In the Philobiblon, Richard de Bury (Bishop of Durham) justifies his love of books in a Christian framework by pointing out that Plato is said to have paid 10000 dinars for a rare scroll of Philolaus. Philolaus‘ work was most likely a transmission of the teachings of Pythagoras, who had gone to Tyre and to Egypt in order to learn from the masters there. Plato used this work to compose the Timaeus, one of the more “mystical” of his treatises. If you are wondering where the Eastern Church got its teaching on the total dissimilarity between the essence of God (unknowable) and His energies (especially those manifested in Creation), this is where it comes from: it was part of the Tradition embodied in Hellenic wisdom, culled from Egypt:
This is the state of affairs about nature and harmony. The essence of things is eternal; it is a unique and divine nature, the knowledge of which does not belong to man. Still it would not be possible that any of the things that are, and are known by us, should arrive to our knowledge, if this essence was not the internal foundation of the principles of which the world was founded, that is, of the limiting and unlimited elements. Now since these principles are not mutually similar, neither of similar nature, it would be impossible that the order of the world should have been formed by them, unless the harmony intervened . . . ~ Philolaus, Fragment DK 44B 6a.
Out of Egypt, said the Patristic Fathers, have I called my Son. Here was an example of the higher, “secret” meaning of Scripture, which they discerned in the literal text, and defended in their apologetics. The Logos (of course) is the intervening harmony which causes the co-inherence of the invisible higher world (which is Divine, and completely dissimilar) and the mortal, material world (which nevertheless is made “in the Image”). Through the Logos, argued Saint Paul, the worlds were brought into Being, and they will be recapitulated or “summed up in Him” again at the end of Time (Colossians). The Christian ought to be “ahead of the Times”, because the Logos has in these latter days revealed Himself as co-substantial with the Father, our older brother, a person Who stooped to conquer Death.
The modern pagan rejection of Christianity puts the West in an interesting position. It is a sort of Mexican stand off. On the one hand, the pagans of the classical world actually were incorporated into the Medieval Tradition (arguably with historic difficulties or distortions), and converted to the Church in droves, with notable exceptions. So the stream of spirit moved into Christian civilization, presenting two problems: 1) Some pagan thought was lost or misunderstood, but to the extent it was not, it now presents as “Christian” (eg., the doctrine of Purgatory). 2) Tradition now possesses a distinctly Christian cast in the West. It is for these reasons (among others) that Gornahoor has encouraged a revival of Tradition that is a return to the Medieval outlook, both because a rejection of the Logos understood as Christ would be to repeat on a grand scale the historic distortions which did occur when Christianity assimilated Greece & Rome, and because to an enormous and little understood degree, Christianity was actually meant to be the perfecting and crown of those very pagan mysteries. There are other cogent reasons, more practical than that, as well. Cologero’s quote from Tomberg about “salvation” is relevant here:
Salvation is the helping hand offered to idealistically minded human beings who, though no longer identifying themselves with natural evolution, still lack sufficient strength of themselves to alter its course.
It is perilous, possibly foolhardy, to reject a prophet, vehicle, or messenger, because why would God send another one? Or, put even more precisely (since God’s mercy is infinite), why would we recognize the Divine the second time, if we rejected it the first time around?
These, however, are merely practical considerations of various orders, which can always be contested empirically or historically in the form of interminable debate. What is more importantly at stake is the very concept of Logos itself, both metaphysically and practically. Every Tradition had a Tao or Logos which represented the work of the best minds and spirits in apprehending what the Spirit was trying to teach men over vast bodies of space and Time, and the infinite abyss of the Fall (even worse). A rejection of Logos might well be accompanied by a turning inward, like the crawfish in Tomberg’s Tarot card, which represents the darkening of the Nous in self-imposed, invincible ignorance.
Tomberg lays particularly heavy emphasis both on Love as being more perfect than the Eastern ideal of returning to the purely embryonic primordial state (he does not however, deny their validity), and the practice of mercy and service as being integrally bound up with the “gift of tears” given to the West. He teaches that the lost sheep of the “personality” was destined for salvation, and pleads with the Lord of mercy to forgive him for retaining the use of the human reason and its chakra in his Meditations: the French Hermetic Christian tradition of Magic was uniquely both human and Christian in this way. Like Abraham pleading with God for the life of the city, Tomberg suspected that this was God’s divine intention all along, and that earlier Traditions were only “imperfect” in that they were capable of being preserved, refined, and transformed in a non-Revolutionary way into something even more themselves. That was why he dared to wrestle with the angels. In chapter 2, he even asserts that Love is prior to Being.
And in fact this was how the Christian claim should have been made, and occasionally, was made in the proper manner by very august characters and intellects. There was actually a small revival of it at Cambridge in old England, but these are far from the best expositors. A better example of it would be Bonaventura, or John Scotus Erigena. Yet the “baptism” of what was true, beautiful, and good was certainly how the medieval instinct understood itself to be working, although obviously it was imperfect as it played out in time and space.
Or is it? Unused to seeing Tradition embodied at all, & undiscerning (in general) of possibilities and limits, the modern world wears its spectacles from a supposed Olympian vantage point in order to condemn the old orders. A Time & Space in particular (400-1500) isn’t a rarefied time and space, but falls in between 700BC-399AD & 1501-2014 AD. Which means that criticism aimed at this period would reflect upon the periods immediately proceeding and following; to truly judge the period, one would have to resort to Transcendence, and this judgement is much more favorable.
Therefore, Cologero has asserted the distinction between Revolution and “the opposite of Revolution”, or between Becoming and an Order based on Love’s generation of Being. So that we ought to take a different and more charitable view of the Middle Ages:
Paradox… is not dialectical. Paradox is the simultaneous assertion (not the reconciliation) of opposites. Because of the paradox not just of Christ’s incarnation (God in the human) but also of divine creation (God’s presence in all that is infinitely distant from him), matter was that which both threatened and offered salvation. It threatened salvation because it was that which changed. But it was also the place of salvation, and it manifested this exactly through the capacity for change implanted in it. When wood or wafer bled, matter showed itself as transcending, exactly by expressing, its own materiality. It manifested enduring life (continuity, existence) in death (discontinuity, rupture, change). Miraculous matter was simultaneously – hence paradoxically – the changeable stuff of not-God and the locus of a God revealed (34-35) In this sense, medieval history can never be properly “understood” as much as experienced.
Bynum continues:
Paradox is by definition impossible to explain in discursive language. One cannot simultaneously assert contraries. Rude, other-denying facts such as identity and annihilation, or the haunting presence and yet utter beyondness of ultimate meaning, cannot be spoken together. Yet together they must be lived. Their simultaneity cannot be stated; it can only be evoked – and even this only inadequately.
It can easily be seen that a man of Tradition would have an easier time soaking in thought that is affinitive to him by taking the same non-Revolutionary approach common to the classical & medieval worlds. The Church gets blamed for burning books of pagan knowledge, but it needs to be remembered that a great deal of ancient learning was in fact saved by the Semitic “axial religions”, baptized by the saints (St. Patrick permitted “finger magic” based on the oghams), & passed down in the common culture of a thoroughly medieval and Christian people. And this does not even begin to address the esoteric or scholarly side of it, which was much more aggressive and open to inheriting the pagan tradition, including embodying it in the Eucharist.
We distinguish, therefore, between the occasional or even sustained rhetoric of the Christian authors (including that arch-pagan and super-Christian, Tertullian) and the actual action of the Spirit, reflected in their thought, which actions blows where it wills & ignites high intellects, pure characters, & rare hearts in a variety of Traditions. What is the purpose of this variety except to reach those within a specific variety, & to convince those who are rising above it with the use of it, with even greater proofs, that their path is blessed? For since our access is not direct, we approach this through a desire of imitating that initial inspiration, but the fact of inheriting very specific traditions from those above us in the Great Chain of Being. And since it stands to strong Reason that if one is “risen” above one’s Western tradition, it would seem to serve but little to the purpose to immerse one’s self again in the elementary and rudimentary elements, we conclude that the medieval heritage remains of great, even inestimable, value, most particularly for those who desire to rise above it.
Or, as Saint Paul put it,
2 But is under tutors and governors until the time appointed of the father. 3 Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world: 4 But when the fulness of the time was come , God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, 5 To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. 6 And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying , Abba, Father. 7 Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ. 8 Howbeit then , when ye knew not God, ye did service unto them which by nature are no gods. 9 But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage ? 10 Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years. 11 I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain.
If Christianity, too, has a tutelary function in the exoteric realm, it still makes seemingly little sense to surpass one tutor, and to graduate to another. After a while, might one not wonder if the problem was in the pupil, rather than the tutor? Be sure that one is truly seeking the Father, rather than merely desiring to escape the General Law of the Tutor, & this requires great, even supernatural honesty with the Self.
The emphasis on decency and good order, even in spiritual matters, is characteristic of the medieval outlook. We could do well to profit from it. It accords greatly with being men who are affiliated with that which is the “opposite of a Revolution”: men of Logos, men of the West.
Thanks for the answer: “the essence of Christianity is the esoteric made exoteric”.
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So this is a chiasm, in which earth echoes heaven, and heaven echoes earth. But yet (and this is the part where I may be differentiating a little from you) both remain more fully themselves, a paradox.
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I hope I didn’t convey the notion that as modes of being, there is no distinction between heaven and earth [and the subtle world too]. I meant that after accomplishing the Hero’s Journey, the World in its entirety is seen in a completely new way by the being that would have accomplished it. As modes of being, they each have their own conditions, but the Hero has gone beyond these conditions, the Hero has realized that within himself which acted as the sufficient reason for the prevailing of these conditions, and has conquered them.
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There may be quite a few pagans farther along in Christian esoteric practice than many nominal Christians will ever hope to be. It’s a strange, paradoxical, and uncomfortable fact (along with many others), but it seems to match with Divine and human truth.
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I don’t know if Freemasonry can still be considered as something akin to a Christian Path, but even in the preliminary stages for example, when one is locked with a skull and bones in a dark part of the lodge, preceding one’s initiation, one meditates deeply on the futility of his prior perceptions of life (the room’s setting acting as a support for the initial destruction of his false and profane self), and is ready, for the death that is to befall him, to re-begin a re-orientation of this perception of life, having being reduced to his materia prima following the utterance of the fiat lux; as he begins the initiatic voyage, his perceptions of the world merge from within, realizing and actualizing according to his aptitudes, the possibilities within himself, learning to live again [building Solomon’s Temple]; but you say this yourself, the paradox is resolved the deeper one sinks into the Arcanum. The stumbling block for most is the persistence of some of these perceptions even after they have, to a lesser or greater extent, began the path; they never truly mastered silence/death and hence began the path with their own pre-conceived notions, albeit subtle and “crafty” (in their solemnity and apparent reality), as the goal, thus they may end up worse than they were before, having gone deeper into a certain perception that they should have earlier destroyed e.g. a notion of what “heaven is”,a bias either for or against something, a “belief” etc.
In fact, in the beginning, there should be no attempt at all to try and fit into something or to escape anything, first, it should be an acceptance of what one is, whatever that may be, followed by a seamless cathartic collapse or a sudden realization of the futility of what people call “me”; something akin to a gestalt. One advantage of being under someone’s tutelage, is that they can help with this deconstructive process; to use an Islamic concept to better explain it; there are certain Sheikhs or Muqadims(someone who is like a stand-in for a Sheikh) who exert something called the Himma. This is akin to the fiat lux, in that it is a “reproduction” of the Divine Command that created Order out of Chaos; the Tutor has the ability to directly assert his ‘will’ towards the disciple so that the disciple is freed from certain difficulty. This can help the disciple in the beginning to completely destroy himself (his profane self) and achieve silence/initiatic death as well as later on, when the disciple is under a heavy burden, or is stuck at a certain point in the initiatic voyage. That means that by his Himma or you can say “will-power” (not forceful, just harmonious and in tandem with nature), a Tutor can help a disciple experience higher states of consciousness,literally- show him the essence of things even without much effort from the disciple. So the point is that perhaps the lingering of certain pre-conceived perceptions is what makes some Christians not able to make as much progress as pagans. (I hope by pagans you don’t mean “new-age”, I take it you mean philosophers like Plotinus and Aristotle).
Michel, better answer here:
http://www.gornahoor.net/?p=7152
” Exoteric philosophy comprised ancient Greek philosophy
Esoteric philosophy is identical with the Christian religion”
Notice that in this syllogism, exoteric is identified with the esoteric Logos or inner Fire of the universe (of the Stoics), and that esoteric is identified with outward ritual. So this is a chiasm, in which earth echoes heaven, and heaven echoes earth. But yet (and this is the part where I may be differentiating a little from you) both remain more fully themselves, a paradox.
Thanks, Scardanelli, for the reference.
Michel, I agree, but notwithstanding Borella and others’ insistence that the essence of Christianity is “the esoteric made exoteric”, the religion is based around paradoxes to begin with, so that esoteric and exoteric (being terms we use to denote spiritual experience) remain with their meaning, despite the eventual vision in which they merge in the Light. Just as there are a lot (or at least a few notable) pagans who have “Christian bones”, but remain formally pagan, there are accurate spiritual contours denoted by the use of the terms you mentioned (exoteric, esoteric). Specifically, it’s the manner in which “God”, the “Light”, or “Love” is experienced – is it primarily through rituals or dogmas or practices, or does it flow through images that surface in the soul? There may be quite a few pagans farther along in Christian esoteric practice than many nominal Christians will ever hope to be. It’s a strange, paradoxical, and uncomfortable fact (along with many others), but it seems to match with Divine and human truth. I don’t understand why this is, but it is a mystery, and in order to comprehend it, one has to enter into the Arcanum. Since those who do this tend to be of higher spiritual quality than the rest of us, we call them “saints” or “prophets” or some other term, and speak of them having an esoteric truth that others lack, or that others can only formulate through art, poetry, or ritual, and experience in fleeting fashion, but hopefully more fully after death. That’s the only way of harmonizing seemingly conflicting truths, in the paradox. Or, even better, through meditation on the paradox. Ideally, however, you are correct, & perhaps we can say that the perfect man is the one for whom the esoteric and exoteric aspects are seamless realities, either entered at will, and accurately correlated to each other.
Thank you for the link to the CS Lewis quote, Logres…is was a warm refreshing breeze for the soul. Another man enamored of all things medieval, Kenelm Henry Digby has a fascinating little book called Maxims of Christian Chivalry- a collection from his larger work the Broad Stone of Honor. I’ve come back to it off and on when in need of inspiration. From the foreword: “Nay! Nay! Chivalry is not dead, even in our day of sordid thought and selfish aim. It only slumbers. It will awaken, careless of all gain, defiant of all danger, devoted, impetuous, enthusiastic as ever crusader, when a man recognizes his vocation to personal honour…”
Lovely article Mr. Logres. I have some questions though, is the modern pagan thought and influence widespread? Also (regardless of whether or not it is widespread) , does it really pose what may be called a threat? Perhaps being a recluse I am unaware of certain things. Finally, at a certain point, doesn’t the line between “esoteric” and “exoteric” become non-existent? Isn’t it just One Savior? One Faith? One Spirit? One Love? (I know enough at least to sometimes still feel the effects of the misuse of those words.)
From the Infinite Archetypes, everything has been fashioned, God in His Wisdom has determined their measurements viz, limiting them and manifesting/creating them according to their own Archetypal Nature, their initial states as Limited Realities “occuring” as Being; the thing that is the sufficient reason for this creation being Beauty or Beatitude, the result of which is Love. There must be Beauty for there to be Love. But there must be Light for something akin to perception of Beauty to occur. “The Light” as a Reality can be seen on the one hand as God, or on the other hand as the “intermediary” necessary for Creation itself to occur. This is an “intermediary” without conjunction or mixture. It is simply an intermediary (and the first point of view, i.e. viewing it as nothing other than God, for His presence is never bereft of Radiance, finds its validation in this, no conjunction, no mixture, just Light). Of course this intermediary has been revealed to us as many names in the form of avatars and prophets, but it has been chiefly revealed as Jesus Christ. Moving on, the Presence of Christ enabled the Archetypes to see the Beauty of God. Seeing this Beauty, they fell in Love with Him and wanted this Love to continue forever. How could this be done?
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Digressing, when we see something we deem beautiful, we fall in love with it (for instance, a man is almost immediately attracted to a beautiful woman and can love her without even knowing her name), and seek to unite ourselves with it. But upon uniting ourselves with it, being one with it, there is nothing left to deem beautiful, to “desire” , to Love. The replacement of this void, is the “desire” for the perpetuation of the experience we had when we first united ourselves to it. The form of Love has changed therefore, from loving the thing, to loving the perpetuation of the experience of the thing. Thus we “desire” this and it can reach a point where the strength of this Love is so strong that we forget all else and are immersed in the experience; for instance, during the sexual experience at the epitome of the orgasm.
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The perpetuation of this state of Love, could only be if God recreated the Universe with each instant/moment. So that, when the Universe, or rather, when we are recreated (by virtue of “the intermediary of The Light”) with each instant/moment [this recreation conforming to our Archetypal Natures, which is why it is called manifestation or unveiling- “unveiling of our Archetypal Natures via limitation into Being”] we see the Beauty of God and fall in Love with Him all over again, and hence we are “Being”. All the activities of all creatures are nothing other than, to a lesser or greater degree, a modulation of this Activity.The creatures reflect this Love, this “thing” that has caused them to “BE” in a haphazard way; they think they love this or that, but in truth, it is only God that they seek, it is only He that they Love. The process that brought them here must be “overturned” for them to realize this, they must see the essence of the traces; it is in this physical world that they are fully “expressed” as a Possibility, the salt has “encapsulated the beings” so that this “fixity” mimics their Immutable Archetypal Nature in its Changelessness, its “Infinite Fixity”. Just as they were unveiled by Light to be manifested, so they must be unveiled by Light to see who they really Love, or they must be veiled by darkness just as God covers Himself in “thick dark clouds”. What is called the “exoteric” is just a veiling of this Love; but Christ has torn the veil separating us from it, we can once more, from our “fixed state as salt” [which mimics what we are as Immutable Archetypes] via His “intermediary” as “The Light” see the Beauty of God and fall in Love Him [not in the haphazard way characterized by the life we knew before], so that by virtue of this Love we are “Being” and as such, we can experience this Love, manifested as the creation of US as the Universe with each moment; in short, so that by this Grace, we can be saved. This is the Grace that overturns the cosmogonic process by repeating it in an upside down manner (by ascension as compared to descent or “falling”).
So with that (please forgive me for my long comments) I fail to see the exoteric or esoteric, only the One Love of God and different “measures” of perceiving it; this Love has never changed and it “endures forever”.
http://www.millinerd.com/2011/01/horton-on-election-modern-purgatory.html
“Not surprisingly, Hart sees the poverty of this perspective as a direct result of the loss of that old millinerd hobbyhorse, the analogia entis (the “covenant of light”), which again, is shorthand for patristic/medieval metaphysical consensus, that transcendence – the only Christian kind – which transcends classical notions of transcendence. Christian “being” is almost always caricatured before it is deconstructed. But Xavier Zubiri explains the actual Christian view: “Being is operation. And the more perfect something is, the deeper and more fertile is its operative activity. Being, said Dionysios, is ecstatic.” But back to Hart:
What is absent from the [Calvinist/Bañezian] picture of divine causality is that ancient metaphysical vision that Przywara chose to call the ‘analogia entis’. In this “analogical ontology’, the infinite dependency of created being upon divine being is understood strictly in terms of the ever-greater difference between them; and, under the rule of this ontology, it is possible to affirm the real participation of the creature’s freedom in God’s free creative act without asserting any ontic continuity of kind between created and divine acts. When, however, the rule of analogy declines – as it did at the threshold of modernity – then invariably the words we attempt to apply both to creatures and to God (goodness, justice, mercy, love, freedom) dissolve into equivocity, and theology can recover its coherence only by choosing a single ‘attribute’ to treat as univocal, in order that God and world might be united again. In the early modern period, the attribute most generally preferred was ‘power’ or ‘sovereignty’ – or, more abstractly, ’cause.’
Calvin’s theological errors, therefore, were the result of an atmospheric poverty. We trust the medievals not because they are old, but because of the air they breathed; and whether people realize it or not, people like C.S. Lewis because, as a medievalist, he breathed it too…”
Notice that “the Covenant of Light” is the exact exoteric counterpart to the project of the Meditations, in Tomberg, and that the Great Chain of Being expresses this as a metaphysical Philosophy, the Queen of Sciences.