Temple and Contemplation brings together for the first ... - ImagoMundi

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THE IMAGO TEMPLI IN CONFRONTATION the crypt of the Temple. They constitute a double hierarchy, originating in the three acts of contemplation of the First and highest of the hierarchic Intelligences—the Intelligence that Suhravardi always calls by the name it has in Zoroastrian angelology, in which it is the First Archangel to proceed from Ormazd: Bahman (Avestan Vohu-Manah, Greek Eunoia) or Bahman-Light. 19 From the three acts of contemplation of the First Emanant or first Intelligence, there proceed a second Intelligence, a heaven, and the Soul that moves this heaven. This same ternary rhythm is repeated from Intelligence to Intelligence down to the Ninth, and from heaven to heaven, from the Sphere-Limit—the Sphere of Spheres—to the heaven of the Moon. When it reaches the Tenth, the process is as it were exhausted. The Tenth is what philosophers call the active Intelligence, whereas theologians and theosophers call it the Holy Spirit. Both are in agreement about this identification. This Intelligence-Holy Spirit is the archangel Gabriel of the Koran, the messenger of the inspired revelation of the prophets, who is also the Angel of the human race, the Angel from whom our souls emanate. The hierarchical Intelligences are so many hypostases, and are named the Cherubim (the Angeli intellectuales of the Latin translations). The Souls that move each heaven are the Animae or Angeli caelestes. 20 An impulse of love prompts the Animae caelestes to resemble the Intelligences whence they proceed, and it is through this impulse that each of them implicates its heaven in its motion. For this reason, the relationship between the two hierarches is typified sometimes as the relationship between a love that dominates (qahr) and a love that obeys {mahabbah; from this point of view Suhravardi calls the Angeli caelestes the "celestial faithful of love"), sometimes as the relationship of parent and child, and sometimes as that between teacher and pupil. It is this relationship, too, which organizes the hierarchic Intelligences in, so to say, a symbolic manner so that they form an Order of the celestial Temple. It should be noted that Suhravardi typifies it as an Order of futuwwah, or Sufi Order. Each higher Intelligence is the master (pir) that initiates the Intelligence that follows it: it instructs it like a teacher his 19 On the theory of the procession of the Intelligences, see my Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, op. cit., chap. II, 'Avicennism and Angelology'. See also En Islam Iranien, op. cit., index s.v. Bahman, Intelligences. 20 Cf. principally Suhravardi, 'Les Temples de la Lumiere', and 'Livre d'heures', the French translation in L'Archange empourpre, op. cit. 272 THE IMAGO TEMPLI IN CONFRONTATION pupil; it inscribes it in the register (jaridah) of its pupils; it bestows on it the symbolic cloak (khirqah) of its investiture, 21 etc. The gradation here corresponds exactly to one found in an Ismaili text. 22 From level to level of the hierarchy, each God in turn has his God until we attain the "God of Gods", who is the "God of being in its totality", according to the terms that Suhravardi employs. This is why spiritual ascent to the God of Gods is not possible for man unless he first unites himself with the Angel from whom he emanates, his celestial parent and his guide. This is the meaning of all Suhravardi's romances of spiritual initiation. It is to go out of the Temple crypt in order to enter the Temple. This brief survey enables us to perceive how the same Imago Templi governs the relationship of each Intelligence to its "Temple" (maskin, its dwelling-place) or heaven, including the relationship of Gabriel, as the Angel of humanity, to the "Temples of Light" which are human spiritual individualities. Each heaven or Temple of heaven is composed of three things: the cherubic Intelligence from which this heaven emanates, this heaven that is the scope of its nostalgia; the Soul that moves it with a view to assuaging this nostalgia; and, finally, the heaven itself, whose subtle matter is condensed into the star it bears. The astral liturgies composed by Suhravardi should be compared with the famous astral liturgies celebrated in the temples of the Sabians. 23 The liturgy specifies the Intelligence that is the sovereign of each heaven; it invokes its moving Soul and glorifies the beauty of the heaven in question. 24 But the hymn is not addressed to the "astral mass". The liturgy is consummated in the Malakiil; the star is a "person" only because it possesses a Soul, a Soul of which it is not the image, and which itself pertains to the Malakut. Unlike human souls, this Soul does not possess sensible perception; but the Anima caelestis has over human souls the advantage of possessing the active Imagination 21 Suhravardi, 'Le Bruissement des Ailes de Gabriel', French translation in ibid. Compare this with the initiation ritual of the futuwwah. See Traites des compagnonschievaliers, recueil de sept "Futuwwat-Nameh, Persian text published by M. Sarraf, with an analytical Introduction in French by H. Corbin, Bibl. Iranienne, vol. 20 (Tehran/ Paris, 1973). This is the conversation between 'Amalaq the Greek and his master Kosta ben Luqa; see En Islam iranien, op. cit., vol. II: 'Sohravardi et les Platoniciens de Perse', pp. 133 ff., 262, 284. 23 Cf. my study 'Sabian Temple and Ismailism', published above. 24 See 'En Islam iranien', op. cit., vol. II, pp. 126 ff., the psalm composed by Suhravardi in praise of the archangel Shahrivar and the lord Hurakhsh. See also the liturgies in 'Livre d'heures', in L'Archange empourpre, op. cit. 273
THE IMAGO TEMPLI IN CONFRONTATION in its pure state, and consequently it never succumbs to the delirium of the estimatory faculty and of the senses, as do human souls. The image that it possesses of its heaven is an Imago Templi in all its purity. 2. The destruction of the Temple crypt. As for our souls, they emanate from the Angel of the human race whose theurgy they are, as each heaven is the theurgy of the Intelligence from which it emanates. They are "temples", called by Suhravardi "Temples of Light". The Angel who is both the Holy Spirit and the Angel of humanity bears the same relationship to these "Temples of Light" as does each Cherub to its soul and its heaven. The word haykal (temple) is often used to designate the external habitation, the material body of the building which contains the Light and whose destruction sets this Light free. In effect, it designates the human microcosm itself as a spiritual individuality, just as the Twelve Imams are called "temples of the tawhid"; that is to say, according to the esotericists, temples of theomonism. 24a At the heart of each temple of Light conceived in this sense is a sanctuary that Suhravardi calls the khangah—a term again borrowed from Sufism and normally used to mean a lodge of Sufis. In Suhravardi's visionary recitals, the spiritual man withdraws into the khangah: there, the meeting with the Angel takes place. 25 This amounts to saying that the khangah—the sanctuary of the temple which is the microcosm—is situated at "the meeting-place of the two seas." It is here that the visionary is visited by the flashes of light in which the experience of Suhravardi's "oriental theosophy" culminates. When the presence of these lights is prolonged—when they become permanently present—the state attained is designated by Suhravardi as Sakinah. This word is precisely the Arabic equivalent of the Hebrew Shekhinah: the mysterious divine presence in the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Solomon. 2 6 Thus, the Arabic equivalent to the term Shekhinah is used by Suhravardi to signify this Presence in the Temple of Light, in the khangah, the sanctuary of the human microcosm. 24a We should note that the idea of the spiritual individuality of man as the temple was a theme already familiar to the Stoics and to Philo. Cf. R.J. McKelvey, The New Temple (Oxford, 1969), pp. 53 ff. 25 Cf. principally Suhravardi, 'Le Bruissement des Ailes de Gabriel' and 'Un jour, avec un groupe de soufis', in L'Archange empourpre, op. cit. 26 On the Shekhinah, see principally Gershom G. Scholem, Les Origines de la Kabbah, translated from the German by J. Loewenson (Paris, 1966), index s.v. 274 THE IMAGO TEMPLI IN CONFRONTATION These human temples of Light are at present in exile, in the crypt of the celestial Temple. Herein lies the difference from the sense of the world experienced as a temple in the religion of pre-Christian antiquity. The sages of antiquity prayed in a temple that was intact; the prayer of Suhravardi's sage rises from the depths of the temple crypt, because he has been exiled from the Temple. We are situated between two catastrophes: one is the premise of salvation, the other is perhaps irremediable. The first is the descent into exile; this is something we will return to, because it determines the persistence of the Imago Templi. The second is in some sense the sending of the exile himself into exile: this occurs at the moment in which the world ceases to be experienced as the Temple crypt. This is not simply the destruction of the Temple, but the destruction of the Temple crypt: the crypt in which the exiles awaited their return to the Temple. Some have spoken of an astronomical revolution, but the phrase does not exactly cover what is at issue here. The issue here is the cessation of a hierophany, the hierophany of the Imago Templi; a cessation that involves the ruin of the Imago caeli, which above all determined the superior mode of contemplating the heavens of which Suhravardi spoke to us a little while ago. The split between angelology and astronomy is not just an episode in the history of science; it signifies the destruction of the Temple from which the Angel-messenger declared that he came. It is true that this destruction is only effective for those who believed or believe themselves to be bringing it about, for in fact the perception of the supra-sensible celestial Temple, and the angelology governing this perception, do not depend on the history of astronomy. For, as I said above, the Imago caeli does not derive from empirical perceptions: it precedes and directs such perceptions. To destroy the Imago caeli is to change the very mode of perception and create thereby a hiatus, a breach which misleads the historian. The world has ceased to be the crypt of the Temple. The destruction of the Temple begins with the dispeopling of the crypt. Once the crypt has been dispeopled of the presences that inhabited it, the Temple itself is open to attack. But the final process must be traced back in its distant origins. We were speaking earlier, with reference to the Imago Templi, of two mirrors which face each other and reflect within each other the same Image. It is one of these mirrors, the Imago caeli, that has been destroyed: 275
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Temple and Contemplation brings together for the first ... - ImagoMundi

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