TRADITON AND ANTITRADITION

 

291. Tradition means a handing over (latin trans-dare): the handing over of a supertemporal circle of principles here in time.

 

292. Tradition is the atemporal thrown into temporality.

 

293. Knowledge of the origin, knowledge of the path, knowledge of the all-transcending, ultimate goal: this is metaphysical realisation.

 

294. Tradition springs forth from the eternal, points at the eternal, and in the human modality of being represents the aspiration towards the eternal.

 

295. Metaphysical tradition is at the same time solar and polar: polar for though it appears in the earthly-human sphere, yet it is of heavenly origin and for this reason its origin is not subject to the whirlpool of existence (samsara), it is solar for the powers characteristic of my self-awareness which provide the rule of the auton are present in it.

 

296. There is only one primordial tradition for there is only one metaphysics, and there is only one metaphysics for there is only one being.

 

297. Tradition can never be identified simply with metaphysical doctrines or with symbology bearing a doctrinal value, and even less with the archaic documents that present these. Tradition is the total acceptance of a world and the total denial of another.

 

298. Metaphysically speaking, tradition is nothing other than »remembrance«, and the bearing of the connection with the origin. Modernity, however, is not only the lack of this »remembrance«, but at the same time the denial of this metaphysical »remembrance« and aims at the destruction of every kind of representation of remembrance.

 

299. The most sinister thing is forever if something subsists, but not truly; this is really much worse than if it disappeared. Since if something does not truly subsist, it will sooner or later come to function as a caricature and antithesis of the original.

 

[It especially refers to those legitimate traditional, spiritual and initiatory organisations which have maintained their continuity, but whose original features have gradually faded away or turned directly to their opposites.]

 

300. Each and every language is a tradition.

 

301. In the earthly-human sphere there cannot be a bipolar opposition bigger and tenser than of that between tradition and antitradition, and traditionality and antitraditionality, respectively.

 

302. Antitradition can be understood only from tradition; it cannot stand by itself.

 

303. Since the offensive form of antitraditionality appeared, the slightest compromise between traditionality and antitraditionality has been an enormous antitraditional triumph.

 

[An example: »Catholic-Marxist dialogues always implied the defensiveness of the Church and the success of Marxism - regardless of the fact that in the course of these dialogues it was invariably the Marxists whose performance was weaker than that of the Catholics. Since the very fact that in religious circles the question was not whether to send Marxists to the stake but to find the common ground among the opposing views, demonstrated the defensiveness of the Church. For Marxists it was not the outcome of the dialogues which was important but that the Church started to »court« them.« (András László)]

 

304. A traditional man should become a scholar in antitradition.

 

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Metaphysical aphorisms by András László

 

Visit this location at Echoes, Metaphysics of frequencies in Second Life

In civilizations of a traditional nature, intellectual intuition lies at the root of everything; in other words, it is the pure metaphysical doctrine that constitutes the essential, everything else being linked to it, either in the form of consequences or applications to the various orders of contingent reality.

 

Not only is this true of social institutions, but also of the sciences, that is, branches of knowledge bearing on the domain of the relative, which in such civilizations are only regarded as dependencies, prolongations, or reflections of absolute or principial knowledge.

 

Thus a true hierarchy is always and everywhere preserved: the relative is not treated as non-existent, which would be absurd; it is duly taken into consideration, but is put in its rightful place, which cannot but be a secondary and subordinate one; and even within this relative domain there are different degrees of reality, according to whether the subject lies nearer to or further from the sphere of principles.

 

Thus, as regards science, there are two radically different and mutually incompatible conceptions, which may be referred to respectively as traditional and modern. We have often had occasion to allude to the 'traditional sciences' that existed in antiquity and the Middle Ages and which still exist in the East, though the very idea of them is foreign to the Westerners of today. It should be added that every civilization has had 'traditional sciences' of its own and of a particular type. Here we are no longer in the sphere of universal principles, to which pure metaphysics alone belongs, but in the realm of adaptations.

(…)

 

By seeking to sever the connection of the sciences with any higher principle, under the pretext of assuring their independence, the modern conception robs them of all deeper meaning and even of all real interest from the point of view of knowledge; it can only lead them down a blind alley, by enclosing them, as it does, in a hopelessly limited realm.

 

Moreover, the development achieved in this realm is not a deepening of knowledge, as is commonly supposed, but on the contrary remains completely superficial, consisting only of the dispersion in detail already referred to and an analysis as barren as it is laborious; this development can be pursued indefinitely without coming one step closer to true knowledge.

 

It must also be remarked that it is not for its own sake that, in general, Westerners pursue science; as they interpret it, their foremost aim is not knowledge, even of an inferior order, but practical applications, as can be deduced from the ease with which the majority of our contemporaries confuse science and industry, and from the number of those for whom the engineer represents the typical man of science.

(…)

 

Modern experimentalism involves the curious illusion that a theory can be proven by facts, whereas in reality the same facts can always be equally well explained by several different theories; some of the pioneers of the experimental method, such as Claude Bernard, have themselves recognized that they could interpret facts only with the help of preconceived ideas, without which they would remain 'brute facts' devoid of all meaning and scientific value.

 

Since we have been led to speak of experimentalism, the opportunity may be taken to answer a question that may be raised in this connection: why have the experimental sciences received a development in modern civilization such as they never had in any other?

 

The reason is that these sciences are those of the sensible world, those of matter, and also those lending themselves most directly to practical applications; their development, proceeding hand in hand with what might well be called the 'superstition of facts', is therefore in complete accord with specifically modern tendencies, whereas earlier ages could not find sufficient interest in them to pursue them to the extent of neglecting, for their sake, knowledge of a higher order. It must be clearly understood that we are not saying that any kind of knowledge can be deemed illegitimate, even though it be inferior; what is illegitimate is only the abuse that arises when things of this kind absorb the whole of human activity, as we see them doing at present.

(…)

 

One of the characteristics of the present age is the exploitation of everything that had hitherto been neglected as being of insufficient importance for men to devote their time and energy to, but which nevertheless had to be developed before the end of the cycle, since the things concerned had their place among the possibilities destined to be manifested within it; such in particular is the case of the experimental sciences that have come into existence in recent centuries.

 

There are even some modern sciences that represent, quite literally, residues of ancient sciences that are no longer understood: in a period of decadence, the lowest part of these sciences became isolated from all the rest, and this part, grossly materialized, served as the starting-point for a completely different development, in a direction conforming to modern tendencies; this resulted in the formation of sciences that have ceased to have anything in common with those that preceded them. Thus, for example, it is wrong to maintain, as is generally done, that astrology and alchemy have respectively become modern astronomy and modern chemistry, even though this may contain an element of truth from a historical point of view; it contains, in fact, the very element of truth to which we have just alluded, for, if the latter sciences do in a certain sense come from the former, it is not by 'evo-lution' or 'progress' - as is claimed - but on the contrary, by degeneration.

(…)

 

These are the two complementary functions proper to the traditional sciences: on the one hand, as applications of the doctrine, they make it possible to link the different orders of reality and to integrate them into the unity of a single synthesis, and on the other, they constitute, at least for some, and in accordance with their individual aptitudes, a preparation for a higher knowledge and a way of approach to it - forming by virtue of their hierarchical positioning, according to the levels of existence to which they refer, so many rungs as it were by which it is possible to climb to the level of pure intellectuality.

 

It is only too clear that modern sciences cannot in any way serve either of these purposes; this is why they can be no more than 'profane science', whereas the 'traditional sciences', through their connection with metaphysical principles, are effectively incorporated in 'sacred science'.

 

The ways leading to knowledge may be extremely different at the lowest degree, but they draw closer and closer together as higher levels are reached. This is not to say that any of these preparatory degrees are absolutely necessary, since they are mere contingent methods having nothing in common with the end to be attained; it is even possible for some persons, in whom the tendency to contemplation is predominant, to attain directly to true intellectual intuition without the aid of such means; but this is a more or less exceptional case, and in general it is accepted as being necessary to proceed upward gradually.

 

The whole question may also be illustrated by means of the traditional image of the 'cosmic wheel': the circumference in reality exists only in virtue of the center, but the beings that stand upon the circumference must necessarily start from there or, more precisely, from the point thereon at which they actually find themselves, and follow the radius that leads to the center. Moreover, because of the correspondence that exists between all the orders of reality, the truths of a lower order can be taken as symbols of those of higher orders, and can therefore serve as 'supports' by which one may arrive at an understanding of these; and this fact makes it possible for any science to become a sacred science, giving it a higher or 'anagogical' meaning deeper than that which it possesses in itself.

 

Every science, we say, can assume this character, whatever may be its subject-matter, on the sole condition of being constructed and regarded from the traditional standpoint; it is only necessary to keep in mind the degrees of importance of the various sciences according to the hierarchical rank of the diverse realities studied by them; but whatever degree they may occupy, their character and functions are essentially similar in the traditional conception.

 

What is true of the sciences is equally true of the arts, since every art can have a truly symbolic value that enables it to serve as a support for meditation, and because it’s rules, like the laws studied by the sciences, are reflections and 'applications of fundamental principles: there are then in every normal civilization 'traditional arts', but these are no less unknown to the modern West than are the 'traditional sciences'. The truth is that there is really no 'profane realm' that could in any way be opposed to a 'sacred realm'; there is only a 'profane point of view', which is really none other than the point of view of ignorance.

 

This is why 'profane science', the science of the moderns, can as we have remarked elsewhere be justly styled 'ignorant knowledge', knowledge of an inferior order confining itself entirely to the lowest level of reality, knowledge ignorant of all that lies beyond it, of any aim more lofty than itself, and of any principle that could give it a legitimate place, however humble, among the various orders of knowledge as a whole. Irremediably enclosed in the relative and narrow realm in which it has striven to proclaim itself independent, thereby voluntarily breaking all connection with transcendent truth and supreme wisdom, it is only a vain and illusory knowledge, which indeed comes from nothing and leads to nothing.

 

This survey will suffice to show how great is the deficiency of the modern world in the realm of science, and how that very science of which it is so proud represents no more than a deviation and, as it were, a downfall from true science, which for us is absolutely identical with what we have called 'sacred' or 'traditional' science. Modern science, arising from an arbitrary limitation of knowledge to a particular order-the lowest of all orders, that of material or sensible reality-has lost, through this limitation and the consequences it immediately entails, all intellectual value; as long, that is, as one gives to the word 'intellectuality' the fullness of its real meaning, and refuses to share the 'rationalist' error of assimilating pure intelligence to reason, or, what amount to the same thing, of completely denying intellectual intuition.

 

The root of this error, as of a great many other modern errors - and the cause of the entire deviation of science that we have just described - is what may be called 'individualism', an attitude indistinguishable from the anti-traditional attitude itself and whose many manifestations in all domains constitute one of the most important factors in the confusion of our time; we shall therefore now study this individualism more closely.

 

----

 

excerpts from The Crisis of the Modern World by René Guenon

 

Chapter 4: Sacred and profane science

 

----

 

Dekoulou Monastery, Greece

 

LENS TEST: ASAHI PENTAX smc Pentax 200mm f2.5

 

Metaphysics of a bottle bead-cork. In the neighborhood, Tokyo, Japan. © Michele Marcolin, 2023. K1ii + smc Pentax 200mm f2.5

 

Some time has gone since I cquired it, but it happened right that I completed the clad during the crush of my computer, so images, homework and everything ended up in a tail. Anyway...

 

This is not a lens: it is a plasma gun that liquefies everything around your subject! A fantastic tool! I can't possibly conceive how somebody can spend negative reviews on Pentax Forum lens listing not recommending it: must be the fruit of complete photographic infancy... the use of a faulty lens... or the need of a psychological-mental examination (at least an optometric eye test)!

 

The smc Pentax 200mm f2.5 has virtually the same lens design of the 135mm f 2.5, with which it evidently shares the same great sharpness wide open, the solid contrast/color rendering, and the essential, but effective mechanical quality (and also some negative points). It is an incredible photographic tool of a gone age, which pairs perfectly with Pentax K-1, offering yes a heavy combo, but very well balanced when hand-held. Not really saying that it is perfect or easy to hand-hold (despite you do it most of the time); but it is a lens that does not like strong light (not incidentally the 8 blades of its aperture close down until f32), therefore in low light it demands great care in nailing perfectly your subject in focus, due to the extremely thin DOF it achieves. And the weight becomes a challenge. It has also sometimes inconsistent erratic rendering, probably results of its extreme design.

 

I do not have a completely mint copy, despite functionally it has no problem. It is a foundling: I rescued it on the junk market in a very poor state. It took quite a while to restoring it, since some internal rings where oxidized and hard to remove. It is a lens that was manufactured in a industrial age (despite not in large numbers), with good quality standards, but without an eye to its maintenance in time and the manual built of the Takumars. Internal components often used to be fixed with bonds or solutions that are not impossible to overcome for a clad, but that were not originally intended for that. Solvents and a-like don't go well hand in hand with coatings and glass. Lenses are large and it is pretty challenging avoiding touching them or damaging them. Users were probably expected to buy a newer one, when something got compromised inside (during bubble economy time it might not have been an issue). My lens withstood my siege on my work bench for some weeks, before I was finally able to access the internal lenses, to remove the mold they had. And I had to use pretty unorthodox systems to complete the work. So, despite I originally acquired it to fix it end reselling it for good bucks, due to some faint marks that remained in a couple of spots and an internal ring that I had to force and recycle in a different way, I decided to keep it. But I am so glad for that, because I got to discover a marvelous photographic tool.

 

Ideal for environmental portrait (in a studio a 200mm is probably too long - min. foc. is around 2 m), astrophotography, travel photo, it has an amazing dreamy blur (the background one, but particularly the foreground). I can only compare it to H.I.H. smc Pentax* 135mm f1.8 for general rendering. Being a tool of its age, it comes with the usual 'disclaimer' of most legacy lenses: some CA in very strong light and some fall of contrast in frontal illumination. Nothing tragic: you know it, you avoid those situations - if you purchase one of these lenses and then complain, you are a fool. Better drop photography and go fishing. That is part of its charm. Beside, if I recall well, this was the first 200mm lens with an f2.5 aperture, put out by Pentax in a momento of show-off of its technological capability - I believe only Nikon had a Nikkor 200mm f2 (!!) that came out that same 1977, which is faster and with a very beautiful rendering, but less sharp wide open and with more CA. On digital this one still kicks!

  

Rudolf Steiner

Steiner um 1905.jpg

BornRudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner

27 (25?) February 1861

Murakirály, Kingdom of Hungary, Austrian Empire (now Donji Kraljevec, Croatia)

Died30 March 1925 (aged 64)

Dornach, Switzerland

Alma materVienna Institute of Technology

University of Rostock (PhD, 1891)

Spouse(s)

Anna Eunicke (1899–1911)

Marie Steiner-von Sivers (1914–1925)

Era20th-century philosophy

RegionWestern philosophy

SchoolMonism

Holism in science

Goethean science

Anthroposophy

Main interests

Metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, esotericism, Christianity

Notable ideas

Anthroposophy, anthroposophical medicine, biodynamic agriculture, eurythmy, spiritual science, Waldorf education, holism in science

Influences[show]

Influenced[show]

Steiner Seven Apocalyptical Seals Transparent.png

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Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner (27 (or 25) February 1861[5] – 30 March 1925) was an Austrian philosopher, social reformer, architect, and esotericist.[6][7] Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published philosophical works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy; other influences include Goethean science and Rosicrucianism.[8]

 

In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality.[9] His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions,[10]:291 differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, the movement arts (developing a new artistic form, eurythmy) and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts.[11] In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked to establish various practical endeavors, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture,[12] and anthroposophical medicine.[13]

 

Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang Goethe's world view, in which "Thinking… is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas."[14] A consistent thread that runs from his earliest philosophical phase through his later spiritual orientation is the goal of demonstrating that there are no essential limits to human knowledge.[15]

  

Contents

1Biography

1.1Childhood and education

1.2Early spiritual experiences

1.3Writer and philosopher

1.4Theosophical Society

1.5Anthroposophical Society and its cultural activities

1.6Political engagement and social agenda

1.7Attacks, illness, and death

1.8Spiritual research

1.9Esoteric schools

2Breadth of activity

2.1Education

2.2Biodynamic agriculture

2.3Anthroposophical medicine

2.4Social reform

2.5Architecture and visual arts

2.6Performing arts

3Philosophical ideas

3.1Goethean science

3.2Knowledge and freedom

3.3Spiritual science

3.4Steiner and Christianity

3.4.1Christ and human evolution

3.4.2Divergence from conventional Christian thought

3.4.3The Christian Community

4Reception

4.1Scientism

4.2Race and ethnicity

4.2.1Judaism

5Writings (selection)

6See also

7References

8Further reading

9External links

Biography[edit]

Childhood and education[edit]

 

The house where Rudolf Steiner was born, in present-day Croatia

Steiner's father, Johann(es) Steiner (1829–1910), left a position as a gamekeeper[16] in the service of Count Hoyos in Geras, northeast Lower Austria to marry one of the Hoyos family's housemaids, Franziska Blie (1834 Horn – 1918, Horn), a marriage for which the Count had refused his permission. Johann became a telegraph operator on the Southern Austrian Railway, and at the time of Rudolf's birth was stationed in Murakirály (Kraljevec) in the Muraköz region of the Kingdom of Hungary, Austrian Empire (present-day Donji Kraljevec in the Međimurje region of northernmost Croatia). In the first two years of Rudolf's life, the family moved twice, first to Mödling, near Vienna, and then, through the promotion of his father to stationmaster, to Pottschach, located in the foothills of the eastern Austrian Alps in Lower Austria.[13]

 

Steiner entered the village school, but following a disagreement between his father and the schoolmaster, he was briefly educated at home. In 1869, when Steiner was eight years old, the family moved to the village of Neudörfl and in October 1872 Steiner proceeded from the village school there to the realschule in Wiener Neustadt.[17]:Chap. 2

  

Rudolf Steiner, graduation photo from secondary school

In 1879, the family moved to Inzersdorf to enable Steiner to attend the Vienna Institute of Technology,[18] where he enrolled in courses in mathematics, physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, and mineralogy and audited courses in literature and philosophy, on an academic scholarship from 1879 to 1883, at the end of which time he withdrew from the Institute without graduating.[2]:122,443,446,456,503[19]:29 In 1882, one of Steiner's teachers, Karl Julius Schröer,[17]:Chap. 3 suggested Steiner's name to Joseph Kürschner, chief editor of a new edition of Goethe's works,[20] who asked Steiner to become the edition's natural science editor,[21] a truly astonishing opportunity for a young student without any form of academic credentials or previous publications.[19]:43

 

Before attending the Vienna Institute of Technology, Steiner had studied Kant, Fichte and Schelling.[22]

 

Early spiritual experiences[edit]

 

Rudolf Steiner as 21-year-old student (1882)

When he was nine years old, Steiner believed that he saw the spirit of an aunt who had died in a far-off town asking him to help her at a time when neither he nor his family knew of the woman's death.[23] Steiner later related that as a child he felt "that one must carry the knowledge of the spiritual world within oneself after the fashion of geometry ... [for here] one is permitted to know something which the mind alone, through its own power, experiences. In this feeling I found the justification for the spiritual world that I experienced ... I confirmed for myself by means of geometry the feeling that I must speak of a world 'which is not seen'."[17]

 

Steiner believed that at the age of 15 he had gained a complete understanding of the concept of time, which he considered to be the precondition of spiritual clairvoyance.[22] At 21, on the train between his home village and Vienna, Steiner met an herb gatherer, Felix Kogutzki, who spoke about the spiritual world "as one who had his own experience therein".[17]:39–40[24] Kogutzki conveyed to Steiner a knowledge of nature that was non-academic and spiritual.

 

Writer and philosopher[edit]

In 1888, as a result of his work for the Kürschner edition of Goethe's works, Steiner was invited to work as an editor at the Goethe archives in Weimar. Steiner remained with the archive until 1896. As well as the introductions for and commentaries to four volumes of Goethe's scientific writings, Steiner wrote two books about Goethe's philosophy: The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World-Conception (1886),[25] which Steiner regarded as the epistemological foundation and justification for his later work,[26] and Goethe's Conception of the World (1897).[27] During this time he also collaborated in complete editions of the works of Arthur Schopenhauer and the writer Jean Paul and wrote numerous articles for various journals.

  

Rudolf Steiner around 1891/92, etching by Otto Fröhlich

In 1891, Steiner received a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Rostock, for his dissertation discussing Fichte's concept of the ego,[10][28] submitted to Heinrich von Stein, whose Seven Books of Platonism Steiner esteemed.[17]:Chap. 14 Steiner's dissertation was later published in expanded form as Truth and Knowledge: Prelude to a Philosophy of Freedom, with a dedication to Eduard von Hartmann.[29] Two years later, he published Die Philosophie der Freiheit (The Philosophy of Freedom or The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity—Steiner's preferred English title) (1894), an exploration of epistemology and ethics that suggested a way for humans to become spiritually free beings. Steiner later spoke of this book as containing implicitly, in philosophical form, the entire content of what he later developed explicitly as anthroposophy.[30]

  

Marie Steiner 1903

In 1896, Steiner declined an offer from Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche to help organize the Nietzsche archive in Naumburg. Her brother by that time was non compos mentis. Förster-Nietzsche introduced Steiner into the presence of the catatonic philosopher; Steiner, deeply moved, subsequently wrote the book Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom.[31] Steiner later related that:

 

My first acquaintance with Nietzsche's writings belongs to the year 1889. Previous to that I had never read a line of his. Upon the substance of my ideas as these find expression in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, Nietzsche's thought had not the least influence....Nietzsche's ideas of the 'eternal recurrence' and of 'Übermensch' remained long in my mind. For in these was reflected that which a personality must feel concerning the evolution and essential being of humanity when this personality is kept back from grasping the spiritual world by the restricted thought in the philosophy of nature characterizing the end of the 19th century....What attracted me particularly was that one could read Nietzsche without coming upon anything which strove to make the reader a 'dependent' of Nietzsche's.[17]:Chap. 18

 

In 1897, Steiner left the Weimar archives and moved to Berlin. He became part owner of, chief editor of, and an active contributor to the literary journal Magazin für Literatur, where he hoped to find a readership sympathetic to his philosophy. Many subscribers were alienated by Steiner's unpopular support of Émile Zola in the Dreyfus Affair[32] and the journal lost more subscribers when Steiner published extracts from his correspondence with anarchist John Henry Mackay.[32] Dissatisfaction with his editorial style eventually led to his departure from the magazine.

 

In 1899, Steiner married Anna Eunicke; the couple separated several years later. Anna died in 1911.

 

Theosophical Society[edit]

Main article: Rudolf Steiner and the Theosophical Society

 

Rudolf Steiner in Munich with Annie Besant, leader of the Theosophical Society. Photo from 1907

In 1899, Steiner published an article, "Goethe's Secret Revelation", discussing the esoteric nature of Goethe's fairy tale The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. This article led to an invitation by the Count and Countess Brockdorff to speak to a gathering of Theosophists on the subject of Nietzsche. Steiner continued speaking regularly to the members of the Theosophical Society, becoming the head of its newly constituted German section in 1902 without ever formally joining the society.[10][33] It was also in connection with this society that Steiner met and worked with Marie von Sivers, who became his second wife in 1914. By 1904, Steiner was appointed by Annie Besant to be leader of the Theosophical Esoteric Society for Germany and Austria. In 1904, Eliza, the wife of Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, became one of his favourite scholars[34]. Through Eliza, Steiner met Helmuth, who served as the Chief of the German General Staff from 1906 to 1914[35].

 

In contrast to mainstream Theosophy, Steiner sought to build a Western approach to spirituality based on the philosophical and mystical traditions of European culture. The German Section of the Theosophical Society grew rapidly under Steiner's leadership as he lectured throughout much of Europe on his spiritual science. During this period, Steiner maintained an original approach, replacing Madame Blavatsky's terminology with his own, and basing his spiritual research and teachings upon the Western esoteric and philosophical tradition. This and other differences, in particular Steiner's vocal rejection of Leadbeater and Besant's claim that Jiddu Krishnamurti was the vehicle of a new Maitreya, or world teacher,[36] led to a formal split in 1912/13,[10] when Steiner and the majority of members of the German section of the Theosophical Society broke off to form a new group, the Anthroposophical Society. Steiner took the name "Anthroposophy" from the title of a work of the Austrian philosopher Robert von Zimmermann, published in Vienna in 1856.[37] Despite his departure from the Theosophical Society, Steiner maintained his interest in Theosophy throughout his life.[8]

 

Anthroposophical Society and its cultural activities[edit]

RudolfSteiner.jpeg

The Anthroposophical Society grew rapidly. Fueled by a need to find an artistic home for their yearly conferences, which included performances of plays written by Edouard Schuré and Steiner, the decision was made to build a theater and organizational center. In 1913, construction began on the first Goetheanum building, in Dornach, Switzerland. The building, designed by Steiner, was built to a significant part by volunteers who offered craftsmanship or simply a will to learn new skills. Once World War I started in 1914, the Goetheanum volunteers could hear the sound of cannon fire beyond the Swiss border, but despite the war, people from all over Europe worked peaceably side by side on the building's construction. Steiner moved from Berlin to Dornach in 1913 and lived there to the end of his life.[38]

 

Steiner's lecture activity expanded enormously with the end of the war. Most importantly, from 1919 on Steiner began to work with other members of the society to found numerous practical institutions and activities, including the first Waldorf school, founded that year in Stuttgart, Germany. At the same time, the Goetheanum developed as a wide-ranging cultural centre. On New Year's Eve, 1922/1923, the building burned to the ground; contemporary police reports indicate arson as the probable cause.[13]:752[39]:796 Steiner immediately began work designing a second Goetheanum building - this time made of concrete instead of wood - which was completed in 1928, three years after his death.

 

At a "Foundation Meeting" for members held at the Dornach center during Christmas, 1923, Steiner spoke of laying a new Foundation Stone for the society in the hearts of his listeners. At the meeting, a new "General Anthroposophical Society" was established with a new executive board. At this meeting, Steiner also founded a School of Spiritual Science, intended as an "organ of initiative" for research and study and as "the 'soul' of the Anthroposophical Society".[40] This School, which was led by Steiner, initially had sections for general anthroposophy, education, medicine, performing arts (eurythmy, speech, drama and music), the literary arts and humanities, mathematics, astronomy, science, and visual arts. Later sections were added for the social sciences, youth and agriculture.[41][42][43] The School of Spiritual Science included meditative exercises given by Steiner.

 

Political engagement and social agenda[edit]

Steiner became a well-known and controversial public figure during and after World War I. In response to the catastrophic situation in post-war Germany, he proposed extensive social reforms through the establishment of a Threefold Social Order in which the cultural, political and economic realms would be largely independent. Steiner argued that a fusion of the three realms had created the inflexibility that had led to catastrophes such as World War I. In connection with this, he promoted a radical solution in the disputed area of Upper Silesia, claimed by both Poland and Germany. His suggestion that this area be granted at least provisional independence led to his being publicly accused of being a traitor to Germany.[44]

 

Steiner opposed Wilson's proposal to create new European nations based around ethnic groups, which he saw as opening the door to rampant nationalism. Steiner proposed as an alternative "'social territories' with democratic institutions that were accessible to all inhabitants of a territory whatever their origin while the needs of the various ethnicities would be met by independent cultural institutions."[45]

 

Attacks, illness, and death[edit]

The National Socialist German Workers Party gained strength in Germany after the First World War. In 1919, a political theorist of this movement, Dietrich Eckart, attacked Steiner and suggested that he was a Jew.[46] In 1921, Adolf Hitler attacked Steiner on many fronts, including accusations that he was a tool of the Jews,[47] while other nationalist extremists in Germany called for a "war against Steiner". That same year, Steiner warned against the disastrous effects it would have for Central Europe if the National Socialists came to power.[46]:8 In 1922 a lecture Steiner was giving in Munich was disrupted when stink bombs were let off and the lights switched out, while people rushed the stage apparently attempting to attack Steiner, who exited safely through a back door.[48][49] Unable to guarantee his safety, Steiner's agents cancelled his next lecture tour.[32]:193[50] The 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich led Steiner to give up his residence in Berlin, saying that if those responsible for the attempted coup [Hitler and others] came to power in Germany, it would no longer be possible for him to enter the country.[51]

 

From 1923 on, Steiner showed signs of increasing frailness and illness. He nonetheless continued to lecture widely, and even to travel; especially towards the end of this time, he was often giving two, three or even four lectures daily for courses taking place concurrently. Many of these lectures focused on practical areas of life such as education.[52]

  

Steiner's gravestone at the Goetheanum

Increasingly ill, he held his last lecture in late September, 1924. He continued work on his autobiography during the last months of his life; he died on 30 March 1925.

 

Spiritual research[edit]

Steiner first began speaking publicly about spiritual experiences and phenomena in his 1899 lectures to the Theosophical Society. By 1901 he had begun to write about spiritual topics, initially in the form of discussions of historical figures such as the mystics of the Middle Ages. By 1904 he was expressing his own understanding of these themes in his essays and books, while continuing to refer to a wide variety of historical sources.

 

"A world of spiritual perception is discussed in a number of writings which I have published since this book appeared. The Philosophy of Freedom forms the philosophical basis for these later writings. For it tries to show that the experience of thinking, rightly understood, is in fact an experience of spirit." (Steiner, Philosophy of Freedom, Consequences of Monism)

 

Steiner aimed to apply his training in mathematics, science, and philosophy to produce rigorous, verifiable presentations of those experiences.[53] He believed that through freely chosen ethical disciplines and meditative training, anyone could develop the ability to experience the spiritual world, including the higher nature of oneself and others.[32] Steiner believed that such discipline and training would help a person to become a more moral, creative and free individual – free in the sense of being capable of actions motivated solely by love.[54] His philosophical ideas were affected by Franz Brentano,[32] with whom he had studied,[55] as well as by Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, and Goethe's phenomenological approach to science.[32][56][57]

 

Steiner followed Wilhelm Dilthey in using the term Geisteswissenschaft, usually translated as "spiritual science".[58] Steiner used the term to describe a discipline treating the spirit as something actual and real, starting from the premise that it is possible for human beings to penetrate behind what is sense-perceptible.[59] He proposed that psychology, history, and the humanities generally were based on the direct grasp of an ideal reality,[60] and required close attention to the particular period and culture which provided the distinctive character of religious qualities in the course of the evolution of consciousness. In contrast to William James' pragmatic approach to religious and psychic experience, which emphasized its idiosyncratic character, Steiner focused on ways such experience can be rendered more intelligible and integrated into human life.[61]

 

Steiner proposed that an understanding of reincarnation and karma was necessary to understand psychology[62] and that the form of external nature would be more comprehensible as a result of insight into the course of karma in the evolution of humanity.[63] Beginning in 1910, he described aspects of karma relating to health, natural phenomena and free will, taking the position that a person is not bound by his or her karma, but can transcend this through actively taking hold of one's own nature and destiny.[64] In an extensive series of lectures from February to September 1924, Steiner presented further research on successive reincarnations of various individuals and described the techniques he used for karma research.[52][65]

 

Esoteric schools[edit]

See also: Rudolf Steiner's exercises for spiritual development

Steiner was founder and leader of the following:

 

His independent Esoteric School of the Theosophical Society, founded in 1904. This school continued after the break with Theosophy but was disbanded at the start of World War I.

A lodge called Mystica Aeterna within the Masonic Order of Memphis and Mizraim, which Steiner led from 1906 until around 1914. Steiner added to the Masonic rite a number of Rosicrucian references.[66]

The School of Spiritual Science of the Anthroposophical Society, founded in 1923 as a further development of his earlier Esoteric School. This was originally constituted with a general section and seven specialized sections for education, literature, performing arts, natural sciences, medicine, visual arts, and astronomy.[41][43][67] Steiner gave members of the School the first Lesson for guidance into the esoteric work in February 1924.[68] Though Steiner intended to develop three "classes" of this school, only the first of these was developed in his lifetime (and continues today). An authentic text of the written records on which the teaching of the First Class was based was published in 1992.[69]

Breadth of activity[edit]

After the First World War, Steiner became active in a wide variety of cultural contexts. He founded a number of schools, the first of which was known as the Waldorf school,[70] which later evolved into a worldwide school network. He also founded a system of organic agriculture, now known as biodynamic agriculture, which was one of the very first forms of, and has contributed significantly to the development of, modern organic farming.[71] His work in medicine led to the development of a broad range of complementary medications and supportive artistic and biographic therapies.[72] Numerous homes for children and adults with developmental disabilities based on his work (including those of the Camphill movement) are found in Africa, Europe, and North America.[73] His paintings and drawings influenced Joseph Beuys and other modern artists. His two Goetheanum buildings have been widely cited as masterpieces of modern architecture,[74][75][76][77][78] and other anthroposophical architects have contributed thousands of buildings to the modern scene.[79] One of the first institutions to practice ethical banking was an anthroposophical bank working out of Steiner's ideas; other anthroposophical social finance institutions have since been founded.

 

Steiner's literary estate is correspondingly broad. Steiner's writings, published in about forty volumes, include books, essays, four plays ('mystery dramas'), mantric verse, and an autobiography. His collected lectures, making up another approximately 300 volumes, discuss an extremely wide range of themes. Steiner's drawings, chiefly illustrations done on blackboards during his lectures, are collected in a separate series of 28 volumes. Many publications have covered his architectural legacy and sculptural work.

 

Education[edit]

 

The Waldorf school in Verrières-le-Buisson (France)

Main article: Waldorf education

As a young man, Steiner was a private tutor and a lecturer on history for the Berlin Arbeiterbildungsschule,[80] an educational initiative for working class adults.[81] Soon thereafter, he began to articulate his ideas on education in public lectures,[82] culminating in a 1907 essay on The Education of the Child in which he described the major phases of child development which formed the foundation of his approach to education.[83] His conception of education was influenced by the Herbartian pedagogy prominent in Europe during the late nineteenth century,[80]:1362, 1390ff[82] though Steiner criticized Herbart for not sufficiently recognizing the importance of educating the will and feelings as well as the intellect.[84]

 

In 1919, Emil Molt invited him to lecture to his workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart. Out of these lectures came a new school, the Waldorf school. In 1922, Steiner presented these ideas at a conference called for this purpose in Oxford by Professor Millicent Mackenzie. He subsequently presented a teacher training course at Torquay in 1924 at an Anthroposophy Summer School organised by Eleanor Merry.[85] The Oxford Conference and the Torquay teacher training led to the founding of the first Waldorf schools in Britain.[86] During Steiner's lifetime, schools based on his educational principles were also founded in Hamburg, Essen, The Hague and London; there are now more than 1000 Waldorf schools worldwide.

 

Biodynamic agriculture[edit]

Main article: Biodynamic agriculture

In 1924, a group of farmers concerned about the future of agriculture requested Steiner's help. Steiner responded with a lecture series on an ecological and sustainable approach to agriculture that increased soil fertility without the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.[12] Steiner's agricultural ideas promptly spread and were put into practice internationally[87] and biodynamic agriculture is now practiced in Europe,[88] North America, South America[89], Africa[90], Asia[88] and Australasia.[91][92][93]

 

A central aspect of biodynamics is that the farm as a whole is seen as an organism, and therefore should be a largely self-sustaining system, producing its own manure and animal feed. Plant or animal disease is seen as a symptom of problems in the whole organism. Steiner also suggested timing such agricultural activities as sowing, weeding, and harvesting to utilize the influences on plant growth of the moon and planets; and the application of natural materials prepared in specific ways to the soil, compost, and crops, with the intention of engaging non-physical beings and elemental forces. He encouraged his listeners to verify his suggestions empirically, as he had not yet done.[91]

 

Anthroposophical medicine[edit]

Main article: Anthroposophical medicine

From the late 1910s, Steiner was working with doctors to create a new approach to medicine. In 1921, pharmacists and physicians gathered under Steiner's guidance to create a pharmaceutical company called Weleda which now distributes natural medical products worldwide. At around the same time, Dr. Ita Wegman founded a first anthroposophic medical clinic (now the Ita Wegman Clinic) in Arlesheim.

 

Social reform[edit]

Main article: Threefold Social Order

For a period after World War I, Steiner was active as a lecturer on social reform. A petition expressing his basic social ideas was widely circulated and signed by many cultural figures of the day, including Hermann Hesse.

 

In Steiner's chief book on social reform, Toward Social Renewal, he suggested that the cultural, political and economic spheres of society need to work together as consciously cooperating yet independent entities, each with a particular task: political institutions should establish political equality and protect human rights; cultural institutions should nurture the free and unhindered development of science, art, education and religion; and economic institutions should enable producers, distributors and consumers to cooperate to provide efficiently for society's needs.[94] He saw such a division of responsibility, which he called the Threefold Social Order, as a vital task which would take up consciously the historical trend toward the mutual independence of these three realms. Steiner also gave suggestions for many specific social reforms.

 

Steiner proposed what he termed a "fundamental law" of social life:

 

The well-being of a community of people working together will be the greater, the less the individual claims for himself the proceeds of his work, i.e. the more of these proceeds he makes over to his fellow-workers, the more his own needs are satisfied, not out of his own work but out of the work done by others.

 

— Steiner, The Fundamental Social Law[95]

He expressed this in the motto:[95]

 

The healthy social life is found

When in the mirror of each human soul

The whole community finds its reflection,

And when in the community

The virtue of each one is living.

Architecture and visual arts[edit]

 

First Goetheanum

  

Second Goetheanum

  

Detail of The Representative of Humanity

 

English sculptor Edith Maryon belonged to the innermost circle of founders of anthroposophy and was appointed to head the Section of Sculptural Arts at the Goetheanum.

 

Steiner designed 17 buildings, including the First and Second Goetheanums.[96] These two buildings, built in Dornach, Switzerland, were intended to house significant theater spaces as well as a "school for spiritual science".[97] Three of Steiner's buildings have been listed amongst the most significant works of modern architecture.[98]

 

His primary sculptural work is The Representative of Humanity (1922), a nine-meter high wood sculpture executed as a joint project with the sculptor Edith Maryon. This was intended to be placed in the first Goetheanum. It shows a central, free-standing Christ holding a balance between the beings of Lucifer and Ahriman, representing opposing tendencies of expansion and contraction.[99][100][101] It was intended to show, in conscious contrast to Michelangelo's Last Judgment, Christ as mute and impersonal such that the beings that approach him must judge themselves.[102] The sculpture is now on permanent display at the Goetheanum.

 

Steiner's blackboard drawings were unique at the time and almost certainly not originally intended as art works.[103] Josef Beuys' work, itself heavily influenced by Steiner, has led to the modern understanding of Steiner's drawings as artistic objects.[104]

 

Performing arts[edit]

See also: Eurythmy

Steiner wrote four mystery plays between 1909 and 1913: The Portal of Initiation, The Souls' Probation, The Guardian of the Threshold and The Soul's Awakening, modeled on the esoteric dramas of Edouard Schuré, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.[105] Steiner's plays continue to be performed by anthroposophical groups in various countries, most notably (in the original German) in Dornach, Switzerland and (in English translation) in Spring Valley, New York and in Stroud and Stourbridge in the U.K.

 

In collaboration with Marie von Sivers, Steiner also founded a new approach to acting, storytelling, and the recitation of poetry. His last public lecture course, given in 1924, was on speech and drama. The Russian actor, director, and acting coach Michael Chekhov based significant aspects of his method of acting on Steiner's work.[106][107]

 

Together with Marie von Sivers, Rudolf Steiner also developed the art of eurythmy, sometimes referred to as "visible speech and song". According to the principles of eurythmy, there are archetypal movements or gestures that correspond to every aspect of speech – the sounds (or phonemes), the rhythms, and the grammatical function – to every "soul quality" – joy, despair, tenderness, etc. – and to every aspect of music – tones, intervals, rhythms, and harmonies.

 

Philosophical ideas[edit]

Live through deeds of love, and let others live understanding their unique intentions: this is the fundamental principle of free human beings.

Rudolf Steiner, Philosophy of Freedom. Chapter 9

 

Goethean science[edit]

See also: Goethean science

In his commentaries on Goethe's scientific works, written between 1884 and 1897, Steiner presented Goethe's approach to science as essentially phenomenological in nature, rather than theory- or model-based. He developed this conception further in several books, The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World-Conception (1886) and Goethe's Conception of the World (1897), particularly emphasizing the transformation in Goethe's approach from the physical sciences, where experiment played the primary role, to plant biology, where both accurate perception and imagination were required to find the biological archetypes (Urpflanze), and postulated that Goethe had sought but been unable to fully find the further transformation in scientific thinking necessary to properly interpret and understand the animal kingdom.[108] Steiner emphasized the role of evolutionary thinking in Goethe's discovery of the intermaxillary bone in human beings; Goethe expected human anatomy to be an evolutionary transformation of animal anatomy.[108] Steiner defended Goethe's qualitative description of color as arising synthetically from the polarity of light and darkness, in contrast to Newton's particle-based and analytic conception.

 

Particular organic forms can be evolved only from universal types, and every organic entity we experience must coincide with some one of these derivative forms of the type. Here the evolutionary method must replace the method of proof. We aim not to show that external conditions act upon one another in a certain way and thereby bring about a definite result, but that a particular form has developed under definite external conditions out of the type. This is the radical difference between inorganic and organic science.

 

— Rudolf Steiner, The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception, Chapter XVI, "Organic Nature"

Knowledge and freedom[edit]

See also: Philosophy of Freedom

Steiner approached the philosophical questions of knowledge and freedom in two stages. In his dissertation, published in expanded form in 1892 as Truth and Knowledge, Steiner suggests that there is an inconsistency between Kant's philosophy, which posits that all knowledge is a representation of an essential verity inaccessible to human consciousness, and modern science, which assumes that all influences can be found in the sensory and mental world to which we have access. Steiner considered Kant's philosophy of an inaccessible beyond ("Jenseits-Philosophy") a stumbling block in achieving a satisfying philosophical viewpoint.[109]

 

Steiner postulates that the world is essentially an indivisible unity, but that our consciousness divides it into the sense-perceptible appearance, on the one hand, and the formal nature accessible to our thinking, on the other. He sees in thinking itself an element that can be strengthened and deepened sufficiently to penetrate all that our senses do not reveal to us. Steiner thus considered what appears to human experience as a division between the spiritual and natural worlds to be a conditioned result of the structure of our consciousness, which separates perception and thinking. These two faculties give us not two worlds, but two complementary views of the same world; neither has primacy and the two together are necessary and sufficient to arrive at a complete understanding of the world. In thinking about perception (the path of natural science) and perceiving the process of thinking (the path of spiritual training), it is possible to discover a hidden inner unity between the two poles of our experience.[54]:Chapter 4 Truth, for Steiner, is paradoxically both an objective discovery and yet "a free creation of the human spirit, that never would exist at all if we did not generate it ourselves. The task of understanding is not to replicate in conceptual form something that already exists, but rather to create a wholly new realm, that together with the world given to our senses constitutes the fullness of reality."[110]

 

In the Philosophy of Freedom, Steiner further explores potentials within thinking: freedom, he suggests, can only be approached gradually with the aid of the creative activity of thinking. Thinking can be a free deed; in addition, it can liberate our will from its subservience to our instincts and drives. Free deeds, he suggests, are those for which we are fully conscious of the motive for our action; freedom is the spiritual activity of penetrating with consciousness our own nature and that of the world,[111] and the real activity of acting in full consciousness.[54]:133–4 This includes overcoming influences of both heredity and environment: "To be free is to be capable of thinking one's own thoughts – not the thoughts merely of the body, or of society, but thoughts generated by one's deepest, most original, most essential and spiritual self, one's individuality."[10]

 

Steiner affirms Darwin's and Haeckel's evolutionary perspectives but extended this beyond its materialistic consequences; he sees human consciousness, indeed, all human culture, as a product of natural evolution that transcends itself. For Steiner, nature becomes self-conscious in the human being. Steiner's description of the nature of human consciousness thus closely parallels that of Solovyov:[112]

 

Spiritual science[edit]

See also: Anthroposophy and Rudolf Steiner's exercises for spiritual development

 

Rudolf Steiner 1900

In his earliest works, Steiner already spoke of the "natural and spiritual worlds" as a unity.[32] From 1900 on, he began lecturing about concrete details of the spiritual world(s), culminating in the publication in 1904 of the first of several systematic presentations, his Theosophy: An Introduction to the Spiritual Processes in Human Life and in the Cosmos. As a starting point for the book Steiner took a quotation from Goethe, describing the method of natural scientific observation,[113] while in the Preface he made clear that the line of thought taken in this book led to the same goal as that in his earlier work, The Philosophy of Freedom.[114]

 

In the years 1903–1908 Steiner maintained the magazine "Lucifer-Gnosis" and published in it essays on topics such as initiation, reincarnation and karma, and knowledge of the supernatural world.[115] Some of these were later collected and published as books, such as How to Know Higher Worlds (1904/5) and Cosmic Memory. The book An Outline of Esoteric Science was published in 1910. Important themes include:

 

the human being as body, soul and spirit;

the path of spiritual development;

spiritual influences on world-evolution and history; and

reincarnation and karma.

Steiner emphasized that there is an objective natural and spiritual world that can be known, and that perceptions of the spiritual world and incorporeal beings are, under conditions of training comparable to that required for the natural sciences, including self-discipline, replicable by multiple observers. It is on this basis that spiritual science is possible, with radically different epistemological foundations than those of natural science. He believed that natural science was correct in its methods but one-sided for exclusively focusing on sensory phenomena, while mysticism was vague in its methods, though seeking to explore the inner and spiritual life. Anthroposophy was meant to apply the systematic methods of the former to the content of the latter[116][117]

 

For Steiner, the cosmos is permeated and continually transformed by the creative activity of non-physical processes and spiritual beings. For the human being to become conscious of the objective reality of these processes and beings, it is necessary to creatively enact and reenact, within, their creative activity. Thus objective spiritual knowledge always entails creative inner activity.[32] Steiner articulated three stages of any creative deed:[54]:Pt II, Chapter 1

 

Moral intuition: the ability to discover or, preferably, develop valid ethical principles;

Moral imagination: the imaginative transformation of such principles into a concrete intention applicable to the particular situation (situational ethics); and

Moral technique: the realization of the intended transformation, depending on a mastery of practical skills.

Steiner termed his work from this period onwards Anthroposophy. He emphasized that the spiritual path he articulated builds upon and supports individual freedom and independent judgment; for the results of spiritual research to be appropriately presented in a modern context they must be in a form accessible to logical understanding, so that those who do not have access to the spiritual experiences underlying anthroposophical research can make independent evaluations of the latter's results.[54] Spiritual training is to support what Steiner considered the overall purpose of human evolution, the development of the mutually interdependent qualities of love and freedom.[10]

 

Steiner and Christianity[edit]

In 1899 Steiner experienced what he described as a life-transforming inner encounter with the being of Christ; previously he had little or no relation to Christianity in any form. Then and thereafter, his relationship to Christianity remained entirely founded upon personal experience, and thus both non-denominational and strikingly different from conventional religious forms.[10] Steiner was then 38, and the experience of meeting the Christ occurred after a tremendous inner struggle. To use Steiner's own words, the "experience culminated in my standing in the spiritual presence of the Mystery of Golgotha in a most profound and solemn festival of knowledge."[118]

 

Christ and human evolution[edit]

Steiner describes Christ as the unique pivot and meaning of earth's evolutionary processes and human history, redeeming the Fall from Paradise.[119] He understood the Christ as a being that unifies and inspires all religions, not belonging to a particular religious faith. To be "Christian" is, for Steiner, a search for balance between polarizing extremes[119]:102–3 and the ability to manifest love in freedom.[10]

 

Central principles of his understanding include:

 

The being of Christ is central to all religions, though called by different names by each.

Every religion is valid and true for the time and cultural context in which it was born.

Historical forms of Christianity need to be transformed in our times in order to meet the ongoing evolution of humanity.

In Steiner's esoteric cosmology, the spiritual development of humanity is interwoven in and inseparable from the cosmological development of the universe. Continuing the evolution that led to humanity being born out of the natural world, the Christ being brings an impulse enabling human consciousness of the forces that act creatively, but unconsciously, in nature.[120]

 

Divergence from conventional Christian thought[edit]

Steiner's views of Christianity diverge from conventional Christian thought in key places, and include gnostic elements.[108] However, unlike many gnostics, Steiner affirms the unique and actual physical Incarnation of Christ in Jesus at the beginning of the Christian era.

 

One of the central points of divergence with conventional Christian thought is found in Steiner's views on reincarnation and karma.

 

Steiner also posited two different Jesus children involved in the Incarnation of the Christ: one child descended from Solomon, as described in the Gospel of Matthew; the other child from Nathan, as described in the Gospel of Luke.[94] He references in this regard the fact that the genealogies in these two gospels list twenty-six (Luke) to forty-one (Matthew) completely different ancestors for the generations from David to Jesus. See Genealogy of Jesus for alternative explanations of this radical divergence.

 

Steiner's view of the second coming of Christ is also unusual. He suggested that this would not be a physical reappearance, but rather, meant that the Christ being would become manifest in non-physical form, in the "etheric realm" – i.e. visible to spiritual vision and apparent in community life – for increasing numbers of people, beginning around the year 1933. He emphasized that the future would require humanity to recognize this Spirit of Love in all its genuine forms, regardless of how this is named. He also warned that the traditional name, "Christ", might be used, yet the true essence of this Being of Love ignored.[108]

 

The Christian Community[edit]

In the 1920s, Steiner was approached by Friedrich Rittelmeyer, a Lutheran pastor with a congregation in Berlin, who asked if it was possible to create a more modern form of Christianity. Soon others joined Rittelmeyer – mostly Protestant pastors and theology students, but including several Roman Catholic priests. Steiner offered counsel on renewing the spiritual potency of the sacraments while emphasizing freedom of thought and a personal relationship to religious life. He envisioned a new synthesis of Catholic and Protestant approaches to religious life, terming this "modern, Johannine Christianity".[94]

 

The resulting movement for religious renewal became known as "The Christian Community". Its work is based on a free relationship to the Christ, without dogma or policies. Its priesthood, which is open to both men and women, is free to preach out of their own spiritual insights and creativity.

 

Steiner emphasized that the resulting movement for the renewal of Christianity was a personal gesture of help to a movement founded by Rittelmeyer and others independently of his anthroposophical work.[94] The distinction was important to Steiner because he sought with Anthroposophy to create a scientific, not faith-based, spirituality.[119] He recognized that for those who wished to find more traditional forms, however, a renewal of the traditional religions was also a vital need of the times.

 

Reception[edit]

See also: Anthroposophy § Reception

Steiner's work has influenced a broad range of notable personalities. These include philosophers Albert Schweitzer, Owen Barfield and Richard Tarnas;[32] writers Saul Bellow,[121] Andrej Belyj,[122][123][124] Michael Ende,[125] Selma Lagerlöf,[126] Edouard Schuré, David Spangler,[citation needed] and William Irwin Thompson;[32] child psychiatrist Eva Frommer;[127] economist Leonard Read;[128] artists Josef Beuys,[129] Wassily Kandinsky,[130][131] and Murray Griffin;[132] esotericist and educationalist George Trevelyan;[133] actor and acting teacher Michael Chekhov;[134] cinema director Andrei Tarkovsky;[135] composers Jonathan Harvey[136] and Viktor Ullmann;[137] and conductor Bruno Walter.[138] Olav Hammer, though sharply critical of esoteric movements generally, terms Steiner "arguably the most historically and philosophically sophisticated spokesperson of the Esoteric Tradition."[139]

 

Albert Schweitzer wrote that he and Steiner had in common that they had "taken on the life mission of working for the emergence of a true culture enlivened by the ideal of humanity and to encourage people to become truly thinking beings".[140]

 

Anthony Storr stated about Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy: "His belief system is so eccentric, so unsupported by evidence, so manifestly bizarre, that rational skeptics are bound to consider it delusional."[141]

 

Robert Todd Carroll has said of Steiner that "Some of his ideas on education – such as educating the handicapped in the mainstream – are worth considering, although his overall plan for developing the spirit and the soul rather than the intellect cannot be admired".[142] Steiner's translators have pointed out that his use of Geist includes both mind and spirit, however,[143] as the German term Geist can be translated equally properly in either way.[144]

 

The 150th anniversary of Rudolf Steiner's birth was marked by the first major retrospective exhibition of his art and work, 'Kosmos - Alchemy of the everyday'. Organized by Vitra Design Museum, the traveling exhibition presented many facets of Steiner's life and achievements, including his influence on architecture, furniture design, dance (Eurythmy), education, and agriculture (Biodynamic agriculture).[145] The exhibition opened in 2011 at the Kunstmuseum in Stuttgart, Germany,[146]

 

Scientism[edit]

See also: Anthroposophy: Scientific basis

Olav Hammer has criticized as scientism Steiner's claim to use scientific methodology to investigate spiritual phenomena that were based upon his claims of clairvoyant experience.[139] Steiner regarded the observations of spiritual research as more dependable (and above all, consistent) than observations of physical reality. However, he did consider spiritual research to be fallible[2]:p. 618 and held the view that anyone capable of thinking logically was in a position to correct errors by spiritual researchers.[147]

 

Race and ethnicity[edit]

Steiner's work includes both universalist, humanist elements and historically influenced racial assumptions.[148] Due to the contrast and even contradictions between these elements, "whether a given reader interprets Anthroposophy as racist or not depends upon that reader's concerns".[149] Steiner considered that by dint of its shared language and culture, each people has a unique essence, which he called its soul or spirit.[139] He saw race as a physical manifestation of humanity's spiritual evolution, and at times discussed race in terms of complex hierarchies that were largely derived from 19th century biology, anthropology, philosophy and theosophy. However, he consistently and explicitly subordinated race, ethnicity, gender, and indeed all hereditary factors, to individual factors in development.[149] For Steiner, human individuality is centered in a person's unique biography, and he believed that an individual's experiences and development are not bound by a single lifetime or the qualities of the physical body.[33] More specifically:

 

Steiner occasionally characterized specific races, nations and ethnicities in ways that have been termed racist by critics.[150] This includes descriptions by him of certain races and ethnic groups as flowering, others as backward, or destined to degenerate or disappear.[149] He presented explicitly hierarchical views of the spiritual evolution of different races,[151] including—at times, and inconsistently—portraying the white race, European culture or Germanic culture as representing the high point of human evolution as of the early 20th century, although he did describe them as destined to be superseded by future cultures.[149]

Throughout his life Steiner consistently emphasized the core spiritual unity of all the world's peoples and sharply criticized racial prejudice. He articulated beliefs that the individual nature of any person stands higher than any racial, ethnic, national or religious affiliation.[13][94] His belief that race and ethnicity are transient and superficial, and not essential aspects of the individual,[149] was partly rooted in his conviction that each individual reincarnates in a variety of different peoples and races over successive lives, and that each of us thus bears within him or herself the heritage of many races and peoples.[149][152] Toward the end of his life, Steiner predicted that race will rapidly lose any remaining significance for future generations.[149] In Steiner's view, culture is universal, and explicitly not ethnically based; he saw Goethe and idealist philosophy in particular as the source of ideas that could be drawn upon by any culture, and he vehemently criticized imperialism.[153]

In the context of his ethical individualism, Steiner considered "race, folk, ethnicity and gender" to be general, describable categories into which individuals may choose to fit, but from which free human beings can and will liberate themselves.[33]

 

Judaism[edit]

During the years when Steiner was best known as a literary critic, he published a series of articles attacking various manifestations of antisemitism[154] and criticizing some of the most prominent anti-Semites of the time as "barbaric" and "enemies of culture".[155] On a number of occasions, however, Steiner suggested that Jewish cultural and social life had lost all contemporary relevance[156] and promoted full assimilation of the Jewish people into the nations in which they lived. This stance has come under severe criticism in recent years.[149]

 

Steiner was a critic of his contemporary Theodor Herzl's goal of a Zionist state, and indeed of any ethnically determined state, as he considered ethnicity to be an outmoded basis for social life and civic identity.[157]

 

Towards the end of Steiner's life and after his death, there were massive defamatory press attacks mounted on him by early National Socialist leaders (including Adolf Hitler) and other right-wing nationalists. These criticized Steiner's thought and anthroposophy as being incompatible with National Socialist racial ideology, and charged him of being influenced by his close connections with Jews and even that he himself was Jewish.[46][155]

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Steiner

... going beyond the finite infinite ...

 

Aristotle (384–322 BC), Metaphysics

The mysterious metaphysical novel impressed anyone who read it. Podcasters called it an "EXISTENTIAL MASTERPIECE" and non-paid or requested reviewers called it "EXCEPTIONAL."

 

It should not be missed from any shelf or library.

 

THE HIDDEN FACE by author M. I. VERRAS.

 

Amazon, EBay, Barnes&Noble, Walmart, Target and more.

 

Published by Palmetto Publishing.

Metaphysical vibe

Quantum realm

Mobile in time

Visit this location at Echoes, Metaphysics of frequencies in Second Life

Book jacket for the New Metaphysical Library no.006,

Contemporary, depending on whatever place in time you find yourself...

Chapters include: Staying on the Path, Ethics of Time Traveling, Avoid Imploding the Universe.

(oh and Olly Moss and Spacesick hold the crown for fake-retro book covers!)

www.flickr.com/photos/psychoactivartz/8290783042/sizes/l/...

The Hereios are in a funk. You will find them in exile today at the Metaphysical leper colony, the Flickr home to “castaways, cast outs, social rejects, pissed-off individuals, perverted hermits” and the self-exiled.

 

Over at 7 Days of Shooting the weekly theme is “A Book Title”.

 

All that, and the fact that it’s “Black and White Wednesday, sent me off in search of a book title about leper colonies. I know that’s all very strange – but it’s just how my mind works.

 

Anyway, I found a book title, and it is so utterly intriguing I put a hold on it at the library and will probably lay my hands on it this weekend. It sounds like fiction, but it’s a true story about a real place. Here’s a good recording about the place:

www.thestory.org/stories/2013-08/legacy-home-leprosy-pati...

 

Here’s a bit of the review from Goodreads:

  

In the Sanctuary of Outcasts

by Neil W. White III

 

White . . . had it all . . . The problem was he didn't have the money to pay for it. So he began kiting checks [and] found himself sentenced to a year and a half in prison. Justice, it turned out, would be more than skin deep. White was assigned to Carville, a prison that doubled as a leper colony. Everything about Carville was tailor-made to make White rethink his priorities. He didn't change overnight, but as White turned his incarceration into a crusade to end the stigma of leprosy, he learned lessons in humility, generosity, and the simple transcendent beauty of the human spirit. His story is well worth reading.

www.goodreads.com/book/show/6217732-in-the-sanctuary-of-o...

 

"The distinctive characteristic of a traditional society is order."

 

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

 

"A normal civilization is one that rests on principles, one in which all is ordered and in a hierarchy consistent with these principles, so that everything is seen to be an application and extension of a metaphysical doctrine."

 

René Guénon

Today's We're Here Challenge: Metaphysical Leper Colony

 

As soon as I read this challenge I thought of an abandoned building outside of Palm Springs. I have no idea what kind of building it was. The temperature of 101F made me hurry my photoshoot so it didn't come out how I'd pictured.

  

The weather forecast says it's going to rain. I think a need a little chocolate...

Starting with a chocolate bokeh :)

Giordano Bruno..Giordano Bruno (Latin: Iordanus Brunus Nolanus; Italian: [dʒorˈdano ˈbruno]; 1548 – February 17, 1600), born Filippo Bruno, was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, poet, and astrologer. He is celebrated for his cosmological theories, which went even further than the then-novel Copernican model: while supporting heliocentrism, Bruno also correctly proposed that the Sun was just another star moving in space, and claimed as well that the universe contained an infinite number of inhabited worlds, identified as planets orbiting other stars. Beginning in 1593, Bruno was tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition on charges including denial of several core Catholic doctrines (including the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and Transubstantiation). Bruno's pantheism was also a matter of grave concern.[4] The Inquisition found him guilty, and in 1600 he was burned at the stake in Rome's Campo de' Fiori. After his death he gained considerable fame, particularly among 19th- and early 20th-century commentators who regarded him as a martyr for science,[5] though scholars emphasize that Bruno's astronomical views were at most a minor component of the theological and philosophical beliefs that led to his trial.Bruno's case is still considered a landmark in the history of free thought and the future of the emerging sciences. In addition to his cosmological writings, Bruno also wrote extensively on the art of memory, a loosely organized group of mnemonic techniques and principles. Historian Frances Yates argues that Bruno was deeply influenced by Arab astrology, Neoplatonism, Renaissance Hermeticism, and the Egyptian god Thoth. Other studies of Bruno have focused on his qualitative approach to mathematics and his application of the spatial paradigms of geometry to language. Born Filippo Bruno in Nola (in Campania, then part of the Kingdom of Naples) in 1548, he was the son of Giovanni Bruno, a soldier, and Fraulissa Savolino. In his youth he was sent to Naples for education. He was tutored privately at the Augustinian monastery there, and attended public lectures at the Studium Generale. At the age of 17, he entered the Dominican Order at the monastery of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples, taking the name Giordano, after Giordano Crispo, his metaphysics tutor. He continued his studies there, completing his novitiate, and became an ordained priest in 1572 at age 24. During his time in Naples he became known for his skill with the art of memory and on one occasion traveled to Rome to demonstrate his mnemonic system before Pope Pius V and Cardinal Rebiba. In his later years Bruno claimed that the Pope accepted his dedication to him of the lost work On The Ark of Noah at this time. While Bruno was distinguished for outstanding ability, his taste for free thinking and forbidden books soon caused him difficulties. Given the controversy he caused in later life it is surprising that he was able to remain within the monastic system for eleven years. In his testimony to Venetian inquisitors during his trial, many years later, he indicates that proceedings were twice taken against him for having cast away images of the saints, retaining only a crucifix, and for having made controversial reading recommendations to a novice.[16] Such behavior could perhaps be overlooked, but Bruno's situation became much more serious when he was reported to have defended the Arian heresy, and when a copy of the banned writings of Erasmus, annotated by him, was discovered hidden in the convent privy. When he learned that an indictment was being prepared against him in Naples he fled, shedding his religious habit, at least for a time. First years of wandering, 1576–1583 Bruno first went to the Genoese port of Noli, then to Savona, Turin and finally to Venice, where he published his lost work On The Signs of the Times with the permission (so he claimed at his trial) of the Dominican Remigio Nannini Fiorentino. From Venice he went to Padua where he met fellow Dominicans who convinced him to wear his religious habit again. From Padua he went to Bergamo and then across the Alps to Chambéry and Lyon. His movements after this time are obscure. The earliest depiction of Bruno is an engraving published in 1715 in Germany, presumed based on a lost contemporary portrait. In 1579 he arrived in Geneva. As D.W. Singer, a Bruno biographer, notes, "The question has sometimes been raised as to whether Bruno became a Protestant, but it is intrinsically most unlikely that he accepted membership in Calvin's communion"During his Venetian trial he told inquisitors that while in Geneva he told the Marchese de Vico of Naples, who was notable for helping Italian refugees in Geneva, "I did not intend to adopt the religion of the city. I desired to stay there only that I might live at liberty and in security." Bruno had a pair of breeches made for himself, and the Marchese and others apparently made Bruno a gift of a sword, hat, cape and other necessities for dressing himself; in such clothing Bruno could no longer be recognized as a priest. Things apparently went well for Bruno for a time, as he entered his name in the Rector's Book of the University of Geneva in May 1579. But in keeping with his personality he could not long remain silent. In August he published an attack on the work of Antoine de la Faye, a distinguished professor. He and the printer were promptly arrested. Rather than apologizing, Bruno insisted on continuing to defend his publication. He was refused the right to take sacrament. Though this was eventually reversed, he left Geneva.

He went to France, arriving first in Lyon, and thereafter settling for a time (1580–1581) in Toulouse, where he took his doctorate in theology and was elected by students to lecture in philosophy. It seems he also attempted at this time to return to the Catholic fold, but was denied absolution by the Jesuit priest he approached. When religious strife broke out in the summer of 1581, he relocated to Paris. There he held a cycle of thirty lectures on theological topics, and he also began to gain fame for his prodigious memory. Bruno's feats of memory were based, at least in part, on his elaborate system of mnemonics, but some of his contemporaries found it easier to attribute them to magical powers. His talents attracted the benevolent attention of the king Henry III. The king summoned him to the court. Bruno subsequently reported "I got me such a name that King Henry III summoned me one day to discover from me if the memory which I possessed was natural or acquired by magic art. I satisfied him that it did not come from sorcery but from organised knowledge; and, following this, I got a book on memory printed, entitled The Shadows of Ideas, which I dedicated to His Majesty. Forthwith he gave me an Extraordinary Lectureship with a salary." In Paris Bruno enjoyed the protection of his powerful French patrons. During this period, he published several works on mnemonics, including De umbris idearum (On The Shadows of Ideas, 1582), Ars Memoriae (The Art of Memory, 1582), and Cantus Circaeus (Circe's Song, 1582). All of these were based on his mnemonic models of organised knowledge and experience, as opposed to the simplistic logic-based mnemonic techniques of Petrus Ramus then becoming popular. Bruno also published a comedy summarizing some of his philosophical positions, titled Il Candelaio (The Torchbearer, 1582). In the 16th century dedications were, as a rule, approved beforehand, and hence were a way of placing a work under the protection of an individual. Given that Bruno dedicated various works to the likes of King Henry III, Sir Philip Sidney, Michel de Castelnau (French Ambassador to England), and possibly Pope Pius V, it is apparent that this wanderer had experienced a meteoric rise and moved in powerful circles. England, 1583–1585 Woodcut illustration of one of Giordano Bruno's less complex mnemonic devices In April 1583, Bruno went to England with letters of recommendation from Henry III as a guest of the French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau. There he became acquainted with the poet Philip Sidney (to whom he dedicated two books) and other members of the Hermetic circle around John Dee, though there is no evidence that Bruno ever met Dee himself. He also lectured at Oxford, and unsuccessfully sought a teaching position there. His views spurred controversy, notably with John Underhill, Rector of Lincoln College and subsequently bishop of Oxford, and George Abbot, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury. Abbot mocked Bruno for supporting "the opinion of Copernicus that the earth did go round, and the heavens did stand still; whereas in truth it was his own head which rather did run round, and his brains did not stand still",[22] and reports accusations that Bruno plagiarized Ficino's work. Still, the English period was a fruitful one. During that time Bruno completed and published some of his most important works, the six "Italian Dialogues," including the cosmological tracts La Cena de le Ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper, 1584), De la Causa, Principio et Uno (On Cause, Principle and Unity, 1584), De l'Infinito, Universo e Mondi (On the Infinite, Universe and Worlds, 1584) as well as Lo Spaccio de la Bestia Trionfante (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, 1584) and De gl' Heroici Furori (On the Heroic Frenzies, 1585). Some of these were printed by John Charlewood. Some of the works that Bruno published in London, notably The Ash Wednesday Supper, appear to have given offense. It was not the first time, nor was it to be the last, that Bruno's controversial views coupled with his abrasive sarcasm lost him the support of his friends. John Bossy has advanced the theory that, while staying in the French Embassy in London, Bruno was also spying on Catholic conspirators, under the pseudonym 'Fagot', for Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth's Secretary of State.

Last years of wandering, 1585–1592 In October 1585, after the French embassy in London was attacked by a mob, Bruno returned to Paris with Castelnau, finding a tense political situation. Moreover, his 120 theses against Aristotelian natural science and his pamphlets against the mathematician Fabrizio Mordente soon put him in ill favor. In 1586, following a violent quarrel about Mordente's invention, the differential compass, he left France for Germany. Woodcut from "Articuli centum et sexaginta adversus huius tempestatis mathematicos atque philosophos," Prague 1588 In Germany he failed to obtain a teaching position at Marburg, but was granted permission to teach at Wittenberg, where he lectured on Aristotle for two years. However, with a change of intellectual climate there, he was no longer welcome, and went in 1588 to Prague, where he obtained 300 taler from Rudolf II, but no teaching position. He went on to serve briefly as a professor in Helmstedt, but had to flee again when he was excommunicated by the Lutherans. During this period he produced several Latin works, dictated to his friend and secretary Girolamo Besler, including De Magia (On Magic), Theses De Magia (Theses On Magic) and De Vinculis In Genere (A General Account of Bonding). All these were apparently transcribed or recorded by Besler (or Bisler) between 1589 and 1590.[24] He also published De Imaginum, Signorum, Et Idearum Compositione (On The Composition of Images, Signs and Ideas, 1591).

The year 1591 found him in Frankfurt. Apparently, during the Frankfurt Book Fair,[citation needed] he received an invitation to Venice from the patrician Giovanni Mocenigo, who wished to be instructed in the art of memory, and also heard of a vacant chair in mathematics at the University of Padua. At the time the Inquisition seemed to be losing some of its impetus, and Venice seemed especially safe as it was the most liberal state in Italy; therefore Bruno was lulled into making the fatal mistake of returning to Italy. He went first to Padua, where he taught briefly, and applied unsuccessfully for the chair of mathematics, which was assigned instead to Galileo Galilei one year later. Bruno accepted Mocenigo's invitation and moved to Venice in March 1592. For about two months he functioned as an in-house tutor to Mocenigo. When Bruno announced his plan to leave Venice to his host, the latter, who was unhappy with the teachings he had received and had apparently developed a personal rancour towards Bruno, denounced him to the Venetian Inquisition, which had Bruno arrested on May 22, 1592. Among the numerous charges of blasphemy and heresy brought against him in Venice, based on Mocenigo's denunciation, was his belief in the plurality of worlds, as well as accusations of personal misconduct. Bruno defended himself skillfully, stressing the philosophical character of some of his positions, denying others and admitting that he had had doubts on some matters of dogma. The Roman Inquisition, however, asked for his transferral to Rome. After several months and some quibbling the Venetian authorities reluctantly consented and Bruno was sent to Rome in February 1593. Imprisonment, trial and execution, 1593–1600 In Rome, Bruno's trial lasted seven years during which time he was imprisoned, lastly in the Tower of Nona. Some important documents about the trial are lost, but others have been preserved, among them a summary of the proceedings that was rediscovered in 1940. The numerous charges against Bruno, based on some of his books as well as on witness accounts, included blasphemy, immoral conduct, and heresy in matters of dogmatic theology, and involved some of the basic doctrines of his philosophy and cosmology. Luigi Firpo lists these charges made against Bruno by the Roman Inquisition: holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith and speaking against it and its ministers; holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith about the Trinity, divinity of Christ, and Incarnation; holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith pertaining to Jesus as Christ; holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith regarding the virginity of Mary, mother of Jesus; holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith about both Transubstantiation and Mass; claiming the existence of a plurality of worlds and their eternity; believing in metempsychosis and in the transmigration of the human soul into brutes; dealing in magics and divination. The trial of Giordano Bruno by the Roman Inquisition. Bronze relief by Ettore Ferrari, Campo de' Fiori, Rome.

Bruno continued his Venetian defensive strategy, which consisted in bowing to the Church's dogmatic teachings, while trying to preserve the basis of his philosophy. In particular, Bruno held firm to his belief in the plurality of worlds, although he was admonished to abandon it. His trial was overseen by the Inquisitor Cardinal Bellarmine, who demanded a full recantation, which Bruno eventually refused. On January 20, 1600, Pope Clement VIII declared Bruno a heretic and the Inquisition issued a sentence of death. According to the correspondence of Gaspar Schopp of Breslau, he is said to have made a threatening gesture towards his judges and to have replied: Maiori forsan cum timore sententiam in me fertis quam ego accipiam ("Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it"). He was turned over to the secular authorities. On February 17, 1600, in the Campo de' Fiori (a central Roman market square), with his "tongue imprisoned because of his wicked words", he was burned at the stake.[29] His ashes were dumped into the Tiber river. All of Bruno's works were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1603. Inquisition cardinals who judged Giordano Bruno were: Cardinal Bellarmino (Bellarmine), Cardinal Madruzzo (Madruzzi), Cardinal Camillo Borghese (later Pope Paul V), Domenico Cardinal Pinelli, Pompeio Cardinal Arrigoni, Cardinal Sfondrati, Pedro Cardinal De Deza Manuel, Cardinal Santorio (Archbishop of Santa Severina, Cardinal-Bishop of Palestrina). Physical appearance The earliest likeness of Bruno is an engraving published in 1715[30] and cited by Salvestrini as "the only known portrait of Bruno". Salvestrini suggests that it is a re-engraving made from a now lost original.This engraving has provided the source for later images. The records of Bruno's imprisonment by the Venetian inquisition in May 1592 describe him as a man "of average height, with a hazel coloured beard and the appearance of being about forty years of age". Alternately, a passage in a work by George Abbot indicates that Bruno was of diminutive stature: "When that Italian Didapper, who intituled himselfe Philotheus Iordanus Brunus Nolanus, magis elaborata Theologia Doctor, &c with a name longer than his body...". The word "didapper" used by Abbot is the derisive term which in period meant "a small diving waterfowl".Cosmology

Cosmology before Bruno. Illuminated illustration of the Ptolemaic geocentric conception of the Universe. The outermost text reads "The heavenly empire, dwelling of God and all the selected" Despite Copernicus' recent publication of his heliocentric work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, during Bruno's time most educated Catholics subscribed to the Aristotelian geocentric view that the earth was the center of the universe, and that all heavenly bodies revolved around it. The ultimate limit of the universe was the primum mobile, whose diurnal rotation was conferred upon it by a transcendental God, not part of the universe (although, as the kingdom of heaven, adjacent to it[34]), a motionless prime mover and first cause. The fixed stars were part of this celestial sphere, all at the same fixed distance from the immobile earth at the center of the sphere. Ptolemy had numbered these at 1,022, grouped into 48 constellations. The planets were each fixed to a transparent sphere. In the first half of the 15th century Nicolaus Cusanus (not to be confused with Copernicus a century later) reissued[citation needed] the ideas formulated in Antiquity by Democritus and Lucretius and dropped the Aristotelean cosmos. He envisioned an infinite universe, whose center was everywhere and circumference nowhere, with countless rotating stars, the Earth being one of them, of equal importance. He also considered that neither were the rotational orbits circular, nor was the movement uniform. In the second half of the 16th century, the theories of Copernicus (1473–1543) began diffusing through Europe. Copernicus conserved the idea of planets fixed to solid spheres, but considered the apparent motion of the stars to be an illusion caused by the rotation of the Earth on its axis; he also preserved the notion of an immobile center, but it was the Sun rather than the Earth. Copernicus also argued the Earth was a planet orbiting the Sun once every year. However he maintained the Ptolemaic hypothesis that the orbits of the planets were composed of perfect circles—deferents and epicycles—and that the stars were fixed on a stationary outer sphere. Few astronomers of Bruno's time accepted Copernicus's heliocentric model. Among those who did were the Germans Michael Maestlin (1550–1631), Christoph Rothmann, Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), the Englishman Thomas Digges, author of A Perfit Description of the Caelestial Orbes, and the Italian Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). Curiously, Bruno's Nolan compatriot, Nicola Antonio Stigliola, born just two years before Bruno himself, believed in the Copernican model. The two, however, probably never met after their youth. Bruno's cosmology Bruno believed (and praised Copernicus for establishing a scientific explanation for the fact[citation needed]) that the Earth revolves around the sun, and that the apparent diurnal rotation of the heavens is an illusion caused by the rotation of the Earth around its axis. Bruno also held (following Nicholas of Cusa[citation needed]) that because God is infinite the universe would reflect this fact in boundless immensity. The universe is then one, infinite, immobile.... It is not capable of comprehension and therefore is endless and limitless, and to that extent infinite and indeterminable, and consequently immobile. Bruno also asserted that the stars in the sky were really other suns like our own, around which orbited other planets. He indicated that support for such beliefs in no way contradicted scripture or true religion. In 1584, Bruno published two important philosophical dialogues in which he argued against the planetary spheres (Christoph Rothmann did the same in 1586 as did Tycho Brahe in 1587). Bruno's infinite universe was filled with a substance—a "pure air," aether, or spiritus—that offered no resistance to the heavenly bodies which, in Bruno's view, rather than being fixed, moved under their own impetus (momentum). Most dramatically, he completely abandoned the idea of a hierarchical universe. The Earth was just one more heavenly body, as was the Sun. God had no particular relation to one part of the infinite universe more than any other. God, according to Bruno, was as present on Earth as in the Heavens, an immanent God, the One subsuming in itself the multiplicity of existence, rather than a remote heavenly deity.Bruno also affirmed that the universe was homogeneous, made up everywhere of the four elements (water, earth, fire, and air), rather than having the stars be composed of a separate quintessence. Essentially, the same physical laws would operate everywhere, although the use of that term is anachronistic. Space and time were both infinite. There was no room in his stable and permanent universe for the Christian notions of divine creation and Last Judgement. In Bruno's model, the Sun was simply one more star, and the stars all suns, each with its own planets. Bruno saw a solar system of a sun/star with planets as the fundamental unit of the universe. All these planets constituted an infinite number of inhabited worlds, a philosophical position known as cosmic pluralism. According to Bruno, an infinite God necessarily created an infinite universe, formed of an infinite number of solar systems, separated by vast regions full of aether, because empty space could not exist (Bruno did not arrive at the concept of a galaxy). Comets were part of a synodus ex mundis of stars, and not—as other authors maintained at the time—ephemeral creations, divine instruments, or heavenly messengers. Each comet was a world, a permanent celestial body, formed of the four elements. Bruno's cosmology is marked by infinitude, homogeneity, and isotropy, with planetary systems distributed evenly throughout. Matter follows an active animistic principle: it is intelligent and discontinuous in structure, made up of discrete atoms. This animism (and a corresponding disdain for mathematics as a means to understanding) is the most dramatic respect in which Bruno's cosmology differs from a modern scientific understanding of the universe. During the late 16th century, and throughout the 17th century, Bruno's ideas were held up for ridicule, debate, or inspiration. Margaret Cavendish, for example, wrote an entire series of poems against "atoms" and "infinite worlds" in Poems and Fancies in 1664. Bruno's true, if partial, vindication would have to wait for the implications and impact of Newtonian cosmology. Bruno's overall contribution to the birth of modern science is still controversial. Some scholars follow Frances Yates stressing the importance of Bruno's ideas about the universe being infinite and lacking geocentric structure as a crucial crosspoint between the old and the new. Others see in Bruno's idea of multiple worlds instantiating the infinite possibilities of a pristine, indivisible One, a forerunner of Everett's many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. While most academics note Bruno's theological position as pantheism, physicist and philosopher Max Bernhard Weinstein in his Welt- und Lebensanschauungen, Hervorgegangen aus Religion, Philosophie und Naturerkenntnis ("World and Life Views, Emerging From Religion, Philosophy and Nature"), wrote that the theological model of pandeism was strongly expressed in the teachings of Bruno, especially with respect to the vision of a deity which had no particular relation to one part of the infinite universe more than any other, and was immanent, as present on Earth as in the Heavens, subsuming in itself the multiplicity of existence. Retrospective views of Bruno The monument to Bruno in the place he was executed, Campo de' Fiori in Rome.

41°53′44.16″N 12°28′19.80″E Late Vatican position The Vatican has published few official statements about Bruno's trial and execution. In 1942, Cardinal Giovanni Mercati, who discovered a number of lost documents relating to Bruno's trial, stated that the Church was perfectly justified in condemning him. On the 400th anniversary of Bruno's death, in 2000, Cardinal Angelo Sodano declared Bruno's death to be a "sad episode" but, despite his regret, he defended Bruno's prosecutors, maintaining that the Inquisitors "had the desire to serve freedom and promote the common good and did everything possible to save his life."[38] In the same year, Pope John Paul II did make a general apology for the deaths of prominent philosophers and scientists due to the Inquisition. A martyr of science

Some authors have characterized Bruno as a "martyr of science," suggesting parallels with the Galileo affair which began around 1610. They assert that, even though Bruno's theological beliefs, or perceptions of them by others, were an important factor in his heresy trial, his Copernicanism and cosmological beliefs played a significant role in the outcome.

"It should not be supposed", writes A. M. Paterson of Bruno and his "heliocentric solar system," that he "reached his conclusions via some mystical revelation....His work is an essential part of the scientific and philosophical developments that he initiated." Paterson echoes Hegel in writing that Bruno "ushers in a modern theory of knowledge that understands all natural things in the universe to be known by the human mind through the mind's dialectical structure." Ingegno writes that Bruno embraced the philosophy of Lucretius, "aimed at liberating man from the fear of death and the gods." Characters in Bruno's Cause, Principle and Unity desire "to improve speculative science and knowledge of natural things," and to achieve a philosophy "which brings about the perfection of the human intellect most easily and eminently, and most closely corresponds to the truth of nature" Other scholars oppose such views, and claim Bruno's martyrdom to science to be exaggerated, or outright false. For Yates, while "nineteenth century liberals" were thrown "into ecstasies" over Bruno's Copernicanism, "Bruno pushes Copernicus' scientific work back into a prescientific stage, back into Hermetism, interpreting the Copernican diagram as a hieroglyph of divine mysteries." Theological heresy In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy Hegel writes that Bruno's life represented "a bold rejection of all Catholic beliefs resting on mere authority." Alfonso Ingegno states that Bruno's philosophy "challenges the developments of the Reformation, calls into question the truth-value of the whole of Christianity, and claims that Christ perpetrated a deceit on mankind... Bruno suggests that we can now recognize the universal law which controls the perpetual becoming of all things in an infinite universe."A. M. Paterson says that, while we no longer have a copy of the official papal condemnation of Bruno, his heresies included "the doctrine of the infinite universe and the innumerable worlds" and his beliefs "on the movement of the earth". Michael White notes that the Inquisition may have pursued Bruno early in his life on the basis of his opposition to Aristotle, interest in Arianism, reading of Erasmus, and possession of banned texts.[48] White considers that Bruno's later heresy was "multifaceted" and may have rested on his conception of infinite worlds. "This was perhaps the most dangerous notion of all... If other worlds existed with intelligent beings living there, did they too have their visitations? The idea was quite unthinkable." Frances Yates rejects what she describes as the "legend that Bruno was prosecuted as a philosophical thinker, was burned for his daring views on innumerable worlds or on the movement of the earth." Yates however writes that "the Church was... perfectly within its rights if it included philosophical points in its condemnation of Bruno's heresies" because "the philosophical points were quite inseparable from the heresies." According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "in 1600 there was no official Catholic position on the Copernican system, and it was certainly not a heresy. When [...] Bruno [...] was burned at the stake as a heretic, it had nothing to do with his writings in support of Copernican cosmology." Similarly, the Catholic Encyclopedia (1908) asserts that "Bruno was not condemned for his defence of the Copernican system of astronomy, nor for his doctrine of the plurality of inhabited worlds, but for his theological errors, among which were the following: that Christ was not God but merely an unusually skillful magician, that the Holy Ghost is the soul of the world, that the Devil will be saved, etc." The website of the Vatican Secret Archives, discussing a summary of legal proceedings against Bruno in Rome, states: "In the same rooms where Giordano Bruno was questioned, for the same important reasons of the relationship between science and faith, at the dawning of the new astronomy and at the decline of Aristotle's philosophy, sixteen years later, Cardinal Bellarmino, who then contested Bruno's heretical theses, summoned Galileo Galilei, who also faced a famous inquisitorial trial, which, luckily for him, ended with a simple abjuration." Artistic depictions Following the 1870 Capture of Rome by the newly created Kingdom of Italy and the end of the Church's temporal power over the city, the erection of a monument to Bruno on the site of his execution became feasible. The monument was sharply opposed by the clerical party, but was finally erected by the Rome Municipality and inaugurated in 1889. A statue of a stretched human figure standing on its head designed by Alexander Polzin depicting Bruno's death at the stake was placed in Potsdamer Platz station 52°30′35.4″N 13°22′33.5″E in Berlin on March 2, 2008.Retrospective iconography of Bruno shows him with a Dominican cowl but not tonsured. Edward Gosselin has suggested that it is likely Bruno kept his tonsure at least until 1579, and it is possible that he wore it again thereafter.

An idealized animated version of Bruno appears in the first episode of the 2014 television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. In this depiction, Bruno is shown with a more modern look, without tonsure and wearing clerical robes and without his hood. Cosmos presents Bruno as an impoverished philosopher who was ultimately executed due to his refusal to recant his belief in other worlds, a portrayal that was criticized as simplistic or historically inaccurate. Appearances in fiction Bruno and his theory of 'the coincidence of contraries' (coincidentia oppositorum) play an important role in James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake. Joyce wrote in a letter to his patroness, Harriet Shaw Weaver, 'His philosophy is a kind of dualism – every power in nature must evolve an opposite in order to realise itself and opposition brings reunion'. Amongst his numerous allusions to Bruno in his novel, including his trial and torture, Joyce plays upon Bruno's notion of coincidentia oppositorum through applying his name to word puns such as "Browne and Nolan" (name of Dublin printers) and '"brownesberrow in nolandsland". Bruno Giordano features as the hero in a series of historical crime novels by S.J. Parris (pseudonym of Stephanie Merritt).

The Last Confession by Morris West (posthumously published) is a fictional autobiography of Bruno, ostensibly written shortly before his execution. In 1973 the biographic drama Giordano Bruno was released, an Italian/French movie directed by Giuliano Montaldo, starring Gian Maria Volonté as Bruno. The computer game In Memoriam features a lead character who claims to be Bruno, returned from the dead to seek vengeance. Bruno features as a main character in the historical segments of John Crowley's mystical Ægypt tetralogy of novels. The story covers his education as a Dominican and his investigation for heresy, and presents multiple versions of his execution on the Campo de' Fiori. His name appears and he is recognized in the novel Children of God by Mary Doria Russell. Deborah Harkness' A Discovery of Witches mentions Bruno and quotes from Eroici furori: "Desire urges me on, as fear bridles me." He is mentioned in 'A Man against a Background of Flames' by Paul Hoggart (2013). Giordano Bruno Foundation] The Giordano Bruno Foundation (German: Giordano Bruno Stiftung) is a non-profit foundation based in Germany that pursues the "Support of Evolutionary Humanism". It was founded by entrepreneur Herbert Steffen in 2004. The Giordano Bruno Foundation is considered critical of religion, which it characterizes as detrimental to cultural evolution. Giordano Bruno Memorial Award

The SETI League makes an annual award honoring the memory of Giordano Bruno to a deserving person or persons who have made a significant contribution to the practice of SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence). The award was proposed by sociologist Donald Tarter in 1995 on the 395th anniversary of Bruno's death. The trophy presented is called a Bruno. Astronomical objects named after Bruno The 22 km impact crater Giordano Bruno on the far side of the Moon is named in his honor, as are the main belt asteroids 5148 Giordano and 13223 Cenaceneri; the latter is named for one of his works.

 

METAPHYSICAL TORSION AND CELESTIAL ABANDONMENT / THE FINAL / CHRISTELLE GEISER & AEON VON ZARK / NAKED EYE PROJECT BIENNE / ALTERED STATE SERIE / THE WEIRD DREAM / PORTRAIT.

Kharkiv,Ukraine

Grand Rapids, Michigan "Frozen Photowalk" with....

Don: www.flickr.com/photos/12295985@N05

Gary: www.flickr.com/photos/gsyrba

Molly: www.flickr.com/photos/itsonlyjustme

Tom: www.flickr.com/photos/13566761@N06

Evidence and Mystery

 

God created the world out of nothing; this is the teaching of the Semitic theologies, and by it they answer the following difficulty: if God had made the world out of a preexisting substance, that substance must be either itself created, or else Divine. The creation is not God, it cannot therefore emanate from Him; there is an unbridgeable hiatus between God and the world, neither can become the other; the orders of magnitude or of reality, or of perfection, are incommensurable.

 

The main concern of this reasoning is not a disinterested perception of the nature of things, but the safeguarding of a simple and unalterable notion of God, while making allowance for a mentality that is more active than contemplative. The aim is therefore to provide, not a metaphysical statement that does not engage the will or does not appear to do so, but a key notion calculated to win over souls rooted in willing and acting rather than in knowing and contemplating; the metaphysical limitation is here a consequence of the priority accorded to what is effective for the governing and saving of souls. That being so, one is justified in saying that Semitic religious thought is by force of circumstances a kind of dynamic thought with moral overtones, and not a static thought in the style of the Greek or Hindu wisdom.

 

From the point of view of the latter, the idea of emanation, in place of creatio ex nihilo, in no way compromises either the transcendence or the immutability of God; between the world and God there is at once discontinuity and continuity, depending on whether our conception of the Universe is based on a scheme of concentric circles or on one of radii extending outward from the center to the periphery: according to the first mode of vision, which proceeds from the created to the Uncreated, there is no common measure between the contingent and the Absolute; according to the second mode of vision, which proceeds from the Principle to its manifestation, there is but one Real, which includes everything and excludes only nothingness, precisely because the latter has no reality whatsoever. The world is either a production drawn from the void and totally other than God, or else it is a manifestation "freely necessary" and "necessarily free" of Divinity or of Its Infinitude, liberty as well as necessity being Divine perfections.

 

As tor the contention that the creationist concept is superior to the so-called emanationist or pantheistic concepts because it is Biblical and Christ-given, and that the Platonic doctrine cannot be right because Plato cannot be superior either to Christ or the Bible, this has the fault of leaving on one side the real fundamentals of the problem.

 

First, what is rightly or wrongly called "emanationism" is not an invention of Plato, it can be found in the most diverse sacred texts; second, Christ, while being traditionally at one with the creationist thesis, nevertheless did not teach it explicitly and did not deny the apparently opposed thesis. The message of Christ, like that of the Bible, is not a priori a teaching of metaphysical science; it is above all a message of salvation, but one that necessarily contains, in an indirect way and under cover of an appropriate symbolism, metaphysics in its entirety. The opposition between the Divine Bible and human philosophy, or between Christ and Plato, therefore has no meaning so far as the metaphysical truths in question are concerned; that the Platonic perspective should go farther than the Biblical perspective brings no discredit on the Bible, which teaches what is useful or indispensable from the point of view of the moral or spiritual good of a particular humanity, nor does it confer any human superiority on the Platonists, who may be mere thinkers just as they may be saints, according to how much they assimilate of the Truth they proclaim.

 

For the Platonists it is perfectly logical that the world should be the necessary manifestation of God and that it should be without origin; if the monotheistic Semites believe in a creation out of nothing and in time, it is evidently not, as some have suggested, because they think that they have the right or the privilege of accepting a "supralogical" thesis that is humanly absurd; for the idea of creation appears to them on the contrary as being the only one that is reasonable and therefore the only one that is capable oflogical demonstration,as is proved precisely by tlfe method of argumentationused in theology.

 

Starting from the axiom that God created the worldout of nothing, the Semites reason thus, grosso modo: since God alone has Being, the world could not share it with Him; there had there fore to be a time when the world did not exist; it is God alone who could give it existence. On the religious plane, which so far as cosmology is concerned demands no more than the minimum necessary or useful for salvation, this idea of creation is fully sufficient, and the logical considerations which support it are perfectly plausible within the framework of their limitation; for they at least convey a key truth that allows a fuller understanding of the nature of God, as it is pleased to reveal itself in the monotheistic religions.

 

More than once we have had occasion to mention the following erroneous argument: if God creates the world in response to an inward necessity, as is affirmed by the Platonists, this must mean that He is obliged to create it, and that therefore He is not free; since this is impossible, the creation can only be a gratuitous act. One might as well say that if God is One, or if He is a Trinity, or if He is all-powerful, or if He is good, He must be obliged to be so, and His nature is thus the result of a constraint, quod absit.

 

It is always a case of the same incapacity to conceive of antinomic realities, and to understand that if liberty, the absence of constraint, is a perfection, necessity, the absence of arbitrariness, is another.

 

If, in opposition to the Pythagorean-Platonic perspective, the concept is put forward of an Absolute which is threefold in its very essence, therefore devoid of the degrees of reality that alone can explain the hypostatic polarizations - an Absolute which creates without metaphysical necessity and which in addition acts without cause or motive - and if at the same time the right is claimed to a sacred illogicality in the name of an exclusive "Christian supernaturalism'', then an explanation is due of what logic is and what human reason is; for if our intelligence, in its very structure, is foreign or even opposedto Divine Truth, what then is it, and why did God give it to us? Or to put it the other way round, what sort of Divine message is it that is opposed to the laws of an intelligence to which it is essentially addressed, and what does it signify that man was created "in the image of God"?

 

[According to Genesis "God created man in his own image" and "male and female created He them." Now according to one Father of the Church, the sexes are not made in the image of God; only the features that are identical in the two sexes resemble God, for the simple reason that God is neither man nor woman. This reasoning is fallacious because, although it is evident that God is not in Himself a duality, He necessarily comprises the principia! Duality in His Unity, exactly as He comprises the Trinity or the Quaternity; and how can one refuse to admit that the Holy Virgin has a prototype in God not only as regards her humanity but also as regards her femininity?]

 

And what motive could induce us to accept a message that was contrary, not to our earthly materialism or to ourpassion, but to the very substance of our spirit? For the "wisdom according to the flesh" of Saint Paul does not embrace every form of metaphysics that does not know the Gospels, nor is it logic as such, for the Apostle was logical; what it denotes is the reasonings whereby worldly men seek to prop up their passions and their pride, such as Sophism and Epicureanism and, in our days, the current philosophy of the world. "Wisdom according to the flesh" is also the gratuitous philosophy that does not lead us inwards and which contains no door opening on to spiritual realization; it is philosophy of the type of"art for art's sake” which commits one to nothing and is vain and pernicious for that very reason.

 

The incomprehension by theologians of Platonic and Oriental emanationism arises from the fact that monotheism puts in parenthesis the notion, essential metaphysically, of Divine Relativity or Maya; it is this parenthesis, or in practice this ignorance, which inhibits an understanding of the fact that there is no incompatability whatever between the "absolute Absolute", Beyond-Being, and the "relative Absolute", creative Being, and that this distinction is even crucial.

 

The Divine Maya, Relativity, is the necessary consequence of the very Infinitude of the Principle: it is because God is infinite that He comprises the dimension of relativity, and it is because He comprises that dimension that He manifests the world. To which it should be added: it is because the world is manifestation and not Principle that relativity, which at first was only determination, limitationand manifestation, gives rise to that particular modality constituting "evil". It is neither in the existence of evil things that evil lies nor in their existential properties nor in their faculties of sensation and of action, if it be a question of animate beings, nor even in the act insofar as it is the manifestation of a power; evil resides only in whatever is privative or negative with respect to good, and its function is to manifest in the world its aspect of separation from the Principle, and to play its part in an equilibrium and a rhythm necessitated by the economy of the created Universe.

 

In this way evil (wholly evil though it be when looked at in isolation) attaches itself to a good and is dissolved qua evil when one looks at it in its cosmic context and in its universal function.

 

Platonists feel no need whatever to try to fill the gap which might seem to exist between the pure Absolute and the determination and creative Absolute; it is precisely because they are aware of relativity in divinis and of the Divine cause of that relativity that they are emanationists.

 

In other words, the Hellenists, if they did not have a word to express it, nevertheless possessed in their own way the concept of Maya, and it is their doctrine of emanation that proves it.

  

[...] Four thousand volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what the soul is [...]

-- Quote by Voltaire (French Philosopher and Writer. One of the greatest of all French authors, 1694-1778)

 

Nikon D70 and Nikon D200, 3 shots collage for info let's see the comments.

 

Rome, Italy (April, 2014)

Giorgio de Chirico 1888-1978 Rome

Composizione metafisica con testa di Giove

Metaphysical composition with head of Jupiter v 1970

Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (Palais de Tokyo)

 

LE SURRÉALISME

 

Selon Wikipédia : "Le surréalisme est un mouvement artistique du XXe siècle, comprenant l’ensemble des procédés de création et d’expression (peinture, musique, cinéma, littérature...) utilisant toutes les forces psychiques (automatisme, rêve, inconscient) libérées du contrôle de la raison et en lutte contre les valeurs reçues. Il est caractérisé par sa transdisciplinarité (peinture, objet, collage, cinéma, costume...) et l'importante collaboration entre ses membres.

En 1924, André Breton le définit dans le premier Manifeste du surréalisme comme un « automatisme psychique pur, par lequel on se propose d'exprimer, soit verbalement, soit par écrit, soit de toute autre manière, le fonctionnement réel de la pensée. Dictée de la pensée, en l'absence de tout contrôle exercé par la raison, en dehors de toute préoccupation esthétique ou morale […] ».

Le surréalisme repose sur la croyance à la réalité supérieure de certaines formes d'associations négligées jusqu'à lui, à la toute-puissance du rêve, au jeu désintéressé de la pensée. Il tend à ruiner définitivement tous les autres mécanismes psychiques et à se substituer à eux dans la résolution des principaux problèmes de la vie. En réactualisant la dimension poétique de la peinture, le surréalisme se heurte à la question de la représentation du non-figurable et de l'indicible."

C'est une excellente définition bien évidemment, mais le Surréalisme se comprend mieux encore si on le situe dans l'histoire de la peinture européenne. Si on le met en perspective avec le passé artistique et idéologique de l'Europe, car les deux sont intimement liés, et avec l'art contemporain officiel actuel.

 

Le Surréalisme est un courant de l'Art Moderne (1815-1950) qui adopte le dogme fondamental, qui a donné son nom à cette période de l'art européen : L'impératif du nouveau, du changement en art, et notamment en peinture.

Le Surréalisme est la trace, un des symptômes, d'une mutation idéologique majeure en Europe. Une rupture idéologique qui est commune à l'Europe et aux Amériques et qui va se répandre dans le monde entier pendant tout le 20è siècle. Sauf quelques poches de résistances.

Une nouvelle religion, celle de la Modernité, a commencé d'apparaître en Europe au siècle des "Lumières". "Les Lumières" c'est une auto-appellation qui signifie clairement que tout ce qui est avant elles, et tout ce qui n'est pas elles, est "Ombres". Le passé est dépassé, l'avenir sera radieux, à condition de changer, évoluer, révolutionner, progresser en détruisant tous les archaïsmes des Temps Anciens.

Le Surréalisme est donc dans le domaines des arts une suite des "Lumières" et une conséquence de la croissance des connaissances scientifiques et du perfectionnement des techniques qui se sont mis en place à partir de la fin du 18è siècle.

L'homme doit inventer sans cesse pour se forger un avenir radieux, sur terre. Et cela dans tous les domaines, scientifiques, techniques, politiques, éthiques et esthétiques. "La révolution d'abord et toujours" est le titre d'un manifeste surréaliste d'André Breton. Arthur Rimbaud a professé "il faut être absolument moderne". "Transformer le monde". "Changer la vie" sont des slogans qui apparaissent à cette époque et qui sont encore vivants de nos jours dans tous les aspects de la vie de l'homme d'Occident. Depuis la seconde guerre mondiale il n'a pas existé de discours politique ni d'idéologie active qui ne proclame, jusqu'à la nausée, la nécessité de "changer la vie".

Cette adoration de la Déesse Modernité, du Dieu Progrès est une rupture considérable dans les croyances depuis les origines de l'homme. Pendant des millénaires les sociétés humaines ont vécu dans le respect absolu du passé. Une des toutes premières religions dans les sociétés humaines est le culte des ancêtres. L'homme est le fils de ses pères, de la Chine à l'Egypte, de la Grèce à Rome, des cultures les plus humbles aux grandes civilisations. Un Romain professe "tout ce qui est ancien m'est cher". Il faut observer, au passage, que cette idéologie n'a pas empêché les Romains de développer une civilisation complexe et de conquérir tout le monde méditerranéen et même au delà. Pas plus qu'elle n'a été un obstacle à la fondation et à la pérennisation de grandes civilisations durables et prospères comme L'Egypte, l'Inde, la Chine....

 

L'Art Moderne se caractérise par sa volonté obstinée d'inventer des esthétiques nouvelles. Il faut imaginer une beauté autre, et trouver des significations différentes de celles dont l'art européen a été porteur dans le passé. L'Art Moderne, annoncé dès le début du 20è siècle par les peintres romantiques (Delacroix) et les pré-impressionnistes a été un facteur tout à fait remarquable de renouvellement des formes esthétiques dans la peinture européenne. Cette volonté d'invention, de changement s'exprime en peinture, dans l'emploi des couleurs, dans la recherche d'un nouveau dessin, dans la nouveauté et la diversité des thèmes abordés.

 

Les techniques utilisées par les peintres européens, au cours du 19è siècle, pour créer un art nouveau sont multiples, sauf omission, on peut les recenser ainsi :

1) "La Peinture Plate": par exemple avec Manet, plus tard Gauguin, Maurice Denis, Raoul Dufy, les Nabis... Cette technique réduit ou supprime les volumes et la perspective et privilégie les lignes. Le peintre ne s'efforce plus de rendre le monde en trois dimensions, comme il l'a fait pendant des siècles. Le peintre propose une vision du monde qui accepte la planéité du tableau. L'artiste peint en deux dimensions. C'est un retour à une esthétique qui était celle de la peinture Byzantine, Romane et Gothique. Avec d'autres thèmes évidemment, puisque une des caractéristiques de l'art moderne est la raréfaction des motifs religieux, ou des sujets inspirés par l'antiquité grecque et romaine.

2) La décomposition de la lumière et des couleurs, en taches et en points."Le Tachisme". Les Pré-impressionnistes (École de Barbizon, Corot) Les Impressionnistes. Les Pointillistes (Seurat, Signac)

3) Les couleurs arbitraires ou symboliques. L'artiste s'écarte des couleurs "réelles", celles perçues par l’œil et le cerveau humain, et invente des couleurs apparemment arbitraires: Gauguin, les Fauves, le symbolisme, le surréalisme ... C'est une technique que la peinture romane et gothique avaient mis en pratique très régulièrement.

4) La valorisation de l'Esquisse. L'esquisse a été pendant des siècles, seulement, ce que son nom indique : une Étude préparatoire à un tableau définitif. Au 19è l'esquisse devient un procédé définitif, terminal, d'expression artistique.

5) La décomposition de l'espace et des volumes du monde réel, en lignes et surfaces, plus ou moins synthétiques et significatives. (Cézanne, Braque).

6) La "multiplicité des points de vue" sur un objet ou un sujet. Technique qui cherche à rendre le réel comme si on le regardait, en même temps, depuis plusieurs points de l'espace. (Les Cubistes)

Toutes ces techniques tendent à inventer, dans le domaine de la peinture, une beauté qui s'éloigne de l'imitation de la Nature, de la reproduction du réel qui a été la règle en Europe depuis le 15è siècle.

7° L'art abstrait. C'est seulement avec l'art abstrait de la seconde génération, pas guère avant les années 1900, que les peintres quittent le monde de notre réel en développant toute une série d'images tirées de la géométrie euclidienne. C'est le règne des carrés, des rectangles, des triangles, des losanges, des polygones réguliers ou irréguliers, des lignes droites, courbes, ondulées... Car à force de "torturer" le réel la peinture finit par le quitter. Littéralement, le peintre cesse de figurer le monde, il s'en abstrait.

L'Art Abstrait terminal témoigne de ce chemin vers la Modernité qui est la nouvelle religion des Temps.

 

Dans cette palette de techniques nouvelles le Surréalisme apparaît comme un art résolument figuratif. Il ne cultive pas l'abstraction.

De cette ancrage dans le figuratif les plus grands noms du surréalisme en peinture en témoignent :

René Magritte (1898-1967)

Salvador Dali (1904-1989)

Joan Miro (1893-1983)

Max Ernst (1891-1976)

Yves Tanguy (1900-1955)

Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978)

Outre quelques femmes comme Léonora Carrington (1917-2011).

Le Surréalisme privilégie un dessin très précis. L'esquisse est pratiquée à l'occasion, mais l'acuité des formes est plutôt caractéristique de cette école. Le style est aussi souvent celui de "la peinture plate" aux volumes aplatis et à la perspective réduite. Plus que par son style, en définitive proche du classicisme, c'est par ses thèmes que le Surréalisme est changement et donc modernité.

 

Au plan thématique, le Surréalisme se veut la peinture de l'absurde. C'est l'irruption, en grand, de l'absurde dans la peinture européenne. Une nouveauté, car l'absurde n'avait jamais été un thème très courant, sauf dans quelques rares œuvres ésotériques à destination de l'aristocratie.

L'absurde du Surréalisme n'est pas encore l'absurde de l'Art Contemporain Officiel : une cuvette de WC, une paire de lunettes sur des chaussures, une machine à écrire emballée dans du plastique. L'absurde surréaliste se veut le plus souvent gai, onirique.

Surtout le surréalisme n'a pas encore inventé le laid comme base de l' art. Le surréalisme se veut révolutionnaire, mais en restant dans le cadre du beau. Il n'est pas en rupture avec l'esthétique il recherche seulement un changement d'esthétique. Un changement d'esthétique qui se situe plus dans les thèmes que dans les techniques. C'est un art qui veut explorer le domaine du rêve, mais qui ne cherche pas donner des cauchemars.

Le sens ? Le Surréalisme se veut signifiant, mais à un autre niveau que celui du conscient. Son absurde à des raisons qui sont censées nous échapper au premier regard. De toute façon le spectateur pourra imaginer le sens à sa façon. Le surréalisme se refuse à tenir un discours guidé par la logique ordinaire. Il veut nous faire sortir d'un réel qu'il juge trop prosaïque. Le peintre surréaliste est censé atteindre aux mystères irrationnels de l'inconscient humain. C'est une époque très fascinée par les séductions de la nouvelle "science" psychanalytique.

 

L'obsession du nouveau rencontre nécessairement des limites, comme toutes les obsessions. Certaines œuvres surréalistes sentent beaucoup l'artifice. Il n'est pas facile de figurer, de représenter, c'est à dire d'amener à la conscience, le rêve, c'est à dire l'inconscient. Et il est peut être encore plus difficile de faire partager son inconscient, ou supposé tel, à d'autres.

Depuis la toute fin du 20è siècle et les débuts du 21è siècle l'humanité occidentale est tout juste en train d'apprendre que l'obsession du nouveau peut être totalement stérilisante, et déboucher sur des impasses, voire des destructions irréversibles.

Déjà, André Breton parlait de "tuer l'art".

C'est très exactement ce que s'est proposé l'art contemporain officiel à partir des années 1950.

En toute logique obsessionnelle du modernisme, après "l'art autrement", la nouveauté absolue c'était l'Anti-Art, le Non-Art.

Après l'absurde aimable et fantaisiste du Surréalisme, la peinture est parvenue à l'absurde laid et sans espoir de l'Art Conceptuel, l'Art de l'Oeil Sommital.

 

THE SURREALISM

 

According to Wikipedia: "Surrealism is a 20th century artistic movement, including all creative and expressive processes (painting, music, cinema, literature...) using all psychological forces (automatism, dream, unconscious) liberated from the control of reason and in struggle against received values. It is characterized by its transdisciplinarity (painting, object, collage, cinema, costume...) and the important collaboration between its members.

In 1924, André Breton defined it in the first Manifesto of Surrealism as a "pure psychological automatism, by which we propose to express, either verbally, in writing or in any other way, the real functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, outside any aesthetic or moral concern...".

Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association that have been neglected until now, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to permanently ruin all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving the main problems of life1 (20th century). In updating the poetic dimension of painting, surrealism comes up against the question of the representation of the non-figurable and the unspeakable."

This is an excellent definition of course, but Surrealism is even better understood if we situate it in the history of European painting. If we put it in perspective with the artistic and ideological past of Europe, because the two are intimately linked, and with contemporary official contemporary art.

Surrealism is a current of Modern Art (1815-1950) that adopts the fundamental dogma that gave its name to this period of European art: the imperative of the new, of change in art, and in particular in painting.

Surrealism is the trace, one of the symptoms, of a major ideological mutation in Europe. An ideological rupture that is common to Europe and the Americas and that will spread throughout the world throughout the 20th century. Except for a few pockets of resistance.

A new religion, that of Modernity, began to appear in Europe in the Age of Enlightenment. "The Lights" is a self-appellation that clearly means that everything that precedes them, and everything that does not obey their logic , is "Shadows". The past is outdated, the future will be bright, provided that we change, evolve, revolutionize, progress by destroying all the archaisms of the ancient times.

Surrealism is therefore in the field of the arts a continuation of the "Enlightenment" and a consequence of the growth of scientific knowledge and the improvement of techniques that were put in place from the end of the 18th century.

Human must constantly invent to forge a bright future for himself on earth. And this in all fields, scientific, technical, political, ethical and aesthetic. "Revolution first and always" is the title of André Breton's surrealist manifesto. Arthur Rimbaud professed "you have to be absolutely modern". "Transforming the world." "Changing life" are slogans that appeared at that time and are still alive today in all aspects of the life of the Western man. Since the Second World War there has been no political discourse or active ideology that does not proclaim, until nausea, the need to "change life"

This worship of the Modern Goddess, of the God of Progress, is a considerable rupture in beliefs since the origins of man. For thousands of years, human societies have lived in absolute respect for the past. One of the very first religions in human societies is the cult of ancestors. Man is the son of his fathers, from China to Egypt, from Greece to Rome, from the most humble cultures to the great civilizations. A Roman professes "everything that is old is dear to me". It should be noted, in passing, that this ideology did not prevent the Romans from developing a complex civilization and conquering the entire Mediterranean world and even beyond. Nor has it been an obstacle to the foundation and perpetuation of great, lasting and prosperous civilizations such as Egypt, India, China....

 

Modern Art is characterized by its obstinate desire to invent new aesthetics. It is necessary to imagine a different beauty, and to find meanings different from those of which European art has been a carrier in the past. Modern Art, announced at the beginning of the 20th century by the romantic painters (Delacroix) and pre-impressionists, has been a remarkable factor in the renewal of aesthetic forms in European painting. This desire for invention and change is expressed in painting, by the use of colours, by the search for a new design, by the novelty and diversity of the themes addressed.

The techniques used by European painters during the 19th century to create a new art are numerous, unless omitted, they can be listed as follows:

1) "La Peinture Plate": for example with Manet, later Gauguin, Maurice Denis, Raoul Dufy, the Nabis... This technique reduces or eliminates volume and perspective and favours lines. The painter no longer strives to make the world three-dimensional, as he has done for centuries. The painter proposes a vision of the world that accepts the flatness of the painting. The artist paints in two dimensions. It is a return to an aesthetic that was that of Byzantine, Romanesque and Gothic painting. With other themes of course, since one of the characteristics of modern art is the increasing scarcity of religious motifs, or subjects inspired by Greek and Roman antiquity.

2) The decomposition of light and colours into spots and points: "The Tachism". The Pre-Impressionists (Barbizon School, Corot) The Impressionists. Les Pointillistes (Seurat, Signac)

3) Arbitrary or symbolic colours. The artist moves away from "real" colours, those perceived by the human eye and brain, and invents apparently arbitrary colours: Gauguin, the Fauns, symbolism, surrealism... It is a technique that Romanesque and Gothic painting had applied very regularly.

4) The valorization of the Sketch. The sketch has been for centuries, only, what its name suggests: a Preparatory Study for a final painting. In the 19th century, the sketch became a definitive, terminal process of artistic expression.

5) The decomposition of the space and volumes of the real world, into more or less synthetic and significant lines and surfaces. (Cézanne, Braque).

6) The "multiplicity of points of view" on an object or subject. A technique that seeks to render reality as if we were watching it, at the same time, from several points in space. (Cubists)

All these techniques tend to invent, in the field of painting, a beauty that is far removed from the imitation of Nature, from the reproduction of reality that has been the rule in Europe since the 15th century.

7° Abstract art. It was only with the abstract art of the second generation, not until the 1900s, that painters left the world of our reality by developing a whole series of images drawn from Euclidean geometry. It is the reign of squares, rectangles, triangles, diamonds, regular or irregular polygons, straight, curved, undulating lines.... Because by dint of "torturing" the real, painting ends up leaving it. Literally, the painter ceases to represent the world, he abstracts himself from it.

The final Abstract Art testifies to this path towards Modernity which is the new religion of the Times.

In this palette of new techniques, Surrealism appears as a resolutely figurative art. He does not cultivate abstraction.

The greatest names of surrealism in painting testify to this anchoring in the figurative:

René Magritte (1898-1967)

Salvador Dali (1904-1989)

Joan Miro (1893-1983)

Max Ernst (1891-1976)

Yves Tanguy (1900-1955)

Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978)

In addition to some women like Léonora Carrington (1917-2011).

Surrealism favours a very precise drawing. The sketch is occasionally practiced, but the sharpness of the forms is rather characteristic of this school. The style is also often that of "flat painting" with flattened volumes and reduced perspective. More than by its style, ultimately close to classicism, it is through its themes that Surrealism is change and therefore modernity.

 

On a thematic level, Surrealism is intended to be the painting of the absurd. It is the irruption, in great, of the absurd in European painting. A novelty, because the absurd had never been a very common theme, except in a few rare esoteric works for the aristocracy.

The absurdity of Surrealism is not yet the absurdity of Official Contemporary Art: a toilet bowl, a pair of glasses on shoes, a typewriter wrapped in plastic. The surrealist absurdity is most often meant to be cheerful, dreamlike.

Especially surrealism has not yet invented the ugly as the basis of art. Surrealism is revolutionary, but within the framework of beauty. He is not at odds with aesthetics, he is only looking for a change of aesthetics. A change of aesthetics that is more in the themes than in the techniques. It is an art that wants to explore the realm of dreams, but does not seek to give nightmares.

The meaning? Surrealism is meant to be meaningful, but at a level other than that of the conscious. Its absurdity has reasons that are supposed to escape us at first sight. In any case, the viewer will be able to imagine the meaning in his own way. Surrealism refuses to hold a discourse guided by ordinary logic. He wants to get us out of a reality that he considers too prosaic. The surrealist painter is supposed to reach into the irrational mysteries of the human unconscious. It is a time very fascinated by the seductions of the new psychoanalytical "science".

 

The obsession of the new necessarily encounters limits, as do all obsessions. Some surrealist works feel a lot of artifice. It is not easy to figure, to represent, i. e. to bring to consciousness, the dream, i. e. the unconscious. And it may be even more difficult to share your unconscious, or supposedly so, with others.

Since the very end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, Western humanity has only just learned that the obsession with the new can be totally sterilizing, and lead to dead ends, even irreversible destructions.

André Breton was already talking about "killing art".

This is exactly what official contemporary art has been proposing since the 1950s.

In accordance with the obsessive logic of modernity, after the "art differently", the absolute novelty was the Anti-Art, Non-Art.

After the absurd lovable and whimsical of the Surrealism, the painting has reached, the ugly and hopeless absurdity of Conceptual Art, the Art of the High Eye.

   

Sentimental Exploration's.

 

Metaphysics literarische Ästhetik systematische Dialoge Inspirationen ausgerichtet,

milieux philosophiques matérielles fondamentales visions subordonnées embrassant principes,

poesie composte esterni drammi legislative beni leggi concorsi di assistenza,

plé rannáin fóillíochta mearbhall tuiscint dealbh bhréige le chéile codanna údaraithe,

gwybodaeth ystyriaethau parhaus strategaethau reslo rhifyddol gwyddorau gwleidyddol arddangos gwallau,

similes species, perpetuis plures differentias rerum est episodic quae praestat casus tragoediis,

necesaria conexión prosa perceptible revelar secretos opuestos cosas inanimadas articulos para recreo o funciones se separa,

υποχωρώντας υπόλοιπα αυτοσυνείδησης γνωρίζοντας προς τα μέσα νόηση εκπρόσωπος αποφάσεις ξεφυτρώνουν απόψεις σαφή,

medidas distintas subsequentes autênticos princípios infinitos beleza modelar reino habita razões luminar,

基礎原理静止自然熟考文字行為を見つめ別送知覚フィギュア.

Steve.D.Hammond.

“There was something disquieting about the way an intimate object, seemingly withdrawn into its solemn steadfastness, could affect human emotions. Any old thing forgotten in a corner, if the eye dwelt on it, acquired an eloquence of its own, communicating its lyricism and magic to the kindred soul. If a neglected object of this kind were forcibly isolated, that is, divested of its warmth and of the protective coat of its environment, or even ironically combined with completely unrelated things, it would reassert its dignity in the new context and stand there, incomprehensible, weird, mysterious.”

 

—Werner Haftmann, Painting in the Twentieth Century (1982)

 

Visit this location at Echoes, Metaphysics of frequencies in Second Life

These pipes just go on forever. If they are parallel they will never meet...but since the universe is curved I think they converge in another dimension. Or maybe the curve around and connect to themselves.......

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"It is not metaphysically possible to kill the gods and seek to efface the imprint of the Divinity upon man without destroying man himself; the bitter experience of the modern world stands as overwhelming evidence to this truth. The face which God has turned toward the cosmos and man is none other than the face of man toward the Divinity and in fact the human face itself.

 

In all traditions the significance of the “face” is emphasized since it bears the direct imprint of the Divine upon the human. In the Quran there are several references to the “face of God” which have become sources of meditation for many Muslim sages.

 

One cannot “efface” the “face of God” without “effacing” man himself and reducing him to a faceless entity lost in an anthill. The cry of Nietzsche that “God is dead” could not but mean that “man is dead” as the history of the twentieth century has succeeded in demonstrating in so many ways."

Frome, Somerset, UK

 

Smena 8M

Svema 125 Film

Visit this location at Echoes, Metaphysics of frequencies in Second Life

Another necklace from the LIFESTRANDS series I’m doing.

Strictly speaking doctrinal knowledge is independent of the individual. But its actualization is not independent of the human capacity to act as a vehicle for it. He who possesses truth must none the less merit it although it is a free gift. Truth is immutable in itself, but in us it lives, because we live.

 

If we want truth to live in us we must live in it.

 

Knowledge only saves us on condition that it enlists all that we are, only when it is a way and when it works and transforms and wounds our nature even as the plough wounds the soil.

 

To say this is to say that intelligence and metaphysical certainty alone do not save; of themselves they do not prevent titans from falling. This is what explains the psychological and other precautions with which every tradition surrounds the gift of the doctrine.

 

When metaphysical knowledge is effective it produces love and destroys presumption. It produces love, that is to say the spontaneous directing of the will towards God and the perception of "myself" - and of God - in one's neighbour. It destroys presumption, for knowledge does not allow a man to overestimate himself or to underestimate others. By reducing to ashes all that is not God it orders all things.

 

All St. Paul says of charity concerns effective knowledge, for the latter is love, and he opposes it to theory inasmuch as theory is human concept. The Apostle desires that truth should be contemplated with our whole being and he calls this totality of contemplation "love".

 

Metaphysical knowledge is sacred. It is the right of sacred things to require of man all that he is.

 

Intelligence, since it distinguishes, perceives, as one might put it, proportions. The spiritual man integrates these proportions into his will, into his soul and into his life.

 

All defects are defects of proportion; they are errors that are lived. To be spiritual means not denying at any point with one's "being" what one affirms with one's knowledge, that is, what one accepts with the intelligence.

 

Truth lived: incorruptibility and generosity.

 

Since ignorance is all that we are and not merely our thinking, knowledge will also be all that we are to the extent to which our existential modalities are by their nature able to participate in truth.

 

Human nature contains dark elements which no intellectual certainty could, ipso facto, eliminate...

 

Pure intellectuality is as serene as a summer sky - serene with a serenity that is at once infinitely incorruptible and infinitely generous.

 

Intellectualism which "dries up the heart" has no connection with intellectuality.

 

The incorruptibility- or inviolability- of truth is bound up neither with contempt nor with avarice.

 

What is man's certainty? On the level of ideas it may be perfect, but on the level of life it but rarely pierces through illusion.

 

Everything is ephemeral and every man must die. No man is ignorant of this and no one knows it.

 

Man may have an interest that is quite illusory in accepting the most transcendent ideas and will readily believe himself to be superior to some other who, not having this interest (perhaps because he is too intelligent or too noble to have it) is sincere enough not to accept them, though he may all the same be more able to understand them than the other who accepts them. Man does not always accept truth because he understands it; often he believes he understands it because he is anxious to accept it.

 

People often discuss truths whereas they should limit themselves to discussing tastes and tendencies ...

 

Acuteness of intelligence is only a blessing when it is compensated by greatness and sweetness of the soul. It should not appear as a rupture of the equilibrium or as an excess which splits man in two. A gift of nature requires complementary qualities which allow of its harmonious manifestation; otherwise there is a risk of the lights becoming mingled with darkness.

 

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Frithjof Schuon

 

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Quoted in: The Essential Frithjof Schuon (edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr)

"Metaphysical Scene with Little Boat" presents a strikingly surreal landscape where the ordinary laws of nature are playfully suspended. The central image of a paper boat propped up by crutches evokes a sense of fragile buoyancy, as if the boat is on the cusp of setting sail on an unknown voyage. The fish swimming and sinking into the solid ground around it add to the dreamlike quality of the scene, blurring the lines between aquatic and terrestrial realms. The divers wandering this desert-like environment, typically a place devoid of such marine life, further accentuate the painting's surrealism. The backdrop of trees and mountains anchors the composition, providing a familiar reference point in an otherwise disorienting visual field. The sky, painted with clouds in exotic shapes, transitions from a serene blue to the warm hues of orange and yellow, reminiscent of a late afternoon sky, adding a beautiful contrast to the bizarre yet impactful tableau below. The artist has masterfully crafted a digital canvas that challenges perceptions and invites viewers to question the boundaries of reality.

.

 

Sergei Sharov

Post Metaphysical Interior - Homage to Carlo Carrà [1991]

Metaphysical certainty is not God, though it contains something of Him. This is why Sufis accompany even their certainties with this formula: ''And God is more wise".

 

A cult of the intelligence and mental passion take man further from truth. Intelligence withdraws as soon as man puts his trust in it alone. Mental passion pursuing intellectual intuition is like the wind which blows out the light of a candle.

 

Monomania of the spirit, with the unconsious pretension, the prejudice, the insatiability and the haste which are its concomitants, is incompatible with sanctity.

 

Sanctity introduces in the flux of thoughts an element of humility and of charity, and so of calm and of generosity. This element, far from being hurtful to the spiritual impetus or the sometimes violent force of truth, delivers the spirit from the vexations of passions and thus guarantees both the integrity of thought and the purity of inspiration.

 

According to the Sufis mental passion must be ranked as one of the "associations" with Satan, like other forms of"idolatry" of the passions. It could not directly have God for its object, for, were God its direct object, it would lose its specifically negative characteristics.

 

Man must beware of two things: first of replacing God, in practice if not in theory, by the functions and products of the intellect, or of considering Him only in connection with this faculty; and, secondly, of putting the "mechanical" factors of spirituality in the place of the human values - the virtues - or only considering virtues in relation to their "technical" utility and not in relation to their beauty.

 

Intelligence has only one nature, that of being luminous. But it has diverse functions and different modes of working and these appear as so many particular intelligences. Intelligence with a "logical", "mathematical" or- one might say - "abstract" quality is not enough for attaining all aspects of the real.

 

It would be impossible to insist too often on the importance of the "visual" or "aesthetic" function of the intellective faculty.

 

Everything is in reality like a play of alternations between what is determined in advance - starting from principles - and what is incalculable and in some way unforeseeable, of which we have to get to know by concrete identification and not by abstract "discernment".

 

In speculations about formal elements it would be a handicap

to lack this aesthetic function of intellect. A religion is revealed, not only by its doctrine, but also by its general form, and this has its own characteristic beauty, which is reflected in its every aspect from its "mythology" to its art.

 

Sacred art expresses Reality in relation to a particular spiritual vision. And aesthetic intelligence sees the manifestations of the Spirit even as the eye sees flowers or playthings.

 

Thus, for example, in order to understand Buddhism profoundly, if one is not a Buddhist born, it is not enough to study its doctrine; it is also necessary to penetrate into the language of Buddhist beauty as it appears in the sacramental image of the Buddha or in such features as the "sermon on the flower".

 

The aesthetic function of the intelligence - if you may call it

that for lack of a better term - enters not only into the form of every spiritual manifestation but also into the process of its manifestation.

 

Truth must be enunciated, not only in conformity with certain proportions, but also according to a certain rhythm. One cannot speak of sacred things 'just anyhow", nor can one speak of them without limitations.

 

Every manifestation has laws and these intelligence must observe in manifesting itself, or otherwise truth will suffer.

Intellect is not something cerebral, nor is it specifically human

or angelic. All beings "possess" it. If gold is not lead, that is because it "knows" the Divine better. Its "knowledge" is in its very form, and this amounts to saying that it does not belong to it itself, for matter could not know. None the less one can say that the rose differs from the water-lily by its intellectual particularity, by its "way of knowing" and so by its mode of intelligence.

 

Beings possess intelligence in their form to the extent that they are "peripheric" or "passive" and in their essence to the extent that they are "central", "active" and "conscious".

 

A noble animal or a lovely flower is "intellectually" superior to a base man.

 

God reveals himself to the plant in the form of the light of the

sun. The plant irresistibly turns itself towards the light; it could not be atheistical or impious.

 

The infallible "instinct" of animals is a lesser "intellect", and man's intellect may be called a higher "instinct". Between instinct and intellect there stands in some sense the reason, which owes its troubles to the fact that it constitutes a sort of "luciferian" duplication of the Divine Intelligence - the only intelligence there is.

 

Knowledge of facts depends on contingencies which could not enter into principial knowledge. The level of facts is, in certain respects, inverse in relation to that of principles in the sense that it includes modes and imponderables that are the extreme opposite of the wholly mathematical rigour of universal laws. At least this is so in appearance, for it goes without saying that universal principles are not contradicted.

 

Even beneath the veil of the inexhaustible diversity of what is possible their immutability can always be discerned, provided that the intelligence is in the requisite condition for being able to discern it.

 

If the intellect is, so to speak, sovereign and infallible on its own ground, it cannot exercise its discernment on the level of facts otherwise than conditionally. Moreover God may intervene on the level of facts with particular things willed by Himself that are at times unpredictable, and of such things principial knowledge could only take account a posteriori.

 

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Frithjof Schuon

 

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Quoted in: The Essential Frithjof Schuon (edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr)

  

Luminaire dans l'atrium, Université Paris VI

Le titre est emprunté au neuvième roman d'Amélie Nothom, publié en 2000 chez Albin Michel

 

Lamps in the Atrium, University Pierre and Marie Curie, Paris.

The title is taken from a short novel by the Belgian author Amélie Nothomb (2000). In English it is "The Character of Rain", but, in French, it is "Métaphysique des tubes" (Tub's metaphysics). The English translated edition of the novel was published by Faber and Faber.

 

Thank you Wikipédia for a part of the explanation.

Book jacket for the New Metaphysical Library no.064,

Everything you needed to know about bringing things back to life,

Chapters include: Life & Death (& Life Again), Building a Better Corpse, Feeding and Caring for your Undead.

Created beings come to birth in time: they enter the world, as it were, at some particular moment. Each creature, in its cosmic manifestation, is thus associated with its own spatio-temporal locus: it fits somewhere into the universal network of secondary causes. But yet it is not created by these causes, nor is its being confined to that spatio-temporal locus: for its roots extend beyond the cosmos into the timeless instant of the creative act. That is the veritable "beginning" to which Genesis alludes when it declares: „In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram”. It is "the day that the Lord God made the heaven and the earth, and every plant of the field before it sprung up in the earth, and every herb in the ground before it grew." [To be sure, this "before" is not to be understood in the sense of temporal precedence: that would be to miss the entire point! The precedence in question is ontological, or causal, as one could also say.]

 

Let there be no doubt about it: the creature is more —incomparably more!— than its visible manifestation. It does not coincide with the phenomenon. Even the tiniest plant that blooms for a fortnight and then is seen no more is vaster in its metaphysical roots than the entire cosmos in its visible form: for these roots extend into eternity. And how much more does this apply to man! "Before I formed thee in the womb, I knew thee." (Jer. 1:5).

 

Here then, in the scriptural and metaphysical teaching of the omnia simul, we have the definitive answer to evolutionism. With the adoption of an authentically metaphysical standpoint the seemingly interminable debate between the evolutionists and the so-called creationists has at last been put into perspective: it now becomes clear that both sides are in fact looking at only half the picture: the outer or phenomenal half, one could say, forgetting that things have also an inner dimension, an essential core which transcends the plane of the phenomenon.

 

From this truncated point of view, moreover, the riddle of origins becomes truly insoluble—for the simple reason that things ultimately derive, not from the phenomenal plane, but from the side of transcendence. Likewise, they grow and unfold their potential from inside out: the essential, in other words, has primacy over the phenomenal, whatever the empiricists might think. Metaphysics, therefore, is neither a luxury nor an idle speculation; it is there to complete the picture, and is needed if ever we are to make sense out of first origins or final ends. One might add that its neglect in modern times is both a symptom and cause of our contemporary intellectual predicament.

 

Getting back to the subject of evolution, no one doubts that living forms have emerged successively as evolutionists insist: this is an empirical fact, after all. Indeed, it is precisely what the fossil record does permit us to conclude.

 

What is objectionable in the evolutionist position, on the other hand, is that it oversteps what we actually know, first through the transformist hypothesis (for which there is no evidence at all), and secondly by maintaining that the process of speciation can be accounted for in terms of molecular accidents (an assumption which is not only unfounded but astronomically improbable to the point of absurdity).

 

The fact that these unpromising postulates have nonetheless commended themselves to countless individuals derives no doubt from the circumstance that in conjunction they seem to offer a rational means of approach to the mystery of life for minds closed to the metaphysical outlook. As one evolutionist has said: "It is better to think in terms of improbable events than not to think at all."

 

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Wolfgang Smith: Teilhardism and the New Religion

Homage to the hippy era.

 

I see this building and Wolseley, the area in which it is located as a last bastion of hippydom in Winnipeg. I used to regularly go to lunch in this building over 30 years ago at Mrs Lipton's, a former neighbourhood institution. The building was showing its advanced age even then.

 

The Metaphysical Moon is an antique store with limited hours of operation. The chalk board at the side advertises The Healing Edge Studio/Gallery for Art, Heart, Mind. I am glad that stuff like this is still around.

 

Across the street at this corner is an old fire hall now used as a private residence and soon to be a multi family residence.