The Eye of Fire (Part One)

Olivier Clément

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

EROS AND COSMOS: REVOLT OR ASSUMPTION

The two essays you are about to read, one on certain aspects of Western alchemy and the other on the “contemplation of nature” (θεωρία φυσική) in the spirituality of the Christian East, were written in very different periods. The first dates back to the years when, groping my way through the world of myths and religions, little drawn to the Western Christian confessions that I had before me, still on the threshold of the inner tradition that the Orthodox Church both preserves and conceals, I explored the paths of the secret West: alchemy, for example, whose original aim was not to produce gold but to transmute leaden temporality marked by opacity and death into the solar gold of eternal moments; or “the ‘erotic’ of the troubadours,” to borrow an expression from René Nelli, where I saw both the origin (with the Celtic myth of Tristan and Isolde) of the most nostalgic passion of love, along with a kind of Western tantrism arising from a prehistoric foundation where the divine figure was feminine. The second essay, quite recent, reflects a long-matured contemplation within “orthodox” high theology, where I try to highlight the cosmic, even “theosophical” dimension — using this word in Berdyaev’s sense (not “theosophy” proper, for which I have no sympathy!). The “theosophers,” according to Berdyaev (he names Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, and Jacob Boehme), are those who attempt to elucidate cosmic existence through God’s light (or “transluminous” darkness). These two studies are linked by the same concern: bridging the gap that has existed for centuries between Christianity on one side, and the double yet unified mystery of cosmos and eros on the other.

That Western Christianity became a-cosmic seems evident. We must set aside, of course, the sacred arts of the early Middle Ages — Carolingian, Ottonian, and especially Romanesque, with their timeless symbolism: to explain why the same animal figures adorned certain Catalan capitals in the 12th century and served as musical notations in India the following century, Marius Schneider had to trace back to the Neolithic period.¹ In later periods, there were miraculous exceptions: the first Carthusian mystics, Saint Francis of Assisi and his Canticle of the Creatures (whose intuitions Saint Bonaventure tried to conceptualize with unequaled felicity), and those outlying thinkers such as Pico della Mirandola, Jacob Boehme, Saint-Martin the “unknown philosopher,” Novalis, and Paul Claudel. Generally, in late Thomism (more than in Saint Thomas himself) nature became objectified, subject only to rationality, more or less separated from grace and the supernatural, themselves conceived as created. Human, all-too human, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation focused on individual justification, on the Augustinian “God and my soul.” The Byzantine humanists who took refuge in the West during the Turkish conquest were ignorant of the theology (and spirituality) of divine energies which, springing from the resurrected Christ, the pan-human and cosmic Christ, and almost identical to the immense Breath of Life, penetrate the entire universe and, were it not for our blindness, would transform it into a “Burning Bush.” Man, whom Genesis presents as priest and king of creation, charged with naming living beings — that is, discerning and transforming their spiritual essences into offerings — has been conceived, from these same texts flatly interpreted, as nature’s dominator, seeing it merely as either pleasant scenery or an inexhaustible source (which is untrue) of energies no longer spiritual but economic and mechanical. The priest-king became merely a tyrant who claims to master the earth externally and ultimately depletes, disfigures, and destroys it. Today’s ecology highlights these risks, rehabilitates life’s time and rhythms, seeks to renew a nuptial pact between earth and technically-oriented humanity. The end of peasant ways, whose austere and deep spirituality was often fought by Churches that saw only paganism in it, compels us to a clear-eyed love for the earth which is no longer our mother (we have symbolically severed the umbilical cord through our journeys in space) but becomes this precarious fiancée for whom we are responsible.

The risk is that ecology, which is a science, transforms into ecologism — that is, into a religion of Gaia, the archaic Earth-Mother, mediator between man and an impersonal divine, immense cosmic matrix where everything is ultimately reabsorbed. Ecologism has found favorable ground in Germany, where it often allies with Buddhism and a sacralized feminism. Perhaps an inheritance of idealism and romanticism, which emerged contemporaneously with the discovery of the Upanishads. It would be unjust and tasteless to mention the more recent mysticism of earth and blood, or even Heidegger’s approach who, during World War II, wandered through the Black Forest paths from Being to the sacred, perhaps to the divine, while witnesses to the personal God were being swallowed up in the gas chambers.

It seems to me that Western man, rather than dissolving his individuality by “becoming cosmic,” must deepen it by becoming a person in communion, capable of giving voice to the cosmos — this logos alogos as Origen said — of communicating grace to it, receiving it as a gift, transforming it into celebration. For celebration is the cosmic meaning of things! The approach of a cosmic Christianity today would therefore lead less, as Heidegger would wish, from Being to the sacred than to a poetics of communion where the great intuitions of archaic religions could find their place without risk of disintegrating impersonalism. “For creation awaits” and “groans in labor pains,” says Saint Paul in the Epistle to the Romans — “yearns for the revelation of the sons of God.”

Certainly, Western Christians today call for the “safeguarding of creation,” but mainly in an ethical sense. Eastern Christianity, on the other hand, as I have tried to show in the second part of this work, has preserved the ontological and sacramental approach to the universe and considers “the contemplation of God’s glory hidden in beings and things” both as a necessary stage and as a fruit of spiritual life. One is saved not alone, but in the communion of all humans and the transfiguration of the universe. “We must now celebrate this Life from which all life proceeds, and through which all living things, according to their capacity, receive life.”² And again: “God is Breath and the breath of wind is shared by all; it traverses all, nothing confines it, nothing captures it.”³ However, the dark, fertile, feminine depths of the earth remain foreign to this essentially monastic spirituality. The sole allusion found in a 12th century text, the famous Methodos, to the heart situated in the entrails which undoubtedly refers to the maternal God-image of the Bible, was quickly obscured. It was almost exclusively in Russia where the originally “pagan” meaning of the “great humid earth” (that is to say fertile, in contrast with the dust of the steppe) was maintained that Christian thought attempted to assume this depth and (dense) transparency of things, of the telluric: the “great humid earth” becoming “paradisiacal earth.” I am thinking especially of the doctrine, or rather the difficult-to-conceptualize poetics, of the Sophia, of Wisdom, sometimes felt as uncreated, sometimes as created, in a sort of dual unity — prefiguration then expression of the union of two natures in Christ, “without separation and without confusion.” The great Russian “sophiologists” attempted to give life to the conceptuality, of Hellenic origin, of classical trinitarian theology through the very mysterious poetics of Biblical figures of Wisdom (and they often had recourse, moreover, to Kabbalistic symbolism). These figures are found especially in the 8th chapter of the Book of Proverbs, where Wisdom expresses herself thus: “I was established from eternity, from the beginning, before the origin of the earth... When the Eternal laid the foundations of the earth, I was at work beside him, I was his daily delight...” One finds Wisdom again in Ecclesiasticus: “I came forth from the mouth of the Most High... I am the mother of noble love,” and in the Book of Wisdom itself where it is said “that she is an intelligent spirit, holy, unique, multiple, subtle, mobile, penetrating, without stain... She traverses and penetrates all... she is a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty...”

In this mysterious figure, God and creation seem to correspond, for Wisdom is both an unveiling of divine nature and the secret “form” of things, their apparition or trans-apparition, “diaphany” as Teilhard de Chardin says. On one side, Wisdom seems to be God’s interiority, his life, his tenderness, this femininity that the Bible evokes in speaking of his “entrails of mercy,” rahamim, the emphatic plural of rehem, the matrix. Divine Sophia contains the paradigms of all creatures; she is, says Soloviev, the reshit, feminine principle that contains “the unifying power of divided and fractioned being of the world... She is the guardian angel of the world, covering all creatures with her wings to gradually raise them to true being, like a bird brooding over her young. She is the substance of the Holy Spirit that was carried over the dark waters of the nascent world.”⁴

The world, even in its fallenness, remains marked by “sophianity.” This virgin point in that which is secret and that which is manifest constitutes the “creaturely” Sophia, magnetized by divine Sophia, but hidden by our blindness that separates, “diabolizes” in the proper sense of the word, instead of symbolizing. The divine-human process, therefore divine-cosmic, at work in history, whose traces are found in all religions, finds its sacramental fulfillment in the Incarnation and Pentecost — alpha and omega, return to the original and anticipation of the ultimate. Christ born of the Virgin, the “pneumatophore” Virgin, bearer of the Spirit, resurrecting with the entire cosmos in Christ, remake the “dual” unity, the divine-cosmic unity of the two and unique Wisdom(s).

“The created world is united to the divine world through Wisdom divine. Heaven has leaned down toward earth — the world does not exist solely in itself, it is in God. And God does not dwell only in heaven, but also on earth, in the world, with mankind.”⁵

These intuitions, though perhaps impossible to conceptualize, echo what Dominique Cerbelaud, commenting on an early Christian text, the Odes attributed to Solomon (which speak of the Father’s breasts that the Spirit presses to fill the Son’s cup), calls “a very archaic theo-lyric” that the massive canonization of masculine images later completely repressed, making us forget it entirely.⁶

One can evoke here an archetype common to cosmic religions, from the Greek cave of Persephone in the Eleusian mysteries, to the Japanese cave of Amaterasu-Omikami, that “immemorial witness that is the Virgin of Transcendence.”⁷

Indeed, Sergius Bulgakov, celebrating telluric beauty and love — flowers, birds “like living flowers,” the formidable grace of wild beasts — affirms that the Earth, as created Wisdom, is “the Great Mother venerated since time immemorial by pagans” and who, from her creation, “contained within herself the Mother of God to come.”⁸ In this masterpiece of his youth that is The Unfading Light, the ponderous expositions of a thinker schooled in German philosophy suddenly brighten into poems:

The light beyond darkness,
The shapes of your roses
Could not have sprung from obscurity
If their dark roots
Did not plunge into the womb of shadow,⁹

just as “the young, the beautiful Persephone, creature of Wisdom, appears in the world, emerging from the arms of Hades, from dark nothingness...”¹⁰

Soloviev too turned to poetry to celebrate his encounters with Wisdom:

Seas and rivers sparkled at my feet
And I saw all, all was but One,
Unique image of Feminine Beauty...¹¹

The notion of Wisdom appears in the last books of the Old Testament, where the Biblical assimilation of Indo-European genius begins to take shape. It was brilliantly developed by great Russian thinkers who joined to a potentially cosmic Christianity the sense of sacred earth, preserved in their people’s still-archaic sensibility throughout their immense rural expanses. One might wonder if we are not witnessing here a kind of Christian “shaktism” enabling the synthesis of archaic theophanies and the revelation of person and communion of persons. In Hinduism, as we know, Shakti, the god’s consort and thus a feminine figure, is the omnipresent energy filling the universe: “I penetrate heaven and earth,” she says in the Rig Veda, “I have risen from the primordial waters; beyond them I have spread throughout the universe. I touch the sky with my body. I blow like the wind when I create the worlds...”¹²

The parallel is all the more fascinating as the notion of Wisdom in Byzantine theology (and in Byzantino-Serbian art) is closely linked to that of divine energy, as specified in the 14th century by Saint Gregory Palamas.

Thus opens to us, in the Holy Spirit, a space not only divine-human but divine-cosmic where inclusion replaces exclusion, where the most fertile encounters become possible.

The mystery of the earth, in the deepest strata of the soul, is linked to that of femininity. Neolithic man saw in his woman a small earth, in the earth an immense woman. “My sister, my betrothed is an enclosed garden,” “my beloved has gone down to his garden, to beds of spices,” “your belly is a heap of wheat encircled by lilies” — these are lines from the Song of Songs, both love song and symbol of God’s union with his people, with his earth, with each faithful soul.

Earth-woman because she is maternal, because she receives the dead who are buried in her in fetal position; promise of resurrection, because she protects, in every dawn moment, the orphan abandoned after birth. “From you, earth-mother, was born the flesh that would give birth to God incarnate. He took from you his most pure Body, in you he rested three days in the sepulcher. From you spring wheat and vine which become Christ’s Body and Blood... You silently guard the fullness and all the beauty of creation.”¹³

So why this long conflict between Christ and Eros, where it seems that today, in the collective sensibility conditioned by media, Eros has decisively prevailed? Who can still understand the nakedness of the Crucified, or that of Mary of Egypt, that mysterious bird flying over the dunes, as a most pure consummation of divine Eros? Christ, say the Fathers, has no individual eros. To be precise: because he assumes in himself all human nature, feminine as masculine, and because he envelops all humanity and all the earth in his love. Love in whose luminous shadow Saint Paul places the union of man and woman. One always forgets that Jesus’ first miracle is that of the Wedding at Cana where he changes the water of banal procreative coupling into the wine of blazing eros (and in the Orthodox Church, this is the Gospel read at the heart of the marriage liturgy).

Christianity brought a fundamental revolution compared to archaic religions — a revolution already broadly sketched out, but more through exclusion than inclusion (except in the Song of Songs) by means of Biblical tradition. This revolution marked the emergence of personhood, opposing mere species-behavior and fusional ecstasies. Instead of sacred prostitution blessed by the Baals, union with God now appears as a communion symbolized by the faithful love between man and woman. And she is affirmed as a person, not just a reproducer. Jesus takes up Genesis’ text about man and woman being torn from their lineage, called to become “one flesh,” but sets aside the command to multiply.

Let us compare one of the numerous statues of Artemis of Ephesus with one of the equally numerous images of Mary and child, preferably an icon, the Virgin of Tenderness or the “Directress” Virgin. Artemis has a beautiful but impersonal, absent face — what matters is her body with its prodigious clusters of breasts. She is the inexhaustible bearer of life. In the icon, the body fades away, leaving essentially the face, that of a person fulfilling herself freely in faith, in a unique bond with the living God.

Monasticism sought to reveal in humans, beyond biological life that only multiplies to die, the imperishable image of God. Long before psychoanalysts, the monks, these men “intoxicated with God,” deeply explored the connection between sexuality and death (in the evolution of living things, after organisms reproduced through binary fission for millennia, sexual polarization and death appeared together). To free oneself from sexuality in its genital expression is to escape necessity, that daily form of death. It happens thus with certain monks, through powerful asceticism that allows them to live no longer in death but in the Spirit, that eros becomes internalized and transfigured. Desire then frees itself from needs, primarily from carnal need (which these monks no longer experience as a cosmic impulse but as a subhuman slavery) to reach directly toward God and identify with agape (it is significant that among the great Byzantine mystics this latter word disappears and only “eros” remains). In the true monk, desire is wholly attracted, consumed, devoured by the fiery abyss of divinity, through the dazzling, tragic, infinitely noble and gentle beauty of the Face of faces, that of Christ. In this light, one’s neighbor is also revealed as a face, the world as a “Burning Bush,” and the monk becomes “separated from all and united to all” (and to everything).

This is why the great spiritual person is not at all asexual. If a man, he fulfills his virility, his paternity; if a woman, her femininity, her maternity, while integrating sexual polarity which is also cosmic polarity (the symbols of alchemy can enlighten us here, as Jung understood in his study titled Psychology and Alchemy). The spiritual father acquires maternal tenderness, the spiritual mother a virile strength. In them and around them the cosmic war ceases and perhaps the world begins to be transfigured. Wild beasts live peacefully around them, even at their service, for they sense in them, said a master, the perfume that was Adam’s before the fall.

Thus, in the great monk, eros is not denied; it is illuminated and illuminates. “Let physical eros be for you a model in your desire for God,” says Saint John Climacus,¹⁴ and again: “Blessed is he whose passion for God is no less violent than the lover’s for his beloved,”¹⁵ so that a spiritual person, seeing a woman “of singular beauty, took the opportunity to greatly glorify the Creator, and this vision intensified his love for God and brought him to tears.”¹⁶ Saint John Climacus recommends a similar attitude toward secular music and all forms of beauty. Here the link between sexuality and death is broken, so that, he adds, if someone has become capable of such spiritual inclination, one can consider him as already resurrected before the universal resurrection!

Yet another conception, tied to radical dualism in the first centuries of our era, confronted sexual permissiveness and became widespread very early in ascetic literature and even entered patristic theology. Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor, among many others, held that the creation of woman was the consequence and first manifestation of the fall. Gregory of Nyssa believes that the first creation, the only truly paradisiacal one, was that of a human both virile and asexual. The Genesis text “male and female he created them” would testify to a second, inferior creation; “It is clear that this must be understood without relating it to the first image, for in Christ Jesus, as the apostle says, there is neither male nor female.” The asexual human, “without division between male and female,” alone reflects divine nature, for he is endowed with spirit and reason; “bodily organization, divided into masculine and feminine sexes, belongs to irrational and animal life.¹⁷ The distinction of sexes exists only in view of sin: it was in foreknowledge of the fall that God created woman. Sexuality is part of these “garments of skin” with which he clothed the first couple, exiled from paradise, to ensure the perpetuation of the species. Resurrected life will be angelic life and this is what the monk must anticipate. Fasting and vigils also have the aim of suppressing in man the impulse of eros, to turn him as soon as possible into an old man finally freed from sex. Ascetic texts often show a horrified fascination with women, saying it is better to share a meal with a wild beast than with a woman, even if she is one’s mother or sister.

From this severe asceticism, which demands our attention, and which indicates an uncommon sexual vigor, there was often a shift to a sentimental and insidiously malicious moralism. Especially in the 19th century, God seemed to oppose life in its force and beauty. The connections linking eros to the cosmic and divine were broken. In effect, eros was denied, and sexuality, reduced to misery, became for some (especially men) merely a brutal pursuit of pleasure, and for others (especially women) merely bourgeois resignation.

Two extreme cases, one in the West, the other in the East, appear highly symbolic.

In Western Europe, we have the witch hunts, the pyres on which they burned from the end of the Middle Ages until the “Age of Enlightenment.” Along with the confinement of the “mad” (though there are many kinds of madness), the witch hunts served to exorcise, in one stroke, the double and unique mystery of earth and woman, to clear the way for both 18th century debauchery and a mechanistic vision of nature, stripped of those “secondary qualities” that Descartes despised. Church men, undeniably sadistic executioners, stripped and tortured alleged witches, searching for stigmata of the devil “on the secret openings of the body.” An abundant and incredibly misogynistic literature was unleashed. The then-classic work, the Malleus Maleficarum, presented woman as a creature of instinct, possessed by a orgiastic frenzy, a witch in love with the devil. This figure springing from masculine anguish was indeed the result of an untransfigured asceticism. A well-known ambivalence of the sacred: in archaic religions, female sexuality was always supernatural, linked to the world of gods, while in this denatured and delirious Christianity, it linked to the world of demons. Until the end of the 19th century, in proper society where women hid or repressed their impulses and pleasure, men had come to think it didn’t exist at all, as evidenced by André Gide’s confidences about his honeymoon in Algeria (young boys were preferable then).

The Christian East did not know mandatory celibacy for clergy (which arose from the incompatibility, established by Leviticus, between altar service and sexuality). But for a long time — and I’m not sure it's over — it considered woman as “impure.” Yet it too had, in a more marginal way admittedly, an extreme case where the dualism of a certain monasticism expressed itself violently — the religious rage against eros. This was the Russian sect of Skoptsy, meaning the “castrated ones,” exemplified by one André Ivanov (who died in 1832) and whose practices were fully revealed two years later at the Saratov trial. Here, untransfigured asceticism found its most brutal materialization. Like Origen, the Skoptsy based themselves on Jesus’ words in Matthew’s Gospel: “There are eunuchs who have made themselves so for the Kingdom of heaven" (19:12) and “It is better for you that one of your members perish than for your whole body to go into hell” (5:29). Through the evangelical notions of baptism and new birth, they understood castration, which they practiced with a fire-heated knife, because Christ speaks of “baptism by fire” (Matt. 3:11). The women, for their part, would cut off their breasts and perform excision. The greater or lesser radicality of the mutilation allowed them to attain either the dignity of angel or of archangel. The goal was not suffering but purity, the charismatic fullness of an asexual life. Here too, one finds in the background misogyny, woman conceived as a temptress, capable of experiencing a pleasure that frightens man. Members of the sect were not permitted to touch a woman, shake her hand, or eat at the same table. If a mother had washed her son’s shirt, she had to place it on a chair or table, never hand it directly to him for fear of defiling him.

It is true that the Russian Orthodox Church, which celebrates marriage with both spiritual and carnal magnificence, could only condemn such excesses. This doesn’t prevent finding in them, taken to absurd extremes, certain attitudes of original monasticism. Nor does it prevent these attitudes from being reborn more discreetly: consider the later Tolstoy, the one of “Tolstoyism,” and reread The Kreutzer Sonata.

The results of these degenerations have been terrible, both for the paths taken by modern technology and for the obsessive chatter about sexuality in secularized society. Technology has destroyed peasant wisdom, ruined our villages, hypertrophied the suburbs with ugliness and hatred (for where there is no more beauty, men can only hate each other), and violated the earth, preferring conquest and exhaustion of space to respect for slow maturation. As for contemporary atheism, it seems to me to have two main causes: on one hand the near-silence of Christians, who continue, faced with the scandal of evil, to speak of a good and all-powerful God, and on the other hand the revolt of life, of woman, facing a sickening mixture of moralism, legalism, and sentimentality.

Sexuality without eros, without mystery, is now both banal and omnipresent. With the contemporary “implosion,” what remains, especially in the media and collective imagination (although what actually comprises people’s lives, who knows?), are drugs, violence, and sex. When passion was exhausted by permissiveness itself, AIDS was needed to rediscover the link, denounced by the early monks, between sex and death. Church leaders condemn, denounce, when they should reflect on their own responsibilities. What do they know of the celebration of the moment, of the desperate search for another that so many young people experience today in practicing a sexuality about which no one tells them either its cosmic immensity or spiritual significance — this joy in heaven, according to Jewish mysticism, when a man and woman truly love each other, so that their union often needs no ecclesiastical or social sanction to know religious depth (for the religious is not a compartment of culture, but the purity and intensity of all life). Making this depth known is undoubtedly the only way today to introduce the full scope of the sacrament.

Simultaneously, the ever-questioning intelligence of the West has carried out immense explorations in the domain of sexuality and its psychological dimensions. Weininger and especially Freud decisively opened the paths; great Orthodox thinkers like Rozanov and Vycheslavtsev, too little known, especially the second, in the West, have insisted on the religious significance of sex, on the possible links between the unconscious and interiority, between the psyche and the pneuma, to use Pauline vocabulary. “The sexual act, in its soul and truth, today completely lost,” writes Rozanov, “is precisely the act by which we do not destroy chastity, but on the contrary acquire it... (Then) sex is noumenal, it is of a transcendent, religious order... The fabric of nature is broken at this point... it is the image of the other world that emerges here in our own.”¹⁸

For Boris Vycheslavtsev, Freudian therapy leaves man imprisoned in immanence, in the narcissistic ocean of his subjectivity. It produces shifts that can relieve but not heal. Eros, in the fullness of its meaning, is an ontological impulse of which sexuality is only one expression. The “elsewhere” reveals itself in the “heart,” the most central and most “ec-static” center, where man can open himself to the solicitation of the absolute. One could say that the “heart” is “superconscious,” that there is therefore superconscious in the unconscious, and that this is the “image of God” of which the Church Fathers speak. While the unconscious remains closed to law and norm, whose voluntarism gives rise to ambiguities, blockages, and resistances, it is reached by the “image,” to which Vycheslavtsev gives the double meaning of icon and face. The image of Christ, God’s face in man, allows us to see the image of the beloved in God. Thus eros is gradually transfigured.

Freudian psychoanalysis then appears as the negative moment of ascesis. It must be both integrated and reversed in an “ethic of transfigured eros.” Mystical union, the spiritual marriage of the soul, is no longer reduced to an illusory sublimation of sexuality; rather, sexuality can find its meaning by becoming their symbol.¹⁹ And here again, in all its dimensions, is the Song of Songs.

This effort to deepen psychoanalysis and rediscover the spiritual meaning of eros has been continued and developed in our time by philosophers and psychologists who, significantly, are often women: Jewish women like Éliane Amado Lévy-Valensi or Catherine Chalier, Christian women like Françoise Dolto, Marie Balmary, Denis Vasse and Maurice Bellet. A great Greek philosopher and theologian, Christos Yannaras, has taken up the same research in his beautiful Variations on the Song of Songs.²⁰

Thus we are moving, no doubt after a long and ruinous conflict, toward a consummation of cosmos and eros in a renewed Christianity. The perspective, from now on, can only be that of the person and the communion of persons. There will be no restoration of sacred nature religions, no reinvention of tantrism, but a theopoetics of communion will allow us to rediscover the cosmos as celebration, eros as an impulse toward a dual unity, welcoming to the excluded, the orphan, to that little unknown guest that is the child. As Vladimir Soloviev showed in The Meaning of Love,²¹ procreation is not the primary purpose of eros; fecundity diminishes as one rises in the scale of living beings. Through a fundamental revolution that can be contested but not suppressed, woman has today conquered mastery of her fertility. The child, while it can become a whim, is no longer a fatality. Eros has no meaning other than its own mystery, of which Rozanov spoke so well. It no longer stems from the necessities of the species, but from the encounter of two persons. This encounter is “chaste,” in the sense that Russian religious philosophers like Paul Evdokimov have given to this term, when it assumes all the immensity of life, all cosmic celebration in a reciprocity, a tenderness, an incandescence where one “living soul” “knows” another “living soul” (to use the very language of the Bible), according to the mystery of the union of Christ and the Church, that is to say of God and earth, of Logos and Wisdom... Then Nietzsche’s bitter remark fades away: “I have never met a woman by whom I would like to have a child!” Love, which has no purpose other than itself, is fertile through its superabundance. To love someone is also, one day, to desire a child by him (or by her, of course). To love someone is to nurture their creative impulse which, also and especially, expresses eros. It is sometimes to access a shared creation.

We will need to reinvent a symbolism of the body, following Maximus the Confessor’s great affirmation that soul and body symbolize each other, just as the sensible and the intelligible symbolize each other to make the world God’s house. Alyosha Karamazov’s kiss to the earth, when he feels that the angelic worlds, expressed through the stars, unite with earthly splendor, with autumn’s final majestic flowers, is the true response to the otherwise sterile “fidelity to the earth” of the “philosopher with a hammer.” Alchemy, which died from becoming, with modernity’s impulse, a reductive chemistry, can help us here with its symbols that mark out a kind of nuptial art: first one must elucidate and utilize the “cosmic sexuality” of Sulfur and Mercury, which begins by “neutralizing” in Salt; then dissolve these imperfect “coagulations,” make the Sun and Moon shine forth in their purity, arrange between them a marriage that will make them tend toward their perfect, eschatological form: the inner gold radiating in the body of glory. This symbolism of Sun and Moon is moreover universal in ancient myths, even in the Arab world where the masculinity of the moon and femininity of the sun express a reversal!

In archaic Greek art, the Kouros represented a naked adolescent, with a vegetative purity and beauty, a young plane tree trunk when its bark has burst, and the body encompasses the face. In the art of the icon, it is the inverse: only the face remains, and within the face, the gaze.

Do we understand that the bodily form itself is spiritual? Will we manage to reconcile the Kouros and the icon? Is not Wisdom present simultaneously in the tree and in the face? Godard, in a film that was difficult for Christians, Je vous salue Marie, nevertheless said that the soul can envelop the body. Blasphemy sometimes prophesies.

“Love will no longer be (only) the commerce between a man and a woman, but that of one humanity with another. Closer to the human, it will be this love we prepare for, struggling tirelessly: two solitudes protecting themselves, completing each other, limiting themselves, and bowing to one another... For the woman will be… not merely a complement, but a complete form of life.”²²

Perhaps woman, perhaps femininity, Wisdom, will become the mediator between the two symbols I have just evoked: the Kouros and the icon.

Then the distance that has separated, that still separates in our fears and dreams, Christ on one side and cosmos and eros on the other, would be abolished. It would no longer be the distance of death but that of the Spirit, of the Breath that gives life, intoxication of the desert, of passion and the patience of loving, of creative impulse. Have not Dionysus and the Crucified One joined together to write: Sing a new song, the world is transfigured!

Pentecost 1994

1. Marius Schneider, El origen musical de los animales-símbolos en la mitología y la escultura antiguas, Barcelona 1946.

2. Dionyius the Areopagite, Divine Names VI, 1.

3. Maximus the Confessor, On the Divine Names 1, 4.

4. Vladimir Soloviev, Russia and the Universal Church

5. Sergius Bulgakov, The Wisdom of God

6. Un Dieu d’eau et de vent. L’Esprit Saint dans les Odes de Salomon, in La Vie spirituelle, May-June 1994, p. 317.

7. Louis Massignon, Méditation d’un passant aux bois sacrés d’Isé, in Parole donnée, Paris 1962, pp. 412-413.

8. Sergius Bulgakov, The Unfading Light

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Cited by N. Losski, Histoire de la philosophie russe, Paris 1954, p. 84.

12. Rig Veda, 8, 7, 125.

13. The Unfading Light, op. cit.

14. The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 26, 34.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Gregory of Nyssa, The Creation of Man, PG 44, 181,

18. V. Rozanov, The Apocalypse of Our Times

19. Vysheslavtsev, B. P. The Ethics of Transfigured Eros [in Russian]. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1931.

20. Christos Yannaras, Variations on the Song of Songs

21. Vladimir Soloviev, The Meaning of Love

22. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet