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

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THE IMAGO TEMPLI IN CONFRONTATION nothing less than this, certainly, but also nothing more. But this destruction of the Imago caeli—of the Temple crypt—was made possible only by the shattering of the symmetry exhibited, first, by the triadic structure of the celestial temples (Intelligence, Soul, and subtle body of the Sphere), and, second, by the triadic structure of gnostic anthropology: spirit, soul and body. This anthropological triad was gradually eclipsed in Western Christian thought. What remained was the dualism of soul and body, or of spirit and body, of thought and extension—a dualism for which Descartes could not then be held responsible. This anthropological destruction has a striking parallel in the destruction wrought in the sphere of celestial physics by Averroes in his desire to be a strict Aristotelian. The consequence of this was in effect the disappearance of the second angelic hierarchy, the hierarchy of the Angeli caelesles or Animae caelestes as affirmed by Avicenna and Suhravardi. Since the world of the Animae caelestes marked the threshold of the Imaginal world, the sovereignty of the active Imagination or Imaginatio vera was as a result entirely overthrown, and with it that whole world of the Soul, the world in-between, medial between the Jabarut and the Mulk. From that moment on, the way lay open to a vision of the world which, being no longer a vision governed by the Imago Templi, was to end by no longer perceiving in the cosmos anything apart from immanent and purely mechanical laws. Without the world of the Soul there is no Imago. Thus man had lost his own soul as the heavens had lost theirs: there was no longer an active Imagination to secrete and reflect in the sensorium the metaphysical Images of intelligible realities, revealed to it on its own level. What remains is an imagination whose products are now declared to be merely imaginary, the fantastic productions of the phantasia —in short, unreal. Never again will it raise man to "the meeting-place of the two seas". The ordeal of exile no longer exists; instead, there is a deliberate refusal to feel exiled, a rejection of the idea of the world as the crypt of the Temple—a rejection that heralds the devastation of the Imago Templi. Such a devastation is a sine qua non for the ascendancy of the norm that induces the desacralization of the world, its "disenchantment" in the etymological sense of the word. {Die Entzauberung der Welt was the title of a book which appeared between the two world wars.) What will be tinfuture of this norm? We can envisage a reply to this question only if, by means of the double 276 THE IMAGO TEMPLI IN CONFRONTATION negation of refusing the refusal which desacralizes the world, we return to the moment in which the Imago Templi affirms itself not as an image to be destroyed, but as the instrument of salvation enabling us to leave the crypt. We must rediscover the meaning of the crypt. When the Imago Templi is destroyed, one is no longer even aware of being in the depths of a crypt. The world is "disorientated": there is no longer an "Orient". One thinks one is out in the open, that there is neither an above nor a below. By contrast, for all our mystical theosophers the world has an "Orient" and is "orientated"; there is an above and a below, not necessarily in the sense of geometrical distance, but ineluctably in the sense of a metaphysical distance. This is so because entry into this world is perceived essentially as an entry into the world of exile, as a "descent" from the Orient of the Temple to the Occident of the world as the crypt of the Temple. 27 The Imago Templi is then there so that the visionary, withdrawing into his khangah—the sanctuary of his microcosm—may recollect his origin. Unlike the sage of antiquity, he experiences his entry into this world as a rupture. It is exile far from the Temple. The Angel's whole message is to remind him that an exile does not delay when his family calls him back, that he must return in haste. This is the whole theme of Suhravardi's recital of the "occidental exile", as well as of several other recitals. 3. Entry into the world of exile. There is fundamental agreement between Suhravardi's hermeneutic of exile and that emphasized by a contemporary Cabbalistic master, Friedrich Weinreb, in his many books. I do not say that this agreement is surprising—far from it: it is to be expected and is therefore all the more significant. Destruction of the Temple means entry into the world of exile. In short, both for the master of Ishraq and for the Cabbalistic master, the destruction of the Temple is the actual occasion of our birth into this world which is the world of exile, but also the world through which we have to pass if we are to reach the new Temple. The 27 This is the whole theme of pre-existence that we find in Suhravardi. In his exoteric treatises, the skaykh al-ishraq adopts a position opposed to this idea. In all his esoteric treatises, on the other hand, which take the form of symbols and parables, the idea of pre-existence is implied. See for example 'L'Epitre des hautes tours', where it is said towards the beginning that "return implies the anteriority of presence. We do not say to someone who has never been to Egypt: 'Return to Egypt'" (L'Archange empourpre, op. cit.). We believe that by distinguishing between the natures of the different treatises of Suhravardi, we resolve an ambiguity that was already troubling Mulla Sadra Shirazi. 277
THE IMAGO TEMPLI IN CONFRONTATION destruction of the Temple is the end of the "previous life" and of the "previous world". 28 The history of humanity begins with the exile, which in its turn begins with the destruction of the Temple. There is a striking recital dealing with the descent of the Neshamah 29 (man's celestial soul, one of the souls that dwells with God, the idea of which is extremely close to the Zoroastrian idea of the Fravarti/Foruhar). This soul is asked to animate a human being whose embryo is in the process of growing. The soul is aware of all it will have to give up in order to "descend" to earth, but only through its descent will the human being be marked with the divine seal and bear within him the Imago Dei. For this reason, the soul too traverses the same road as God until the return from exile. The Shekhinah in exile is "the totality of all the suffering of all time and of the suffering of all creatures in all the worlds". As long as Creation endures there will be exile, up till the time when the last Neshamah has descended into this world. The Angel who accompanies the Neshamah during its descent reveals to it that it will find him again at the end of its passing through the world of exile, that he will be there to take it back "home". He tells it that all it learned of the meaning of Creation in its existence "before this world" will be plunged into oblivion, like a temple destroyed. Its garment of light will become a garment conditioned by the form of time. Yet in its exile the Neshamah will be in unison with the exile of the Shekhinah. Imitating the gesture of the priests on the roof of the Temple of Solomon when it was being devoured by flames, the Angel throws the keys of the Temple back into the heavens. To know these things is eo ipso to avoid confusing the apparent history of humanity with the history conveyed to us in the divine Logos, the Word of the prophets; for the latter history is played out on another plane and cannot be measured with the yardstick of our world and our life. Our measures are valid only for the world of exile, because they are provided by the very form of the exile. By means of the Word—of the divine Logos—sacred history reaches down to us as "on a boat connecting the different worlds". In fact, this Word exists in different worlds, in the realities belonging to different levels. It also has the virtue of conferring another existence on each reality: "The Images produced by the Word (the Logos) dwelling in such and such a reality are the symbols and 28 Friedrich Weinreb, op. cit., p. 35. 29 Ibid. See the admirable pages 20-32 of this book. 278 THE IMAGO TEMPLI IN CONFRONTATION parables of those Images which exist in another reality." The same applies to the Imago Templi. To understand it, as we said at the beginning, is to reach "the meeting-place of the two seas". Who will reach it? The reply to this question is given in an equally striking hermeneutic relating to the saving of Moses from the waters; for one of the symbolic properties of Water is to typify the sense of time and of engulfment in time. Pharoah's aim is to make all male children who sink into time succumb to the indifferent uniformity of all that is encased in time, and to prevent them from rising to the height of the worlds revealed by the divine Word. They are to drown in the waters of secular, onedimensional history. The little "ark" in which, according to esoteric tradition, his "celestial parents" saved Moses, was in fact the divine Word, and Moses was preserved from the flux of historical time. What Pharoah wanted, on the other hand, was that only "normal man" should survive—the man who conforms absolutely to the norm of a world which, above all, does not wish to know that it is in exile. 31 The analyses of the sacred, for which we are indebted to the sociological philosophies or philosophical sociologies from the nineteenth century to the present day, strike us as being in perfect conformity with the intentions and dispensation of Pharoah. Even when they agree in thinking and saying that "history is nothing other than the profanation of the sacred |and that] it is therefore the decadence and decomposition of a previously given reality", 32 it is no less the case that the content they attribute to the notion of the sacred is of an alarming poverty, because it is reduced to purely formal aspects. This is because these analyses have themselves taken on the form of the world of exile to such an extent that they can no longer even be aware or perceive that it is a world of exile. And yet the majority of our contemporaries live according to ideologies spawned by these analyses. At this point there is a preliminary question to be asked. If History is nothing other than the profanation of the sacred, in the sense that the profane, which used to be mute, has now itself taken possession of the Word, how is it possible to speak of the sacred using a Word which is itself desacralized, a Word which, in its very nature, profanes and is 29 Ibid., pp. 35-36. 31 Cf. Friedrich Weinreb, Die jiidischen Wurzeln des Matthaus Evangelium (Zurich, Origo- Verlag, 1972), pp. 40—41. 32 Cf. J.F. Marquet, 'Sacre et profanation', in Bulletin de la Societe ligerienne de philosophie', (1973), pp- 54 ff. 279
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