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

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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. 388 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 389
THE IMAGO TEMPLI IN CONFRONTATION command to gather itself and jump over—a leap that was well within its power. But the rider was not looking at the chasm that faced the horse. Dazed, wondering, he was looking into the middle distance, where the upper reaches of the sky were suffused with an orange-gold radiance which might have been from the sun or from something else even more brilliant hidden from view by a castle. Its walls and turrets growing out of the ledges of the mountainside, visible also from below through the gap between the crags, between the ferns and trees, rising to a needle-point at the top of the picture—indistinct in outline, as though woven from gently shimmering clouds, yet still vaguely discernible in all the details of its unearthly perfection, enveloped in a shining and lilac-coloured aureole— stood the castle of the Holy Grail." 293 This visionary page written by Solzhenitsyn is evidence that the Imago Templi, the image of the castle-temple left to mankind by Parsifal, will never be lost. It is in some sense the response to the geste of Parsifal, and both together are the response to the desperate cry of the Templar knights that we heard echoing at the start in an amphitheatre in the High Pyrenees. Together they reply: No! the Temple is not destroyed forever. This was known to Suhravardi also, with whom we began this discussion and with whom it is right that we should end it. Suhravardi composed an entire "Book of hours" in honour of the "guardians of the Temple", who are unknown to the majority of men. They guard a secret Temple, and those who find their way to it can join in the invocation which returns, like a refrain, in one of the most beautiful psalms composed by Suhravardi: "O God of every God! Make the litany of the Light arise. Make the people of Light triumphant. Guide the Light towards the Light. Amen." 294 Paris, Thursday July 25, 1974 293 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, trans. Michael Guybon (Collins & Harvill Press, London, 1968), p. 259. 294 Cf. Suhravardi's 'Livre d'heures', of which extracts are translated in my anthology entitled L'Archange Empourpre, op. cit. 390
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Temple and Contemplation brings together for the first ... - ImagoMundi

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