The Eye of Fire (Part Three)

Olivier Clément

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

Supplementary Note

Even though it may be difficult, if one wishes to avoid reductionist syncretism, to compare sets of images and concepts each taken in their coherence, analogies can be established between alchemical poetics and broader approaches, like Tantrism, or specifically spiritual ones like Hesychasm (from which, as we have seen, certain Russian religious philosophers sought to illuminate and adopt the theme of earthly holiness).

Alchemy and Tantrism employ and undoubtedly revive the same archaic symbolism of a mytho-cosmic nature. Just as alchemy allowed for maintaining, beneath the high monotheistic architecture of medieval and post-medieval Christianity, an approach that hallows matter and sexuality, so too Tantrism seems born of a lucid systematization of the conceptions underlying the deeply poetic and carnally charged rites and myths of daily Hindu life, but which Vedantic speculation increasingly neglected in favor of an “intellectual” and disincarnating expression of “non-duality.” The Vedanta considers the world as an illusion, Tantrism as a “divine play,” without however, as is almost always the case in Hinduism, its proper consistency being assured, nor otherness (notably that of the divine and the particular) being as strongly affirmed as unity.

One of the greatest spiritual masters of the Christian East, Maximus the Confessor, also employed the expression “divine play” in the context of the “cosmic liturgy.” However, this tradition, about which we will attempt to give some indications in the following chapter, strongly insists, in its approach to “hypostasis,” on the antinomy and coincidence, in God as in man His image, of absolute unity and no less absolute diversity (and this is why the human hypostasis is not the individual, but the individual’s call to his fulfillment as person-in-communion).

Certainly the “Hesychast” tradition is of a purely spiritual order while the symbolism of alchemy is “psycho-cosmic.” The distinction between spirit and psyche is nevertheless often tenuous or even arbitrary. The spiritual is inscribed in the psychic and the latter’s attitudes always have spiritual implications. Great mystics like Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme have used certain themes from alchemy. One difference appears, however: in alchemy, as with the philosophers and neo-Platonists from whom some of its theoreticians draw inspiration, it sometimes happens that the relationship between the visible and invisible, between the One, the World Soul, and matter, is conceived in a hierarchical manner, where the inferior appears as a degradation of the superior. Most Greek Fathers, on the contrary, and thus the Hesychast spiritual masters, conceived this relationship in a manner that could be called “perichoretic”, from the word perichoresis, which designates a communicating interpenetration where the invisible certainly shows through the visible, but where the latter, reciprocally, must be contemplated through the invisible: “If invisible things are contemplated through visible things, to a much greater extent visible things are understood deeply through invisible things…” (Maximus the Confessor, Mystagogy 2). This perichoresis is clearly founded on the relation of the divine and human (thus also the cosmic) in the incarnate Word, Who makes the world a eucharist. Perichoretic vision, many traces of which could be found in alchemy too, which, especially in a West where the dominant theology had become a-cosmic, saw a eucharist even — and indeed particularly — in the stone.