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The Counsel of the Exile Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, 'The Unknown Philosopher' (1743-1803) |
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Man has been set amidst the darkness of created things only to demonstrate by his individual light the existence of their Supreme Agent, to convince all who misconstrue it. All things should speak, since the spirit and the voice of God should fill all, and yet all is mute about us. It is a sign of the glory of our humanity, as it is an instance of the signal wisdom of Providence, that all such proofs adduced form the external order are thus deceptive in their last analysis ... The entire universe, notwithstanding all the splendours which it displays before our eyes, can never of itself manifest the truly divine treasures. There is not a man in possession of his true self for whom the temporal universe is not a great allegory or fable which must give place to a grand morality. At the first glance which man directs upon himself, he will perceive without difficulty that there must be a science or an evident law for his own nature, since there is one for all beings, though it is not universally in all, and since even in the midst of our weakness, our ignorance, and humiliation we are employed only in the search after truth and light. Albeit, therefore, the efforts which man makes daily to attain the end of his researches are so rarely successful, it must not be considered on this account that the end is imaginary, but only that man is deceived as to the road which leads thereto, and is hence in the greatest of privations, since he does not even know the way in which he should walk. The overwhelming misfortune of man is not that he is ignorant of the existence of truth, but that he misconstrues its nature. What errors and what sufferings would have been spared us if, far from seeking truth in the phenomena of material nature, we had resolved to descend into ourselves, and had sought to explain material things by man, and not man by material things; if, fortified by courage and patience, we had preserved in the calm of our imagination the discovery of the light which we desire all of us with so much ardour. Man is the sole being in the natural order who is not complelled to pursue the same road invariably. The function of man differs from that of other physical beings, for it is the reparation of the disorders in the universe. Man possesses inumerable vestiges of the faculties resident in that Agent which produced him; he is the sign or visible expression of the Divinity. The saintly race of man, engendered from the fount of wonder and the fount of desire and intelligence, was established in the region of temporal immensity like a brilliant star for the diffusion of heavenly light. I must not conceal that this crass envelope is the actual penalty to which the crime of man has made him subject in the temporal region. Thereby begin and thereby are perpetuated the trials without which he cannot recover his former correspondence with the light. When God has recourse to such visible signs as the universe to communicate his thought, it is to employ them in favour of beings separated from him. Had all beings remained in his unity, they would not have needed this means to draw towards him. The universe is therefore a sign of God's love for corrupted creatures separated voluntarily from the First Cause and submitted to the laws of justice in the womb of the visible universe. God operates unceasingly to remove the separation so contrary to their felicity. The wisdom and bounty of the Divine Being are manifested by the birth of man into terrestrial life. He is thus placed in a position to soothe by his labour and striving a part of the evils which the first crime has caused on the earth. It is perhaps this wrong connection of ideas (that the earth is a mere point in the universe) which has led men to the still falser notion that they are not worthy of the Creator's regard. They have believed themselves to be obeying the dictates of humility when they have denied that the earth and all that the universe contains exists only on man's account, on the ground that the admission of such an idea would be only conceit. But they have not been afraid of the laziness and cowardice which are the inevitable results of this affected modesty. The present day avoidance of the belief that we are the highest in the universe is the reason that we have not the courage to work in order to justify that title, that the duties springing from it seem too laborious, and that we would rather abdicate our position and our rights than realise them in all their consequences. Where is the pilot that will guide us between these hidden reefs of conceit and false humility? If there be anything deplorable in our existence, it is to know that we ourselves bar the approach of Divinity; it is to be physically aware that the Divinity is ever moving around us, striving to enter our hearts and thus raise us from the dead, to enliven us by the fire of the Spirit. The least ray of the Divine Word suffices to operate this prodigy within us, substituting virtues and characterised faculties in place of the tenebrous state which is peculiar to the region we inhabit. Yet it is the ray of this Word which we drive zealously away as though it were death. The learned describe nature; the wise explain it. Had we the courage to make voluntarily the sincere and continual sacrifice of our entire being, the ordeals, oppositions and evils which we undergo during life would not be sent us; hence we should always be superior to our sacrifices, like the Repairer, instead of being almost invariably inferior to them. Man's head is raised toward heaven, and for this reason he finds nowhere to repose it on earth. All the impressions which are made on us by Nature are designed to exercise our soul during its term of penitence, to prompt us towards the eternal truths shown beneath a veil, and to lead us to recover what we have lost. We are all in a widowed state, and our task is to remarry. As a proof that we are regenerated we must regenerate everything around us.
[ Source: The Dedalus Book of the Occult (2003) by Gary Lachman. ISBN: 1903517206 ] |
