Home
Thank you for your inquiry concerning my article “Colorless Light and Pure Air“. You are right to suppose it has been controversial, to say the least.
One of the most important criticisms was voiced in the pages of the journal Sophia some years ago by Dr Martin Lings and Mr Alvin Moore—may their memories be eternal. I had erred, they argued, in saying that the Divine Essence may be regarded as feminine. Quoting Schuon I wrote, “The Supreme Divinity is either Father or Mother” (p. 26), and then, before proceeding to the contested remarks on the following pages, I was careful to insert the following cautionary note:
“We must not forget, of course, that the Divine is finally beyond all categories, and that in Himself [as Schuon says] ‘God could be neither masculine nor feminine, for it would be an error of language to reduce God to one of two reciprocally complementary poles.’ Insofar as each requires the other to be what it is, Reality is obviously neither alone, nor even both as a synthesis, for its perfect simplicity is prior to all such pairs or syzygies. On the other hand, if ‘each sex represents a perfection’, and if we attend to that perfection as such, ‘God cannot but assume the characteristics of both'” (p. 46, note 107).
What came next in the body of the article was an attempt to attend precisely to the “perfection as such” of Divine femininity.
At no point did I mean to suggest, however, that other darshānas are impossible, nor would I now dispute the fact that the point of view recommended by these two eminent gentlemen remains the doctrinal and metaphysical norm. One understands perfectly well what Dr Lings meant in saying that the Sanskrit neuter Tad, or That, “is greater than either” the masculine or the feminine.
On the other hand I feel obliged to point out that this normative teaching in no way excludes the somewhat more “specialized” perspective set forth in my article—a perspective one is free to entertain, not of course as a doctrinal description of the Essence as such, but as an operative upāya or methodic provocation having the power to effect an ascent within the Principle. Moore and Lings both stressed that the Essence in itself is not feminine, and their claim is incontestable. The position adopted in my article, however—solidly based, I believe, on a number of indications in Schuon’s published and unpublished work—was that in relation to the Divine Person, the Essence may be envisioned nonetheless according to a feminine mode and that, as a means of transcending the domain of forms, this approach to the very highest Reality may be regarded as having a certain alchemical priority.
Writing to me privately after the publication of these criticisms, a long-time friend of Schuon’s offered the following very helpful observation.
“It does not seem to me that you have gone too far in your claims about the Virgin. What can go too far is our need to put everything under the control of our mental formulations. The criticisms expressed in these letters could have been avoided by simply putting some words here and there between quotation marks. It is thus that I read them, and this expedient would perhaps have been enough to mark your intentions and to tranquilize those who would dot every ‘i.'”
I accept this advice very gladly, and with my correspondent’s suggestion in mind, I would therefore rephrase my thoughts on the disputed issue this way: while it is certainly true that the Essence is not in itself either masculine or feminine, it is precisely for this reason that the Essence is “feminine”, and it is to this mystery that I intended to point in saying that the Virgin Mary “is” the ineffable Dhāt (= Tad).
Near the start of his own letter on this subject Mr Moore wrote that “there are other valid and more compelling views” than the one presented in “Colorless Light”. Validity I concede—within the limits just discussed. At the same time, however, if one is treating a matter as subtle and elusive as the Divine femininity, surely what is more compelling for a given soul must in part at least be a function of vocation and temperament. Schuon would never have insisted it was necessary for everyone, even every esotericist, to accept all his teachings regarding the Virgin, and he certainly never supposed all and sundry would appreciate his paintings, one of which I include at the end of the article. My aim was therefore not to impose his vision on my reader nor to assume (as Moore worried) that Schuon’s “private revelations are incumbent” on others, but rather—as announced near the beginning of the article—to “assist the esotericist who is a priori open to the depth of this mystery to see Mary more truly in her intrinsic reality” (p. 5).
Need we quarrel about this? If in looking along the trajectory established by the Mariology set forth in the article one man finds himself drawn more deeply than another into the very heart of the Divine Reality, it is certainly not for him to take pride in that fact or to act as if his path were the only one possible. But neither, I respectfully submit, is it for another man to stand in his way.