The World as Will and Representation - Böhme, Erigena and 'anthropic realism'

 

The Triple World is Mind alone

 

Buddha, Lankâvatâra Sûtra

 

 

Intellectus omnium est omnia

 

Scotus Erigena

 

 

Seeing that in recent times materialism has become more and more untenable (even for many representatives of our scientific priest-class), there has been as of late, at least according to our perception, a quite substantial rise of all kinds of vaguely ‘spiritual’ approaches to reality, ranging from panpsychism to metaphysical idealism in all its varieties. One thinker that seems have had a little bit of a renaissance is Schopenhauer and his ‘voluntaristic idealism’, which could also be said to constitute an ‘objective idealism’ (as opposed to the more ‘subjective’ ones like that of Fichte).

 

Now we don’t want to develop here a complete argument for idealism per se, nor argue the validity of it; suffice to say that there have been made some decent cases for it (in recent times often even with the help of the newest revelations of quantum physics) which warrant at least some investigation. The basic premise all of the above mentioned system have in common is that reality is fundamentally mind, phenomena being only the ‘representations’ of said mind.

 

With every surge of idealism there emerge of course the same old questions: Whose mind is it? my pure subjectivity or some kind of ‘Universal Mind’? and what lies ‘behind’ the representation, i.e. is there an ominous ‘Thing in itself’ (as Kant posed) or not (the Fichtean position); might the noumena not even be ‘things’ per se but, as some have proposed recently following Schopenhauer, more akin to ‘volitional states’, of which the phenomena are merely the extrinsic expression/manifestation? Et cetera, pp.

 

We want to argue in the following that there is indeed an interesting case to made for what could be called a Schoperhauerian approach to idealism, i.e. for a vision of the world as ‘Will and Representation’, although in a manner quite ‘unorthodox’ to Schopenhauer’s system itself (which in many way represents a caricature of authentic eastern doctrines, mixed with the typical ‘anti-intellectualism’ of modern and especially post-Kantian philosophy). Obviously we can only give a very rough sketch of this theory, seeing that a full development would demand a much deeper investigation of, amongst others, Erigena (esp. Book IV of the Periphyseon) and the writings of Jakob Böhme, which is of course not feasible in this context, at least for the time being.

 

Let us begin with a fundamental question, which always imposes itself when we talk about idealism: What is the world that we perceive in our day to day life? Now, we want to argue that this world could indeed be described as ‘representation’, however it is not our ‘subjective imagination’, meaning that it is not merely ‘all in our heads’, as a certain kind of solipsism likes to think, but in fact really ‘out there’ (‘representation’ = Vorstellung, literally: ‘standing/positing before’). To use the classic language of german idealism we could say that it has ‘being’ but this being (as it appears to us) is fundamentally a Für-sich-sein not an An-sich-sein. We cannot deny that from the very highest point of knowing (paravidyâ), i.e. the ‘Divine Knowledge’, the world could indeed be called an ‘illusion’ (although, to quote Peter Kingsley, “to dismiss the illusion as an illusion would itself be an illusion”), however this ‘illusion’ is not without substance^[1], in fact this ‘substance’, as it might be called, is nothing else than the ‘Real’ itself (the old Vedantic analogy of the snake and the rope comes to mind).

 

‘Illusion’ is thus grounded in reality, in ‘Ultimate Reality’ nonetheless (Al-Haqq, Brahman; Erigena’s Physis or Natura; after all, how could there be anything ‘other’ than the ‘really Real’?). The view we want to propose here corresponds roughly to the idea of ‘anthropic realism’ as developed by Dr. Wolfgang Smith in many of his writings  and which could be seen as constituting a via media between the naïve realism of modern science and the excessive idealisms of old.

 

The cosmos as such is neither the objective reality we suppose it to be, nor on the other hand a subjective apparition answering to the postulates of idealist philosophy, but constitutes precisely an intentional object of human knowing: no more, and no less (Smith, Christian Gnosis, VIII).

 

To put it succinctly:

 

Anthropic realism … affirms that the cosmos exists, not in splendid isolation as a Kantian Ding an sich, but indeed ‘for us’, that is to say, as an object of human intentionality. Man and cosmos, therefore, belong together: they form a complementarity (Smith, Physics-as-Philosophy).

 

Subject and Object are thus not separated (as also evidenced by Husserlian Phenomenology) but in a way ‘consubstantial’ (in the old sense of the word as ‘co-emergent’: “when this is there, that is there”); the one cannot exist without the other, macro- and microcosm posit themselves reciprocally ‘like two sides of the same coin’, a unity which is ultimately consummated in the act of ‘knowing’. However, Smith distinguishes between two ways of knowing (corresponding to the anthropological division of man into anima-corpus and spiritus), that of ‘cognition’ or ‘intellection’, which pertains to the noetic faculties and which is literally ‘not of this world’ (participating in the supra-individual, a-temporal nous) and the ‘psychic perception’ mediated by the senses.

 

“The ultimate seer”, Smith argues, “is not the psychic percipient, but non other than what in Indian tradition has been referred to from time immemorial as the Purusha [or nous, intellectus], the aeviternal witness”, although “the two are closely united, inseparable in fact”:

 

For one is forced to conclude that the psychic observer derives his power of vision directly from the Purusha himself.  And yet he knows not that Purusha: his gaze, as we have noted, is directed ‘outwards’ into the corporeal realm. What stands at issue here is none other than the traditional distinction between ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’, which proves to be one of the most difficult to conceive … Whereas the Purusha  is indeed the ‘ultimate’ witness, the process of visual perception entails what may be termed a psychic or ‘ego-centric’ observer as well … This ‘ego-centric’ observer is facing ‘outwards’ towards the corporeal plane, which means, from a Platonist point of vantage, that he is indeed constrained to gaze upon ‘shadows’, as the celebrated myth has it … There are thus, apparently,  two  seers:  the egocentric and the spiritual, the temporal and the aeviternal, and the disconnect between the two – between so-and-so gazing upon the petunias in his garden and the aeviternal Purusha – could not be more extreme (cf. The Mystery of Visual Perception).

 

We touch here already on the mystery of how ‘this world’ (and by extension all ‘worlds’, the classical triloka corresponding traditionally to different states of consciousness, i.e. of ‘knowing’) [2], the world of separation, death, time and materiality originates. In the last consequence it is in fact nothing other than a product of the psychikos anthropos St. Paul talks about (“who knoweth not the things of God because they are spiritually discerned”, 1. Cor. 2:14); it is thus nothing but a ‘superimposition’ (skr. adhyâsa) over the ‘true reality’, the ‘world of union’ (alma de-yihuda), and could even be said to have been ‘created’ by the Fall itself!^[3] Man is the reader of reality and the sensible world is his translation.

 

This is exactly the doctrine of Scotus Erigena.^[4] According to this Irish schoolman, Adam, upon his fall, succumbed to the ‘carnal mind’; he turned away from the noetic unity towards the ‘shadows’ of becoming, thus ‘splitting up’ reality and ‘positing’ (vor-stellen, or setzten in the Fichtian sense) the world of separation (alma de-peruda) :

 

It is in this way therefore that man proves in fact to cause the split of reality into that of the spurious (or illusory) one, which – being spread among transient things of the sensibles – only seems to be; and that of the substantial (or true) one, which – being originally established among eternal things of God – comes to be revealed to man. In this sense, it is right to say that the split of reality arises from man, and it remains there unless man completely brings his nature into right order so as to actually achieve the pristine state of union with the substantial reality of God’s creation (Sushkov, Being and Creation in John Scottus, IV).

 

One could say that, for Erigena, what we perceive is nothing other than God (or rather the self-revelation of God through His Logos in the totality of the kosmos noetos, which alone constitutes ‘substantial reality’), as seen through the ‘filter’ of our fallen minds and “if the doors of perception were cleansed, all would appear to man as it is, infinite” (Blake).^[5]

 

If we could fully restore our ‘angelic vision’ (visio beatifica) the world would indeed vanish before the divine Splendor (the paradisiacal ‘garments of light’). There is thus only God and His self-disclosure through his eternal Word (the logos ekthetos) ^[6], which is also God; the One Universal Principle that ever ‘goes forth’ in the eternal utterance of His Verbum Fiat, while at the same time ever resting in the eternal Sabbath of his absolute self-identity (“I am that I am”), independent of all. ^[7] Creation is thus conceived by Erigena as a ‘theophany’ of the inexhaustible and infinite Divine Spirit which is the universal ‘substance’, all finite (phenomenal) things being (or rather: ‘not-being’, since they lack all aseity) merely ‘accidental’, i.e. a ‘negation’ posited by the defective knowing of fallen man.[8] For now we see only ‘in part’, as the Apostle says, “but when that which is perfect is come then that which is in part shall be done away” (negatio negationis) and we shall know ‘in full’, “know as we are known” (1. Cor. 13:10).

 

To gain true knowledge of God (which is the only ‘knowledge’ deserving of this name) a veritable metanoia is needed (“be ye transformed by the renewal of your nous”, Rom. 12:2), a ‘turning-away’ (Umkehr) from the ‘shadows’, back towards the ‘Sun’ (“the True Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world”, Joh. 1:9; which is “the light by which we see”; cf. Politeia 509). We have to die to the old Adam (psychikos anthropos) and start to ‘know’ by “the eye of the heart” (i.e. the nous), as St. Paul says (Eph. 1:18); a metanoia which can only be affected by the grace of the Blessed One, for it is the Word of God that “penetrates even to dividing soul and Spirit” (Hebr. 4:12) and “if any man come to Me and hate not his own soul (psyche) he cannot be my disciple” (Lk. 14:26).

 

It is the psyche then, which is in fact the ‘father of lies’[9] and ‘murderer from the beginning’^[10] and which conjures up the illusion of the world, for as St. Thomas rightly says “there is nothing in the (human) intellect which is not first in the senses” (nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu), which likewise means that the world we perceive in ‘carnal mode’ is necessarily corporeal, limited, corrupted.^[11]

 

Now we see here an interesting similarity with Schopenhauer for whom ‘the veil of mâyâ’ is nothing else than our ‘representation’ (in the Kantian sense). Mâyâ is not ‘caused’ by God per se, but indeed by our ‘carnal consciousness’, the fallen human mind; to put it in eastern terms: “Verily, all this is Brahman”, i.e. substantial Physis on which nama-rupa are imposed by our ‘ignorance’ (avidyâ), but “a wise man, freed from name and form (namarupa), attains the Purusha, who is greater than great” (Mundaka Upan, III.2.8).^[12] 

 

According to this view ‘time and space’ (as we perceive them), as well as gross or ‘sensible’ matter (hyle aisthetos) pertain likewise exclusively to human perception (aisthesis) having no ‘objective’ reality outside of it (the only reality being the nunc stans of Intellect). ^[13]

 

Erigena’s teachings seem thus to approach an ‘anthropic realism’ avant la letter, for it is Adam (psychikos anthropos) who basically fulfils the role of the Platonic ‘world-soul’ (psyche tou pantos), i.e. that of developing (‘unrolling’) the possibilities inherent to the noetic ‘forms’ (in which he shares by virtue of participation in the super-individual nous) into an indefinitude of finite manifestations.

 

The primal ‘idea’ of creation is in fact the human form itself, which contains all by virtue of being as imago Dei, i.e. an eikon of the Divine Logos, qui est sapientia et ars Patris (hence why the world could rightly be called a macro-anthropos and original man a micro-theos):

 

No part of it (creation) is found, either corporeal or incorporeal, which does not subsist by being created in man, which does not perceive through him, which does not live through him, which is not incorporated in him … if man had not sinned [i.e. submitted himself to the power of senses] he would not be ruled among the parts of the universe, but would himself rule the whole of it as his subject; and he would not employ for that purpose these corporeal senses of the mortal body, but would govern eternally and faultlessly the whole and the parts of it in accordance with the laws of God, without any physical act in space or time, but solely by the rational apprehension of its natural and innate causes and by the easy use of right will (Erigena, Periphyseon,764A, 782B-C).

 

Thus it is said that things “subsist as causes in the Divine understanding, but as effects in human knowledge” (ibid. 779c)^[14] and from this flows also the Divine appointment of man as the ‘Shepherd of Being’, the ‘High Priest of Creation’ called to ‘realize’ the ‘semantic’ (essential) dimension of all things as the cosmic mediator.

 

It is also easy to see why man drags the whole cosmos down with him. The Fall constitutes in a sense a ‘disjunction’ of essence (that which truly is) and existence (that which is only ‘accidentally’ or ‘apparently’), or, to use to Maximilian terminology, a ‘split’ between tropos and logos (what Böhme calls man’s ‘unfaithfulness’ to his celestial bride Sophia) under which “all creation groaneth and travailleth” (Rom. 8:22); the world is quite literally ‘out of joint’.

 

For both St. Maximus and Erigena it is not (the logos of) human nature (essence) itself which is corrupted by the Fall but the accidental ‘mode’ (tropos) of existence, which now ‘covers’ up the pristine ‘pearl’ of the Divine Wisdom, which lies hidden in the darkness of the sinful creature “like a lily among thorns” (Cant. 2:2) until it is once more ‘uncovered’ (entborgen) by the ‘New Man’.

 

For everything which her Creator primordially created in her (i.e. human nature) remains whole and intact, though remaining hidden until now, ‘awaiting the revelation of the sons of God’ (Erigena, Op.cit. 761B).

 

This ‘rupture’ results, according to St. Maximus, also in a fragmentation of the will into ‘gnomic’ (hypostatic) and natural will, such that “what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” (Rom. 7:15), for “the flesh desires against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another” (Gal. 5:17); a disjunction which is ultimately mended by the Incarnation of the God-Man, who, in His agony in the garden, fully ‘re-submits’ the fallen human will to the Divine (non mea voluntas sed tua fiat – Lk. 22:42) thus restoring tropos to logos (cf. St. Maximus, Opusculum, VI). ^[15]

 

We touch here on what constitutes the second part of Schopenhauer’s magnum opus, namely ‘The World as Will’, which also allows us to take the ideas of Jakob Böhme closer into consideration.[16] 

 

Böhme’s view of creation and the Fall is in many ways similar to that of Erigena (often quite strikingly so), although, if we follow the scholastic definition of the immortal (‘pneumatic’) soul as ‘will and intellect’ (these being also the modi of procession in divinis according to St. Thomas; c.f. S.Th. I.36), he provides us with deeper insights into the ‘volitional’ element of the equation, i.e. the dimension of the ‘freedom’ of the creature vis-à-vis its Creator (the sine qua non for all love and relation).

 

When, according to Erigena, “only those things which are contemplated by the intellect alone truly are” (Op. cit. 445B), it is ‘will’ which, according to Böhme, is in a sense the very principle of all intellect, even the Divine Mind itself^[17] (the Nous/Logos, which is ultimately the only Intellect there is); which brings us to Böhme’s theory of ‘imagination’. 

 

In the beginning (i.e. the non-temporal Principle) is the Ungrund, the divine Abyss, the absolute, undetermined Infinite, analogous to the Neoplatonic One or Ein-Sof of the Kabbalists. In this primordial ‘Chaos’ in which absolutely everything is eternally contained (albeit ‘hidden’ and not yet ‘seen’, like objects in a dark room) there is from all eternity a bottomless, unoriginated Will, that “is desirous, it willeth to be somewhat, that it might be manifest in itself”.

 

Now the process of this manifestation in Böhme is quite complex and cannot here be fully traced out, suffice it to say that this ‘desire’ of the Will to ‘something’ leads to the ‘imagining’ of itself into the Living God, the most Holy and Blessed Trinity, which is not ‘other’ from the Ungrund, but could be considered the external manifestation of its Will (a process which exhibits some similarity with the emergence of the Nous from the One in Platonic philosophy).

 

The Most Blessed Trinity is eternally ‘latently’ present in the Ungrund (“The Ternary in Ein-Sof”, as Baader says)^[18], however as of yet in a more or less ‘virtual’ or ‘unconscious’ state (obviously we use this term here purely analogously), i.e. it has yet to ‘take on nature’ by ‘magically’ manifesting itself fully through the Will of the Ungrund.

 

The first beginning is the fathomless Will (Father) ‘centering’ itself into a primordial Centre or ‘Subjectivity’ (Gemüth), His ‘Heart’ (the Son), in which the abyssal, incomprehensible Will grounds itself in the ‘byss (Grund) and attains to a first comprehension. From this primitive Subjectivity-Centre the Will goes out again (as the Hl. Spirit), yearning for an ‘object’ in which to reflect itself thereby ‘fashioning’ a mirror for itself (the divine Wisdom) where it beholds itself in its Triplicity.

 

This mirror is fashioned (or rather ‘disclosed’ or ‘revealed’) by an act of imagination. The volitional movements emanate from the divine Centre like ‘sensors’, ‘grasping’ for objects in a desire to ‘sense’ themselves, and through this very desiring they shape (or even ‘create’) these objects and make formings in the mirror, so that the mirror (as intentional object) is fashioned by the act of imagining by the divine Mind (Gemüth) just as the divine Mind attains to self-consciousness (or ‘subjectivity’) by its being reflected in the mirror.

 

We see already that the terminus technicus of ‘imagination’ signifies two basic act (which are, for Böhme, but absolutely one), namely that of  ‘making images’ and of ‘putting the will into (or towards) something’. The images appear in the contemplation of the divine Gaze precisely as ‘outwards’ expression of its inner volitions. They are ‘magically’ generated by the Will in a process of progressive ‘intensification’, becoming ever more visible with increasing desire (while being shaped by the desire itself in a continual dialectic of subject and object reciprocally positing each other). We might compare it to vague thoughts or sentiments rising up in the Mind from unconscious desires (similar to how dream-images are produced) and these thoughts beget new thoughts, making centre from centre, branching out like an enormous tree from the original Centre of the divine Heart; and these thoughts become once more object of desire and are ‘compacted’ into concrete images and impressions which stir up the desire even more – until finally the desire is moved action and the ‘still joy’ of self-contemplation is overshadowed by the will to ‘posses’ what it sees there before it, sprawling in a wondrous multitude, to manifest or ‘give birth to’ (ausgebären) this imagination, to render it substantial.

 

To do so the divine Will enters into a contradiction with itself, it polarizes itself into a duality of ‘wills’ or ‘centres’ (Spirit and Nature, or even: Father and Son), the “Yes and No” in which all things exist and descents into the darkness of the eternal Birth, where both poles enter into a violent struggle until finally Nature is subdued by Spirit and liberated from its painful ‘wrath’ by that which Böhme calls the ‘Lightning’ (Blitz) or Schrack, its ‘hunger’ quenched by the victorious break-through of light and love (the ‘Sun’ which shines into the darkness of the Father).

 

This marks the ‘birth of the Son’ properly so called. After the birth pangs of the dark matrix, there ‘breaks through’ the Divine Sun out of eternal night, rising from the ‘fathomless deeps’ (gruntlos mere – Eckhart) of the Ungrund like the Egyptian Atum “who ascended from the Abyss to the Celestial Waters” (Book of the Dead), the noetic Solar Hero (the Logos) slaying the Ouroboros of All-Possibility.

 

As such the ‘dark Fire’ of the first Principle (the Father) gives birth to the mild Light of boundless love (the Son), which are then reconciled by the Hl. Spirit who goes forth from them as their life and movement (the ‘Air’), the ‘bond of Love’ (Caritas vinculum perfectionis) between the two, ‘hypostatic Charity’ as such (for Love takes two; indeed Love being the ‘bond that unites all things’ it always presupposes a plurality of ‘uniteables’, the Yes and No, which are the two ‘poles’ which spark off the mild ‘energy-flow’ of divine Love). And here the eternal Oneness becomes manifest  (there being no ‘manifestation’ without sublimated contradiction), by which all three Persons have fully ‘posited’ or ‘actualized’ themselves in a loving Unity possessing one indivisible Will, so that one could say God is ‘esoterically’ (in His Ungrund) Three in One and ‘exoterically’ (in the Grund) One in Three.

 

Keeping with our ‘idealistic’ scheme we might simply say that the ‘Divine Mind’ (the Logos of Erigena) emerges (in actuality) from the paternal abyss (patrikos bythos) of the One by an act of ‘imagination’ of the eternal, ‘unessential’ Will; the Deus absconditus of the primordial ‘Chaos’ gives birth to Himself as the Deus revelatus of pure Being-Consciousness-Bliss, infinite Light and Love. This principle of ‘imagination’ applies to all intellectual beings “as above so below”; in sense one could say that according to Böhme one ‘is’ always what one ‘wills’ oneself to be (i.e. ones ‘exoteric’ manifestation is an expression of ones ‘esoteric’ will), hence why the will in Böhmian theosophy could indeed be called ‘magical’.

 

The divine Mind is made manifest (as Logos or Nous), containing in itself the totality of noeta fused in one unconfused unity. And as soon as this Divine Sun (“the ruler and king of all”, Plotinus) rises it radiates outwards  into its ‘Periphery’, the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ as the eternal manifestation of Wisdom (Sophia) in which the abyssal pleroma stands revealed in its external Glory; a creative self-disclosure which could be described as an initial ‘unloosening’: 

 

The bond which – in the Inner Life of God – held the forces entwined in unity is unloosed by the Creative Fiat, and that now every power is released and left free to express itself according to its own will. There thus arises, at the creation, a countless number of relative ‘centra’ of particular of wills, which determine themselves each after its own character (Martensen, Jacob Boehme, II.2).

 

Analogous to the ‘theogonic’ procession, intellectual beings ‘emanate’ (or ‘fulgurate’ as per the Leibnizian expression) as particular centra^[19] possessing free will (radically free in fact, since it is rooted, like the divine Will, in the unfathomable Ungrund itself) like so many ‘sparks’ or “gleaming mirrors of Divinity” (St. Hildegard), each reflecting all others in the harmony of divine Wisdom.

 

We could say that these ‘sparks’ are like ‘peripheral points’ held in unity by their submission to the Supernal Centre (of which each centre is like a fractal copy, possessing in its nous the totally of noeta), the one divine Will which moves through them like a soft wind stirring the leaves of a tree, or like the hand of pianist gently sliding over the keys, making them resound in a great harmony.

 

However each relative ‘will-centre’ has yet to ‘confirm’ its position (situs) ordained for it in the divine Wisdom from eternity; like the divine Centre, it has to ‘give birth to itself’ from darkness into the light by ‘centralizing’ itself back into God (or by ‘imagining into the divine Heart’, as Böhme says). In order to realize its ‘true subjectivity’ (Selbheit), each has to ‘subject’ its will to the Supreme Subject, thus becoming ‘integrated’ into the celestial Corpus Mysticum Christi as a fully realized ‘member’. As Baader puts it:^[20]

 

At the principal emanation from the Creator the creature is given its selfhood (Selbheit), which it has to ‘give back’ to Him in an act of free volition; only through this very ‘surrender’ of itself can it gain its true selfhood (Vorlesungen über die Lehre Jacob Böhme’s, III).

 

As we have already seen, nothing can become manifestly ‘realized’ without a contrarium (Böhme’s “Yes and No”, a dialectical sublimation of opposites later so prominently picked up by Hegel). To pass from ‘virtuality’ to ‘actuality’, from Ungrund to Grund, and to enter into the ‘Kingdom’, the creature has to renounce its own ‘selfhood’, negate its own negation  to fully affirm itself; a dialectic movement by which it renounces it-self to gain it-Self, according to the Christian vision of kenotic agape, which is metaphysically founded in the very Life of the Most Holy Trinity in which each Person eternally ‘empties itself’ to be ‘fulfilled’ in the eternal hypostatic ‘Love-play’ (Chaque Personne se trouve en se perdant).

 

By willingly entering into the Will of God and leaving my own nature deprived of will (willenlos), God enters into it and instead of annihilating my selfhood (Selbheit) it is thereby elevated (deified). Only in this manner can this union be realized and when Böhme says that the selfhood and creatureliness are lost – aufgehoben and thereby elevated (erhoben) – he means to say that it is lost to God or aufgehoben (mediated), whereby it is precisely elevated, preserved and realized in the fullness of its truth (Baader, Speculative Dogmatik, IV.9).

 

Thus all has to pass from difference/contradiction to identity/affirmation; everything (even God Himself) has to be born from death into life, per ignem ad lucem.[21]

 

Now, as we know only too well, both Lucifer and Adam failed this ‘test’. Lucifer’s sin was essentially pride (Hoch-mut, i.e. an ‘upwards’ movement) he wanted (‘willed’) to ‘express’ himself instead of God, to ‘create himself’ as an opposite ‘centre’, a rival to God, and thus fell into the ‘wrath-fire’ (“he learned by experiment that there is nothing but God”, says Baader, i.e. that there cannot be a ‘separate’ centre, God being the ‘One without second‘). Adam’s sin on the other hand was ‘baseness’ (Nieder-tracht, a ‘stooping downwards’); he got seduced by the lower states, to develop the indefinite possibilities hidden in the paradisiacal wholeness (which only God is allowed to do).

 

He ‘ate’^[22] from the ‘Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil’ thus losing the ‘Tree of Life’, meaning he ‘dis-covered’ (in the literal sense, the Heideggerian entbergen) duality and lost unity (“The intellect becomes what it knows”, says Aristotle). By a ‘false imagination’ his will tended ‘downwards’ thus ‘positing’ this world of separation (alma de-peruda) and being exiled from the Paradise, whose ‘walls are made of opposites’ (cf. Cusanus, De visione Dei, IX).

 

The Fall is essentially an ‘exteriorization’ (“they saw that they were naked”, i.e. they posited themselves as ‘objects’), an inversion of the inner and outer (which amounts to a development of the possibilities contained in the ‘forms’, like the psycho-somatic previously ‘virtually’ hidden in the ‘pneumatic body’ of Adam)^[23], a ‘turning-away’ from the radiant Face of the Lord (“So bleibe denn die Sonne mir im Rücken!”,  Faust II). Adam-Narcissus, seduced by his own ‘reflections’ (in the two-fold sense of ‘mirage’ and dianoia), sinking into the ‘psychic waters’ (the distorting mirror on which the intellectual ‘ray’ is dispersed; speculum aenigmatum) thus covering his logos by the mud of generation and death and leaving his true Self (the ‘pearl of Celestial Wisdom’), which is ‘greater than all these worlds’, now ‘smaller than a mustard-seed’ (Chân. Up. III; cf. also Mat. 13:31).

 

However, even after the Fall, in which Adam posits himself in his false ‘selfhood’ external from God, no human ‘centre’ is ever fully separated from Him (this being indeed the prime illusion); each has its own ‘periphery’ but is itself centred on the periphery of the One and only true Centre (which is ultimately the centre and periphery of all: cuius centrum est ubique, circumferential nusquam); it is thus not a fully closed of ‘monad’ or ‘atom’ but remains ‘opened’ (i.e. ‘relative’) to God through the ‘radius’ of the ‘ray of the intellect’ (sutrâtman: “I am the Vine you are the branches”, Joh. 15:5), just as, according to the scholastic teaching, the hypostases in God are not ‘monadic’ but ‘subsistent relations’, being, in a sense, ‘towards’ each other (esse ad) in the Trisagion of the ‘Divine Liturgy’.

 

To ‘revert’ this inversion and restore the tropos-logos, we have to submit our will totally to God to ‘reaffirm’ ourselves, and become ‘reborn’ in the Son to reach once more our eternal Fatherland; a haven which all will eventually enter, but not necessarily by the same door (the true ‘door’ being obviously Christ, to whom we enter through the Cross, the Tree of Life in which the horizontal axis of good-evil is reintegrated into the vertical which re-joins Heaven and Earth and in the ‘middle’ of which blossoms the heavenly fruit of the Most Blessed Sacrament (Cor Jesu sacratissimum, centrum omnia cordium in quo habitat omnis plenitude).

 

God being ‘all in all’ there can in fact not even really be a question of ‘entering in’, since, in a way, we never truly ‘left’. For as Erigena says:

 

He is everywhere, and without Him nothing can be, and beyond Him nothing extends. For He is the place and the circumference of all things (Op. cit. 453A).

 

Heaven and Hell are thus already ‘magically’ present in us according to the tropos of our ‘will’ and shall thus become ‘revealed’ (or ‘discovered’) upon our death: “There is verily no entering in; for heaven and hell are everywhere, being universally co-extended” (Böhme, De Sig. Re.).

 

Heaven and Hell are universally extended because they are essentially the Principle itself, the Love of God being, according to Erigena, experienced (‘known’) by the sinner as the eternal ‘anguish-fire’ which “burneth and dieth not”; they are the not so much ‘places’ but a ‘volitional states’ of the intellectual soul.

 

When thou seest a man stand before thee, thou mayest say, ‘Here stand now the three worlds!’ – The dark Fire-World, the heavenly Light-World, and this World of the Senses. With the soul, man stands in the abyss of Hell; with the spirit, he stretches upward into Heaven; and in his body he has an extract of this whole world of the senses. To whichever of these three worlds thou dost surrender thyself, this comes to rule in thee; and thou takest on (or dost receive) its properties. Take heed to thyself, therefore! for what we make of ourselves, that we are; what we awaken in us, that lives and moves in us (Böhme, Sex puncta).

 

To summarize, we might simply say that everything that is is only by virtue of being known (Sein ist Bewusst-sein), as Baader says: Cogitor ergo sum, or likewise: Cogito, quia cogitor a Deo; for all knowing is a participation in the Divine Knowing (con-naissance, con-scientia)[24], i.e. in the Logos, the “Light which lighteth every man”, and as such ‘naturally supernatural’ (and “if the eye wasn’t sun-like it could never see the Sun”)[25]. Thus that what I know is That by which I know as well as That by which I am known (per ipsum, et cum ipso, et in ipso). There’s simply nothing outside of God, who is ultimately ‘the only Knower’ and the only ‘Known’^[26], since all there can be truly known is God, or rather His self-disclosure (creatio in Deo ex Deo) as logos ekthetos (the ‘divine world’ or kosmos noetos).^[27] Only Intellect subsists, while Intellect itself comes into being (from the ‘Non-being’ of the Ungrund) by the ‘imagination’ of the divine Will. All ‘things’ we perceive in the finite (un-)reality are ‘accidental’ modifications (Eckhart’s modicum, or: mâyâ) constituted by the fallen (‘sensual’) mind, stemming from Adam’s ‘false imagination’ into primordial ignorance (avidyâ), which has to be overcome by metanoia (restitution of recta ratio or vidyâ; so that we may finally “know even as we are known”, 1. Cor. 13:12) and by a surrendering of the will to God (Gelassenheit, i.e. a kenosis of self as imitatio Christi, which is a participation in the mystery of Trinitarian agape) – For “not everyone that says unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father who is in Heaven” (Matt. 7:21).        

That we may thus die to the ‘old man’ and recover the pearl-crown of Heavenly Wisdom, so help us the Almighty God, nunc et in saecula, Amen.