significantly, as Nietzsche rightly noted in Human, All Too Human, given the nature of human interaction, every pursuit of justice not only rests on partial injustice but also creates new injustices.30 In an ongoing relationship, as the temporal and spatial contexts of an offense are broadened to give an adequate account of it, it becomes clear that any action we undertake now is inescapably ambiguous, at best partially just and therefore partially unjust. No peace is possible within the overarching framework of strict justice for the simple reason that no strict justice is possible. Hence the demand at communal or political levels is often is often not for “justice” but for “as much justice as possible.” But the trouble is that, within the overarching framework of strict justice, enough of justice never gets done because more justice is always possible than in fact gets done. Second, even if strict justice were possible, it is questionable whether it would be desirable. Most of us today feel that the legal provisions of the Hebrew Bible which insist that the punishment be commensurate with the crime are excessive. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” strikes us as too severe. Originally, of course, the provision was meant to restrict the excesses of vengeance. And yet it is precisely the demand for more than equal retribution that is strictly just. If a person’s tooth is broken in retribution for her breaking of mine, we are not even for the simple reason that the situation of offense is manifestly not one of exchange. In a situation of exchange, both of us would have disposal over our teeth, and I would give you mine under condition that you give me yours. But in a situation of offense, the consent to the exchange is lacking. By breaking 30 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human. A Book for Free Spirits (transl. Marion Faber; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 216. For a related but different critique of justice see Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’,” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of ? 17 my tooth you have violated me, and therefore you deserve greater punishment than just the equal breaking of your tooth. Most of us, however, don’t think that a world in which corrective justice was pursued even with strictness as the principle “tooth for a tooth” demands would be a desirable one; and so, even when we demand “justice,” we are in fact after something much less than strict justice, which is to say that we are ready tacitly to “forgive” part of the offense. We are at least implicitly aware that the normal functioning of human life is impossible without grace. Third, even if justice could be satisfied, the conflicting parties would continue to be at odds with one another. The enforcement of justice would rectify past wrongs but it would not create communion between victims and perpetrators. Yet some form of communion—some form of positive relationship—needs to be established if the victim and perpetrator are to be fully healed. Consider the fact that personal and group identities are not defined simply from within an individual or a group, apart from relationships with their near and distant neighbors. We are who we are not simply as autonomous and self- constituting entities but essentially also as related and other-determined. I, Miroslav Volf, am who I am not simply because I am distinct from all other individuals but in part also because over past 2 years, for instance, I have been shaped by interaction with my son, Nathanael. Similarly, to be a Serb today is in part to have Albanians as one’s neighbors and Kosovars as a minority within one’s borders, to be a citizen of a country that waged wars against Bosnia and Croatia and was bombed by NATO. If we are in part who we are because we are embedded in a nexus of relations which make others to be part of ourselves, then we cannot be properly healed without our relationships being healed too. Justice, eds. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 24-26. ? 18 The pursuit of justice, even if per impossibile fully successful, would satisfy our sense of what is right, but would not heal us. It would bring us peace only as the absence of war, but not as harmonious ordering of differences. The “first justice, then reconciliation” stance implies that forgiveness should be offered only after the demands of justice have been satisfied. Forgiveness here means no more than the refusal to allow an adequately redressed wrongdoing to continue to qualify negatively one’s relationship with the wrongdoer. Strange as it may seem, forgiveness after justice is not much different from forgiveness outside justice. Forgiveness outside justice means, you will recall, treating the offender as if he had not committed the offense. Forgiveness after justice means doing the same—only that the demand that justice be satisfied before forgiveness can be given is meant to redress the situation so that one can rightly treat the wrongdoer as if he had not committed the deed. Whereas in the first case forgiveness is the stance of a heroic individual who is “strong” and “noble” enough to be unconcerned with the offense, in the second case forgiveness is the stance of a strictly moral individual who shows enough integrity that after the injustice has been redressed he or she refuses to feel and act vindictively. To forgive outside justice is to make no moral demands; to forgive after justice is not to be vindictive. In both cases it is to treat the offender as if he had not committed the offense or as if it were not his. The first and decisive argument that I brought against the “first justice, then reconciliation” stance applies to this notion of forgiveness too. If justice is impossible, as I have argued, then forgiveness could never take place. There is another important argument against this notion of forgiveness. If forgiveness were properly given only after 19 strict justice has been established, then one would not be going beyond one’s duty in offering forgiveness; one would indeed wrong the original wrongdoer if one did not offer forgiveness. “The wrong has been fully redressed,” an offender could complain if forgiveness were not forthcoming, “and hence you owe me forgiveness.” But this is not how we understand forgiveness. It is a gift that the wronged gives to the wrongdoer. If we forgive we are considered magnanimous; if we refuse to forgive, we may be insufficiently virtuous—for, as Robert Adams argues, “we ought in general be treated better than we deserve”31—but do not wrong the other. We need to look for an alternative both to forgiveness and reconciliation outside of justice and to forgiveness and reconciliation after justice. I want to suggest that such notions of forgiveness and reconciliation are to be found at the heart of the Christian faith—in the narrative of the cross of Christ, which reveals the very character of the God. On the cross, God is manifest as the God who, though in no way indifferent toward the distinction between good and evil, nonetheless lets the sun shine on both the good and the evil (cf. Matthew 5:45); as the God of indiscriminate love who died for the ungodly to bring them into the divine communion (cf. Romans 5:8), the God who offers grace—not cheap grace, but grace nonetheless—to the vilest evildoer. 4. Will to Embrace, Actual Embrace So what is the relationship between reconciliation and justice that is inscribed in the very heart of the Christian faith? Partly to keep things rhetorically simpler, I will substitute the more poetic “embrace” for “peace” as the terminal point of the ?31 Robert M. Adams, “Involuntary Sins,” The Philosophical Review, 104 (1985), 24. 20 reconciliation process as I explore this issue in the reminder of my text. The Christian tradition can be plausibly construed to make four central claims about the relation between justice and embrace. 4.1. The Primacy of the Will to Embrace The starting point is the primacy of the will to embrace the other, even the offender. Since the God Christians worship is the God of unconditional and indiscriminate love the will to embrace the other is the most fundamental obligation of Christians. The claim is radical, and precisely in its radicality, so socially significant. The will to give ourselves to others and to welcome them, to readjust our identities to make space for them, is prior to any judgment about others, except that of identifying them in their humanity. The will to embrace precedes any “truth” about others and any reading of their action with respect to justice. This will is absolutely indiscriminate and strictly immutable; it transcends the moral mapping of the social world into “good” and “evil.” The primacy of the will to embrace is sustained negatively by some important insights into the nature of the human predicament. Since the Christian tradition sees all people as marred by evil and since it conceives of evil not just as act but as a power that transcends individual actors, it rejects the construction of the world around exclusive moral polarities—here, on our side, “the just, the pure, the innocent,” and there, on the other side, “the unjust, the defiled, the guilty.” Such a world does not exist. If our search for peace is predicated on its existence, in its factual absence we will be prone to make the mistake of refusing to read conflicts in moral terms and thus lazily fall back on either establishing symmetries in guilt or proclaiming all actors as irrational. Instead of 21 conceiving of our search for peace as a struggle on behalf of “the just, the pure, the innocent,” we should understand it as an endeavor to transform the world in which justice and injustice, innocence and guilt, crisscross and intersect, and we should do so guided by the recognition that the economy of undeserved grace has primacy over the economy of moral desert. 4.2. Attending to Justice as A Precondition of Actual Embrace Notice that I have described the will to embrace as unconditional and indiscriminate, but not the embrace itself. A genuine embrace, an embrace that neither play-acts acceptance nor crushes the other, cannot take place until justice is attended to. Hence the will to embrace includes in itself the will to determine what is just and to name wrong as wrong. The will to embrace includes the will to rectify the wrongs that have been done, and it includes the will to reshape the relationships to correspond to justice. And yet, though an actual embrace requires attending to justice, it does not require establishment of strict justice. Indeed, the pursuit of embrace is precisely an alternative to constructing social relations around strict justice. It is a way of creating a genuine and deeply human community of harmonious peace in an imperfect world of inescapable injustice.32 Without the grace of embrace, humane life in our world in which evil is inescapably committed but our deeds are irreversible would be impossible.33 32 Robert Burt, “Reconciliation with Injustice,” Transgression, Punishment, Responsibility, Forgiveness. Studies in Culture, Law and the Sacred (Madison: University of Wisconsin Law School, 1998), 106-122 (=Graven Images 4 [1998]). 33 On the need for forgiveness against the backdrop of the irreversibility of deeds see Hanah Arendt, The Human Condition. A Study of the Central Dilemmas Facing Modern Man (Garden City: Doubleday, 1959), 212f. ? 22 4.3. Will to Embrace as Framework for the Search for Justice To emphasize the will to embrace means more than to advocate learning how to live with inescapable injustice while not giving up on the pursuit of justice. For the will to embrace is also a precondition of (even tenuous) convergences and agreements on what is just in a world of strife. Without the will to embrace, each party will insist on the justness of their own cause, and strife will continue. For, given the nature of human beings and their interaction, there is too much injustice in an uncompromising struggle for justice. The will to embrace—love—sheds the light of knowledge by the fire it carries with it. Our eyes need the light of this fire to perceive any justice in the causes and actions of our enemies. Granted, our enemies may prove to be as unjust as they seem, and what they insist is just may in fact be a perversion of justice. But if there is any justice in their causes and actions, only the will to embrace will make us capable of perceiving it, because it will let us see both them and ourselves with their eyes. Similarly, the will to exclude—hatred—blinds by the fire it carries with it. The fire of exclusion directs its light only on the injustice of others; any justness they may have is enveloped in darkness or branded as covert injustice—a merely contrived goodness that makes their evil all the more deadly. Both the “clenched fist” and the “open arms” are epistemic stances; they are moral conditions of adequate moral perception. The clenched fist hinders the perception of the possible justness of our opponents and thereby reinforces injustice; the open arms help detect any justness that may hide behind what seems to be the manifest injustness of 23 our opponents and thereby reinforces justice. To agree on justice in situations of conflict you must want more than justice; you must want embrace. 4.4. Embrace as the Horizon of the Struggle for Justice As in many of our activities, in the struggle for justice much depends on the telos of the struggle. Toward what is the struggle oriented? Is it oriented simply toward ensuring that everyone gets what they deserve? Or is it oriented toward the larger goal of healing relationships? I think the later is the case. Hence the embrace should be the telos of the struggle for justice. If not, reconciliation will not even be attempted until the “right” side has won. And unless reconciliation is the horizon of the struggle for justice from the outset, it is not clear why reconciliation should even be attempted after the victory of the “right” side has been achieved. Pulling all four features of the relation between reconciliation and justice together we can say that reconciliation, describes primarily a process whose goal is the creation of a community in which each recognizes and is recognized by all and in which all mutually give themselves to each other in love. As such, the concept of reconciliation stands in opposition to any notion of self-enclosed totality predicated on various forms of exclusion. And far from standing in contrast to justice, for such a notion of reconciliation justice is an integral element. Though reconciliation may be seen from one angle to issues ultimately in a state “beyond justice,” it does so precisely by attending to justice rather than by circumventing it. 24 5. Forgiveness and the Primacy of Embrace Forgiveness can be properly understood and practiced only in the context of the stance which gives primacy to reconciliation but does not give up the pursuit of justice. So what is the relation between forgiveness and justice? First, forgiveness does not stand outside of justice. To the contrary, forgiveness is possible only against the backdrop of a tacit affirmation of justice. Forgiveness always entails blame. Anyone who has been forgiven for what she has not done will attest to that. Forgiveness should therefore not be confused with acceptance of the other. Acceptance is a purely positive concept; any notion of negation is foreign to it, except, obviously, that it implies negation of non-acceptance. But negation is constitutive of forgiveness. To offer forgiveness is at the same time to condemn the deed and accuse the doer; to receive forgiveness is at the same time to admit to the deed and accept the blame.34 Second, forgiveness presupposes that justice—full justice in the strict sense of the term—has not been done. If justice were fully done, forgiveness would not be necessary, except in the limited and inadequate sense of not being vindictive; justice itself would have fully repaid for the wrongdoing. Forgiveness is necessary because strict justice is not done and strictly speaking cannot be done. 34 It is important to note that human forgiveness cannot remove guilt. As Nicolai Hartmann rightly pointed out in his Ethics, human forgiveness is “a moral act on the part of him who forgives and solely concerns his conduct toward the guilty... Forgiveness may very well take from the guilt that special sting of guilt which inheres in the deserved contempt and hostility of the man who has been wronged; and it may give back to the guilty the outward peace which he had spurned; but it can never remove the moral guilt itself” (Nicolai Hartmann, Ethics III. Moral Freedom, transl. Stanton Coit [London: George Allen & Unwin, 1932], 271- 272—italics added). Only divine forgiveness actually removes guilt. When human beings forgive they (1) forego resentment, (2) refuse to press the claims of justice against the other and therefore also (3) bear the cost of the wrongdoing . As a result of human forgiveness, the guilty is treated as if he or she were not guilty (to be distinguished from defining forgiveness itself as treating the other as if he or she had not committed the offense). But unless forgiven by God, he or she remains guilty, human forgiveness notwithstanding. ? 25 Third, forgiveness entails not only the affirmation of the claims of justice but also their transcendence. More precisely, by forgiving we affirm the claims of justice in the very act of not letting them count against the one whom we forgive. By stating that the claims of justice need not be (fully) satisfied, the person who forgives indirectly underscores the fact that what the sense of justice claims to be a wrongdoing is indeed a wrongdoing. Fourth, since it consists in forgoing the affirmed claims of justice, forgiveness, like any instantiation of grace, involves self-denial and risk. One has let go of something one had a right to, and one is not fully certain whether one’s magnanimity will bear fruit either in one’s inner peace or in a restored relationship. Yet forgiveness is also laden with promise. Forgiveness is the context in which wrongdoers can come to the recognition of their own injustice. To accuse wrongdoers by simply insisting on strict justice is to drive them down the path of self-justification and denial before others and before themselves. To accuse wrongdoers by offering forgiveness is to invite them to self-knowledge and release. Such an invitation has a potential of leading the wrongdoer to admit guilt and to repent, and thereby healing not only wrongdoers but also those who have been wronged by them. Fifth, the first step in the process of forgiveness is unconditional. It is not predicated on repentance on the part of the wrongdoer or on her willingness to redress the wrong committed. Yet, full-fledged and completed forgiveness, is not unconditional. It is true that repentance—the recognition that the deed committed was evil coupled with the willingness to mend one’s ways—is not so much a prerequisite of forgiveness as, more profoundly, its possible result. Yet repentance is the kind of result of forgiveness whose 26 absence would amount to a refusal to see oneself as guilty and therefore a refusal to receive forgiveness as forgiveness. Hence an unrepentant wrongdoer must in the end remain an unforgiven wrongdoer—the unconditionality of the first step in the process of forgiveness notwithstanding. Finally, forgiveness is best received if in addition to repentance there takes place some form of restitution. Indeed, one may ask whether the repentance is genuine if the wrongdoer refuses to restore something of what she has taken away by the wrongdoing—provided that she is capable of doing so. In sum, forgiveness is an element in the process of reconciliation, a process in which the search for justice is an integral and yet subordinate element. Conclusion In the later part of this essay I sought to explicate the social significance of the foundational act of the Christian faith—the death of Christ. This step from the narrative of what God has done for humanity on the cross of Christ to the account of what human beings ought to do in relation to one another was often left unmade in the history of Christianity. The logic of God’s action, it was sometimes argued, was applicable to the inner world of human souls plagued by guilt and shame; they outer relationships in family, economy, and state ought to be governed by another logic, more worldly logic. At least in Protestantism, this disjunction between the inner and outer was one important reason why the Christian faith could be misused to legitimize violence. 35 Emptied of 35 See, for instance, Paul Tillich, Against the Third Reich. Paul Tillich's wartime addresses to Nazi Germany (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998). ? 27 their social import, religious symbols nonetheless floated loosely in the social world and could be harnessed to purposes that are at adds with their proper content. Significantly, this disjunction is never to be found in the New Testament; instead, the central religious narratives and rituals are intended to shape all domains of early Christian’s lives. Arguably, the central Christian rituals, Baptism and Eucharist, enact the narrative of divine action precisely as the pattern for lives of believers. It may well be the case, someone may respond, that the Christian faith at its heart fosters peace rather than violence. But in what ways can it do so in concrete social and political settings? First, the narrative of divine action can motivate and shape behavior of individual actors in conflict situations. Depending on their position, such individual actors can be significant and even decisive for the future of conflicts.36 Second, this narrative can shape broader cultural habits and expectations that make peaceful solutions possible. It takes a particular cultural soil for the seed of peace to bear fruit. Of course, the narratival portrayal of the divine redemptive action cannot be simply mirrored in human interaction, be that on individual, communal, or political planes. Instead, one has to aim at culturally and situationally appropriate practical analogies as near or distant echoes of the divine redemptive action that lies at the heart of the Christian faith. Finally, the narrative of divine action as it applies to human interaction can help shape social institutions. One way to think about how this may be the case is to recall the concluding words of Anthony Giddens’ book Modernity and Self-Identity. After noting the emergence in the high modernity of what he calls “life politics” (as distinct from “emancipatory politics”) which demands a remoralization of social life, he writes 28 How can we remoralize social life without falling prey to prejudices? The more we return to existential issues, the more we find moral disagreements; how can these be reconciled? If there are no transhistorical moral principles, how can humanity cope with clashes of ‘true believers’ without violence? Responding to such problems will surely require a major reconstruction of emancipatory politics as well as the pursuit of the life-political endeavors.37 The narrative of the God of unconditional love who reconciles humanity without condoning injustice along with its intended patterning in the lives of human beings and communities, contains, I suggest, at least some resources for such a reconstruction of politics. ?36 See Religion, 37 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 231.
- [Eckhart's Image of the Eye and the Wood: An analogy which explains “all that I have ever preached about”](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/eckharts-image) - Eckhart’s Image of the Eye and the Wood: An analogy which explains ‘all that I have ever preached about’1 by Reza Shah-Kazemi This essay was first published in the journal, Sacred Web (www.sacredweb.com), and is reproduced here with the kind permission of Sacred Web Publishing. To speak about Meister Eckhart is to speak about spiritual realization. Almost every single sermon of this master of Christian metaphysics and spirituality is „realizational?: each one of them issues an imperative summons to realize—to „make real?—the „one thing needful?. Now this „one thing? is difficult to grasp, impossible to define, but the need for it enters into the very definition of human consciousness. How then to express it, and to express it in a way which heightens our sense of need for it, at the same time as pointing the way to the fulfilment of this need? Eckhart provides a particularly compelling model of how to express the inexpressible, and is certainly one of the most successful „preachers? known to us, if our criterion of „success? be this: rendering the imperative of spiritual realization not just intelligible but irresistible. One of the central aspects of this success lies in Eckhart?s use of images, analogies, metaphors, symbols—all of which, in different ways, do not so much express an ingenious use of language, as elicit the spiritual move required of all of us: just as the image is one step removed from that of which it is an image, so our consciousness is called to move from its outer surface to its own inner depth. Eckhart?s communication of spiritual realities through verbal means, whether this be through images, analogies or doctrinal expositions, arises from this inner depth, and does not merely point to it: Whatever can be truly put into words must come from within, moved by its inner form: it must not come in from without, but out from within. It truly lives in the inmost part of the soul. (I:283) 2 Every image that is most „moving?, then, should be seen as a surging up, from within, of the reality expressed by the image; it is a living reality, within the inmost part of the soul, that calls out to be communicated, rather than just a mode of speech that reaches out for a goal as yet unconsummated. Hence for Eckhart, inner realization must come first, and then its verbal expression will effectively convey, if not the intrinsic reality of the experience itself, then at least that aspect of the realization which is communicable. But it is not just communication which is dependent on realization: comprehension by the hearer is also proportioned to realization; this is made clear by Eckhart in his discussion of the deepest meaning of poverty. He pleads with his listeners: I beg you to be like this in order that you may understand this sermon: for by the eternal truth I tell you that unless you are like this truth we are about to speak of, it is not possible for you to follow me. (II:269) In other words, a particular mode of being is an essential component of understanding. Something „like? the poverty of which he is to speak is thus a kind of opening through which the meaning of profound poverty may enter the soul, and help bring to fruition that partial mode of poverty that is already existent and which prefigures, by its very intention, the complete or integral poverty in question here. In other words, one has to be poor, already, in order to understand poverty; one has to abandon one?s apparent richness, one?s self-sufficiency, one?s own will: He who has abandoned all his will savours my teaching and hears my words. (II:144) With this as our background, let us turn to the sermon (number 60) containing the eye-wood image: As I was coming here today I considered how to preach to you clearly so that you would understand me properly, and I hit upon an analogy. If you can understand it, you will be able to grasp my meaning and get to the bottom of all that I have ever preached about. The analogy is with my eye and wood. When my eye is open it is an eye: when it is shut it is the same eye; and the wood is neither more nor less by reason of my seeing it. Now mark me well: Suppose my eye, being one and single in itself, falls on the wood with vision, then though each thing stays as it is, yet in the very act of seeing they are so much at one that we can really say „eye-wood?, and the wood is my eye. Now, if the wood were free from matter and wholly immaterial like my eyesight is, then we could truly say that, in the act of seeing, the wood and my eye were of one essence. If this is true for material things, it is all the more true of spiritual. (II:103-4) It is useful to dwell on these striking words; to try to imagine the effect they would have upon Eckhart?s listeners. It is a simple image, and yet it is said to contain the essence of everything he ever preached about. We do not think he is exaggerating in making this bold claim. For in this image we discern, first and foremost, an intimation of the principle of union, for which Eckhart is of course renowned; but we also find an indication of the path to that union, that is intellective perception of the transcendent truth, a perception which implies self-effacement and methodic concentration; a concentration which is transformed, by grace, into realization of identity with the transcendent truth; a truth which is thereby revealed as one?s own deepest being. Transcendent truth is thus transfigured into immanent reality by the grace that is both elicited and constituted by intellective perception of, and pure concentration upon, the Absolute. This is the core of my interpretation of the image. Now I have to substantiate this interpretation, and the best way to do so is to refer, of course, to other parts of his teachings. First, though, let us make the following observations. The eye remains quite distinct from the wood when considered apart from the vision wherein the two are united; and the wood does not change by virtue of being seen by the eye. We can interpret this to mean that the Absolute, as the ultimate spiritual object of the intellective vision, is not affected in its transcendent essence either by being „perceived? or not perceived; the change in question relates to the eye which so completely enters the wood in the act of vision that it becomes one with it; while a complete identity of essence on the level of matter is precluded due to the principle of separativity inherent in matter, such is not the case in the spiritual domain, where the lower is assimilable by the higher. For material multiplicity veils spiritual unity, spiritual unity contains all possible material things in eternal, perfect and infinite mode: to say „spiritual? is to say „universal?, hence the more spiritual a thing is the more inclusive and thus universal it becomes: [A]ll spiritual things are raised above material: the higher they are raised, the more they expand and embrace material things. (II:10) Now we have to ask: what is the object that the intellect focusses upon, and how does it do so, and with what part of the intellect? As regards the question of the object, the Absolute, we appear to be faced with a contradiction. For, again and again, Eckhart reminds us that the pure Absolute, the essence of God, the Godhead, beyond all being, cannot be conceived— how, then, can it be perceived? Human conceptions of the essence of the Divine constitute so many veils over it, for „it is its nature to be without nature. To think of goodness or wisdom or power dissembles the essence and dims it in thought. The mere thought obscures essence.? (II:32) ... goodness and wisdom and whatever may be attributed to God are all admixtures to God?s naked essence: for all admixture causes alienation from essence. (II:39) All human conceptions of the essence are thus creaturely and imperfect. What can be conceived of God is His being qua Creator, Judge, and so on. In other words, one can conceive of Him as the uncreated correlate of the created universe; but his Essence, the Godhead, is not exhausted by this dimension of His being: God, inasmuch as He is “God”, is not the supreme goal of creatures ... if a fly had reason and could intellectually plumb the eternal abysm of God?s being out of which it came, we would have to say that God, with all that makes Him “God” would be unable to fulfill and satisfy that fly! (II:271) The intellect can plumb the „eternal abysm? out of which God, qua Creator, arose; in other words the intellect is intrinsically capable of discerning that there is, beyond God, a truly transcendent reality, a pure absolute that is not relativized by contact with any created realm. It is not enough to say that God is pure being, because being is itself a relativity, albeit the most indeterminate of all relativities. Masters of little subtlety say God is pure being. He is as high above being as the highest angel is above a midge ... when I have said God is not a being and is above being, I have not thereby denied Him being: rather I have exalted it in Him. If I get copper in gold, it is there ... in a nobler mode than it is in itself. (II:150-151) So we can conceive of being and its relativity, together with the fact that being is exalted in God, while God is relativized by association with being; but the very conception of being as a limitation bears within itself the implication of that which goes beyond this limitation: the truly Infinite, the Godhead beyond Being. The pure Absolute is thus implied within our conception of the relativity of God, or in Hindu terms, the para Brahman (the „supreme? Absolute) is implied within the conception we have of the apara Brahman (the „non-supreme? Absolute). But this only pushes further back the problem with which we began: if that which is conceivable is by that very token, relative, is this Godhead—ultimate object of intellectual vision—not relativized by the very fact that the intellect can indeed conceive of it, even if this conception pertains to that which is beyond all conception? No, because one can answer, with Eckhart, that if the intellect is capable of conceiving of this transcendent Essence, it is because, in its essence, it is not other than It: There is a power in the soul ... If the whole soul were like it, she would be uncreated and uncreatable, but this is not so. In its other part it has a regard for and a dependence on time, and there it touches on creation and is created. To this power, the intellect, nothing is distant or external... This power seizes God naked in His essential being. It is one in unity, not like in likeness. (I:190) We have here a metaphysical version of the classical ontological proof of God: whereas for St. Anselm, the reality of God is proven by the human capacity for conceiving Him, for Eckhart, the relativity of God as Creator is proven by the intellectual capacity to conceive of the Essence which surpasses this relative dimension of the divine nature; and this intellectual capacity, in turn, proves or expresses the spiritual capacity for realizing identity with that Essence. It is important to note Eckhart?s distinction between the two parts of the soul mentioned in the above citation. That part of the soul that „has a regard for time? and that „touches on creation? is created. The uncreated part, however, the intellect, transcends time and space, and is directed to the transcendent realm. Elsewhere, he distinguishes between two degrees or levels within the intellect itself; he describes the lower powers in terms of the lower intellect, anger, desire and the senses. The higher powers are: the higher intellect, memory and will. Now when one is concerned with „seizing God naked in His essential being?, all cognitive contents of the intellect, all the images stored in the memory, all exercise of one?s own will, must be transcended. What then remains is but the ground or essence of the soul, the imageless silent centre „for no creature ever entered there, nor has the soul there either activity or understanding ... this part is receptive to nothing save only the divine essence without mediation. There God enters with His all, not merely with a part?. (I:3) The intellect, then, while being one in itself, is nonetheless extrinsically differentiated in accordance with the ontological plane of its operation: when focussing on the created order it is itself endowed with a created aspect and is moreover individualized in proportion to its contact with that order; but when reposing within itself, having been re-absorbed back into its source, it is wholly uncreated, and it is universalized to the extent that its one-ness with the „naked being? is realized. However, to make contact with this uncreated substance of the intellect, grace is indispensable: A master who has spoken best of all about the soul says that no human wit can ever come to know what the soul is in her ground ... What we can know of it must be supernatural: it must be by grace. (I:190) The natural resources of the personal intellect are insufficient to grasp the source of the intellect, the „spark? of the soul which transcends the soul itself even while mysteriously residing within it. This co-incidence of presence and transcendence can only be understood if the notion of depth comes to denote height: the spark in the depths of the soul is that transcendent source whence flow the powers of the intellect. That which flows cannot turn back and grasp the source of its own flow—therefore the natural functions of the intellect must be stilled as the condition for that miraculous re-flux or „inflowing? back to the source; and this can only be a supernatural operation, an act of divine grace, the result of which is that the point of actual consciousness is transported into the immanent depth that the ground of the soul is. We can therefore assert that the essential preliminary function of the intellect in Eckhartian terms is to establish the distinction between itself—consciousness—and that of which it is conscious—outward things—and to be dissatisfied with all such objects of consciousness in the very measure that they can be conceived of in distinctive fashion. This involves the ruthless rejection of all ideas and images, traces in the mind of external existents which all imply and entrench the nothingness of alterity. In other words, one?s concentration on the Absolute must be absolute; it must not be tainted with any distraction by the relative. In cognitive terms this means that one must „unknow,? or strip away, all contents of thought: There must be a stillness and a silence for this Word to make itself heard. We cannot serve this Word better than in stillness and silence: there we can hear it and there too we will understand it aright—in the unknowing. To him who knows nothing, it appears and reveals itself. (I:20) To thus „unknow? means in concrete terms to in-gather all the powers of the soul, interiorizing them for the sake of unitive concentration; concentration, not on this or that image, but on the Truth itself in the inmost depths of silent stillness: (we must) concentrate all our powers on perceiving and knowing the one, infinite, uncreated, eternal truth. To this end, assemble all your powers, all your senses, your entire mind and memory; direct them into the ground where your treasure lies buried. (I:19) The „unknowing? thus pertains to all modes of the individual powers of the soul: pure concentration is an ignorance, so far as the individual is concerned, for it subsumes within itself in undifferentiated mode all aspects of the soul?s functioning, resulting in a „modeless mode? of ignorance, a void, a virginal receptivity, which accepts only the influx of the divine Being, Truth and Blessedness. This is the „treasure? that lies buried deep beneath the superficial layers of cognition which are so many veils over it.3 As regards images, not one, however exalted, is to remain. Even the image of Christ is to be resisted and excluded. Eckhart quotes the words from the Gospel of St John, chapter 16, verse 7: It is expedient for you that I should go away from you, for if I do not go away, the Holy Spirit cannot come to you. And he comments: This is just as if he had said: “You rejoice too much in my present form, and therefore the joy of the Holy Ghost cannot be yours.” So leave all images and unite with the formless essence. (III:128) Eckhart?s position becomes more intelligible when the notion of „image? is understood, along with the corresponding state of freedom from all images. In the Birth of the Word in the soul, all things are attained, not as phenomena in the transient realm but as noumena, in their objective reality within God; as phenomena they are perceived as images refracted through the limited and hence distorting prisms of creaturely consciousness, but as noumena within the divine principle, they are grasped as they really are. It is for this reason that Eckhart maintains that we must be free of all images in our quest for the reality of God. If any image—whether noble or base—is present in the mind, God must necessarily be absent: The least creaturely image that takes place in you is as big as God. How is that? It deprives you of the whole of God. As soon as the image comes in, God has to leave with all His Godhead ... Go right out of yourself for God?s sake, and God will go right out of Himself for your sake! When these two have gone out what is left is one and simple. In this One the Father bears His Son in the inmost source. (I:118) Now it is important to bring in at this point the following crucial principle, for which Eckhart was accused of coming close to heresy, that of the nothingness of the creature: All creatures are pure nothing. I do not say that they are a little something, or anything at all, but that they are pure nothing. (I: Note C, No. 26) The creature is nothing because in itself it is an implicit negation of all that which is excluded by its own limitations: to negate that which is unconditionally Real is to be negated by it, hence to be reduced to nothingness. God alone, or Oneness alone, is pure affirmation, for: One is the negation of the negation and a denial of the denial. All creatures have a negation in themselves: one negates by not being the other ... but God negates the negation: He is one and negates all else, for outside of God nothing is. (II:339) So just as the creature as such is a pure nothing, and must be negated, if the pure positivity of the One is to be affirmed, so the image of creaturely objects is a pure nothing, and must be excluded from consciousness if spiritual concentration is to be perfect. One observes here a cognitive reflection, in the domain of spiritual method, of an ontological process, in the realm of metaphysical reality: the abstention from all images is the negative aspect of unitive concentration, and this reflects and prefigures that self-effacement which is the negative aspect of unitive realization: no sooner is the self effaced—„gone right out of itself?—than the immanent Godhead is realized, in a union which precludes all exclusive affirmation of either of the self or of God: the Godhead alone abides in this union: Where two are to become one, one of them must lose its being. So it is: and if God and your soul are to become one, your soul must lose her being and her life. As far as anything remained, they would indeed be united, but for them to become one, the one must lose its identity and the other must keep its identity. (I:52) As regards the positive aspect of unitive concentration, the uncreated essence of the intellect—the „citadel of the soul?, the „spark?, the inmost light of consciousness—this seeks, not some object apart from itself, but its own inner infinity. To the essence of the intellect „nothing is distant or external?. In other words, in true intellection or spiritual vision, the object and the subject are identical. If there is a certain interdependence, a certain correlation or even a mutually imposed shared relativity, between the created soul as subject and the Creator as object, there is, as between the ground of the soul or the essence of the intellect, and the absolute Godhead, not so much a correspondence as a total identity. In Sermon 60, after mention of the eye-wood image, Eckhart states that the soul?s inmost consciousness, its „spark? does not seek God as Father, Son or Holy Ghost, nor is it satisfied with divine being; rather, it seeks to know whence this being comes, it wants to get into its simple ground, into the silent desert into which no distinction ever peeped, of Father, Son or Holy Ghost. In the inmost part, where none is at home, there that light finds satisfaction, and there it is more one than it is itself. (II:105) This inmost part of the soul is thus more one than it is itself; it is somehow in the soul, but absolutely not of it.4 Its true identity is thus not even located within itself: it is more one than it is itself. Total selflessness is thus integral to true oneness; or let us say, selflessness is the shadow cast by oneness, a oneness that brooks no otherness. This oneness, being absolute, cannot therefore be anything but the supreme Godhead, the One. Thus the oneness within the unfathomable depth of the soul is only truly „satisfied? in the „One? that utterly transcends the God of the Persons—the „multiple? God, we might even say: The infinite God who is in the soul, He grasps the God who is infinite. (II:259) The object of concentration is therefore not some separate entity „out there?; it is the subject?s own deepest reality: the object of vision—the „wood? of the Absolute, immanent within the soul—is thus to be understood not as some fixed object, but as an infinite process, something which has a beginning but not an end; it is a centre which unfolds in infinitude. Thus the passage from the created to the uncreated part of the soul is an inverse reflection—in depth, and subjectively—of the passage from God to the Godhead—in height, and objectively; transcendent height is thus identical with interiorization in depth. This principle, which is so important in understanding Eckhart?s perspective, is established in the following sentence: The deeper the well, the higher it is; height and depth are one. (III:53) And also in this passage: God is brought down, not absolutely but inwardly, that we may be raised up. What was above has become inward. You must be internalized, from yourself and within yourself, so that He is in you. It is not that we should take anything from what is above us, but we should take it into ourselves, and take it from ourselves, and take it from ourselves into ourselves. (II:46) We interpret this as follows: The „highest? is revealed as the „inmost? only when consciousness is most fully interiorized; it is thus that the highest is taken „into ourselves?; taking it „from ourselves? means understanding that our inner substance is itself the „highest? inasmuch as this is immanent in all that exists; and finally taking it „from ourselves into ourselves? means sublimating the outer personal consciousness—an exteriority which implies alterity—within the inner unitive dimension, wherein no differentiation subsists. The notion of not taking „anything from what is above us? can mean, in this perspective, not attempting to appropriate to one?s outer being any properties relating to the transcendent aspect of God: one observes the crucial principle that the transcendent is realizable only by way of immanence, an interiorization to a point in consciousness which transcends by way of depth the empirical consciousness of the outer ego. In another description of the state of union between the soul and the uncreate, Eckhart says: When the soul has got so far it loses its name and is drawn into God, so that in itself it becomes nothing, just as the sun draws the dawn into itself and annihilates it. (III:126) The dawn experiences a loss of identity as dawn, but this loss is infinitely compensated by the brilliance of the rising sun, before which no „dawn? can subsist; the dim light of dawn must be annulled, but only by a light infinitely more radiant, and so it is with the soul: the limited light of its intellect must give way to the infinite light of the Absolute. In another sermon Eckhart says that the light by which the intellect sees must be the light of the Absolute if it is to see the Absolute as It is in Itself: Supposing my eye were a light, and strong enough to absorb the full force of the sun?s light and unite with it, then it would see not only by its own power, but it would see with the light of the sun in all its strength. So it is with the intellect. The intellect is a light, and if I turn it away from all things and in the direction of God, then, since God is continually overflowing with grace, my intellect becomes illumined and united with love, and therein knows and loves God as He is in Himself.? (II:281)5 This extract also helps to underline the methodic necessity of unitive concentration: the intellect, stripped bare of all contingent content, must concentrate on the exclusive reality of God so that, by virtue of its own uncreated substance, it may be sublimated within the uncreated light of God; one observes here a useful clarification of the point made earlier about the implication of the intellect?s capacity to conceive the supra-ontological essence: the eye of the intellect can only gaze on the light of God because of the affinity—and, in the final analysis, identity—between its own uncreated substance and the uncreated reality of God. This analogy is useful in elucidating the nature of pure, unitive concentration which may be envisaged as the methodic counterpart to this transcendent intellectual vision: what, a priori, is a focussing of attention on the supreme object that transcends the personal intellect, becomes, through methodic concentration, a realization of identity with that object, but not as object, rather as immanent subject, the very word „con-centration? suggesting this process of assimilation within one?s own centre, a „taking from oneself into oneself?. This is also implicit in Eckhart?s insistence that „whatever a man draws into himself or receives from without is wrong?; one must not consider God as outside oneself, „but as one?s own and as what is within oneself?. (II:136) In other words, it is one?s deepest oneself which in reality furnishes the transcendent object of that intellection which pertains to a relatively more outward mode of one?s own being: that upon which one concentrates is one?s own deepest self, even if the subjective starting point of concentration is necessarily located on the relative plane of one?s being, whence the innermost subjectivity must at first be envisaged as the transcendent object. But only „at first?, for in reality, „The hearer is the same as the heard in the eternal Word?. (II:83) This total or pure concentration is thus an essential condition for the process whereby the object of concentration „digests? the concentrating subject; whereas in material terms, food consumed is assimilated to the individual, in spiritual terms, this is reversed: that which the individual takes into himself changes him into it: The bodily food we take is changed into us, but the spiritual food we receive changes us into itself. (I:50) This idea is well expressed, with a nuance that opens up the principle of identity, in terms of another analogy using wood; this time, wood symbolizes the relative soul, in relation to the „fire? of the Absolute: Fire changes into itself what is added to it, which becomes its own nature. The wood does not change the fire into itself, but the fire changes the wood into itself. Thus we are changed into God that we may know Him as He is.? (II:137) The wood can only be changed into fire to the extent that it has within its nature a profound affinity with fire; and this, despite the outwardly tangible differences between their respective natures that render them incommensurable in the very measure that they are physically kept apart from each other. One can see the relevance of this image to the relationship between the soul and God: to the extent that the soul subsists in its created awareness, it is remote from God, and there is a strict incommensurability between the soul as such and God as such; but on contact between the wood and fire—the awakening of the soul to the divine reality—an unsuspected affinity is revealed, and, eventually, a total union is consummated. Going back to what Eckhart said above about union, the one agent is reduced to nothing, while the other remains what it is. The drop is reduced to nothing insofar as it is a drop, while the ocean into which it is plunged remains what it is: If you were to cast a drop into the ocean, the drop would become the ocean, and not the ocean the drop. Thus it is with the soul: when she imbibes God, she is turned into God, so that the soul becomes divine, but God does not become the soul. (II:323) To recapitulate: the intellect?s powers of conception function, in the first instance, in a negative manner, excluding all that which can form the basis for determinate—hence limited—conception; therefore, one may say that, in its purely conceptual mode, the intellect is only „satisfied? by that which surpasses its own power of conception—the properly limitless, infinite, transcendent One. To say that the intellect „conceives? of the Absolute— upon which it then concentrates—means that it can conceive of a „somewhat? which is intelligible only by way of negation: as was stated earlier, one can conceive of something which transcends the limits imposed by determinate conception as such; thus it is a conception of the intrinsically inconceivable. But this something that is intrinsically inconceivable is nonetheless still a conception since it is present to the mind in some way. In other words, it is possible to conceive that it is, but impossible to conceive what it is. These points might be made clearer by means of Eckhart?s notion of what it means to speak the Word. The Father eternally „speaks? the Word which is the Son. What this means is that „The object of the Father?s thought is the eternal Word?. (II:300) The Son as Word is therefore the determinate object of the intellection of the Father. For the intellect to unite with the formless essence can then be seen as the inverse of this process. While the first is a downward movement intending manifestation, determination and hence limitation, the second is an upward movement intending the non-manifest, indeterminate and limitless. This upward movement is described in another sermon in terms of a „breakthrough?: This spirit must transcend number and break through multiplicity, and God will break through him: and just as He breaks through into me, so I break through in turn into Him. (I:136) The act of pure transcendence by which the uncreated intellect realizes the essence—the act of vision that unites the eye to the wood—is thus only conceivable as the counterpart of the divine breakthrough into the soul?s essence, so that it would be more accurate to say that it is the Absolute as transcendent object that breaks through and assimilates to itself the uncreated element residing within the depths of the relative subject, rather than to assert baldly that the uncreated intellect „attains? or breaks through into the essence. In other words, the wood absorbs the eye into itself; the eye does not assimilate the wood to itself. The food digests the one who eats it, and not the other way around. The drop becomes the ocean; the ocean does not become the drop. Now there are some who might object to our use of the term „spiritual method?, arguing that Eckhart, in many places appears to reject any idea of a method. For example: [I]f a man thinks he will get more of God by meditation, by devotion, by ecstasies ... than by the fireside or in the stable—that is nothing but taking God, wrapping a cloak round His head and shoving Him under the bench. (I:117) We would argue however that this is not a rejection of meditation and ecstasies as such; rather, it is a rejection of a point of view which would absolutize these relativities. Eckhart appears to be saying that one must relate to God according to His measures and not according to ours; one should not set up a formal or deterministic relationship between one?s own effort—as cause—and His reality—as effect—for if God is posited as the „achievement? of a particular „way?, initiated by the creature, then He, as effect, depends on the creature, as cause, whereas in reality it is the opposite that is true. It is as if Eckhart is saying: you impose on Him your own measures, bringing Him down to your level—„shoving His head under the bench?—and this, after having veiled His true nature—„wrapping a cloak round His head?— by smothering Him with your particular „ways?, which thus arrogate to themselves the status properly belonging to the ostensible object of devotion. Thus, to „shove? God beneath the bench can be understood as the human reduction of the Divine to the level of a horizontally determined chain of conventional causality: on the other hand, to give God His due, is to be perpetually—and „vertically?—aware of Him as the omni-present and inalienable Reality towards which man must ever gravitate. This interpretation is supported by the following statement of Eckhart on the meaning of „equality?, the notion that God is equally present in all things, at all times: [W]hen we speak of “equality”, this does not mean that one should regard all works as equal, or all places or people. That would be quite wrong, for praying is a better task than spinning, and the church is a nobler place than the street. But in your acts you should have an equal mind and equal faith and equal love for your God ... (III:17) As quoted earlier, he said also „We cannot serve this Word better than in stillness and silence?; this clearly implies what we have called a spiritual method. Likewise, in another sermon, he puts to himself the question: is it always necessary to be so „barren and estranged from everything, outward and inward?—can one not pray, listen to sermons, and so on, to help oneself? He answers: „No, be sure of this. Absolute stillness for as long as possible is best of all for you. You cannot exchange this state for any other without harm.? (I:43) Let me repeat: „Absolute stillness for as long as possible?: this sounds very much like a method, the passive or negative aspect of that positive concentration by the inmost intellect on the pure Absolute. Elsewhere he says: If you could naught yourself for an instant, indeed I say less than an instant, you would possess all that this is in itself. But as long as you mind anything at all, you know no more of God than my mouth knows of colour or my eye of taste.(I:144) As regards this self-naughting, it is important to distinguish two types of „nothingness? that pertain to the soul: the first is when the soul is affirmed as such apart from God, and which may be called its negative nothingness, inasmuch as it negates the unique reality of God; and the second is a methodically precipitated nothingness which is, on the contrary, positive, inasmuch as it is a deliberate and conscious negation of the soul?s own apparent „somewhat?, and is thus a nothingness which is receptive to the Divine „somewhat?. To attain to the „somewhat? of God, His Reality, that is, as it were, on the thither side of the Void, the soul must first fall into her own nothingness, here implying the concrete and „upward? or „inward? negation of her own apparent „something-ness?; then God „with His uncreatedness upholds her Nothingness and preserves her in His Something?. (I:59) Now what is the reality of this union which is hinted at in these rich images: the eye-wood phenomenon, the burning of the wood in the fire, the return of the drop to the ocean, the annihilation of the dawn in the sunrise? Even though this question takes us into a vast, indeed, infinite realm, we cannot avoid it if we are to substantiate the claim that this image explains everything that Eckhart ever preached about. The following is an attempt to summarize, as succinctly as the time and space of this lecture permits, what Eckhart says about union. To begin with, he claims that the soul?s „whole beatitude? lies in this union: God the Father gives birth to the Son in the ground and essence of the soul, and thus unites Himself with her ... and in that real union lies the soul?s whole beatitude. (I:5) But as regards the phenomenal state in which this union is realized, we have precious little to go by. As has been noted by many scholars, Eckhart does not give many descriptions of the phenomenon of unitive experience, the highest raptus, gezucket, or „ecstasy?. This has led many to assert that this experience is not fundamental to Eckhart?s teaching; but even if it is true that the metaphysical principle of oneness takes precedence over the phenomenal experience of unity, this does not mean that the experience is of little importance. For, as we saw at the beginning, the only true, and „moving? statement of principles arises from a prior realization thereof, even if that realization itself is to some degree the final result of a previous process of thought, reflection and concentration. But there is no common measure between the cognitive activity preceding union and that union itself. To quote Shankara: The two active causes of the fruit of liberation—the preliminary mental activity and the ensuing cognition in its empirical aspect—are not of the nature of the fruit ...6 The paucity of descriptions of union in Eckhart?s doubtless derives from the ineffability of the experience and thus its intrinsic incommunicability. But in one important sermon, he does give us an extrinsic description, in speaking of St. Paul?s raptus, to which Eckhart clearly attributes the highest status in regard to the experience of union. In the context of exhorting his listeners again to abandon all powers, images and works so that the Word be spoken in them, he says: If only you could suddenly be unaware of all things, then you could pass into an oblivion of your own body as St. Paul did, when he said: “Whether in the body I cannot tell or out of the body I cannot tell: God knows it.” (2 Cor. 12:2) In this case the spirit had so entirely absorbed the powers that it had forgotten the body: memory no longer functioned, nor understanding, nor the senses, nor the powers that should govern and grace the body, vital warmth and body-heat were suspended, so that the body did not waste during the three days when he neither ate nor drank. (I:7) He commends the listener likewise to „flee his senses, turn his powers inward and sink into an oblivion of all things and himself.? One way of understanding what Eckhart means by union is to reflect upon the esoteric significance of the relationship between the Father and the Son in Eckhart?s mystical theology. He portrays this relationship in a variety of ways. The following strikes us as one of the most significant aspects of the nexus of relationships subsisting between the Father and the Son, the Son and humanity, and humanity and the individual human being. Taking first the relationship of Divine Paternity, Eckhart quotes the scriptural principle: No man knows the Father but the Son (Matt. 11, 27) and adds: „if you would know God, you must not merely be like the Son, you must be the Son yourself?. (I:127) To thus „be? the Son means to be the Word eternally spoken by the Father, as opposed to being the man Jesus who was begotten by the Father in a particular time and place. To distinguish between the eternal Birth and the temporal birth makes clear the necessity of realizing within oneself the reality of this ceaseless Birth, of which the temporal Birth is but an extrinsic effect. Herein lies the crux of Eckhart?s teachings, which he expresses by quoting St. Augustine: „What does it avail me that this birth is always happening, if it does not happen in me? That it should happen in me is what matters.? (I:1) The assumption by the Word of human nature is the key to the individual human being?s realization of the Birth of the Word within the soul, and thus union with the source of the Word: God took on human nature and united it with His own Person. Then human nature became God, for He put on bare human nature and not any man. Therefore, if you want to be the same Christ and God, go out of all that which the eternal Word did not assume ... then you will be the same to the eternal Word as human nature is to Him. For between your human nature and His there is no difference: it is one, for it is in Christ what it is in you. (II:313-4; emphasis added) In other words, when the accidents of individuality are eliminated, universal human nature is revealed: not such and such a human being, but humanity as such. This „such-ness?, having constituted the existential container of Divinity, is absorbed by its divine content: becoming one with humanity is thus a stage on the path of ascending to become one with Divinity, describing thereby the inverse of the movement whereby the Divinity descended to become humanity: Why did God become man? That I might be born God Himself. (I:138) Therefore, the true or transcendent meaning of humanity is Divinity, which amounts to saying that man is only true to his deepest nature to the extent that he transcends himself, which he does, in the first instance, by purifying himself from „all of that which the eternal Word did not assume?. It is clear that Eckhart is here stressing the necessity of the divinization of the human and not the humanization of the Divine: the lower must extinguish itself in the face of the higher and only then be re-absorbed by it, rather than bring down the higher to its own level and assimilate it crudely to one?s personal actuality. These considerations are reinforced by an alchemical analogy employed by Eckhart: By being poured into the body, the soul is darkened ... the soul cannot be pure unless she is reduced to her original purity, as God made her, just as gold cannot be made from copper by two or three roastings: it must be reduced to its primary nature ... Iron can be compared to silver, and copper to gold: but the more we equate it without subtraction, the more false it is. It is the same with the soul. (I:202-3) The essence of the soul is darkened and enshrouded by the body: the alchemical „reduction? or „dissolution? required is evidently not aimed at the body qua material, but rather at the soul insofar as it has taken on itself the darkness of its covering: the psychic traces of matter and corporeality, passion for the perishable, attachment to the transient material that is „created after nothing? (I:203). The more the natural, fallen and actual state of the soul—the unrefined copper—is taken for the essence of its being and consciousness, the more false it becomes, the more susceptible to pride, which here means deifying the creature as such, taking darkness for light. One should recall here the idea of copper being more exalted in gold than it is in itself: earlier this image was used in regard to the distinction between Being and Beyond-Being, but it applies with equal relevance to the soul and God: the soul realizes a plenitude in God that is strictly excluded on the plane of its separative affirmation as soul. If this reduction to pure humanity constitutes the aim and limit of the human being?s capacity and renders him at one with the Word, the question now arises: what is it that the Son „knows? of the Father, and that now the individual, reduced to „bare humanity? and thus the Word, also knows, and is? In what does this knowledge and being consist? What does the Son hear from his Father? The Father can only give birth, the Son can only be born. All that the Father has and is, the profundity of the divine being and the divine nature, He brings forth all at once in His only- begotten Son. (I:138) The content of this knowledge is inseparable from the Being of the Absolute; the ontological distinction between the Son as Person and the Godhead qua Essence is not operative in this supra-ontological dimension of essential identity, for, as we saw earlier, The hearer is the same as the heard in the eternal Word. (II:83) Just as the Son is the Father in this unitive dimension, so, if the individual man has become born as the Son by virtue of his effective reduction to pure humanity, it follows that he, too, cannot be other than the One. To say „Birth? is to say „Union?: God the Father gives birth to the Son in the ground and essence of the soul, and thus unites Himself with her ... and in that real union lies the soul?s whole beatitude. (I:5) Here then, we have one absolutely inalienable feature of union: total beatitude. In another description Eckhart speaks as if paraphrasing the Vedantin ternarySat-Chit-Ananda (Being- Consciousness-Bliss); for there are said to be three aspects of the Word as spoken in the soul: „immeasurable power?, „infinite wisdom? and „infinite sweetness? (I:60-61).7 Now these „contents? of the supreme reality of union can not of course be conveyed by the simple image of the eye and the wood. The image can point to the reality of union, but that which flows forth from union can only be experienced, and cannot be conveyed by any image. Even these words used by Eckhart to describe the Word are to be understood in a provisional sense: there are not three distinct elements, each being somehow akin to our empirical awareness of power, knowledge and joy. Rather, they refer to one undifferentiated reality, each element being absolutely identical with the other two, in a mode which utterly transcends all creaturely understanding of power, wisdom or sweetness. These three elements, on the human plane, are images of the archetypes, shadows of realities, conveying something of the character of those realities, but unable to capture their absoluteness. For that absoluteness to be realized, all relativity is to be eliminated; the „wood? of the soul qua soul is to be burnt up in the fire of the Absolute; the drop is to return to the ocean; the dawn is annihilated in the rising sun. But then, one might ask, to what does consciousness return once this union is consummated? For it is a union that strictly requires that one agent of the union must „lose its being?, as we heard earlier. If God and your soul are to become one, your soul must lose her being and her life. As far as anything remained, they would indeed be united, but for them to become one, the one must lose its identity and the other must keep its identity. (I:52) That is a question for another lecture. The answer relates closely to what the Sufis refer to as „subsistence after annihilation? (al-baqa’ ba’d al-fana’). It is summed up in Eckhart?s statement that, once the soul has realized its own nothingness, God in His uncreatedness „upholds her Nothingness and preserves her in His Something?. This same mystery is expressed in Ibn Arabi?s words: The final end and ultimate return of the gnostics ... is that the Real is identical with them, while they do not exist.8 Some concluding words: Eckhart?s whole teaching points to the need to go from the image to That of which it is an image, from the shadow to That which casts the shadow. One must use the image as an icon, and not as an idol. Eckhart uses images—marvellously and convincingly—to demonstrate how we must finally leave behind all images. But to sacrifice is to sacralize: everything which one sacrifices for the sake of the silence required by the Word is regained in absolute plenitude in the source of the Word: virginal receptivity is transformed into infinite fecundity. He who has thus abandoned all things on the lower plane where they are mortal, will recover them in God, where they are reality.? (I:137) But none of this will make any sense unless one of those abandoned things be one?s own self, for, as we saw at the outset: He who has abandoned all his will savours my teaching and hears my words. ________ 1 This is the text of a lecture given at the Eckhart Society Annual Conference, Plater College, Oxford, August 23. It summarizes the most important points made in the chapter on Eckhart in the forthcoming publication, Paths to Transcendence: Shankara, Ibn Arabi and Meister Eckhart on Transcendent Spiritual Realization by Reza Shah-Kazemi (State University of New York). 2 All sermon references are to Meister Eckhart—Sermons and Treatises, (vols I-III) Translated and Edited by M. O?C. Walshe (Longmead: Element Books, 1987,1989). 3 This evokes for us the Islamic etymology of kufr, disbelief: the primary meaning of the word refers to the idea of „covering over?. The kafir is not just the disbeliever but also the farmer who „covers? the seed with earth. Faith and, at a deeper level, gnosis, can be likened to treasure, buried within the earth of forgetfulness. 4 The Sufis describe themselves as being in the world but not of it. 5 One is reminded here of the verse of the Qur?an which speaks of „light upon light?: God is the Light of the heavens and the earth. A similitude of His light is as a niche wherein is a lamp; the lamp is in a glass; the glass is as it were a shining star, [the lamp] is kindled from [the oil] of a blessed tree, an olive that is neither of the east nor of the west, whose oil well nigh would shine, even if no fire touched it. Light upon Light. God guideth to His light whom He will. And God striketh similitudes for men. And God knoweth all things. (“The Light”, XXIV: 35) 6 The Thousand Teachings (Upadesa Sahasri) (London: Shanti Sadan, 1990) Tr. A.J. Alston, II, 18.108. 7 This characterisation of the Word also recalls one of Ibn Arabi?s descriptions of Being (wujud): it is the finding of the Real in ecstasy (wujud wijdan al-haqq fi’l-wajd). See W.C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge (Albany: State University of New York, 1989), p.212. We have commented on this remarkable parallel between the three mystics in the forthcoming work cited above. 8 Ibid., p.375
- [On the Diversity of Divine Self-Disclosures](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/amir-diversity) - That is, that they might know Him, according to the opinion of the majority of the spiritual masters. This interpretation is corroborated by the following words which are part of a Holy Tradition: “I was a Hidden Treasure. I was not known, and I loved to be known. Thus I created the beings and became known to them, and it is through Me that they have known Me.” There is also the verse in which God—exalted is He—says: Thy Lord hath decreed, that ye worship none save Him [Qur’an, 17:23]. “Decreed” means decided in an irrevocable manner. Having been created only for this purpose the jinn and humankind are bound to know Him in conformity with this primordial nature (fi?ra) in which God has created them, and in this respect no one can not know God. But He has also decreed that they worship none but Him, so that they never worship other than Him, for His decisions are executory, irreversible, and cannot be contradicted. If men differ in their knowledge [of the divine Reality], this is due to the diversity of their intelligences which depends on the diversity of their aptitudes (isti?d?d); the latter, however, have no cause, being pure primordial potentialities (li’annah? qad?ma, ghayr maj??la) that constitute a holy, essential effusion which is not affected by any attribute. It is because the manifestations of He who is worshiped are multiple that one sees multiple religions and traditions. The raison d’être of any worship is to magnify [the Worshiped], and thus the worshiper meditates and humbles himself before He who can harm or benefit, give or retain, accord [or withhold] subsistence, elevate or abase... Yet, all these Attributes belong in reality to One Being which is none other than God— exalted is He—the Non-manifest Absolute (al-Ghayb al-mu?laq). Whoever worships any form—the sun or the stars, the fire, light, or darkness, nature, an idol, an imaginary form or a jinn—says about the form which he worships: “This is how He who constitutes the object of my worship presents Himself.”... And he ascribes attributes of the Divine to it, making it a source of harm or benefit, which would be justified from a certain aspect, were it not for the fact that in so doing he assigns a limit [to God] and claims to submit Him to conditions. Ultimately, the worshiper does not seek, through the form which he worships, but the Reality which deserves to be worshiped and which is none other than God—exalted is He. For this is what God has decided and decreed from pre-eternity. But it is His Absolute Manifestation, exempt from all limitation and free from all condition that this worshiper does not grasp, because he has not realized it effectively (?al? al-ta?q?q), despite having a global knowledge thereof (f? al-jumla) which is none other than this primordial knowledge. Thus any worshiper who is not among this blessed group (al-??’ifa al-mar??ma) which constitutes the elite of the gnostics only worships [the absolute Reality] as conditioned, limited, and finally in conformity to his judgment (ma?k?man ?alayhi), for this is how he knows Him. Even dogmatic theologians do not fall outside of this rule, in their judgment that God must be endowed with such and such Attribute, but that it does not befit Him to possess such and such other Attribute. They have made their reason the instrument of [knowing] God; yet reason cannot but pronounce itself in favour of Absolute Transcendence, whereas the knowledge of His Unity (taw??d) as taught to us by the Scriptures and the prophets – blessings and peace be upon them all— comprises a double aspect of transcendence (tanz?h) and of immanence (tashb?h). There is no doubt that theologians, be they Sunnis or Mu?tazilites, have pronounced themselves on the question of God by ascribing Him a particular attribute and denying Him another only after having formed a rational and imaginal conception of God, for their judgment is necessarily a development of this conception; and if one of them objected that in his mind God assumed absolutely no form, it is either because he ignores all the modalities of conception or because he is an insolent liar. This is the reason why you will see them, after having passed all kinds of judgments (?ukm) about God, recognising in the end that, “Whatever conclusion that comes to your mind, know that God is different from it!” With these words they wish to disavow everything they have concocted before; yet, this disavowal constitutes itself a (rational) conclusion which as such would deserve to be rejected. Each group of worshipers therefore seeks to confine the absolute Reality in its own doctrine by negating that God can disclose or manifest Himself in any other way except according to their conception thereof. This is the reason why there are many of those who shall not recognise Him on the Day of Judgement, and who will thereby ask Him to protect them from Himself, as testified by the following authenticated tradition which I quote in meaning (bi al-ma?n?): “[On the Day of Judgment] God will order all the communities to follow that which they worshiped. Only this [Islamic] community will remain in place with all its hypocrites in it. Then God will present Himself before them in a form in which they do not recognise Him, saying unto them: ‘I am your Lord.’ They will exclaim: ‘We seek God’s protection from you! We shall stay in place until the coming of our Lord, and when He comes, we shall recognise Him.’ Then He will show Himself to them in the form which is familiar [to them], and they will testify, ‘Thou, indeed art our Lord!’” Yet, the form [that God will assume in that occasion] and the transformation at issue are but His self-disclosures in conformity with the manner in which God wishes to manifest Himself, and which is desired by Him—exalted is He. In reality they are pure nothingness without the least reality, were it not for the sight of their beholder. God—exalted is He—will remain as He was in Himself before manifesting Himself in this particular self-disclosure, without being affected in His Immutability by the slightest change, as is the case with any divine epiphany, in this world or in the next. The people [mentioned in this ?ad?th] will therefore be in the truth when they contest Him in the first Self-disclosure, since He cannot be enclosed in any form whatsoever, and also in the truth when they recognise Him in the second one, for He who is thus manifested is always the Same through His different Self-disclosures. The point is simply that, the first time, God manifested Himself in a form which was unfamiliar to them in this world, and which they could not imagine insofar as it did not conform to their beliefs. However, each of these deniers only recognised Him as limited and conditioned by the form in which they imagined Him in this world, by concluding (?akama) that He had to be endowed with such and such Attributes and deprived of such and such other ones... No one among them recognised Him [as He is in reality]—escaping all contours of a particular doctrine, and sovereign with respect to a form which would necessarily determine His Self-disclosures. [On the Day of Judgment] they will not recognise Him for the Sovereign when He shall manifest Himself to them in the form familiar to them in this world, whereas it is the Same who manifests Himself to them in each Self-disclosure. Not a single of these deniers who shall ask for His protection for having not recognised Him will be able to recognise Him in His absoluteness [that is, free from any condition or constraint]; he shall recognise Him only in the conditioned form which traces out the contours of his particular belief, a form which is fashioned only by his reason and in which they persist in worshiping Him. Were it not for the permission of the legislator [the Prophet] to “imagine” the Worshiped in our worship of Him, we would not fear affirming that there is no difference between he who fashions an idol by his own hand, thus giving Him a sensory form, and he who gives Him a rational form. Yet, in a famous tradition the Prophet—whose trustworthiness is complete and unquestionable—has authorised imaginal representations [of the Divinity] and has forbidden sensory representations: “Excellence consists in worshiping God as if you see Him”—that is, to imagine Him as being in front of you when, for example, you turn towards the qibla, in order to meet all the appropriate conditions of worship while standing before Him, so that He may be present in your heart throughout your worship. This order has been given to us in such a form because just like—in an external plane—our body is maintained by orientation in the direction of the qibla, thereby being unable to neither turn away nor make a movement [that is not part of the prayers], so does our heart focus in our inside [on the object of its worship], which makes it avoid dispersion and abandonment [to self-propagating thoughts]. But the Prophet did not order this to the one who imagines (mutakhayyil) God thus to “condition” Him for his account while denying it to others, nor to confine Him in a ritual orientation while refusing to admit that a third could assign Him another, nor to ascribe Him an “imaginal form” to the exclusion of any others. For, within these very imaginal representations, He remains—exalted is He—the Absolute who is unconditioned and unaffected by form. Being the Essence of opposites, both of the Absolute and the conditioned, He is at once one and the other. As for the knowers—may God be pleased with all of them—when they will be faced with this Self-disclosure and this change of form in the Ultimate Abode, they will remain in total silence without trying to make Him known to anyone. Such is their attitude already in the here below, for they know Him as the true unconditioned Absolute and also as beyond Absoluteness itself which constitutes already a definition [and thereby a condition]. They know that He is the Manifest who is disclosed through all forms—sensory, rational, subtle, or imaginary—and that He is the Manifest and the Inward, the First and the Last [Qur’an, 57:3]. They have not been ignorant of Him in this world, and they shall not be ignorant of Him in the next either, in whatever form He shall manifest Himself. Which explains the following sentence attributed to certain gnostics: “The gnostics shall be tomorrow, God willing, as they are today.”
- [Kol Nidrei](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/kolnidrei) - Part of the Matheson Trust Sacred Audio Collection Kol Nidrei (also known as Col Nidre) is an Aramaic declaration recited in the synagogue before the beginning of the evening service on every Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Though not a prayer, this dry legal formula and its ceremonial accompaniment have been charged with emotional
- [Forgiveness](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/forgiveness) - As once more we are about to enter the Great Lent, I would like to remind us – myself first of all, and all of you my fathers, brothers, and sisters – of the verse that we just sang, one of the stichera, and that verse says: “Let us begin Lent, the Fast, with joy.” Only yesterday we were commemorating Adam crying, lamenting at the gates of Paradise, and now every second line of the Triodion and the liturgical books of Great Lent will speak of repentance, acknowledging what dark and helpless lives we live, in which we sometimes are immersed. And yet, no one will prove to me that the general tonality of Great Lent is not that of a tremendous joy! Not what we call “joy” in this world – not just something entertaining, interesting, or amusing – but the deepest definition of joy, that joy of which Christ says: “no one will take away from you” (Jn. 16:22). Why joy? What is that joy? So many people under various influences have come to think of Lent as a kind of self–inflicted inconvenience. Very often in Lent we hear these conversations: “What do you give up for Lent?” – it goes from candy to I don’t know what. There is the idea that if we suffer enough, if we feel the hunger enough, if we try by all kinds of strong or light ascetical tools, mainly to “suffer” and be “tortured,” so to speak, it would help us to “pay” for our absolution. But this is not our Orthodox faith. Lent is not a punishment. Lent is not a kind of painful medicine that helps only inasmuch as it is painful. LENT IS A GIFT! Lent is a gift from God to us, a gift which is admirable, marvelous, one that we desire. Now a gift of what? I would say that it is a gift of the essential – that which is essential and yet which suffers most in our life because we are living lives of confusion and fragmentation, lives which constantly conceal from us the eternal, the glorious, the divine meaning of life and take away from us that which should “push” and, thus, correct and fill our life with joy. And this essential is thanksgiving: the acceptance from God of that wonderful life, as St. Peter says, “...created out of nothing...,” created exclusively by the love of God, for there is no other reason for us to exist; loved by Him even before we were born, we were taken into His marvelous light. Now we live and we forget. When was the last time I thought about it? But I do not forget so many little things and affairs that transform my whole life into empty noise, into a kind of traveling without knowing where. Lent returns to me, gives back to me, this essential – the essential layer of life. Essential because it is coming from God; essential because it is revealing God. The essential time, because time again is a great, great area of sin. Because time is the time of what? Of priorities. And how often our priorities are not at all as they should be. Yet in Lent, waiting, listening, singing... you will see, little by little that time – broken, deviated, taking us to death and nowhere else, without any meaning. You will see that time again becomes expectation, becomes something precious. You wouldn’t take one minute of it away from its purpose of pleasing God, of accepting from Him His life and returning that life to Him together with our gratitude, our wisdom, our joy, our fulfillment. After this essential time comes the essential relationship that we have with everything in the world, a relationship 1 which is expressed so well in our liturgical texts by the word reverence. So often, everything becomes for us an object of “utilizing,” something which is “for grabs,” something which “belongs” to me and to which I have a “right.” Everything should be as Communion in my hands. This is the reverence of which I speak. It is the discovery that God, as Pasternak once said, was “...a great God of details,” and that nothing in this world is outside of that divine reverence. God is reverent, but we so often are not. So, we have the essential time, the essential relationship with matter filled with reverence, and last, but not least, the rediscovery of the essential link among ourselves: the rediscovery that we belong to each other, the rediscovery, that no one has entered my life or your life without the will of God. And with that rediscovery, there is everywhere an appeal, an offering to do something for God: to help, to comfort, to transform, to take with you, with each one of you, that brother and sister of Christ. This is that essential relationship. Essential time, essential matter, essential thought: all that is so different from what the world offers us. In the world everything is accidental. If you don’t know how to “kill” time, our society is absolutely ingenious in helping you to do that. We kill time, we kill reverence, we transform communications, relationships, words, divine words into jokes and blasphemies, and sometimes just pure nonsense. There is this thirst and hunger for nothing but external success. Don’t we understand, don’t we understand, brothers and sisters what power is given to us in the form of Lent. Lenten Spring! Lenten beginning! Lenten resurrection! And all this is given to us free. Come, listen to that prayer. Make it yours! Don’t even try to think on your own; just join, just enter and rejoice! And that joy will start killing those old and painful and boring sins... And with that you will have that great joy which the angels heard, which the disciples experienced when they returned to Jerusalem after Christ’s Ascension. It is that joy which was left with them that we nobly adopted. It is first of all the joy of knowing, the joy of having something in me which, whether I want it or not, will start transforming life in me and around me. This last essential is the essential return to each other: this is where we begin tonight. This is what we are doing right now. For if we would think of the real sins we have committed, we would say that one of the most important is exactly the style and tonality which we maintain with each other: our complaining and criticizing. I don’t think that there are cases of great and destructive hatred or assassination, or something similar. It is just that we exist as if we are completely out of each other’s life, out of each other’s interests, out of each other’s love. Without having repaired this relationship, there is no possibility of entering into Lent. Sin – whether we call it “original” sin or “primordial” sin – has broken the unity of life in this world, it has broken time, and time has become that fragmented current which takes us into old age and death. It has broken our social relations, it has broken families. Everything is diabolos – divided and destroyed. But Christ has come into the world and said: “... and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself” (Jn. 12:32). It is impossible to go to Christ without taking with me the essential. It is not the abandonment of everything as we go to Christ; it is finding in Him the power of that resurrection: of unity, of love, of trust, of joy, of all that which, even if it occupies some place in our life, is at the same time so minuscule. It is tragic to think that from churches, from seminaries, what comes to heaven are complaints ... being tired, always something not going right... You know, sitting in my office from time to time, I am admiring people for inventing new “tragedies” every half hour. But we are Christ’s and Christ is God’s. Alexander Schmemann · Forgiveness 2 Alexander Schmemann · Forgiveness Andifwehad–becauseweknow–justa little bit of that which would bring us together, we would replace all my little offenses with even a little amount of that joy. That is the forgiveness we want and ask God to give us. Because if there is a strict commandment in the Gospel, it is that commandment: “if you forgive ... your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive ... neither will your Father forgive ... ” (Mt. 6:14-15). So, of course it is a necessity. But the NOW of that, I repeat it once more, is to be horrified by the fragmentation of our own existence, by the pettiness in our relationships, by the destruction of words, and by the abandoning of this reverence. Now we have to forgive each other whether or not we have any explicit sins or crimes against each other. That reconciliation is another epiphany of the Church as the Kingdom of God. We are saved because we are in the Body of Christ. We are saved because we accept from Christ the world and the essential order. And finally, we accept Christ when we accept each other. Everything else is a lie and hypocrisy. So, fathers, brothers, sisters: let us forgive one another. Let us not think about why. There is enough to think about. Let us do it. Right now, in a kind of deep breath, say: “Lord, help us to forgive. Lord, renew all these relationships.” What a chance is given here for love to triumph! – for unity to reflect the Divine unity, and for everything essential to return as life itself. What a chance! Is the answer we give today yes or no? Are we going to that forgiveness? Are we gladly accepting it? Or is it something which we do just because it is on the calendar – today, you follow, forgiveness; tomorrow, let’s do...? No! this is the crucial moment. This is the beginning of Lent. This is our spring “repair” because reconciliation is the powerful renewal of the ruin. So, please, for the sake of Christ: let us forgive each other. The first thing I am asking all of you, my spiritual family, is to forgive me. Imagine how many temptations of laziness, of avoiding too much, and so on and so forth. What a constant defense of my own interests, health, or this or that... I know that I don’t even have an ounce of this self-giving, self-sacrifice which is truly a true repentance, the true renewal of love. Please forgive me and pray for me, so that what I am preaching I could first of all somehow, be it only a little bit, integrate and incarnate in my life.
- [What Thirst is For](https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/what-thirst-is-for) - What Thirst is For by M. Ali Lakhani It is good knowing that glasses are to drink from. The bad thing is not knowing what thirst is for. Antonio Machado Whoever is desireless, sees the essence of life. Whoever desires, sees its manifestations. These two are the same. Tao Te Ching Man is compounded of both dust and spirit, and, like all creatures, he is covenanted concurrently to both time and eternity. This simultaneity, this admixture, inheres within the very fabric of creation and existence, of revelation itself. To exist is to be and, at the same time, not to be. Growth is a form of evanescence, dying a form of being born. Existence is now and, in a certain sense, forever. Form conceals essence, being resides within becoming, stasis abides in the heart of movement, reality is both present and fleeting, both beyond and within. And in this complexio oppositorum lies the paradox and ambiguity of spiritual expression: divine utterances, ourselves included, contain ineffable meanings. Words proclaim Silence. It is this same ambiguity that clouds the nature of desire — a cloud of ambiguity which only the rays of the Intellect, the supernal Sun, can disperse. This is the ambiguity of Maya, the ambiguity of the Cosmic Veil. And at the heart of this ambiguity lies a choice given to all of mankind: to seek the fulfilment of one's desires in the beatific vision of the Sun’s heavenly Light or to seek it in the tumult of the shadows. From a metaphysical standpoint, privation and proximity, transcendence and immanence, the mystery of the Absolute and the radiance of the Infinite, are each embedded within the very structure of Reality. It is our "ontological distance from God" that constitutes our privation, and the possibility of our "ontological re-integration" within God that constitutes our proximity. "Things are in God and God is in things with a kind of discontinuous continuity" (Schuon), and Reality is therefore translucent with the radiance of God. Creation is understood in traditional thought to be a Veil through which - and in which - God is metaphysically transparent. Insofar as creation is separate from God, man is ontologically distant from the source of his existence and from the object of his salvation, which remains ever transcendent, mysterious, beyond reach. Yet, insofar as creation is a theophany, radiating the immanence of God, man - made in the image of God - has within him both the means and end of the fulfilment of his desires. But what appears as translucent to the Inner Eye of the Heart is perceived as opaque by the Outer Eye of the mind or the senses. Therein lies the ambiguity of the Icon and the Veil, an ambiguity inherent in the process of the concretization of the Absolute, and its reversal. It is the Inner Eye that dis-covers the Beauty beneath the Veil. And it is "sacred desire" (or "spiritual thirst") that impels this discovery. From the traditional perspective, since “all that exists tends towards perfection” and since “God is the Supreme Perfection”, desires are satisfied only by the serenity of the Divine Presence. God is the sole and final refuge of lustful man. This is why Niffari exclaims: “I take refuge in the unity of Thy Quality against every quality”. In the Islamic context, God is said to be both Zahir (“Manifest” or “Outward”) and Batin (“Hidden” or “Inward”). He is revealed to the extent that man perceives Him through his Inner Eye, the Eye of the Heart - the Eye of the Intellect. For traditional man, there is no Truth without Presence, and there is no Presence until God is perceived in the "eternal now", both beyond and within. The world seen in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower. One of the key attributes of modernity is the profanation of desire. “He who knows God is disinterested in the gifts of God, and he who is negligent of God is insatiable for the gifts of God” (Shaykh Ahmad al-'Alawi). Modern man has an insatiable thirst for the gifts of God, but is blind to His Presence. Instead he perceives only the objects of his lusts, breeding through them a world of concupiscence, exploitation, commodification and wanton consumption — a world in which desire is reduced to the need for the instant gratification of individual wants and cravings, and the indulging of personal appetites. In such a world, the notion of the perfectability of desire as love, or the conformity of the soul to the Beauty of the Spirit, is all but forgotten — replaced by modernist explanations of desire in terms of behavioural instincts, or the pleasure/pain principle, or libido, or the evolutionist's creed of the "survival of the fittest". These theories are reinforced and systematized through the tyranny of the modern media and its various seductions that fuel the monster of consumption, creating wants and desires that mankind never before even dreamed of. Lost in such a world is the respect for traditional values, for the nobility of the person, the sanctity of relationships, the wonder of life, and the appreciation that "everything that lives is holy". In a world of such wantonness, desires degenerate, pander to the unsalutary, and eventually erode the very foundation of society. In Cymbeline, Shakespeare observes: The cloyed will, — That satiate yet unsatisfied desire, that tub Both fill'd and running, — ravening first the lamb, Longs after for the garbage. What, then, can fulfil this "satiate yet unsatisfied desire"? It is true that some traditional teachings have anathemized desire, but in so doing, they are in reality no more than condemning the desecration of desire - not desire itself. So, for example, when Bayazid exclaims "I desire not to desire" or the Buddha - who teaches that craven desire is the cause of all suffering - advocates "blowing out the flame of desire", the "desire for desirelessness" to which they aspire is itself a legitimate and necessary form of desire - a prolongation in the will of an apophatic discernment of the intelligence - and is another example of the compexio oppositorum referred to earlier. It is not until the final act of “letting go” -—the initiatic “death” of the “psycho-physical res” which constitutes the crystallised being of man - that desire itself finally ceases, requited ultimately by Divine Presence (visio beatifica) or Mystical Union (unio mystica). But, till then, decentered man is enjoined, by force of his privative conditions, to desire. For thirst and privation are the conditions of existence. Man cannot overcome his privative conditions. To exist in a contingent and imperfect world is to partake of those very qualities. Man will thirst, hunger, bleed and eventually die. But something in man can transcend and survive the contingency and imperfections of his earthly existence. There is a connection between our worldly — sensual — desires (eros) and their intended end (telos). Worldly desires exist in order to be sublimated. The desire of man is prefigured in the desire of God. This is one of the many meanings of the famous hadith qudsi: “I was a hidden treasure; I desired to be known, so I created the world.” Creation then is a projection of God’s desire into the world. In other words, God desires our existence precisely so that we may desire our return to Him, our Origin and Final Sanctuary. Though man's lot cannot be overcome, it can yet be transcended by reconnecting our desires to their sacred Origin, a connection that is