The Eye of Fire (Part Five)

Olivier Clément

Translated from:
L’œil de Feu: Deux Visions Spirituelles du Cosmos
Olivier Clément
Fata Morgana, 1994

Ivan Shishkin, “Forest Landscape With Stream”

II. The Contemplation of Nature (Phusikē Theōria)

Two Spiritual Eyes. The Meaning of the Symbol

Contemplation in Eastern Christianity necessarily involves two stages: direct communion with God, certainly, the vision of divine light; but first comes the “knowledge of beings,” the “contemplation of nature.” Saint Isaac the Syrian employs here the metaphor of “two eyes”: “Just as we have two bodily eyes, we have two spiritual eyes (...) and each has its own vision. Through one we see the secrets of God’s glory hidden in created beings... Through the other we contemplate the glory of God’s holy nature.”¹

The word “world” takes on two meanings here. On one hand, “this world” is pure appearance, illusion, a network of individual and collective hypnoses and idolatries which, by closing creation in upon itself, delivers it to the “powers of darkness.” It is a play of pleasure and pain, of generation and corruption, a game of death — like a dog licking the blade of a saw, as an old adage says, rejoicing in the taste of its own blood until final rupture and suffocation. But beyond this, “the world” signifies God’s creation, fundamentally beautiful and good; and though this is not immediately apparent to ordinary sight, the eye “that sees secrets” reveals its purity and symbolic character.

Purity: here we must recall the interpretation given by Maximus the Confessor to the vision of the Apostle Peter, as reported in the Book of Acts. Peter remained prisoner to the Hebrew conception of pure and impure. He then saw, descending from heaven, an immense sheet covered with pure and impure animals, while a voice commanded him: “Kill, and eat.” According to Maximus, through this sheet and the animals that covered it, “God revealed to Peter, as spiritual nourishment, the visible world perceived through its logoi in the invisible world, or if you will, the invisible world manifested through sensible forms.” Viewed thus, the world contains no impurity, for, continues Maximus, “he who surpasses the superficial and therefore erroneous conception of things sanctifies the visible; he consumes as spiritual food the invisible logoi and obtains the contemplation of nature in the Spirit.”² Such a person “sees the spiritual meaning of beings through their visible form... Thus welcoming the epiphanies of the divine, his intellect receives a more divine transparency...”³ Maximus interprets this contemplation as a cosmic eucharist: sensible things become the “body” of the Lord and their celestial roots His “blood.”⁴ Man makes the interiority of things his own, he participates in their praise, he hears it in them, he makes it fully conscious in himself.

Then the world appears, to use a frequent expression of Saint Ephrem the Syrian, as an “ocean of symbols.” The symbol anticipates or manifests the Incarnation of the Word, axiologically anterior to creation and making of it, as Mircea Eliade⁵ has well shown, an immense theophany. This is the “cosmic liturgy” evoked by Maximus the Confessor: “Undifferentiated One in differentiated things; Him, the Uncomposed in composed things; Him, the Beginningless in things subject to beginning; Him, the Invisible in visible things; Him, the Impalpable in palpable things. Thus does He gather us into Himself from all things...”⁶

The profusion of symbols corresponds to the apophatic approach to “God beyond God”: “To this Cause of all that transcends all, both anonymity is fitting and all names of all beings.”⁷ “For all things are made for it and (...) all subsist in it, and it is because it is that all is produced and preserved and all tends toward it — beings endowed with intelligence through knowledge, animals through sensation, other beings through vital movement or through innate or acquired aptitude. Thus instructed, the theologians praise it all together for having no name and for possessing them all (...). They affirm that this Principle (...) is at once identical in the identical, in the heart of the universe, around it, and Superessential, beyond the universe, beyond heaven (...), in a word, all that is and nothing of what is.”⁸ This Dionysian meditation was summarized at the end of the Western Middle Ages by Meister Eckhart when he spoke of God: Nomen innominabile, Nomen omninominabile, which one might translate, paraphrasing slightly: “the Name that cannot be named, the Name that is named by all things...”

Symbol etymologically means “ring.” In many cultures, a broken ring of which two friends, or lovers, who were separating would each take half, served, many years later, as a sign of recognition. The symbol is a sign of recognition between God and man, properly speaking, I repeat, a sign of incarnation. It is a sensible reality that not only represents but makes present the spiritual reality. The symbol unites the sensible and its “within,” its spiritual “inside.” And this ring is the ring of alliance on the “finger” of God, this “finger” which signifies, in icons, the Holy Spirit.

Thus, for the tradition of Eastern Christianity, a tradition ceaselessly verified through ascetic and spiritual experience, the empirical world has in itself only an allusive meaning. It is from the spiritual world, from divine “idea-volitions,” that it constantly receives existence, such that through these living archetypes, these “words,” the Logos expresses and symbolizes itself in the world. If we consider that nature is sufficient unto itself, that it is merely a set of purely immanent blind processes, it signifies nothing, and death has the final word. Man himself, as merely a “natural” being, has neither meaning nor depth; an infinitesimal particle of nature, he is conditioned by it, his consciousness delivered to contingency — anthropology, as Lévi-Strauss melancholically noted, becomes “entropology.”⁹

But man consciously logikos, consciously the “image of God,” discovers meanings everywhere. In the very density of things, in the humble and so astonishing “epiphany” of their form, he senses divine Wisdom. “What we call nature is not reality in itself but symbol, symbolic expression of the paths of spiritual life. The ‘hardening’ of the world’s body is but proof of the fall that occurs in the spiritual world (...). I traverse this world, my gaze directed toward the depths... Everywhere I encounter mystery and see the reflection of other worlds. Nothing is closed, nothing is definitively fixed... The world is translucent, its boundaries never cease to shift, it penetrates into other worlds and other worlds penetrate it. It knows no opacity.”¹⁰

“Symbolic Knowledge”

For Nicolas Berdyaev, whom I have just cited, symbolic knowledge corresponds to this symbolic structure of the world. It stands in opposition to both fallen reason and “objectification” which presents us with the subjectivity-objectivity dilemma. This fallen reason, left to its own fantasies, is often possessed by forces of disintegration that vampirically feed on what Freud called the individual unconscious, or Jung’s collective unconscious. But beyond these, there is what a Romanian philosopher of our century, Lucien Blaga, termed the “cosmic unconscious.” Neither fallen reason nor fantastical subjectivity, though opposed and linked, are innocent.

“Symbolic knowledge,” whose nature will gradually become clear to us, truly discerns in all things the glory of God. This glory, by definition, cannot be grasped intellectually but reveals itself through the “seizing” it provokes (note the importance of the words "depth" and "admire" in the Bible). The symbol is inseparable from beauty, from that astonishment before “the ‘ah!’ of things,” as Japanese spirituality expresses it. The symbol catalyzes a fundamental “philokalic” experience (philokalia meaning “love of beauty”), a cognition brilliant in its self-evidence and inseparable from what one might paradoxically call an “objective emotion,” or rather a “trans-sensation of God.” Berdyaev writes: “One can only discover the Meaning by living it through spiritual experience... It can only be sensed through life itself, through a symbolic consciousness.”¹¹

Similarly, Max Scheler, both as a phenomenologist and as one who renewed patristic thought, particularly that of Augustine,¹² distinguishes rational knowledge, which would establish “horizontal” relationships, from spiritual knowledge which would see things “vertically,” in their symbolic relationship with the divine. “Through and above the causal relationship, a symbolic relationship always lies hidden.”¹³ This interiority of things would reveal itself through a lightning-like intuition. Each thing would thus present, beyond its natural “being,” a “meaning” that reveals the divine, and this meaning must also be the object of phenomenological Wesenschau (intuition of essences).

“Symbolic knowledge,” among these thinkers of our century, the age par excellence of dissociation, thus presents itself more or less as an irrationalism. The thought of the Fathers is more nuanced.

A Transfiguration of Rationality

For the Fathers, ascesis, the indispensable ascesis, does not reject but rather assumes and transforms rationality. Man must learn to unify and metamorphose all his faculties in the interior light, including reason. The knowledge of “the glory of God hidden in things” thus appears not as an irrational transport, but as a long patient process where reason refines itself, marvels, becomes ever more respectful, employs an increasingly open conceptuality, even antinomical. At the terminus of this ascesis, one surpasses rational capacities not through lack of light, through “obscurantism,” but, as Palamas often says, through the “superabundance” of light.¹⁴

This is why the Fathers, and notably Maximus the Confessor, took from Greek thought the word Logos which, to be infused with the living and personal sap of biblical davar,¹⁵ nonetheless means “reason.” The goal of “contemplation of nature” is to discern the true “reasons” of things, where the Logos expresses itself as divine Reason or Wisdom. This quest does not despise but rather illuminates human culture, whether in science, technology, or art. As Ilya Prigogine writes at the end of his New Alliance, “scientific knowledge, drawn from dreams of an empyrean revelation, that is, supernatural, can today become (...) a ‘poetic listening’ to nature.”¹⁶

But for us, these are not dreams. Or if they are, they are God’s dreams, more lucid than any “waking.”

For ascesis, particularly here, is an ascesis of awakening, of vigilance, a rejection of the “passions” — that is, of the idolatries that close human vision to spiritual “reasons” and establish between humanity and the world a relationship of mutual devouring. The most trivial language is revealing, when it speaks of what “falls under the senses,” or what one can “get one’s teeth into.” There was, particularly in the nineteenth century (extended today by a certain biological Prometheanism), a will to power in the exercise of reason, a rejection of transcendence (for transcendence demands humility and respect from reason), a desire for reassurance by marking out in the darkness a well-lit and supposedly mastered zone — what Dostoevsky ironically called, after the vast and transparent machinery pavilion at the London Exhibition of 1850, “the Crystal Palace.” Thus nature has become opaque, a vehicle not of reintegrating contemplation, but of a possession where the possessor becomes possessed. The parable of L’Arroseur Arrosé¹⁷ would characterize quite well, it seems to me, certain aspects of contemporary history.

Tearing the intellect away from the world of mutual devouring, of violence, of mechanical and objectified sexuality, ascesis transforms it into an “eye of fire” or “dwelling of light.” This joins with the secret light of things, “that ineffable and prodigious fire hidden in the essence of things as in the [Burning] Bush.”¹⁸ The Fathers use the following analogy: our physical eyes can only see light if they open and purify themselves, and especially because they contain — as the physiology of ancient Greece believed — a spark of this light; similarly the eye of the heart sees the luminous logoi of things, this writing of light, only to the extent that it has been purified and filled with this spiritual fire. Only light can see light; there must be something in common between the seer and what is seen. A single light unites subject and object, abolishing both the exteriority of the latter and the illusory enclosure of the former. Spiritual knowledge, writes Nicolas Berdyaev, “transcends the logical rupture between subject and object (...). Spiritual vision is thus very little ‘subjective’ as well as very little ‘objective.’ It is objective, certainly, but not in the rational sense of the word. It situates subject and object at an incomparably greater depth.”¹⁹ The separation between subject and object is transcended, without the two, however, being confused: the subject communes with the object, or rather, through the mediation of the object, communes with the hypostasis of the Logos of which the object is a subsistent word...

Convergences

This experience is found, though not systematized, sporadic but quite real, in Western Christianity: let it suffice to name Saint Francis of Assisi. It grounds Hindu poetic art, but in an ultimate perspective of fusion rather than communion; at the beginning of our century it inspired certain discoveries by Indian scholars, concerning for example the sensitivity of plants. In Buddhism, one would find it less, it seems to me, in metaphysical systematizations (for which there exist only “impermanent aggregates”), than in the immediacy of an almost “philokalic” experience, for example the Buddha’s smile while contemplating a flower. This experience was taken up most strikingly (in every sense of the word!) by certain forms of Japanese Buddhism. To illustrate this convergence, I will limit myself to recalling the following story, which seems to culminate in a haiku: a Greek girl told me that she had traversed the least known regions of her country in search of a hermit, a spiritual father, who could explain to her what “knowledge of beings” means, gnōsis tōn ontōn, an expression she had found, without understanding it, in texts of the Tradition. Finally, in the mountains, an old monk answered her: “Listen, perhaps it is this. One winter day, I was praying in my heart. Suddenly I raised my eyes to the window of my cell, and I saw the first snowflakes falling. Then, I understood snow.”

All the literature of countries marked by Eastern Christianity bears witness to this supernatural vision of nature, this great blessing at the heart of things. One recalls Alyosha Karamazov’s “kiss to the earth.” And everywhere, especially in our era which seeks, through atheism, new names for mystery, certain poets and painters have intuited this “knowledge of beings.” Let me suffice with a few brief quotations from Claudel and Klee. The first writes: “Only a purified soul will understand the scent of the rose.”²⁰ And the second, commenting on his pictorial research, notes: “The secret is to participate in the Gestaltung, to advance until the mystery reveals itself,”²¹ and further: “Our heart beats to carry us toward the depths, the unfathomable depths of the primordial Breath.”²²

From his study of the phenomena of “synchronicity” (situations of non-causal correspondence between an external event and a psychic state), Jung draws the suggestion that the depth of the physical world and that of consciousness are perhaps one and the same reality. He observes that microphysics and “depth psychology” seem to have a common background, which would be, he says, “as much physical as psychic, and thus neither one nor the other, but rather a third reality of another nature which can at best be grasped through allusions since, by nature, it is transcendental.”²³ This is also suggested by Henri Atlan when, nuancing the hypotheses of the “Princeton gnosis,”²⁴ he notes that “rather than turning over (...) the cosmic tapestry,” one should “try to pass through it to see its right side.”²⁵

Sophiology.

The capacity to discern the logoi of things culminates in the ability to contemplate their complex unity, the interconnection, in the Logos, of their spiritual roots.

“Just as at the center of a circle there is that unique point where all rays meet, so too the one who has been judged worthy to attain to God knows in Him, through direct and concept-free knowledge, all the essences of created things.”²⁶

Here enters the theme of Sophia, of divine Wisdom, developed by the Russian “sophiologists” in the first half of our century. The “sophianicity” of things, this virgin point in each one, refers, says Father [Saint] Paul Florensky, priest, philosopher and mathematician, to Wisdom as “unity (...) of the ideal definitions of the created (...), integral essence of creation.”²⁷ “The ascetic arrives at the absolute source of the created as soon as, washed by the Holy Spirit, detached from his self-existence, he comes to feel within himself in a tangible way his own absolute root, the root of eternity given to him through his participation in the depths of Trinitarian Love.”²⁸ “Then he perceives the eternal roots of the created universe, through which it abides in God.”²⁹

Sergei Bulgakov went even further by integrating into Christianity, as we have said, through “contemplation of nature” where he sees a “panentheism” (not “all is God” but “all is in God”), the archaic theme of the Earth-Mother: a strange and profound thought where the Russian sense of the “great moist Earth,” that is, fertile Earth, joins with a religious rereading of German idealism... In The Unfading Light, Bulgakov describes Sophia as the transparent limit between God and the world. “Love of love,” she receives all, conceives all within herself. In this sense, she is feminine, “one might perhaps call her goddess but not in the pagan sense of the term.” “She is the spiritual soul of creation — Beauty.” The Earth becomes the symbol of “nothingness” which receives the flow of Sophianicity and thus constitutes a potential Sophia. This is Chaos, that real apeiron of which Greek, Babylonian, and other mythologies speak. The Earth symbolizes “cosmic Sophia,” the feminine principle of the created world... And this Earth calls for divinization: “From its creation, it had in its depths the future Mother of God, the womb of divine incarnation...”³⁰

1. Ascetical Homilies 72

2. Questions to Thalassius 27

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid. 35

5. See notably his Treatise on the History of Religions

6. Ambigua, PG 91, 1288

7. Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Divine Names, I, 1, 7

8. Ibid. I, 1, 5

9. This is the conclusion of Tristes Tropiques

10. Nicolas Berdyaev, Freedom and the Spirit

11. Ibid.

12. Hessen, Augustine, Stuttgart, 1942, p. 116, n.2

13. On the Eternal in Man

14. On Holy Light, manuscript, 186v

15. Davar = word

16. The New Alliance—Metamorphosis of Science

17. Translator’s note: L’Arroseur Arrosé (literally “The Sprinkler Sprinkled” or “The Waterer Watered”) was one of the very first comic films ever made, by the Lumière brothers in 1895. It shows a prankster stepping on a gardener’s hose, waiting for him to look into the nozzle, then releasing the water to spray him in the face. It became a classic example of comic reversal — the waterer becomes the one who gets watered, the controller becomes the controlled.

18. St Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua, PG 91, 1148 C

19. Freedom and the Spirit

20. The Black Bird in the Rising Sun

21. Paul Klee, Precise Experiences in the Domain of Art, cited by Nello Ponente, Klee: A Biographical and Critical Study, Geneva, 1960, p. 118

22. Idem, Conference at Jena, cited by N. Ponente, op. cit., p. 101

23. Mysterium Coniunctionis

24. Translator’s note: “Princeton gnosis” refers to Raymond Ruyer’s 1974 book La Gnose de Princeton, which discussed ideas from various Princeton-affiliated scientists and thinkers about consciousness, physics, and spirituality. This was not a formal movement at Princeton; rather it was Ruyer’s interpretation and synthesis of various scientific and philosophical ideas emerging from thinkers associated with Princeton. The book presented a kind of modern scientific-mystical worldview that attempted to bridge physics, consciousness, and spirituality.

25. Between Crystal and Smoke: Essay on the Organization of the Living, Paris, 1979, p. 231

26. St Maximus the Confessor, Centuries on Knowledge, II, 4, PG 90, 1125-1128

27. The Pillar and Foundation of Truth

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid.

30. The Unfading Light