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

THE IMAGO TEMPLI IN CONFRONTATION
profane? 33 This profane and profaning Word is in fact incapable of expressing
the sacred, and the norm of the sacred of which it professes to be
the judge; for how can a consciousness which is entirely theoretical and
ratiocinative, for which no hierophany possesses any reality, really perceive
such a hierophany, for example that of the Imago Templi? In practice and
in truth, only Moses can speak of the sacred—every Moses who is "saved
from the waters of History".
Sociologists and philosophers of History, on the other hand, are the
docile followers of Pharoah. They are men as Pharoah wishes them to
be—they conform to his norm. They are unaware that their dialectic can
relegate "the past to the past" only in the temporal world of the "waters of
History". Whoever does not free himself from the norm which recognizes
only the historical, which acknowledges as true only that which is in time
and in the documents of History, will never understand, for example, that
what sacred history (hierohistory) recounts in the Revelation on Mount
Sinai is not an event which only took place in, let us say, the year 2449
after the Creation. The Revelation on Sinai dwells intemporally within
man, within every Moses who has been saved from the waters. The
foundation lives within us, it is that whereby we exist in truth and in
reality. For this reason it is no less true to say that the Revelation on Sinai
exists also before the beginning of the world. 34
4 The norm of those exiled from the Temple. We have now been given the key to
the recurrences of the Imago Templi. There is no need to evince these
recurrences in terms of a material, historical filiation, or to explain them
in terms of an external historical causality. It must be repeated that the
norm of these recurrences is not written down in legal documents; it is an
inner norm, written in the hearts of those who are exiled from the Temple.
Likewise, the goal towards which we are guided by Suhravardi's "Recital
of the Occidental Exile" is a mystical and eternal Sinai, a Sinai which
33 Mircea Eliade, in Fragments d'un journal (Paris, 1973), p. 310, initiates an entire
inquiry into the question raised here. We ourselves would express the contrast in the
following terms. Profane history sees mankind as mankind has created itself; History is
the creation that man regards as his own, and of which he is the result. Sacred
history or hierohistory reascends to events that are prior to the world, prior to the
destruction of the Temple, because it is by this Temple that I was created, and its
Imago exists within me. This is the key to my hermeneutics, the sacred norm which
determines the ascent from world to world.
34 F. Weinreb, Die judischen Wurzeln, op. cit., p. 42.
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THE IMAGO TEMPLI IN CONFRONTATION
merges with the cosmic mountain of Qaf. At the end of his adventure, the
exile rediscovers the Angel who, as we already know, is the Holy Spirit,
the archangel Gabriel as the Angel of the human race. He is thus the
"celestial parent" from whom the soul of the exile emanated. Above the
Sinai of the Angel of humanity, other Sinais rise in tiers—temples of the
hierarchical Intelligences that antecede him, up to the "God of Gods". At
the summit of the first Sinai, the Shaykh al-ishraq situates the Great Rock
which some Shiite traditions also describe as the "Green Emerald". This
Rock is the oratory, the temple of humanity or the Tenth hierarchical
Intelligence. 35
This great "rock" is designated by the Arabic term sakhrah, and it is so
essentially allied to the Imago Templi and to the tradition of the Temple
that, as we shall see, it is at the origin of the denomination of the Knights
of the Order of the Temple. It has given its name to the building constructed
on the site of the Temple and which is still called, even today, Qubbat al-
Sakhrah, the "Dome of the Rock". Thus the Imago Templi, in Suhravardi
also, is rooted in the deepest traditions concerning the Temple. Very
ancient Jewish traditions tell us that this holy rock was the initial point—
the starting-point—of Creation, the original Centre around which the
earth developed concentrically. Jacob rested his head on it while he slept
and dreamed of the ladder linking Heaven and Earth, which the Angels
ascended and descended (Gen. 28). It corresponds to the position of the
Holy of Holies in the ancient Temple. This is why the place marked by the
rock is seen as the entrance to the higher world or, rather, as already part
of it. It is through the holy rock as the foundation stone that Heaven and
Earth exist and communicate with each other. It was consequently already
at Bethel before Jacob found it there. 36
The idea of such a communication between Heaven and Earth thus
determines the current notion according to which the earthly sanctuary is
situated at the nadir of the celestial Temple, which is at the zenith. This
notion is illustrated by Jacob's vision of the ladder, and is to be found in
all the hierophanies of the Temple. Suhravardi's recital of the Occidental
Exile ends at the great rock of the mystical Sinai, on the summit of the
35 Suhravardi, 'Recit de l'exil occidental'; see En Islam iranien, op. cit., vol. II, pp.
270—294, and L'Archange empourpre, op. cit., VIII, pp. 267—287.
36 Cf. R. J. McKelvey, op. cit., pp. 188-192. See also J. Massingberd Ford, 'A possible
Liturgical Background to the Shepherd of Hernias', in Revue de Qumran, no. 24
(March 1969), pp. 540-541, note 34.
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