PSYCHE’S VIEW
Translated from the French by JANE A. PRATT
Among the Fideli d’Amore vision is proportionate to the degrees of love, the faculty of finding proportionate to the heart. It is love that makes us see; the object seen is not the cause of the love.
—Henry Corbin
This year the question posed by the University of St. John of Jerusalem is formulated in two ways: first as a contrast between symbolic images: “Eyes of fire and eyes of flesh”; then as a comparison of philosophical methodologies: “Science and Gnosis.”
After the steering committee had enthusiastically chosen this question for our annual program a certain discomfort came over me. This may have been primarily because I am a specialist in symbols, and “fire” is never symbolically opposed to “flesh”; rather, all classical literature testifies that the vital impulses of the flesh are comparable to the heat of fire, and that probably—as Bachelard’s reveries1 have it—the primitive tinderbox was modelled on the hot rhythms of intercourse. Then I was led to enquire whether this unusual and symbolically erroneous opposition between flesh and fire did not overlie an identical misunderstanding of the opposition between knowledge and knowing, Science and Gnosis.
So in the first part of this paper we will ask when and in what way profane science became separated from the kind of knowledge that is integrated and salutary, since that is the definition of gnosis. Then we will quickly show the immediate consequences of this insupportable “splitting apart” of consciousness.
In the second part, by the light of “Psyche’s view”—as this is revealed to us in the tale of Apuleius, in its relatively modern seventeenth-century prolongations, and recently through its resurgence in contemporary therapeutic psychology—we will examine how a recovery of gnosis may be glimpsed today in the great crisis of values affecting the scientific West during the past two hundred years.
*
I will not delay over the process of “secularization,”2 but for some time, this process has been producing what-to maintain the imagery of sight—we will call a divergent “strabism” in Western consciousness.
We will leave to contemporary theology (called the theology of secularization) the responsibility for those fantasies which in the wake of Karl Barth along with Harvey Cox or Peter Berger have made even “desacralization” into an eccentricity of Judeo-Christianity!3 The only result of theological fantasms of a bad conscience, like these, is a response such as Carl Amery’s ecological neo-paganism.4 Neither will we go back—seriously this time—to the reflections of the historians and philosophers who have meditated on such questions as whether it was with Guillaume d’Auvergne or Siger de Brabant that the strabism in question began to show in a practical way (that is, to manifest itself in what the civilization did)5 or to ask whether, as one famous thesis holds, it was the ethics of Protestantism and the spirit of Capitalism in the sixteenth century that occasioned the divorce.6
No matter. But it is certain that by the seventeenth century, and particularly in France, the moment of divergence had blatantly occurred.7 The secularization of scientific knowledge had already been accomplished in 1620 when Bacon’s Novum Organum appeared and in 1637 with Descartes’s Discours. The splitting off of anthropological knowledge had already taken place in 1690 with Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding. Barely seventy years separated Bossuet’s Le Discours sur l’Histoire Universelle (1681) from the Discours préliminaire (1715) with which d’Alembert opened the century of the Encyclopaedists. In fact as early as 1697 Bayle had produced the famous dictionary that had such ambiguous ideological results.
But what always matters more than the bickering of scholastics—or scholars—is the way the intellectual sensibility (a term I prefer to “ideology” which is too dry) of a whole epoch is impregnated, or better, the way a myth is incarnated in a whole epoch. The Century of Louis XIV was the majestic preface to the Siécle des Lumières (Century of Lights). The Enlightenment and positivism flowed from it.
Mythically a whole network of images made up what would become a Promethean torch as the eighteenth century ended, the mythology of the Sun King, or the Apollonianism of the Classic Ideal. The Apollo theme, particularly when joined with the theme of Daphne, emerged again and again in counterpoint with the solar thought of the seventeenth century and at the beginning of the eighteenth. Bernini returned twice to this theme, in a painting and a sculpture; Poussin devoted a canvas to Apollon amoureux de Daphne (Apollo in Love with Daphne, 1663–64); Tiepolo also took up the theme; d’Assouçy made an opera ballet out of it, as did M. da Gagliano. Claude Lorrain put the figures of Apollo and Mercury into a landscape … and so on.
The paradigm of this Apollonianism—aside from its culmination in the realization of the Palace of Versailles (1670–82), marked with the theme of the Victorious Sun—was certainly the basic project of Descartes forty years earlier when he wrote his treatise Du Monde et de la lumière (On the World and Light),8 which was to provide a cosmogony and cosmology (observe the total comity of the scientific “method”!) starting with the phenomenon of light. Certainly one might suppose oneself to be concerned here with an entirely Biblical or Platonic metaphor issuing from the Fiat Lux of Genesis or the well-known myth of the cave in Book 10 of the Republic. But no! This was a century of opticians: it opened with Galileo’s telescope and closed with the philosophy of Spinoza, a maker of lenses.9 Descartes’s treatise On the World and Light, like his La Dioptrique, was obsessed by the phenomena of vision.
In the great philosophical disputes that now began, Cartesian dioptrics, model of all the mathematical physics that would come, stood for the reduction of the world, of matter—and that is what Leibnitz held against it—to geometrical and finally to algebraical laws of understanding. The dualistic cleavage between spirit and matter, so often denounced by Henry Corbin, and the conjuring away of the soul (or its reduction to rational spirit) were achieved. The absolute monarchy of the future Sun King (born a year after the publication of the Discours de la méthode in 1638) was prepared for by Descartes’s absolute method which in its “clarity and distinction”—both optical qualities—rested upon “evidence,” “simple seeing,” the bare fact of sight without mediation. After that, by way of Malebranche and Spinoza—and possibly through all the thinkers of the seventeenth century who were seemingly most opposed to each other: the Molinists and Jansenists, Bossuet and Fénelon—this absolutism of clear reason led to the emergence of the “Encyclopedic spirit.”10
An important thing to note here is that the myth was stronger, and more pregnant with effects upon this century than the disputes which would be called “ideological.” It mattered very little that Bossuet fulminated against the quietism of Fénelon, Boileau against the modernism of Charles Perrault; whether Molière attacked Visé or Boursault and Descartes attacked Gassendi, or whether the Uranists led by Mme. de Longueville opposed the Gobelins led by the Prince de Condé, the fact remained that they all spoke the same language which was an Apollonic language of Classical Idealism. It was Boileau in 1674 in L’Art poétique who formulated the rules for this language: “Nothing is beautiful except truth … therefore love reason …” To everyone, truth, the evident, the commonsensical seemed “natural.”
The price of this Apollianism was a split in consciousness and first as a split between science and faith, so evident in Pascal’s Pensées and Bayle’s Dictionary. But the faith was more and more distant and nameless. Already the consuming flash of the Lumières (Lights) had little by little reduced the God of Abraham and Jacob to the “God of learned men and philosophers.” Then, finally, the vague deism of men like Rousseau and Voltaire evaporated when triumphant Science no longer needed even that well-known chiquenaude(snap of the fingers) to explain the mechanics of nature. Psychology, too, was conjured away just after the birth of its name by the very people who would make use of that name later.11 In turning his attention to the soul Descartes had cut it in two; one part, entirely abstract and empty, would become the famous ego cogito, and the other, falling back to the level of neurology, would constitute the seat of modern psychophysiology.
After this reduction of consciousness to a single science and a single analytical and geometrical method, no choice remained to Western thought other than one between split consciousness with its distressing and inescapable dualisms and blindness. The West is one-eyed. It is blinded or half-blinded as the greatly punished figures in mythology always are: Tiresias was blinded for wanting to see Athena; Erymanthe, son of Apollo, for having seen Aphrodite; Ilos for disobeying Athena; Vesta blinded Antylos, and so on.
Like the familiar cyclops, the West sees everything with the same eye. Thus the distress of split consciousness was succeeded by the malady of one-dimensionality. And this last is what led conscienceless Western science, as though by the crematories’ glow, to the lightning blast at Hiroshima. I will not dwell on this picture: it is the picture that follows all attempts to escape the unhappy Kantian split by reductive philosophical thinking. Such a view is characterized by a century-long reductive myth which from Condorcet to Comte or Hegel has given if not a Cyclopian tone at least a Titanic12 one to all modern philosophy. The cyclopian philosophy resulting from this movement flattens out the nuance of difference by calling it antithesis. In wiping out differences it levels the hierarchies. The morality of our science is egalitarian, a leveling which is of service only to the half-blind Cyclops who confuses ends with means. Thus the theological and the metaphysical are reduced to the “positive,” the thesis to the antithesis, and the antithesis to the synthesis. In this way all knowledge (gnosis) is brought down to a science of the instant, to a method of knowing the here and now. The one dimensional language of Classical Idealism has set a bad example: for it is upon its reductive system, its flattening out of signs and defiance of symbols that our whole despairing pedagogy and all our disoriented information are presently based. This one-dimensional language has assimilated all romantic, symbolistic, and Freudian advances and bifurcations. It is as universal as a Latin without lexicon or Roman syntax. It levels all nuances—that is to say, all values—its inadequacy being equally “translatable” from Los Angeles to the Latin Quarter, and from there to the Unter den Linden. Altogether inadequate for the expression of soul, one-dimensionality constitutes the essential symptom of a sickness in our civilization which, beneath its linear logic and its wrinkleless future, is brooding a gigantic titanomachy. As Ricoeur said in criticizing structuralism, sophists are kings when language no longer makes any sense but “the sense of non-sense.”
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These disputed matters and reflections gain precision when one reads my friend James Hillman’s presentation of them in The Myth of Analysis.13 The whole first part of his book is devoted to the modes of psychological creativity—and refers back to the Apuleian legend of Eros and Psyche, while the second part is given over to a violent criticism of the “language of psychology” which he says “insults the soul” and sterilizes “metaphors into abstractions.”14 The language of psychology has died, it seems to me, of the lethal illness that has overtaken all language in Western culture. Indeed the angry question of this psychotherapist may be generally applicable when he asks, “What has happened to this language of psychology in a time of superb communication technics and democratic education?”15 That is the whole problem also for us who are philosophical anthropologists and to resolve it we must make use of the same solutions used by Hillman, as he continues on from Jung.
To begin with we must denounce the academic language of communications technics and mass education. The familiar Freudian-Marxist-Saussurian language blocking the entire system of knowledge with which the industry of our universities now pleases itself—the language of text-books, diplomas, organized contests, and the media—must be repudiated on pain of that “death of Man” upon which Foucault insists. To counter a sterile and inadequate dream-language truthful procedures have to be used. And truthful procedures oppose the axiological leveling of saying “nothing is true.” A philosophy claiming to be new because yesterday’s philosophy is worn out should have a correspondingly new organon.
Without delaying here over the psychological specifications for an adequate philosophical language, let us merely point up the methodology of the “New Psychological Spirit” that Hillman illustrates so well. This means abandoning the dualism, so tenacious in our Indo-European languages,16 in favor of a language that is “more discontinuous, now this and now that, guided as much by the synchronistic present as by the causal past, moving on a uroboric course, which is a circulation of the light and the darkness."17 This language is therefore not antithetic as philosophy from Socrates to Hegel has believed; it is at once metaleptic (guided by the aims of desire, present synchronicity, and past causality) and metabolic (that is, repetitive and differentiating). But metalepse and metabole are really the style of myth.18 The new language uses meta—not anti. This change of course has primordial importance: in the game of dialectics the antithesis is as good as the thesis and only the Titanic deus ex machina of historical becoming introduces the value of truth. By posing the problem as “meta” one reintroduces an internal hierarchy that escapes the Titanism of history. Seen in this perspective those who have been conquered by history and counted for lost are no longer necessarily in the wrong. Truth is reestablished as transcendent in relation to the world and as immanent in relation to the Man of Desire.19
We will not redefine myth here, I will just refer you to other places where I have given such definitions. We will not go back over that philosophy of ours where—in the wake of the greatest surrealist poetry, and of Jung and Henry Corbin—we can affirm along with Walter F. Otto that “Speech and myth are the same thing. Initially myth means the real word … speech about what is.”20 Thus, to honor Henry Corbin, we may certainly say that myth is the “language of the Imaginal.” Ordering dilemmas, as it does through its structure, myth is the center of hierarchy formation, the model by which values are established as neo-Platonism and Hermetism were well aware. That is why myths call for the intervention of those instances of supreme values: the Gods.
This language, at once “metaleptic and metabolic,” constitutes a dynamic source of multivocalism opposed to the strabismic univocalism, that linear language of the classic ideal, of mechanism and positivism. Moreover the procedures of truth in imaginal language permit more pertinent and comprehensive readings, and are more “enlightening,” than the Cartesian analyses of the manifestations of the human soul The procedures of mythical language are agents of truth. Let me show this in a non-dialectical way, for, in one and the same language, and in an ideology which appears on the surface to be homogenous, another language can arise in the chiaroscuro of myth; another ideology, and another myth can come to birth that nourish the depths of the first. And I insist that this has nothing to do with the dialectic succession of antithesis, but rather with the metaleptic and metabolic hollowing out of the hierarchic levels of the thesis.
*
Let us return now to our historical example, the “Century of Louis XIV” so well prefaced by that of Richelieu.21 That period from the Revolt of the Princes in 1614 to the death of Louis XIV in 1714 is characterized by the classical ideal and the myth of solar luminaries. Nietzsche was the first—thanks to a truly scholarly philology—to show that cultures live only through the depths of their contrasts and that in the end the Knowledge which really enables us to escape from nihilism is the Joyful Wisdom of the depths. Apollo shines only during the nighttime of his brother Dionysus. It is the same with the seventeenth and eighteenth Siécles de Lumières [Centuries of Lights]. Considering the first only, we may ask what kind of night-time hollowing out occurred during this century of Apollo redivivus. Rene Huyghe demonstrated that it was the “false unity of XVIIth-century France”; Pierre Brunel speaks of “an apparent triumph of order,”22 saying that the proud device Post Tenebras Lux should, to the contrary, be In Tenebris Lux. Nothing is easier to see than the actual ambiguity of the Lumières: illuminism—alumbrados in the Spain of St. John—meant in the XVIth century, as it did also in the XVIIth and XVIIIth exactly the opposite of the Aufklärung (Enlightenment],23 Its inverse, not its antithesis. For the shadow of a century is more like a mirror image, as though behind the paintings of Le Sueur, Poussin, and Champaigne, a Caravaggio-like “luminism” was preparing to appear, like that of Georges de la Tour, a chiaroscuro like Rembrandt’s, crepuscular paintings like Lorrain’s, and even the unwonted realism of the Nain brothers. Behind the century of the Sun King a whole night was waiting watchfully.
And there was a myth that would organize this night, one that had been reborn in the very soul of Raphael’s, Titian’s, and Correggio’s paintings during the previous century, a century at the end of which Goclenius (1590) and Casmann (1594) had for the first time used the term “psychologia,”24 a century where in the wake of the devotio moderna all the mystical orisons of St. John’s followers were concerned with the “deep center of the soul”: de mi alma en el mas profundo centro …, this myth is none other than the myth of Psyche.
When we consult the list made by Le Maître25 we find that between the Psiche of L. Geliot in 1599 and, to set an arbitrary date, Sériey’s Amour et Psyché, 1780–90, we can count not only twenty-four Latin translations of Apuleius’s tale but also fifteen French translations and about fifteen translations into other languages. In addition, we find twenty-six operas and French novels, six cantatas, and fifty-five paintings or sculptured works. It is true that the mythical figure of Psyche would continue to haunt the romantic century with this same intensity. We must, however, strenuously assert that no train of reasoning—not even a negative procedure like dialectic—can deduce the resurgence of Psyche from the classic ideal. Logically, that ideal, and its century, were more likely to seek for the soul in the pineal gland or Gassendi’s atoms, or as they did later in the tabulae rasae of Condillac’s marble statue. With such linear deductions one risks becoming trapped oneself in the unidimensionality of classical discourse. (Not even Michel Foucault, with all his subtlety, has been able to escape that in what he says about the “representation” and “speech” that characterize classical epistemology.26 Faced with the dictatorship of this representation, with the language of mathesis and taxinomia, Foucault could only assert that outbursts of “madness” put an end to its totalitarianism. His subtlety has become the victim of his formative academic background, so geometrically and precisely dependent on classical language.)
What hollowed out the depths of the Siècle des Lumières was no more a pathological “counter culture” than what happens in any other century; it was the whole somber nocturnal support underlying the culture. For this century excited itself shockingly less about the nascent sciences and the politics and economics that the social sciences were outlining than about religion. Paradoxically, the seventeenth century marked the highest point in the “flight of modern spirituality.”27 It was the century of “extraordinary Catholic renewal”: churches multiplied, new orders flourished. Its Christianism was fundamentally Augustinian. And whereas the “Lights” monopolized all the glamour, theology and religious feeling emphasized the misery of fallen man …28 No religious fermentation of this kind had ever so greatly animated France before, and the names of the most illustrious thinkers were as much, or even more, associated with religious passions as with the discoveries and stylistic characteristics that we remember them for today.
We too often forget that the seventeenth century was also the century of the mysterious Rosicrucian brotherhood,29 with which Descartes had some contacts. Descartes did not launch his philosophy until encouraged by the mystic Berulle, and his correspondents were often eminent religious persons: Father Charles de Condren, General of the Oratoire, Father Gibieuf, Father Mersenne. Nor may we forget the less usual Descartes of the Olympiques, the famous dreams, the glowing visions, and the vow made at Notre-Dame-de Lorette.30 Louis XIV linked his name and his solar prestige with the Gallicanist principles and practices of the French Church (Declaration des quatre articles, 1682). Pascal is more celebrated for his Provincial Letters against the Jesuits than for his treatises On the Vacuum and On Conic Sections. Special mention should be made of Fénelon and the doctrine of Pure Love which returned in the middle of the Century of Light, via Mme. Guyon, to the Alumbrados’ “inspiration of the heart.” Behind the light of the geometrical spirit that was then coming to a focus, “reasons” of the heart were rising along with a spirit of finesse [subtlety].
Racine, in his Jansenism and his plays, is certainly most representative of the style demanded by the classical ideal in both the elegance of his presentation and the preciosity of the rhetoric with which he overlays the “essential motivation of his tragedies which is love.” Love as passion and religion—Phèdre and Esther—are linked in counterpoint in the classicism of Racine. Moreover with Racine—as with Melle de Scudery (Chart of the Tender, 1648) and Margarite Marie (Alacoque of the Sacred Heart, 1673)—this Love becomes a perilous and painful quest, the psychic interiorization of the passion known to the Spanish mystics in their ascensions of Mt. Carmel or Mt. Zion.
During this nocturne of the seventeenth century the myth of Psyche with all its perennial meanings was reborn. Also, as noted earlier, with the century the term “psychology” came to birth. Indeed, this century was studded with the flowering of works all bringing the drama of Psyche explicitly to view. Let us recall a few dates.31 In 1623 there was Marino’s Adone, a strongly colored allegory in which Love, as the Soul’s Desire, opposes the bad advice of Psyche’s sisters, representing liberty and the carnal temptations. Then in 1665 in an “autos mitologicos,” Psiquis y Cupido, Calderon allegorized the legend in a more religious way by personifying Faith as Psyche and Cupid as the Charity incarnate in the Eucharist. In 1656, Benserade’s Ballet de Psyché ou de la Puissance de l’Amour was danced before the future Sun King. In 1669, La Fontaine devoted two books to the Amours de Psyché et Cupidon, and in 1671 Corneille composed a “tragic ballet” about Psyche in five acts. Finally, at the end of the era of the Lights, in 1780, William Blake illustrated George Cumberland’s story of Eros and Psyche.32
That this myth did not lose favor after the Great Century is certainly evident in Victor de Laprade’s famous Psyche of 1821 and in 1823 in the description of the Psyche story that figured on the cup in Lamartine’s La Mort de Socrate. But it was the greatest writers of the seventeenth century who seem to have been suddenly struck by the legend that they inherited directly from Apuleius’s novel, the Metamorphoses.33
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So we must ask, What does this celebrated story contain? Jan Öjwind Swahn34 has showed that Apuleius’s scenario is an integral part of a definite group of stories found all over Europe and that it is made up of a series of motifs: a prohibition is violated by a young wife (against seeing her husband in the light, destroying his animal skin, going back for too long to her family, opening a forbidden door, etc.); punishment by separation ensues and a search for the lost husband begins through a number of trials (wearing iron shoes, filling a jar with tears, crossing deep rivers and inaccessible mountains); some of these tasks are impossible (carrying water in a sieve, sorting an enormous pile of mixed grains, cleaning a stable to the bottom); and during these trials the searcher has encounters that help her (with her husband, with animals, objects, etc.); then finally a last task (the descent into hell whence something must be brought back) occasions the return of the husband and reunion with him.
Swahn’s study demonstrates how pregnant with extensions this myth scheme is, as witness our own Beauty and the Beast, collected in 1757 by Madame Le Prince de Beaumont.35 We must keep in mind, however, that all the authors were inspired by the novel of Apuleius and that the significance of that novel was reinforced by the framework of initiation in which it is set. Apuleius knew all the mythographic traditions of the second century: a native of Africa from Madura—like St. Augustine, his illustrious “neighbor” a century and a half earlier—there was nothing he did not know about Neoplatonism and Asiatic mysticisms. He took his inspiration from Lucius or the Ass,36 a little Greek novel by Lucian, in which he enshrined the Eros and Psyche story. Actually what we find in the Metamorphoses is one initiation story embedded in the heart of another: the story of Lucius changed to an ass for having practiced magic and restored to the human condition by Isis, to whom he dedicates himself after “eating roses” as he was advised. Indeed, all stories with the mythical theme, detected by Swahn, of a quest—or actually a reconquest—no less than Psyche’s explicit adventures in the Metamorphoses, are tales emphasizing the initiatory character of the misfortunes that befall the Beauty, the wife, and Psyche. The Soul (Psyche), Love (Eros, then Tlepolemos disguised as the brigand Haemus), and Initiation are the constituents of this mythical tale.37 Or better said, it is a tale of the Soul initiated by Love.38 Just here we find the answer to this problem of the separation between science and gnosis, to this intolerable strabism we have inherited from the Enlightenment’s “immediate” light of sense-evidence.
Because opposed as it is to the famous “Method” and to the immediacy of evidence, the myth of Psyche is a myth of metamorphosis, but of the metamorphosis of perception. Corresponding with the transmutation of language to which psychology invites us there is a transmutation of awareness. Hillman expresses this in a masterly way when he says, it is a matter of passing from the “Enlightened man, who sees” to the “transparent man.who has become transparent through self-acceptance.”39
We will not linger long on the trials that mark the course of Psyche’s quest for initiation; according to Swahn they are highly banal. One need only remember that in Apuleius40 there are four trials: one consists in sorting an immense heap of mixed seeds before evening, this is the trial by earth; another in bringing back wool from the sheep with golden fleece who are fierce so long as the sun’s ardor communicates its heat to them, this is the trial by fire; then comes the trial by water to go and draw some of the icy water that feeds into the Styx and Cocytus rivers. In these three trials Psyche is helped first by ants, then by a verdant reed growing in the river, and finally by an eagle who comes to bring her water from the Styx. As for the last trial, it is the most fearful: to go and ask Persephone, queen of Hades, for a bit of her beauty. Then a high tower from which she was intending to throw herself—trial by air as invisible and impalpable as Orcus—comes to her aid and gives her the means to make the terrible journey. Here we have a classical scenario of the course of an initiation by the four elements. It is an initiation of the soul, painful, slow, and endlessly recommencing.41
Most significantly, this scenario is framed at its beginning and end with two interdictions against seeing, interdictions that I have elsewhere called complexes, the “spectaculaire complex” (Bachelard) and the “Psyche complex.”42 These two sequences are absolutely symmetrical: the first has to do with being forbidden to look at Amor, the husband, who is foreshadowed to be a monster; the second with being forbidden to see the beauty of the death that Persephone gives. This interdiction and this consent to a certain “blinding,” a certain limitation of simple seeing, is also found in a number of other myths, the myths of Orpheus and Eurydice, Izanagi and Izanami, and those about Odin or Horatius Cocles who have power only because they have sacrificed part of their sight. This also occurs in happenings (that Jung calls synchronistic) where the historical event confirms the meaning of the sensory happening. Was not the seventeenth century also the century of Milton, a blind singer, like the blind Homer whom Rembrandt would paint, and would not Milton be able to say—as Greco had said a century before-that Paradise regained surpasses human clairvoyance, that it is the pure view of the poet, the elect? We know how popular the theme of blind Belisarius was to become in the eighteenth century and that in 1760 Macpherson would successfully create from nothing the mythical story of Ossian, the blind and inspired bard who was inspired because he was blind.43
What profound meaning has this initiatory restriction upon “seeing,” for the immediate, the evident which was the touchstone of the Cartesian Enlightenment? Psyche’s restrictive view is certainly connected with the mystical night, that constant theme with spiritual people. This night is the opposite of the clear and distinct evidence from which the analyses, syntheses, and meticulous listings of the classical ideal proceed. Besides this spiritual aspect, could the restriction not also be one way of expressing the modesty of Psyche’s way of viewing things.
Let us just say that the simple view of science which is pragmatic and technical—“accidental” in Aristotelian terms—stands apart from the profound, total knowledge that constitutes destiny or the meaning of human existence from cradle to grave. Between the instantaneousness of the object and the compulsive instantaneousness of the subject is situated the durée concrete [concrete duration] that Bergson mistakenly sought in the latter and that Hegel mistakenly thought he could construct with distinct theses and antitheses. The “modesty” of Amor, that “holding back” from viewing which Amor recommends twice to Psyche, is indeed imperative for mediation. The temporal maturation that it introduces is certainly the antipodal opposite of time in the old, so-called Newtonian physics that Bergson denounced. The holding back from viewing that Amor teaches is, to begin with, just educational. Amor—often represented as a child, even a little angel—does not educate the soul in a stern Promethean manner but by leading it back to the first movements of infancy. Maturing a plant consists precisely in bringing it to produce its fruit, its own initial seed: this is the meaning of the famous Platonic definition of Amor as “childbirth in Beauty.” “In Beauty,” Socrates says,44 but not in the unveiling and objectifying of that Beauty. For Beauty is made more beautiful by her veils.
Let us not forget that holding back from viewing is called for twice in this myth: the first time before the living beauty of the husband in the nuptial chamber (thalamos), and a second time before the casket containing and veiling “the beauty” of the Goddess of the dead. And here again with Hillman45 we must denounce the scientific insufficiencies of Freud: Eros is not the opposite of Thanatos. Furthermore all Western poetry from Tristan to the Romantics runs counter to such an opposition. With his torch reversed, Eros is himself Thanatos. He is the supreme proof and promise of a triumph “stronger than death.” And this because Eros’s knowledge goes “beneath” and “beyond” the simple view. This is well expressed by the twice repeated interdiction of our myth: in the thalamos (and it would be tempting to Latinize the word as brain neurology has done; the thalamus being the localization of intra-rational sensory knowledge) the simple view is forbidden to illuminate intuition.
If Psyche haunted the nights of consciousness when Cartesianism was becoming established and expanding, it was because the simple view is not enough for knowledge. The initiation of Psyche shows that this view is not the whole of knowledge: there is a night time of the senses, and knowledge comes finally through a sixth sense, very much like the penetration of love. The Vulgate integrates these two meanings of the verb cognoscere beautifully. It is what Bergson foresaw although he confused the original data of knowledge with the immediate data of consciousness. Similarly, when faced with the mystery of the Beyond post mortem, the simple view gets no further than the corpse, it cannot see the Beauty. When the Psyche figure in the tragic ballet of La Fontaine/Corneille opens Persephone’s casket her face turns black. Beneath and beyond is that kind of inclusive knowledge portended by the prefix “meta” of which we spoke in the figures—metalepse and metabole—of the new language. For this meta knowledge is what unites the beneath of Eros to the beyond of Thanatos: Eros endows life with meanings that only death confers upon the soul. And that is where the hierarchy supporting truth becomes established: contrary to both the immediacy of the simple view, the obvious, and also to Bergson’s amorphous duration, the initiatory maturation concretized by Eros somehow makes the prohibition, the discipline, the condition sine qua non for possessing truth. The prohibition plays a major role in establishing the truth; it constitutes the stages, the “degrees,” in the hierarchy.
Thus the new language inspired by the object of these reflections leads to a new logic which is neither the logic of identity nor of antithesis (its inverse), but that of antiphrasis by means of which—as Hillman46 says antiphrastically—“the blind eye of love sees through into the invisible, making the opaque mistake of my loving transparent.” Gnosis is neither the linear product of positive science—reached through an analytic procedure—nor its antithesis in an impossible counterculture which is Utopian in the bad sense of that term. Gnosis is the antiphrasis of science just as Amor and the reasons of the heart are the antiphrasis of the objective simple view of geometry, just as second birth is the antiphrasis of death.47
The same process of initiating the Soul (Psyche) through the search for Love (Eros), which occidental tradition rediscovered in its seventeenth-century reactivation of Apuleius’s tale, was promulgated by the entire initiation process of the Fideli d’Amore who proclaimed themselves emulators of “Joseph and Zulaykha.”48 “The inner pilgrimage”—to repeat a title of Henry Corbin’s—which stresses Joseph and Zulaykha, Majnun and Leyla, in the manner of a deepened Carte du Tendre goes back over the stations leading from the exile to the exodus: Beauty, Love, Sadness. Even the condition of Majnun, “absorbed” by Leyla, implies the transmutation of human love to divine love and the ending of duality in a unique duality: Majnun as “lover” of Leyla is the “mirror eye” with which God contemplates himself.49 The whole doctrine of theophany in Beauty, of Ruzbehan of Shiraz who wrote the famous Jasmin of the Fideli d’Amore, “tends toward the transubstantiation of the contemplative lover into a pure mirror, as such he then subsists as witness of the Absolute, as the very eye with which the Absolute contemplates itself.” Furthermore among these mystics death is inseparable from the absoluteness of this experience of love. But certainly it is the same Platonic spring that gives rise to both this oriental mysticism of the gnosis of love and to the misadventures in the Amor and Psyche story. And it is not without importance that in the depths of the Western Enlightenment the finest spirits of the seventeenth century should have recalled Amor and Psyche. In concluding, however, let us ask ourselves—returning to our meditation on the Century of Lights and its psychic night—who in our time is antiphrastically connecting modern science with the gnosis.
*
I do not know if the notorious “Princeton gnostics” exist. But theoretically the antiphrastic reversals undergone by our mathematics, our logics, and our physical and cosmological theories would authorize such a gnosis. Did not Le Nouvel esprit scientifique and the upsets proclaimed by Bachelard forty years ago in La Philosophie du non50 provide access even then to alternative ways (an alterité) of knowledge, and at that time to the poetic in particular?
But I am certain that in my field of human studies there has been a movement for thirty years—despite the myopia, even blindness, following the laborious birth in the middle of a positivist century of psychology, sociology and history—toward an anthropological gnosis.51 Jung’s whole work confirms the antiphrastic transmutation of contemporary psychology. The recent book in French translation of my friend Hillman, which I have frequently referred to here, is the outcome of just such a circuit turning psychology back to the myth of Psyche and bringing the myth back to the archetypal realities, back to the Gods.
Thus, although I do not know if there is any gnosis in Princeton52 or Pasadena, I am sure there is a gnosis in Ascona, Switzerland, because through a life work such as Jung’s and Corbin’s, through the work of Hillman, and the whole of contemporary anthropology (as I have shown elsewhere) there has occurred a gigantic reversal of the epistemological values set up by the classical “luminaries.” Since then, laboriously, like Glaucus overburdened with the scoria of a millennium of submersion, our theory of knowledge has been brought back to what it was before the divorce, before the tearing apart of distressed consciousness. Paradoxically the extreme progress of our profane sciences is leading us back to a recurrence of the point—an imaginary point—just before the West abandoned its culture for the vertigo of its civilization.
What about the hard work, the impossible initiation tasks, the lessons of the Psyche myth? What about the night side of our culture, hidden first by the Apollonian and then by the Promethean triumphalism of our civilization? We are tempted to ask ourselves if there are no short cuts, if “elsewhere” than in the West the language of the birds may not have escaped alteration by the language of the philosophers of the Enlightenment; if there is somewhere an Orient of Luminaries where the light of the eyes of flesh has not wounded the night and the secret of the soul; if “elsewhere”—in a radical utopia—the hierarchic difference of rank is respected between the inwardness (interiorité) of the modest view and the pragmatic view of the world. How many departures for Khatmandu, how many vulgar pursuits of Zen or Sufism, how many onslaughts on fragments of ancient knowledge are seen in our time, occurring before the astonished eyes of our lost clergy and our bewildered churches, astray in the obvious of the day before yesterday!
Yet the monumental life work of Henry Corbin is there also to serve as a sure guide for the enthusiasm of young orientophiles who can be easily confused by the exploiters of Western bankruptcy. His work is there in all its scholarly rigor to attest that a direct cultural way does indeed exist to assure ourselves that gnosis—that of the Fideli d’Amore, for example—does embrace and justify the wholeness of the human view. It is there to attest that there is something that “views” or “regards” me when I enter upon the stages of the passionately faithful and contemplative regard. I have alluded in the course of writing this article to Corbin’s four volumes, modestly entitled En Islam iranian, which constitute the most significant sum of material to which a New Philosophy in the West can turn.
Now that our deepest scientific certitudes seem to be oriented again to a knowledge in which the known, the knower, and the method of know-ing are all constituents of the same reality, we can see the long detour that Western thought has taken from the way pursued by other ardent seekers who have neither blinked nor hesitated in searching for the Absolute. It is this witness of faith in the existence of a gnostic process of thought that Henry Corbin’s work brings us. So we can say that although we do not know whether a gnosis exists in Princeton or Pasadena, we do have the certainty that it exists here now through the presence of Henry Corbin at the heart of the University of St. John of Jerusalem.
NOTES
1. Cf. Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. A. C. M. Ross (London: Routledge, 1964) and James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis (New York: Harper Colophon, 1978), pp. 45, 67, 71.
2. Cf. my “L’Occident iconoclaste,” Cahiers internationaux de symbolisme, vol. 2, 1963, and as revised in my L’imagination symbolique (Paris: P.U.F., 1977). Also: J. P. Sironneau, Sécularisation et religions politiques (Thèse d’Etat, Univ. de Grenoble, June, 1978), I: 2, 4; II: 2, and bibliography.
3. Cf. Harvey Cox, The Secular City (New York: MacMillan, 1965); Friedrich Gogarten, Destin et Espoir du Monde Moderne (Tournai: Casterman, 1970); J. B. Metz, Théologie du monde (Paris: Cerf, 1971); Peter L. Berger, The Heretical Imperative (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
4. Cf. Carl Amery, Fin de la providence (Paris: Seuil, 1976).
5. Cf. Henry Corbin, Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, trans. Willard Trask (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1980) and Georges Mathieu, Cérémonies commémoratives de la seconde condemnation de Siger de Brabant (Paris: Galerie Kleber, 1957). Cf. also “Entretien avec Georges Mathieu,” Paradoxes 29 (October 1978).
6. Cf. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930)
7. Paul Hazard, La Crise de la conscience européenne, 1680–1715 (Paris: Fayard, 1961).
8. The treatise, although published in 1664, was written in 1633 before the famous Discours. The phenomenon of light and vision obsessed Descartes all his lite, he went back to it constantly in the physiology of the Traité de l’homme and, of course, in the Dioptrique, which is an application of his method where he devotes the first discourse to light, the fifth to the eye and the sixth to vision.
9. Cf. Spinoza, Ethics, 1677.
10. Cf. F. Brunetière, Études critiques IV, 1895.
11. Cf. Hillman, Myth of Analysis, p. 127f.
12. Cf. Václav Černý, Essai sur le titanisme dans la poèsie romantique occidentale entre 1815 et 1850 (Prague: Orbis, 1935).
13. Hillman, Myth of Analysis, op. cit.
14. Ibid., p. 121: “We are made ill because it is ill.”
15. Ibid, p. 123: “Is the soul abandoning speech altogether? If so, the very root of human culture is withering.”
16. Cf. Jung’s interest in the Chinese language of the I-Ching, and the works of my friend Rudolf Ritsema on the import of this language for the imaginal in Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1970–79).
17. Hillman, Myth of Analysis, p. 184.
18. Metalepse: “a rhetorical figure that consists in introducing something by expressing what brings or follows it”; Metabole: “a rhetorical figure that consists in repeating the same idea in different terms in order to get it assimilated.”
19. Cf. my article “Linguistique et métalangage,” in Eranos Yearbook 39 (1970); and revised in my Figures mythiques et visages de l’oeuvre (Paris: Berg. 1979).
20. Cf. Walter F. Otto, “Die Sprache als Mythos," in Mythos und Welt (Stuttgart: Klett, 1962); italics mine
21. My friend Pierre Brunel in his Histore de la littérature française (Paris: Bordas, 1972) even discerns a “Louis XIII century.”
22. Cf. René Huyghe, L’Art et l’âme (Paris: Flammarion, 1960), pp. 273–300, and Brunel, Histoire, vol. 1, p. 227.
23. Cf. Antoine Faivre, Mystiques, théosophes et illuminés au siècle des Lumières (New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1976). We are aware of the confusion that would occur in the XVIII century regarding the “illuminés de Bavière” (enlightened ones of Bavaria).
24. For the first use of this term, cf. Hillman, Myth of Analysis, p. 127 & n.
25. Cf. Henri Le Maitre, Essai sur le mythe de Psyché dans la littérature française de origines à 1890 (Persan: Impremerie de Persan-Beaumont, 1939).
26. Cf. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1973), André Malraux was the first to give a bad example of this kind of one dimensionality in Le Musée imaginaire.
27. Cf. Louis Cognet, La spiritualité moderne. I. L’essor: 1500–1650 (Histoire de la spiritualité chrétienne, vol. 3) (Paris: Aubier, 1965).
28. Cf. Brunel, op. cit.p;
29. Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 1972). This sound scholarly work opens new perspectives on the beginnings of the XVII century.
30. Cf. René Descartes, Oeuvres philosophiques (Paris: Garnier, 1963), vol. 1, p. 213 & n. 8.
31. Cf. Roland Derche, Quatre mythes poétiques (Œdipe, Narcisse, Psyché, Lorelei) (Paris: Société d’Édition d’Énseignement Supérieur, 1962)
32. Kathleen Raine, Blake and the New Age (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979)
33. Cf. Marie-Louise von Franz, A Psychological Interpretation of the Golden Ass of Apuleius (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1980); also Erwin Panofsky, “Blind Cupid,” in Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962).
34. Jahn Öjvind Swahn, The Tale of Cupid and Psyche (Lund: Gleerup 1955).
35. Charles Perrault certainly must have known Amor and Psyche since he speaks of it in his 1695 preface to Contes en vers.
36 Cf. Romans grecs & latins, edited and translated by Pierre Grimal (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), pp. 141ff.
37. Ibid, pp. 263–68.
38. Hillman’s Myth of Analysis exposes this central idea of the tale, but see also the collection of essays on the subject gathered by Gerhard Binder and Reinhold Merkelbach, Amor and Psyche (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968); Erich Neumann, Amor and Psyche, translated by Ralph Manheim (New York: Pantheon, 1956); Marie-Luise von Franz, op. cit.; also Carl C. Schlam, Cupid and Psyche: Apuleius and the Monuments (University Park, Penn.: The American Philological Association, 1976).
39. Hillman, Myth of Analysis, p. 92.
40. Cf. “Apuleius,” in Romans grecs & latins, p. 248.
41. Hillman, Myth of Analysis, pp. 93–96, where the torturing aspects of the initiatory tasks are emphasized.
42. Cf. my Le décor mythique de la Chartreuse de Parme (Paris: Corti, 1960).
43. We should note that in some modern initiations the candidate is blindfolded.
44. Plato, Symposium 206b.
45. Hillman, Myth of Analysis, p. 77.
46. Ibid., p. 91.
47. Cf. Henry Corbin, En Islam iranien: Aspects spirituels et philosophiques, vol. 3: Les Fidèles d’amour (Paris: Gallimard, 1972).
48. Le Jasmin des Fidèles d’amour, p. 25, quoted by Corbin, En Islam iranien, vol. 3, p. 75; see also ibid., vol. 2: Sohrawardî et les Platoniciens de Perse, p. 373 on the “ ‘Histoire’ de Joseph.”
49. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 141.
50, Gaston Bachelard, Le nouvel esprit scientifique (Paris: Alcan, 1934); La philosophie du non (Paris: P.U.F., 1940).
51. Cf. my Science de l’homme et tradition (Paris: Tête de Feuilles, 1975).
52. Raymond Ruyer, La Gnose de Princeton: Des savants à la recherche d’une religion (Paris: Fayard, 1974).
Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1981): 1–19
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