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

THE IMAGO TEMPLI IN CONFRONTATION
the place through which Heaven and earth were in communication, the
intermediary locus "at the meeting-place of the two seas", linking Heaven
with the earth. The destruction of the Temple is destruction of the field of
vision: contemplation collapses for lack of space, for lack of a horizon
beyond this world. Heaven and earth have ceased to comunicate: there is
no longer either temple or contemplation.
From then on the knot of agnosticism tightens around the consciousness,
shutting it off from itself. This is the reign of the "normal" man, of the
man, that is, who conforms to the norm of Pharoah (see above, section II).
The world of such a man is a world that "God no longer looks upon", that
is no longer his concern. An eminent Iranian shaykh, from whom I have
learned much, 292 went so far as to say to me, some time before he died,
when we were speaking about the confident pessimism of Shiite traditions:
"Never forget! The day will come when one will no longer be able even to
utter the name of God in this world." For many of our contemporaries,
that day is already here. The Temple is destroyed. There is no longer any
link between Heaven and earth.
The norm of our world can assume all manner of names: sociology,
dialectical or non-dialectical materialism, positivism, historicism, psychoanalysis,
and so on. There is nothing, not even parapsychology, that does
not oppose a savage refusal to any so-called "spiritualist" consequence
that one might be tempted to deduce from one's observations and discoveries.
The knot which paralyses our awareness is well-tied. The difficulty
is that most men live outside themselves, even though they may never
have gone outside themselves, for the good reason that they have never
been inside themselves. Of course, there is no lack of therapies to make
them go inside themselves; but if these are successful, it is often even more
difficult to make them come out of themselves. Deprivation in the external
world is followed by sterile stagnation, endlessly hammering out the
contours of a false subjectivity. I would say that the virtue of the Imago
Templi lies in making us be within ourselves outside ourselves. For we must not
confuse introspection, introversion, with contemplation: there is no contemplation
without the Temple. The virtue of the Imago Templi lies in
delivering the man-temple both from the dangers of an invasive sociology,
and from the dangers of a subjectivity which is its own thrall. It unties the
292 I refer to Sarkar Agha (Shaykh Abui Qasim Ibrahlmi, who died in 1969). On him
and his work, see En Islam iranien, op. cit., vol. IV, pp. 248-255.
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THE IMAGO TEMPLI IN CONFRONTATION
knot because it re-establishes communication between Heaven and earth,
opening up for all men the spaces beyond.
The norm of the Temple may doubtless appear fragile or absurd in a
world like ours, and the stale of the "guardians of the Temple", of the
contemplatives "at the meeting-place of the two seas", may seem infinitely
precarious. Nevertheless, the norm that they follow itself bears witness to
another world, as for the Essene Community of Qumran it bore witness to
the fact that the celestial cohorts were fighting by the side of their earthly
partners. What will the future of this norm be? The answer, it seems to
me, comes at the end of Albrecht von Scharfenberg's great epic, "The
New Titurel" (see above, section VII). Here, there is an episode which
has all the impact of a parable of the Imago Templi. When Titurel and
Parsifal take the Holy Grail back to the East, they pass through a certain
city. Parsifal leaves the inhabitants of this city with an image of the Castletemple
of the Grail at Montsalvat. And with the aid of this single image,
the inhabitants set about building their own Temple of the Grail.
This Image is also what remains to us. No more; but no less. No less,
because it provides the answer to our question: what will happen in the
future to the norm of the Temple? And it answers this question because
this Image is imperishable, to the extent that we see it rise triumphant in
the "waste land", from an earth that is spiritually more devastated than
the domain of the Grail ever was before the coming of Parsifal. I call to
witness the extraordinary vision of the castle-temple at Montsalvat which
comes in one of the most moving pages written by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Here the Imago Templi, rising like a challenge to dominate the norms of a
hostile landscape, can be contemplated in all its purity. The vision takes
the form of a study made by a painter who is trying to set down the
moment when Parsifal "contemplates" the castle-temple of the Holy Grail
for the first time.
"In shape the picture was twice as high as it was long. It showed a
wedge-shaped ravine dividing two mountain crags. Above them both to
right and left, could just be seen the outermost trees of a forest—a dense,
primeval forest. Some creeping ferns, some ugly, menacing prehensile
thickets clung to the very edge, and even to the overhanging face of the
rock. Above and to the left a pale grey horse was coming out of the forest,
ridden by a man in helmet and cape. Unafraid of the abyss the horse had
raised its foreleg, before taking the final step, prepared at its rider's
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