I returned a few days ago from traveling with a group of students during USC’s “Maymester”. As described in a post early this year, the topic of this off-campus course was Christian monasticism.

The students and I spent four days in each of three monasteries: Christ in the Desert, a Benedictine men’s community in northern New Mexico; The Holy Monastery of St Paisius, an Orthodox women’s monastery in Arizona; and St Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery, one of the Elder Ephraim’s foundations, also in Arizona.

The students were asked to keep journals during our travels. The majority of them were from Protestant backgrounds. Roman Catholic and, especially, Orthodox teachings concerning such things as the Mother of God, the veneration of icons and relics, and the soteriological meaning and purpose of ascetic struggle were something they’d never encountered before.

Needless to say, there were many questions, and not a few moments of utter bewilderment and skepticism! At the same time, I’m finding that the entries in their journals betoken an admirable depth of insight and spiritual engagement. It’s obvious these young people were, and are, processing things on a very deep level. I thought you might be interested in a few of their reflections:

“It has been refreshing to see people who aren’t concerned with things like good looks, money, or personal glory. The monks and nuns I have met on this trip have a certain lightness about them that I believe most worldly people don’t have.”

“I am amazed by St Anthony’s! I seem to catch a vibe from Orthodox Christians that beauty can be healing for the soul. I think they’re right!”

“The heights of the nearby mountains dwarf both the monastery and its inhabitants. This is a constant reminder of the exhortations of St Benedict concerning the search for a humble and contrite heart. As one gazes upon the peaks and their beauty, the soul is reminded of its smallness compared to the mountains—the Mountains of Christ and His saints. Truly the geography reflects the monastic vision.”

“Quite honestly, I was plagued by depression for the last few months. As I have gotten deeper into college life, I’ve realized I no longer want to get a nice job for the sake of making money or to impress my peers. Why am I in college? Who cares if I can make all A’s? If I grow up and get a good job, what would that really do for me? These thoughts plagued me for many months and brought me deep sadness. However, after seeing these monks and nuns, I am energized with a zeal for life. Finally, people who really understand what I was feeling! These men and women aren’t out to impress anyone. They’re not trying to look attractive or intelligent so that people will flock to them. They aren’t hiding their inner struggles to appear perfect, either to themselves or to others. They go through life with a purpose. Monasticism has refreshed me, given me energy and drive!”

“I hate the fact that I have so many possessions, and I hate even more that I cannot bring myself to part from them! In contrast, these monastics have virtually no possessions. They’ve willingly given them up in order to seek God. This is both inspiring and terrifying! It’s certainly got to be freeing. I guess it’s just a fact that the most massive lie we as human beings have bought into is that anything can be more fulfilling than God.”

“The Sunday morning service was amazing. I enjoyed it, even though I had no clue what was going on 85% of the time. It’s incredible to me that people, young and old, are willing to sit (and stand!) through a three-hour church service, whereas people at my church throw a fit if the sermon is over twenty minutes long. I think this really exemplifies the ideals of monasticism.”

“The community that has sprung up around St Anthony’s shows that it is possible to live a certain kind of ‘monastic’ life without actually being a monk or nun. The parents seem to be instilling in their children the importance of God. The older children help with the younger ones, and they all seem to lift one another up. And they have the monks as examples. Even though I sometimes disliked the crowded, somewhat ‘touristy’ feeling here, I can appreciate what attracts people to this place.”

“I’m beginning to see that a good candidate for the monastic life is going to be someone who desires to learn to love in a totally radical way.”

“One thing I’ve noticed. The Protestant churches got rid of some things at the Reformation that they shouldn’t have. I don’t know why we don’t emphasize clearly Biblical practices like fasting and prayer (in the ‘pray without ceasing’ sense). It also seems like a good practice to confess our sins to another person, especially a wiser spiritual leader. It seems like this would make you more truly repentant.”

“I’m glad we have been able to help the monks with their work. The participant in the work gets to experience firsthand the range of human emotion, spirituality, and personal growth in virtue that accompanies physical labor.”

“By abstaining from heavy foods and eating less, I do feel a lot better. I guess this is the purpose of fasting, to avoid feeling sluggish and having dull thoughts. If so, it seems to be working!”

“As I have entered back into ‘normal’ life, it seems the world has a different sense about it. I am shocked by the vulgarity of non-monastic life, the bestial concern with the immediate and the forgetfulness of death. Rage and moodiness had no place at the monasteries. The average man, however, seems to have an existence permeated by these fits of passion. He lacks true vision, thus making him only a shadow of those who are really human, the monks.”

I’m not altogether sure what you in mind. Kaula marga could mean a number of things: Kashmiri Shaivism, the Shri Vidya tradition, or one of the forms of “left-handed” Tantra. Regarding the last of these possibilities, I can certainly say that Westerners would do very well to keep far away from it.

As you yourself know, from the perspective of Vedic Hinduism left-handed Tantra is outright heterodox, and many spiritual masters have condemned it in the strongest terms. It is in any case crucial to distinguish between valid and degenerate expressions of this form, or rather these forms, of Tantra, since the nature of the disciplines is such as to open practitioners (and so-called gurus) all too easily to dark and destabilizing psychic influences. Given your study of Guénon and your admitted “conservatism”, I rather doubt this is the path that interests you, or at least I hope not!

You ask what Schuon’s views may have been. I don’t now recall whether, or if so where, he may addressed tantric practice per se, nor what he might have advised if he’d been asked by a Hindu. What I can tell you, as someone coming from a Christian background, is that he always expressed serious reservations about the compatibility of the Western psyche with Tibetan Buddhism, which he felt was too “complex” and too “heavy”.

If the sadhana you mention involves (as I suspect) visualizations of deities and families of deities, the circulation of internal energies, and other similar practices, I have little doubt this same criticism would apply. You may be interested to know that Schuon discouraged Marco Pallis from attempting to follow the Vajrayana, even though this was his initial intention after his travels in Tibet, and upon Schuon’s advice Pallis changed and entered upon a Pure Land path instead.

No, I have no personal or “concrete” experience in the world of Indian spiritualities, whether Hindu or Buddhist. But I’m told by a close friend who has had considerable “on the ground” experience in India that it’s difficult enough these days to find an authentic guru even in context of the Subcontinent, and that finding one in the West seems even more unlikely.

For all these reasons, I’m concerned about the direction your search seems to be leading you. Of course, “the Spirit bloweth where it listeth”, and there may well be much here that I don’t understand. Be that as it may, why not give Christianity a try before adventuring so far afield? Why not devote some time to plumbing the depths of the Orthodox East? I’m confident what you’re after can be found much closer to home.

What do I think is the best solution to the problem of evil? As it happens, I’ve just finished directing an honors seminar on that very topic, with readings drawn from Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra.

Each of these authors (even Hume) provides an important component to what I believe to be “best”. But perhaps the best of the best can be found in the book by Lewis, the second volume of his Space Trilogy. Obviously I can’t tell the whole story here. Allow me instead to refer you to the end of the novel, particularly Lewis’s vision of what he calls the Great Dance. To give you just a taste of what this involves, here’s the question (with prologue) that I posed to my class the last day we discussed Perelandra:

Milton opens Paradise Lost with an invocation to the Holy Spirit: “What in me is dark Illumin,” he prays, “what is low raise and support; / That to the highth of this great Argument / I may assert Eternal Providence, / And justifie the wayes of God to men.”

As you know, solutions, or attempted solutions, to the problem of evil are called “theodicies” precisely because, like Milton’s poem, they seek to explain the justice of God (the dike of theos in the Greek). If God is truly all-good, all-wise, and all-powerful, how can He justly permit the existence of evil, sin, suffering, and death?

As you also know, Lewis devoted his most influential scholarly tome, A Preface to Paradise Lost, to this poem, and as a Christian theologian, he was of course well aware of the importance of defending God’s justice. But in the last chapter of Perelandra, he seems to suggest that “justice” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. What I’ve got in mind is a passage on p. 180, where the King is made to say to Ransom:

“I know now what they say in your world about justice. And perhaps they say well, for in that world things always fall below justice. But Maleldil [Lewis’s name for God] always goes above it. All is gift. I am Oyarsa [a vicegerent of God’s] not by His gift alone but by our foster mother’s, not by hers alone but by yours, not by yours alone but my wife’s—nay, in some sort, by gift of the very beasts and birds. Through many hands, enriched with many different kinds of love and labour, the gift comes to me. It is the Law. The best fruits are plucked for each by some hand that is not his own” (180).

And then, as if to illustrate and illumine this Law, Lewis begins to describe what he calls the “Great Game” or “Great Dance”. Here’s my question for today: Is this Law just? Is the Game fair? Or would one be right in thinking that it’s precisely because it’s not “just” and not “fair” that the Great Dance is a solution to the problem of evil?

Needless to say, the issue you raise is a controversial (and potentially volatile) one, and the position Orthodox Christians take can easily be misperceived as anti-Semitic. The problem is brought into rather stark relief by the text you cite from Hebrews 8:

“Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah…. In that He saith, A new covenant, He hath made the first old. Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away.”

As is clear from the context, the “old covenant” to which Saint Paul refers included an obligation to perform a ritual animal sacrifice, and man’s fulfillment of his side of the covenant therefore required a place ritually set aside and marked out for the purpose of such sacrifice—in short, a templum or “temple”. So the question arises: When, after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in A.D. 70, there was no longer an appropriate templum, and thus no sanctified space for the required sacrifice, did that covenant remain in force, or is it now “made old” or “obsolete”?

Of course, Judaism continued, and continues today, in the synagogues, but compared to what took place in the Temple, this continuation—it could be, and has been, argued by traditional Christians—is but a “copy and shadow” (Hebrews 8:5), just as animal sacrifices were themselves a “copy and shadow” of the sacrifice on Golgotha, and even as Golgotha in its turn was a “copy and shadow” of the heavenly Sacrifice (Revelation 13:8). So the question becomes: How many shadows does it take before the Light no longer illumines? How many times can you copy a thing before it is no longer legible?

I don’t claim to have the answers. But it’s precisely such highly charged questions that lie behind the issue raised by certain Traditionalists: namely, whether—and if so, to what extent—Judaism remains a fully operative Path. One thing I do know: if the Liturgy of the Catechumens were the only Liturgy—if there were no anaphora and if Christian initiates were no longer able to receive the Eucharistic Mysteries—Christianity would cease to be a fully operative Path. I’ll leave it to others to argue by analogy, if there is such an analogy, as to the state of contemporary Judaism.

I don’t know your friend, nor her theology, and I wouldn’t wish to guess what she means in saying that your misadventure was “all in God’s plan”.

Perhaps she’s a Calvinist, in which case you may be right that she’s envisioning God as a “puppet master”. On the other hand, one doesn’t have to look at things in so predestinarian a way to use such an expression. To suppose—as I certainly do—that there’s some deep meaning, or inner significance, to the events of our lives could be “translated” into more or less anthropomorphic terms by saying that Heaven “has a plan”.

Considering our lives in this way is no threat to free will, as you seem to think. True enough, if freedom consisted merely in fork-in-the-road choices between horizontal or planimetric possibilities, there would be a problem. Jonathan Edwards was surely right: confronted by the world, we always choose the greater apparent good, and not being responsible (or not directly so) for the mechanism that generates the appearance, we’re not responsible for the choice, and thus we’re not really free.

Genuine freedom, however, is vertical: it’s our ability, though rarely exercised, to take a step or two back from what’s going on, whether outside our bodies or inside our minds—to detach ourselves, even if only for a split second, from our ego’s reactions, worries, frustrations, desires; its likes and dislikes, its ups and its downs—to watch ourselves, as if from above and from the point of view of a larger perspective.

That larger perspective, speaking very elliptically for the moment, is “God” … or at least a dimension of Him.

I agree, of course, that there is simply no way to make Christianity, or any other Semitic tradition, as “direct” as Vedānta: the doctrine of the Self must remain largely hidden in such a context. As Schuon notes, “The Vedantic perspective finds its equivalents in all the great religions that regulate humanity, for truth is one; the formulations, however, are dependent on dogmatic perspectives that restrict their immediate intelligibility or that make it difficult to express them in a straightforward way.” This is certainly the case with Christianity.

On the other hand, if one is willing to look not so much at as along the fundamental doctrines and practices of our Orthodox tradition, the Truth of the Self is clearly, if deeply, there—and one doesn’t have to be a perennialist to see it. To take but a single example, consider the following reflections concerning the Feast of the Entrance of the Mother of God, celebrated by the Church on November 21st. They come from Father Alexander Schmemann, sometime dean of Saint Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, who (as I’m sure you know) was one of the most respected of 20th-century Orthodox theologians.

The subject [of this Feast] is very simple: A little girl is brought by her parents to the Temple in Jerusalem. There is nothing particularly remarkable about this since at that time it was a generally accepted custom. Many parents brought their children to the Temple as a sign of bringing them into contact with God, of giving their lives ultimate purpose and meaning, of illumining them from within through the light of higher experience.

But on this occasion, as the service for the day recounts, they lead the child to the Holy of Holies, to the place where no one except the priests was allowed to go, the mystical inner sanctum of the Temple. The girl’s name is Mary. She is the future mother of Jesus Christ, the one through whom, as Christians believe, God himself came into the world to join the human race, to share its life and reveal its divine content. Are these just fairy tales? Or is something given to us and disclosed here, something directly related to our life, which perhaps cannot be expressed in everyday human speech?

Here was this magnificent, massive, solemn Temple, the glory of Jerusalem. And for centuries it was only there—behind those heavy walls—that a person could come into contact with God. Now, however, the priest takes Mary by the hand, leading her into the most sacred part of the building, and we therefore sing, “The most pure Temple of the Savior is led into the Temple of the Lord.” The meaning of these events, words, and recollections is simple: from now on man himself becomes the Temple. No stone temple, no altar, but man—his soul, body, and life—is the sacred and divine heart of the world, its “Holy of holies”. One Temple, Mary—living and human—is led into a temple made of stone, and from within brings to completion its significance and meaning.

What now enters the world is a teaching that puts nothing higher than man, for God Himself takes on human form in order to reveal man’s vocation and meaning as divine. From this moment onward man is free. Nothing stands over him, for the very world is his as a gift from God to fulfill his divine destiny. When we celebrate Mary’s Entrance into the Temple, we celebrate man’s divine meaning and the brightness of his high calling.

Now clearly, as one can immediately discern from his books, Father Alexander was no metaphysician or esotericist, or at least no more an esotericist than any other serious adherent of this exo-esoteric religion. Nonetheless an advaitic Light repeatedly shimmers through the stained glass of these words, notably those I have taken the liberty to italicize, words which seek to convey “something directly related to our life”, but at the same time “something which perhaps cannot be expressed in everyday human speech”.

You call yourself a “crypto-Vedantist”, and I agree that you would no doubt be well advised to continue muting your metaphysics at Church. But that’s simply because Orthodox Autology is itself rather cryptic, not because it’s nonexistent!

You ask what Schuon may have meant (in Logic and Transcendence) when he distinguished between “the traditional theory of emanation” and “the emanationist heresy, which has nothing metaphysical about it and which reduces the Principle to the level of manifestation or Substance to the level of accidents” (p. 58, note 11 of my edition).

As you know, Schuon always specified that “God is in things and things are in God” essentially, not substantially. Since it is in the very nature (or essence) of the Good to communicate itself, God cannot but “radiate”, and this radiation constitutes what we call manifestation or creation. Nonetheless this manifestation involves no division or extrusion of God, as if He were some sort of extended “thing” or “substance”, quod absit. He remains, His self-communication notwithstanding, completely transcendent, hence absolutely other than everything else.

Thus, as I understand the passage in question, “the traditional theory” points to God’s essential presence in manifestation, while “the heresy” makes the mistake of supposing that God is substantially present. It’s the difference, in other words, between panentheism and pantheism.

Perhaps the following observations, coming from two Christian Platonists living several centuries apart, would be helpful here:

“In a super-substantial manner, above the category of origin, the Godhead is the Origin of all origin and the good and bounteous Communication (so far as such may be) of hidden mysteries; and, in a word, It is the Life of all things that live and the Being of all that are, the Origin and Cause of all life and being through Its bounty, which both brings them into existence and maintains them. These mysteries we learn from the Divine Scriptures, and thou wilt find that, in well-nigh all the utterances of the Sacred Writers, the Divine Names refer in a Symbolical Revelation to Its beneficent Emanations” (Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Divine Names, Chapter 1, my italics).

“I know that to create is defined as ‘to make out of nothing’, ex nihilo. But I take that to mean ‘not out of any pre-existing material’. It can’t mean that God makes what God has not thought of, or that He gives His creatures any powers or beauties which He Himself does not possess. Why, we think that even human work comes nearest to creation when the maker has ‘got it all out of his own head’. Nor am I suggesting a theory of ‘emanations’. The differentia of an ‘emanation’—literally an overflowing, a trickling out—would be that it suggests something involuntary. But my words—‘uttering’ and ‘inventing’—are meant to suggest an act” (C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, Chapter XIV).

It seems to me clear that the Areopagite is espousing “the traditional theory”, whereas Lewis is referring (at the end of this passage) to “the emanationist heresy”. Notice that Lewis adds one other important qualification: namely, that the heresy in question construes the creative process as mechanical or automatic, while Schuon and other “traditionalists”, though they underscore the inevitability of manifestation, do not divorce it from the Divine Will.

I’m glad you’ve been reading Owen Barfield’s Worlds Apart; it’s a wonderful book. You’re rather worried, however, about Barfield’s “anthroposophical leanings”—and rightly so, I might add!—and you therefore write to ask, “speaking as one Christian to another”, whether I think this author is always “right”?

That’s a difficult question to answer when it comes to a dialogue, especially one with so many interlocutors and with such a degree of complexity. It seems, as I believe you’ll agree, that Barfield’s views are more or less evenly distributed between Burgeon and Sanderson. But having said that, I’m not sure how much we’re committing him to. However much it may be, do note the author’s characteristic sense of fair play in giving ample space to the objections of his friend C. S. Lewis, here represented by the character Hunter. As I see it, the provocative, dialectical interplay between these (and the other five) participants in some ways undercuts the very question of rectitude.

Note too the modesty of the Barfieldian voices, especially that of Sanderson, the more overtly and self-consciously anthroposophical of the two. If you recall, in response to the question of how indebted he is to Rudolf Steiner (the founder of Anthroposophy), Sanderson responds that while he feels he has personally verified one dimension of Steiner’s teachings and has a strong intuition as to the truth of a second, there’s a third dimension that eludes him entirely. Given my own conversations with Barfield during the last couple decades of his life, I suspect he would have said much the same in relation to Sanderson’s contributions to the dialogue.

As for how “Christian” all this may be, well, that of course was something Barfield and Lewis argued about in their decades-long “Great War”, the main points of which argument Barfield has nicely recapitulated in Hunter’s various objections to Burgeon and Sanderson. Whatever we end up saying about certain more subtle and controversial points—Are our physical bodies in some sense a function of a fallen consciousness? Does the spiritual life consist (in part) in cultivating a “controlled clairvoyance”?—the central claim that originally gave rise to the “War”, and arguably the central claim of this book—namely, that our knowledge is in some sense a participation in the creative work of the Logos—is an unexceptionably Christian idea, an idea reflected (among numerous other places, from the Alexandrian Fathers on down) in fellow Inkling J. R. R. Tolkien’s doctrine of sub-creation.

This coming Maymester I’m once again planning to offer a short (three-week) course, 13-31 May 2013. “Monastic Spirit: A Journey to the Heart of Ancient Christianity” expands on my previous USC Maymester explorations of the “Mysteries of the Christian East”. This time I’ll be taking students to three monasteries. Here’s a brief description from the syllabus:

Starting in the late third and early fourth centuries A.D., spiritually adventurous Christian men and women began moving away from the major urban centers of the Roman Empire to the Thebaid and other desert locations in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine.

Their aim? To enter upon a path of rigorous ascetical and contemplative discipline, whether as hermits or in small communities of like-minded spiritual athletes—a path of “white martyrdom”, as it has sometimes been called, the kind of martyrdom still possible after the conversion of the emperor Constantine in 312 and the end of persecution of the Church.

The “monastic spirit” that motivated these early men and women is still very much alive and well in both the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox Churches. Our goal in this course is to get a taste of what drew, and still draws, such Christian seekers to distance themselves from the world around them and to undertake so demanding and, for most of our contemporaries, so strange a vocation.

To do this, we shall journey to the desert ourselves—the desert of the American Southwest—and spend time living and learning in three monastic communities:

• The Monastery of Christ in the Desert, a Roman Catholic Benedictine men’s community, located in the Chama Canyon, in northwestern New Mexico
• The Holy Monastery of Saint Paisius, an Eastern Orthodox women’s community in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, near the small village of Safford
• Saint Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery, a men’s community, also located in the Sonoran Desert region of southern Arizona

Students will learn about the differing monastic and liturgical practices of the Roman Catholic West and the Orthodox East; they will have the opportunity to attend worship services in Latin, Greek, and English, and to hear some of the most ancient (and hauntingly beautiful) music of the Christian tradition; they will be introduced to the mystical and iconographical symbolism underlying monologic prayer, meditation, and other contemplative practices; and they will be able to speak with monks and nuns about their otherworldly vocations.

Each monastery provides ample—and, perhaps paradoxically, quite comfortable!—accommodations for its guests. That said, students will be encouraged to participate as fully as they are willing and able in the challenging rhythm of these “ancient” communities, getting up well before dawn, eating a vegan/vegetarian diet, helping with gardening and other chores, etc. We shall meet as a class once a day for discussion of the assigned readings, but the emphasis throughout will be on experiential engagement and learning. Time will be available, too, for hiking and enjoying the rugged beauty of the natural environment.

Readings include the following: John Chryssavgis, In the Heart of the Desert: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers; The Rule of Saint Benedict; and Kyriacos Markides, The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality.

Further insights, information, and background can be found via the following links:

A YouTube video featuring Christ in the Desert Monastery, including a taste of Gregorian chant and an interview with the abbot and prior.

A short sample of the ancient Byzantine liturgical music students will hear during services at Saint Paisius Monastery, as sung (in English) by the nuns of that community.

A YouTube video about Saint Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery, including some Byzantine chant as well as photos of the monastery and of the founder, Elder Ephraim of Philotheou on Mount Athos.

An earlier post from this weblog concerning one of my previous Maymester trips to Saint Anthony’s Monastery, with additional links, including a PowerPoint photo presentation at the bottom of the page.

A 60 Minutes special which provides an excellent introduction to the monastic life in general, as well as to the specific Athonite forms of spirituality to be found at Saint Anthony’s.

The deadline for sign-ups and travel deposits is in early February, and space is limited. USC students who are interested in taking the course should contact Jim Clark (jclark@schc.sc.edu), the Director of Off-Campus Education in the USC Honors College.

You ask whether there is anything in the Christian tradition that justifies going beyond the idea that the Jews would be forgiven for crucifying Jesus (“for they know not what they do”) and saying that they would actually be rewarded by God for their actions. And you cite the case of the Sufi saint and martyr Mansur al-Hallaj, who told the Muslims of Baghdad that, if they killed him, they would not only be pardoned but also rewarded, “for you will have acted out of zeal for your religion”.

I’m certainly intrigued by this possible parallel, but in point of fact, no, I know of no reference in the Christian tradition, scriptural or otherwise, to anyone being “rewarded” for the Crucifixion. Indeed, Orthodox liturgical hymnody, especially during Lent and Passion Week, is full of invective against the “Jews”. Of course, one must put this word in quotation marks, for the reproaches in question are not to be construed in an ethnic or “anti-Semitic” way. On the contrary, the “Jews” are but a “type” for all who sin against God.

There might be another way for you to work out a parallel, however. I’m thinking of Augustine’s teaching concerning the “fortunate” nature of the Fall. According to Augustine, “God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit the existence of evil” (Enchiridion, VIII), an idea which reappears in the West in a traditional hymn for the Easter Vigil: O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem, “O happy fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer.”

Perhaps you could therefore argue thus in your lecture: Inasmuch as every sin is a “fall”, and inasmuch as every fall “merits” redemption, it follows that sinners (the “Jews” being their “type) are “rewarded” for their Crucifixion of Christ. I realize this is considerably more roundabout than Hallaj! But that’s about as close as I can come.

I’m delighted to know you’re translating Schuon’s books into German. It’s rather ironic that so few of his writings have appeared to date in his own mother tongue. He once observed that French is more suited to metaphysics and German to poetry, and this of course is why he chose to compose his many books and articles in the former language, reserving the latter for a final outpouring of lyric verse during the last few years of his life. Even so, the relative capacities of a given language notwithstanding, you’re to be commended for this important contribution.

You’ve encountered a “difficulty”, you say, in your work on Logic and Transcendence, specifically in the chapter “The Demiurge in North American Mythology”, and you refer me to p. 133 of my own English translation of the book, which reads as follows:

The key to the doctrine [that of Mâyâ] is basically this: by definition Infinitude requires the dimension of the finite; this dimension, while “gloriously” manifesting the inexhaustible possibilities of the divine Self, projects them right up to the limits of nothingness, if one may put it this way; nothingness “is” not, and yet it “appears” in relation to the real, which projects itself in the direction of the finite.

You then raise an interesting question: “Is it not the Infinite, the Principle, which does the projecting, as in fact is stated at the end of the sentence, where Schuon speaks of the ‘the real, which projects itself in the direction of the finite’”?

I can see your point. On the other hand, the syntax of the original French makes it clear, as I’m sure you’ll agree, that it’s “the dimension of the finite” which “projects” the possibilities.

This doesn’t mean, however, that the Self (or the real) doesn’t also project; on the contrary, its Infinitude is a priori “responsible”—if one can use such an expression—for the radiation or projection in question. Nevertheless, the finite, which is at once the result and the means or medium of this radiation, is itself also involved in the continuing “work” of projection, and necessarily so.

Needless to say, this is all very paradoxical! But that’s the point, isn’t it? And that’s why the Native American traditions that Schuon is discussing in this context so often have recourse to the figure of the “buffoon” or the “trickster”, for whom and in whom the border between what “is” and “is not” is repeatedly crossed and fruitfully “violated”.

The key, or at least one key, to grappling with this apparent antinomy is to remember that “the dimension of the finite” is necessarily a “part” of the Infinite, not something over against or opposed to the Infinite. I often return to these telling words of Ibn al-Arabi: “Do not declare Him non-delimited and thus delimited by being distinguished from delimitation! For if He is distinguished, then He is delimited by His non-delimitation. And if He is delimited by His non-delimitation, then He is not He.”

Do I think there’s an “unbridgeable chasm” between what St Thomas and the Catholic West have to say about God as pure Esse (“being”) and what St Dionysius and the Orthodox East teach with regard to the Divine as a Hyperousia Thearchia (“supra-essential Godhead”)? Is there a conflict, in other words, between Being and Beyond-Being?

Not at all, but I fear it would prove a lengthy distraction from “the one thing needful” to try to develop an answer, as your question seems to intend, in historical terms. What I can tell you, on the historical side, is that the Angelic Doctor quotes the Areopagite more often than he does any of the other Fathers, with the single exception of Augustine. He at least must not have thought there was “chasm”.

In lieu of such a scholarly answer, perhaps a brief note from Schuon will suffice:

“When it is said that the personal God is situated in Māyā, which runs the risk of sounding offensive, one must be careful to make it clear that this God is the Supreme Principle ‘entering’ into universal Relativity, hence still ‘Supreme’ despite the ‘entering’, which enables one to affirm that God the Creator and Legislator is at one and the same time Ātmā and Māyā, or Ātmā in Māyā, but never simply Māyā” (“The Ambiguity of Exoterism”, In the Face of the Absolute).

My sense is that you’re feeling a bit constricted by Thomistic formulations and categories, which you wish to do full justice to despite your evident affinity for perennialist metaphysics. This feeling is understandable. The presence of Māyā in divinis cannot but frustrate those who wish for their terms, and the corresponding realities, to stay put. We must be willing to say, and then unsay, if we wish to honor the “fluid” character of the Real.