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

THE IMAGO TEMPLI IN CONFRONTATION
primitive Johannine community (see below, section VI). 149 What distinguishes
the texts of the Qumran Community from all other apocalyptic
literature (e.g. Daniel 12, I Enoch, Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs) is that
in place of the expectation of the resurrection of the dead there is the lived
sense of a victory already achieved "in the present" over the kingdom of
death. In this sense it is true to say that whoever lives in the Community
of the sons of Light is already living in the last times. The eschatological
experience of communion and companionship with the Angels is accompanied
by a secret paradisal joy. 150
It goes without saying that the Community of Qumran was thus fully
aware of the presence of God's Spirit within itself. Some have wondered
whether one could go so far as to say that this possession of the Spirit was
itself also experienced as an eschatological gift, and this is a theme of
controversy among Qumran scholars. 151 It seems to us, however, that in
contrasting the Christian community, with its certitude of the fait accompli,
with the Community of Qumran looking ahead to an advent of the Spirit
that will bestow a more integral form on the visitations of Yahveh, we fail
to consider what is implied by the simultaneity of the jam (already) and
the nondum (not yet). Is Pentecost—the outpouring of the Spirit—a fact
accomplished once and for all, or is it a fact which is still to come? The
certainty that it is both past and to come is what has inspired all paracletic
movements which could not accommodate themselves to the official Church,
bogged down in History. 152 Such a certainty is also a nostalgia, and these
two together have prompted the recurrence and the persistence of the
Imago Templi in the face of the institutions and dogmas of the official
Church (see below, section VI).
We would make a similar comment with respect to the question whether,
when the Community asserts that it possesses an esoteric divine knowledge
149 D. E. Aune, op. cit., loc. cit. This is also the theme of Aune's admirable theological
study: the realization "in the present" of eschatological salvation in the Qumran
Community, in the 4th Gospel, in the Epistles of Ignatius, in the Odes of Solomon,
in Murcion.
150 Ibid., p. 33, notes 1 and 2. We may recall here that Ismailism conceives of the
entry into the Ismaili da'wah as entry into the "potential Paradise". Cf. my Trilogie
ismaelienne, op. cit., p. 124.
151 Cf. D. E. Aune, op. cit., p. 34, where he discusses the work by H.-W. Kuhn, op.
cit.
152 Cf. H. Corbin, 'L'Initiation ismaelienne ou l'esoterisme et le Verbe', in L'Homme el
son Ange (Paris, Fayard, 1984). See also my study 'L'Idee du Paraclet en philosophic
iranienne', in Face de Dieu, Face de I'Homme (Paris, Flammarion, 1983).
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THE IMAGO TEMPLI IN CONFRONTATION
(and the secrets of its angelology or of its fight against the sons of Darkness
support such an assertion), this is not another aspect of its experience of
the reality of eschatological salvation "in the present", in contrast to
Jewish apocalyptic literature, which locates the acquisition of soteriological
wisdom "in the future". 153
Even when it is recognized that the "gift of gnosis" was seen as an
"eschatological gift", there is still the need for a concept of time which
validates the simultaneity of the jam and the nondum. We are familiar with
the attempt made by present-day "dialectic theology" to "detemporalize"
primitive Christian eschatology, but this is not what we are concerned
with here. On the other hand, to affirm that the Qumran Community is
the only one in which future eschatological salvation penetrates the
present age, and then to go on to assert that the juxtaposition of future and
present must itself be considered as determined and conditioned
"temporally and historically", 154 is simply to relapse into historicism. It is
to lose sight of all that is unique in the "liturgical mystery" lived as an
eschatological experience; to lose sight of what is peculiar to the category
of "liturgical time" in relation to chronological time, for which the
simultaneity of jam and nondum is as unintelligible as the reversability of
time. We believe that here it would be fruitful to introduce an analysis of
the temporality of time, such as we have elsewhere elicited from Shiite
gnosis. 155 It is as though our theological discussions in the West always
stay on the level of "dense and opaque time" (zaman kathif), when we
ought to be bringing into play, above all in this case, ideas cognate with
subtle time {zaman latjf) and hyper-subtle time (zaman altaf). This is the
time of events on the level of the imaginal, the level of the "meeting-place
of the two seas" where we initially situated the hierophanies of the Imago
Templi.
Only if this Imago Templi is grasped on the level of the imaginal and in the
time proper to it, is it true and justifiable to say that it is the hermeneutic
of the Temple—the symbolism of the Temple—which enables the Qumran
153 Cf. D. E. Aune, op. cit., p. 35, in support of H.-W. Kuhn, op. cit.
154 Ibid., p. 36.
155 From the work in particular of Qadi Sa'id Qummi, the outstanding Iranian Shiite
thinker and spiritual master of the seventeenth century. Cf. En Islam iranien, op.
cit., vol. IV, index s.v. zaman. We are indebted to Qadi Sa'id for a remarkable
analysis of temporality, which he schematizes in the three modes mentioned above
(opaque and dense, subtle, and hyper-subtle).
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