Rediscovering the Center: A Meditation
I finished my last article in this very VoegelinView claiming that only with a conscious acceptance and participation in the real, mankind (especially the Western part of it), could return to a state of spiritual healthy. With the wisdom of hindsight, I now wish to continue that enquiry. The matter of the “participation in reality” (or, more dramatically, “participation in truth”) requires some more investigation.
My article proposed that Flannery O’Connor’s “The Enduring Chill” could be read as the fictional analogy of modern man’s anguish triggered by his refusal to accept the nature of reality—be it his regional, social or spiritual reality. The grace of O’Connor’s story is that it manages, as good fiction does, to implement it in even and natural manner; therefore, it manages to discuss the evils of our age, even as though she wrote it some fifty years ago, with the establishment of an analogue cosmion (i.e., an imaginative structure that reflects reality’s structure) to the cosmos where we live—an analogue reality to our own reality. That is, she deals with the issue poetically (in the modern sense of the word “poetry”), as opposed to the rhetorical–logical mode that philosophers use.
If O’Connor constructed an analogue cosmion to our cosmos, then once can easily use her construction to deal with the issues of our reality. Thence, I used “The Enduring Chill” as a springboard to pass from the stage of fiction to the stage of philosophy. When analyzing the issue on the philosophical realm, I assumed that the unity of conscience—and therefore the problem of participation—can be solved by recollecting and knowing our condition as heirs and possessors of ancient traditions and knowledges as Western men and women. That is, to make the anamnesis of our center.
As the world about us seems to be crashing down as a new order arrives, certain postures—both political and spiritual—seems completely strange. Therefore, when Asbury’s visits, in “The Enduring Chill,” the Buddhist class, that scene does not seem so removed of things of our own time. Asbury is not so different from people who scoff Christianity off as a structural imposition of Western society and then turn to the I-Ching, Spiritualist sects, go to yoga classes and play a part in the world-wide numbing of mankind through illicit and licit drugs. In this landscape of spiritual and cultural ruin, it is not wonderful that a part of contemporary society, after witnessing a long period of decay, think that enough is enough and try to return to what seems more “traditional,” believing that in doing so they will restore the world to the normality of bygone days, even if the general concept of “traditional” is mistaken and leads to impressions as vapid as of those collective dreams of their confused antagonists.
The thing is that this process of “restoration” requires, as a non-negotiable part, an understanding of what exactly composes a traditional society—or, better yet, what exactly is “traditional.” It is not granted, in a society so centerless as ours, that this agent who took to himself the role of “grand restaurateur” of his society’s traditions might notice that he himself is noologically sick. What is more, supposing that the return of superficial traditions is done successfully, this individual or his group might be regarded by the general spiritually sick public as a messianic figure, the one who got society rid from the bad influences modernity and reshaped society with what is good and old. This conservative project, then, takes a gnosticist turn and, at once paradoxically and dramatically, become irremediably modern.
Much of modern politics is just a gnosticist parody of the transcendent order, because with the exclusion of the power of the Divine Being, a parodic all-mighty Man will take His place. The presidential desk is catapulted to the place of the Celestial Throne and we entrust to the Statesman all our faith thus transforming transcendental faith into metastatic hope. In other words, it is centerless. To make a reference to another story of prophetic power by Flannery O’Connor, if we miss the anamnetic process of recalling our center and discovering its nature, we are bound to become little Mrs. Turnpins, the prejudiced lady from O’Connor’s “Revelation,” who divides people as either “niggers,” “white trash,” or “ugly” and is flabbergasted when, in a divine flash out of “a visionary light,” she sees people like herself and her husband in the last place of a celestial march, behind legions of white trashes, “clean for the first time,” “black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics.”[1]
* * *
Why is this “center” so important? The center points to an objective place inside an idea; it is the substance, the ousia, of this “what.” It puts an integral unity in the idea. The great drama of modernity is that we try to take every mutation of a given thing in consideration in the process of describing this thing. Perhaps this is more sensible now that issues like “diversity” part of the media’s hodiernal discussions, but long-ago, G. K. Chesterton, in all his witty wisdom, foresaw that the day would come when we would have to fight to prove that the grass is green. The perception that things have a unity (or a fundamental form) to them is actually one of the exposed nerves of the modern mentality: we are equal and yet we are different. We are equal in our human existence and we are different in the way this existence takes shape. In modern democracy, this paradox takes form in the dramatic choice between the will of the majority and the rights of the minorities. The drama of modernity is the drama of compartmentalization, in which every crumb of existence refers only to itself. Every individuality refers only to this individuality, forgetting that a particular can only be a particular because it is a flexion of a higher nature.[2]
This modern drama is actually very recent: Voegelin says it begun in the 18th century and Hugh Trevor-Roper says it is from the 17th.[3] And if it is a drama, it had to had a first act when we rejected the notion of a center. To my mind, the periods that Voegelin and Trevor-Roper point are actually the climax of our story, but not the first act, where the elements of the storm start to gather. To reach this starting point we have to swim further back in time, More specifically, to the Late Middle Ages and to the victory of Nominalism over Realism.
I think the center we are looking for is a symbolic expression of an eidetic reality, and that is why I think its return would prove to be a good remedy to our maladies. Occidental metaphysics expressed it more thoroughly within the Realist framework. Realism, based on the Neoplatonism typical of the High Middle Ages, and later fertilized by Aristotelianism, unified existence and posited that the diversity of the world could be taken as diverse only in the realm of the sensible world, but not in the eidetic. The universals of Realism actually existed because the object in sensible world could be referred back to its fundamental reality to which this variant of the universal was a mere flection or predication. Therefore, the actual existence of universals was not a mere metaphysical and philosophical position—it was an actual and objective understanding of the basic elements of existence. Their understanding was of transcendental and metaphysical order and was part of the general knowledge that formed the bulk of the noetic experience of the ancient man and gave him the basis of his self-understanding, of the care of his soul.
If we consider the geometry of the ancient cosmovision we will see that the symbolism of the center went more or less unchanged after the Revelation of the Messiah, as Apocalypse 22:13 reinforces in a startlingly intransigent fashion. When God reveals He is “Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end,” He is being extremely intransigent because He takes to himself the very basis of the nature of the cosmos. It also meant that He Himself was Time. Time was viewed and experienced as a cyclical and circular pattern, from beginning to new beginning. If that is so, each time we circle time and reach Omega, we necessarily come back to Alpha we come back to a new hypostatic experience with God.[4] (In the case of Christianity, the first experience was Jesus incarnation and the second will be the Second Coming and Final Judgment.) We orbit around God in all our cosmological, hand in hand with Him. God, finally, is everything: our center and our whole.[5]
A pictorial example will do good to our discussion. In the High Middle Ages there were public examples of ancient cosmological understandings. Both in the Chartres Cathedral or in the Church of Santa Maria Novella we will see the seven Liberal Arts depicted as actual figures, that is, they are substantive eidetic realities. I want to call attention to The Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas, harbored in the Church of Santa Maria Novella’s Chapel of the Spanish.[6] This fresco anthropomorphizes the Liberal Arts (or Sciences, to use Dante’s term) as women, which indicates that they have actual existence. They are substantive eidetic realities, so following Socratic-Platonic laws of gnoseology they are knowable. Interestingly, each anthropomorphic form is accompanied by the planet it corresponds in ancient astrology, thus graphically illustrating that each reality corresponds to a circular orbit (since in ancient astronomy each planet revolved around Earth with a perfectly circular course).[7]
The women of the fresco are standing up as seven other men are sit down at their feet, which adds a further subtlety to our example. The men represent the practical uses of each liberal art and each one corresponds to a master of this practical art (e.g. Ptolemy accompanies Astronomy). The men are sit down, so the women outmatch their height. It is important to mention this because it implies that when one puts the celestial arts in practice they lose their wholeness—man cannot possess maximum knowledge (or, as Aristophanes puts it in The Clouds, “surely doth earth draw to herself the essence of our thoughts”). The arts need adaptation both on account to our ignorance but also to the ever-shifting world of the senses. This mean to say that, if we take the Neoplatonic position, we need to lead a bios theoretikos in order to begin to understand the essential eidos of the things. If we change the state of theoria to praxis we lose grasp of the eidos since it can only be achieved through meditation.[8] So it is not wonderful that the highly evocative painting we are analyzing here is dedicated to a master of the bios theoretikos, St. Thomas Aquinas.[9] The fact that the arts have a center means that the researcher (to use A. E. Taylor’s term in his discussion of the Meno)[10] approximates to the substantial knowledge like if he were, for instance, longing for the one he loves. How many times we are in love with someone and, despite that, we hardly understand some of our significant other’s actions? The same is valid with knowledge: the full substantive knowledge of one of the sciences is impossible (only God possesses it: knowledge was His creation so He is its sole owner, though His love for mankind leads Him to share it).[11] The fact that it has a center is serves as a reference for our revolving around the sphere of the knowing as our thoughts and desires revolve around our loved one.
* * *
Eventually, the kind of metaphysical and theological speculation of Scholasticism eventually begun to tear apart. In this brief meditation I do not have the time to consider all of them, though I hope to expand this study sometime in the near future. The most important of them, it seems, is the position of God within this paradigm. One of the biggest problems, starting in the Late Middle Ages, was that in the mind of some, the very syllogistic mode of philosophical exposition left little space either for spiritual inwardness—in other words, mystic and esoteric experience. The highly logic world imposed by the Western metaphysical practice did not seem very welcome to those individuals who preferred, like St. Francis of Assisi, a more ascetic and physical experience with the Creation. It is no wonder, therefore, that the Nominalist position sprung out from the Franciscan order. St. Francis, meaningfully, forbade book access from his monks, fearing that the lust of reading would distract them from their duty with the Lord.[12] The Franciscan drama was based on the assumption that God has unlimited power and that the Scholastic debates prevented the total participation of man in God’s eternal glory. In short, St. Francis required a full and unstoppable metanoia, a conversion of violent order. Philosophical discussions about the nature of God matter very little if we do follow Christ’s commandments. What does our intellectual prowess, our beautiful academic expositions of certain doctrines if God’s power is unlimited and infinite? Is He restricted, for that matter, to do whatever He desires if man’s theology says He cannot do this or that thing? Can man now fish Leviathan?
We might compare the Franciscan call for a violent metanoia through poverty and asceticism with the Orthodox hesychast view of the Christian life. Classic writings in the Orthodox tradition such as the Philokalia or the Way of the Pilgrim diverge wildly in their ecstatic joy and longing for a mystical union with God with the down-to-Earth and rational writings of the majority of the writings in the theological tradition of the Occident as does St. Francis’ teachings and practices diverge from this same theological tradition. However, the Orthodox Church perhaps would never adopt hesychasm if it were not for the great controversy that a certain Barlaam the Calabrian raised in the 14th century. Barlaam challenged hesychasm’s major name, Gregory Palamas, as a heretic for his claims that the created mind could see God. The Orthodox church ruled in favor of Palamas and the hesychast party twice and Palamas was raised as a master of the Christian spiritual practice.
Both the Orthdodox hesychast and the Franciscan position call for what we can label as a “spiritualization of the body,” though the term seems a bit incomplete.[13] The result of this spiritualization is the personal noetic metanoia and the corporeal elevation to a state of godly hypostasis inside the converted individual. However, in hesychasm, the popularization of the practice did not result in the impediment of the Realist metaphysical possibility. In fact, hesychasm and its spiritual consequences cannot happen outside the Realist position. For some reason, however, this was not the case with the Franciscan order, which started to fragmentate not long after St. Francis’ death. Rather, disobeying their master’s explicit orders, the Franciscans entered in academic life and through the hands of Duns Scotus and William of Ockham the Nominalist position, starring a terrible, incomprehensible and near irrational God. It is striking that such a thing could happen. The Western Nominalists feared, as the Eastern Barlaam, that the rational and seemingly de-spiritualized Thomistic philosophy undermined the Christian way of life and that the syllogistic fashion of Scholastic philosophy “closed” the metaphysical possibilities of Christianity. That is to say that the Nominalists were afraid that Thomism and Scholasticism would create a closed-system Christianity. The best way to prevent that was to undermine Thomism and Scholasticism and to break with Realism’s symbolic reality. In other words, Nominalism broke the metaphysical ground that the great symbolic analogies provided and compartmentalized the eidetic order of being into smaller and individualized realities. There are no universals, only individual stages of being that can be referred to as universals only ad hoc.
Based on their actions, we could affirm that the Franciscan Nominalists perhaps suffered of some kind of spiritual malady that made them perceive the symbolic quality of the universals as an impediment to the realization of their mystic intentions. I am not sure if we can indeed portrait them in that light because, as I said, the metaphysics of Realism also carries a bag of potential problems. However, Nominalism generated a centerless metaphysical reality which engendered a seemingly irreversible process of compartmentalization of experience, a process that is behind almost every major problematic characteristic of the modern world. And the desacralized anxiety that is one of the main features of the modern world seems like a distant cousin of that potential spiritual anxiety that the first Nominalists perhaps suffered.
During the time that Realism reigned, the world had a symbolic center that cleared the path of the soul and of the intellect; it was this eidetic center that Realism provided this objective reference that was the light in the individual path. They provide a cosmic architecture that helped the human soul in its journey across the sense experience. I do not think that the return of Realism and its universals will put mankind back on its tracks. (And, indeed, who can make such a claim?) But the cosmic centrality that the universals provided seems to be essential if we are to understand certain features of our life. The ecstatic images of the spheres, their visual incarnation speaks deeply in our mind. It seems very strange that in this very virtual age of ours we feel that our life and the age about us might come across as ephemeral, vaporous or liquid. It is not that the return to these symbolic centers will bring the spiritual problems of our age to an end. But I wonder if the despair that creeps in our anxious souls does not come from the centerless quality of our zooming world: our world has no center and then we cannot locate exactly what we feel. Some say we cannot even speak what we are feeling because it is so particular that not even by approximation our hearer could understand us. How can we feel anything but despair from such a proposition? How cannot we feel that we are trapped inside ourselves? How cannot we feel that we are bound to a miserable isolated life? How cannot we think that life is indeed meaningless if no one can understand us? And, in light of it, if we are trying to get out of this unspeakable individual hell of centerlessness, how can we prevent anyone to follow someone who seems to be trying bring back artifacts from a time where people apparently were more concrete and centered? How can mankind be anything but little Mrs. Turnpnes, wrongly judging our own nature and everyone else’s nature, if we are the pinnacle of our own particular universes? The prophetic power of O’Connor’s tale reveals now all its might: in a world where we are kings of the infinite space, it is only natural that we nurture a pathological arrogance that allows us to label the whole world according to our tastes. In this landscape, only a visionary light can save us.
But if the return to a centered age is impossible, then we can only glance our old centered world from a distance. Their circular forms dance in front of us, in an entranced ecstasy of knowledge put in motion by Divine Love until the beginning of the next cosmic cycle. Love that moves the Sun and other stars to the unspeakable modern love, we transformed Earth in “the land of lost content.”
Notes
[1] Flannery O’Connor, “Revelation,” in The Complete Stories, New York, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1978, p. 508.
[2] A “grammatic flexion of being,” as Julián Marías puts it.
[3] See Eric Voegelin, “The Eclipse of Reality,” in What Is History? and Other Late Unpublished Writings, ed. and intro. Thomas A. Holloweck and Paul Caringella, vol. 28 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1990, p. 111, and Hugh Trevor-Rope, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, Indianapolis, Liberty Fund, 1999.
[4] We should not dismiss the fact that the shape of the letters Α and Ω are very suggestive. The former points upwards in a pyramid-like design while the latter is similar to a dome seen from a sided perspective. We can infer from works such as Zosimos of Panopolis’ On the Letter Omega (late 3rd to early 4th century AD) that some esoteric meaning was attached to these letters. Though some tentative essays have been done on this field, a deep study on the possible esoteric inclinations of the Ancient Greek alphabet is still desideratum.
[5] This perhaps explain why the symbolism of the zodiac—which is at one time a reference of cyclical time and eidetic reality—was easily assimilated by Christians both in the Oriental as in the Occidental traditions.
[6] My choice of painting might seem inappropriate because The Triumph is a 14th-century painting. However, Santa Maria Novella is a Dominican church, and the Dominicans defended the ancient Realist position against the new Franciscan Nominalism. The late date of the painting thus poses no problem at all.
[7] There are slight changes in the correspondence between the planets and the arts from writer to writer, but they are generally the same. See for reference Helene Wieruszkowski, “An Early Anticipation of Dante’s ‘Cieli e Scienzi,’” Modern Language Notes 41, no. 4, April 1946, pp. 222–3; P. J. Heather, “The Seven Planets,” Folklore 54, no. 3, 1943, pp. 338–61; and Titus Burckhardt, La Nascita della Cattedrale: Chartres, tr. Tommaso Buonacerva, Rome, Edizioni Arkeios, 1998, pp. 93–9.
[8] On the other hand, this is why Aristotle says early in the Politics that life is praxis, not poiesis (Pol. 1254a).
[9] The fact that the fresco is a piece of anti-Nominalist propaganda is meaningful too—especially if we compare it with the similar depiction of the liberal arts and planets in the Royal Door of Chartres Cathedral, mentioned in Burckhardt, op. cit.
[10] See A. E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work, 6th ed., Cleveland, Meridian Books, 1956, pp. 136–7.
[11] God, the Alpha and Omega, is the owner of everything—both physical or eidetic. He is the owner of the planets, too. Interestingly, Α and Ω are not only the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, but were also its first and last vowels, and there were seven vowels in ancient Greek, and each corresponded to the seven astrological planets. See the table in Kieren Barry, The Greek Qabalah: Alphabetic Mysticism and Numerology in the Ancient World, York Beach, Maine, Samuel Weiser, 1999, p. 42.
[12] See, for instance, St. Francis letter to St. Anthony of Padua, in Claudio Leonardi, ed. La Letteratura Francescana, vol. 1, Francesco e Chiara d’Assisi, s.l., Fondazione Lorenzo Vala/Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 2004, p. 199. See also Michael Robson, OMFConv., St. Francis: The Man and the Legend, London, Continuum, 1997, pp. 180ff.
[13] I have taken this term from Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “The Prayer of the Heart in Hesychasm and Sufism,” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 31, nos. 1–2, 1986, p. 200.
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