Robert Sardello, Green Man; Earth Angel
FOREWORD
Tom Cheetham has written a remarkable book that has the power of shifting our way of imagining the world. This power stems from his insight into a core longing felt within the heart of human beings, a longing for wholeness that feels as if it were a memory. We imagine that there was a time, long ago, when human beings lived reverently in relation to the earth and the cosmos. We felt, so the story says, whole, in our place, with God at the center and the periphery.
Then the Great Disjunction happened. Matter and Spirit were split into two isolated realms. God was removed from the world and placed in His heaven and the earth, gradually at first, and then more and more rapidly, became the great supplier of commodities, mere material substance.
Different thinkers locate this disjunction at different times and due to different factors, but it is always depicted as occurring sometime in actual history, and the story says we have been on a downward course ever since. This way of imagining the unfolding of evolution always looks to the past as the better time, and all our efforts need to be focused on retrieving the sensibility of the past.
The more sophisticated tellers of this story do not imagine we can return to the past, but they do feel we can return to the values of the past, or find ways of living those past values, primarily by living in relative isolation from the present world dynamics, encompassed in a shield of fear.
Cheetham’s first creative contribution lies in pointing out the obvious, but it is obvious only to one who has a living inner life. The longing for wholeness is an archetypal longing. It belongs to the essence of the soul to feel such longing.
It will always be there. This longing motivates us to search for the ultimate inner meaning of our existence and to at least find ways to assure we do not go off on collective tangents that depart from world destiny. When we understand that the longing originates in the soul, new ways of imagining the world have to be sought, and these new ways have to be conscious soul ways.
Here lies the second and truly great contribution of this book. Cheetham recognizes that a longing of the soul has to be responded to in kind. That is, only soul can respond to soul. Only soul understands soul. If we are to ever get anywhere with this archetypal longing, we have to approach it on its own terms. A metaphysics that excludes imagination, the hallmark of soul, as a world force, is fated to painful longing without the slightest possibility of resolution.
Metaphysics that has no place for the category of imaginal being splits spirit from matter with no way for them to ever be linked. Longing becomes replaced by abstract thought that turns into systems of science and technology. Materialism characterizes the other side of the split. Materialism is the outlook that says that everything in the universe can be understood in terms of the arrangement and action of purely physical forces. And, more subversively materialism offers the notion that all longings can be quieted through material means of every sort.
Cheetham develops a method of proceeding from longing to questions of metaphysics. His method consists of making us feel deeply all that we have lost with the way reality has been split up; the loss of the imagination, the loss of living speech, words as angels, the loss of reading that speaks from within reality rather than about it, and most of all, the loss of the sense of place.
He throws us into the depth of loss, the depth of despair, really. We cannot recover what we cannot feel. Cheetham’s method involves a descent into hell, a necessary descent, but one that distinguishes the hell we live—the literal, surface-bound, consuming, manic world, with the fructifying descent into the darkness where we await the voices and visions of the archetypal worlds.
Cheetham progresses in his method by seeing through the split of spirit and matter, seeking to establish what a metaphysics with imagination as the forming force of the world would mean. As long as we think only in terms of spirit and matter, and its two primary manifestations in the ‘world, religion and science, we contribute to the loss of the subtle, participative sense.
An archetypal metaphysics views creation as happening every moment. All is alive. And soul is not in us; in this metaphysics, we are in soul. The implications of such a view are enormous. However, it takes more than the idea of such a metaphysics to begin discovering the ways to live such a proposed reality. And here is the third great contribution of this book.
Such a metaphysics exists. The outlines of it can be found by interpreting the work of C. G.Jung in a radical way, and the further outlines of it are found in the work of Henry Corbin, the primary
emphasis of this book.
Cheetham makes a long and fruitful excursion into the work of C. G.
Jung as a preparation for introducing the reader into imaginal metaphysics. We have come to think of Jung as the phenomenologist of the soul. When we come to Jung’s ‘work on alchemy, however, we find that the alchemists ‘were seeking to make spirit conscious.
They were working out an imaginal metaphysics of transformation in their theorizing-visioning, and they demonstrated the practicality of this metaphysics in the practice of alchemy. Jung did not quite see them this way, but, in truth, the alchemists were attempting to free spirit from matter and were not just projecting their fantasies onto matter.
Alchemy was simultaneously a transformation of self and of world into completeness. Jung reads this completeness, this wholeness, as involving the incorporation of contradictories, the light and the shadow of soul reality.
Cheetham’s understanding of Jung’s project and the limitations of that project is brilliant. Once those limitations are clear, he is able to establish an all important bridge from Jung to the astounding work of Henry Corbin, from depth psychology that never quite made the metaphysical leap, to Islamic mysticism’s fully developed imaginal metaphysics.
Central to the movement from Jung to Corbin’s creative interpretation of Islamic mysticism is the difference between the darkness of the Shadow in Jung and the luminous darkness of the divine Night. In Jung there exists a throwing together of soul experience and spirit experience without really seeing that there is a decided difference.
Jung’s adamant commitment to soul made it impossible for him to conceive of anything outside of soul, or to plead ignorance when it came to saying what was behind archetypes. Even spirit, for Jung, is the soul’s perception of spirit. One result of this limitation of Jung, a limitation that still exists in present depth psychology and even in Archetypal Psychology as put forth by James Hillman, is that spirit experiences are not recognized as such. For example, there is no recognition that there are these two darknesses—the Shadow and the luminous darkness of the divine Night.
The former is a soul experience, to be integrated into consciousness for completeness, the latter a spirit experience necessary to wholeness, not only of experience,
but of the world. And without that recognition, it is really not possible to tell when one is conscious in soul and when one is conscious in spirit, and certainly, it is not possible to have any sense of the relation between the two.
Hillman solves this dilemma by taking an adamant stance against spirit, as if that opposition would cancel the reality. At the same time, Hillman acknowledges a debt to Corbin for bringing forth the notion of the Mundus Imaginalis. Hillman interprets this as the imaginal world of the soul, saving depth psychology from sophisticated subjectivity.
However, in Corbin, and even more importantly, in the Islamic sources of this term, the Mundus Imaginalis is the imaginal world of the spirit. The confusion wrought by interpreting spirit phenomena as soul phenomena has meant that depth psychology tends to honor the darkness of the descent into hell as if it were the realm of the holy.
Depth psychology is unable to distinguish the realm of the unconscious and the realm of the superconscious. Hillman’s nterpretation of the Mundus Imaginalis is a misinterpretation.
Cheetham’s teasing out of all the exact quotations from Corbin that establish the clear difference between Shadow and Luminous Darkness constitutes one of the scholarly delights of this book that frees us enough from Jung to be appreciative of his efforts while reorienting the search that archetypal longing pulls us into.
While the soul realm is perceived through soul, it is more appropriate, says Cheetham, to say that the superconscious realm is perceived through the “supersensory senses.” While soul is certainly an imaginal realm, the luminous darkness takes us into the imaginal world. These supersensory senses have to be prepared for through meditative disciplines that gradually bring about an alteration of our physiology, one of the effects of the meditation practices in the Islamic mystical tradition.
The difference between soul sensing and supersensory sensing distinguishes the darkness of the lower soul from the Black Light, which is the Light that itself cannot be seen but which makes everything else visible. What is first visible upon entry to the imaginal world are colors, but colors without matter. These colors are the mark of entering into the realm of the Mundus Imaginalis. They also mark entering into the non-knowing
of the heart, the perceptual organ for sensing the spiritual worlds. One of the most beautiful sections of this book describes the seven prophetic colors and their functions.
In this imaginal metaphysics, all beings and things and places are mirrors of the spiritual worlds, illuminated by the Light that makes everything else visible. We are, in effect, then, composed of the artistic play of spiritual beings.
The imaginal metaphysics of Ibn ‘Arabi, as interpreted by Corbin, is a fruitful gnosis that accounts for the divine worlds and for the earthly world, but does not confuse them, nor does it separate them the way we do in the Western tradition.
It is a fruitful Gnosticism. I say fruitful in contrast to Jung’s Gnosticism which confusedly mixes soul and spirit and never resolves the intense archetypal longing.
The gnosis outlined by Corbin is in opposition to any kind of incarnational Christianity. For the metaphysics of Ibn ‘Arabi and other Islamic mystics, the incarnation of Christ is an impossibility, for it historicizes God.
Cheetham indicates that in this cosmology, to say that Christ is God incarnate, is equivalent to saying that God is dead. The entry of God materially, wholly, and substantially into historical, material, and public time and space is the archetypal act of secularization.
In the gnosis of Islamic mysticism Christ is an ever-present reality of the soul. And, Christ did live, but, in this gnostic imagination, he did not die on the cross. One of the most interesting sentences in this book describes an intriguing imagination of what happened to Christ.
Indeed, the chapter comparing Corbin’s view of Christ with the view of Christianity is a pivotal chapter in this book. Corbin speaks of Christ as a man, but also as a figure of Light—both. Christ is also the Soul of the World. This theological chapter gives a basis for approaching the world as spiritual image, populated with Presences.
The doctrine of the Incarnation in the exoteric version of Christianity
collapses any sensibility of the angelic hierarchies. The angelic realms no longer have the power they once did, and that can still be found in esoteric Christianity, which is far more compatible with the view put forth by Corbin.
We find this collapse evident in religion these days, which no longer has a conception of the creating power of the angelic realms. So, there is an imaginal theology accompanying, even preceding, imaginal metaphysics. This theology is
founded on Beauty rather than on Salvation. Cheetham puts his finger on the key element for responding rightly to archetypal longing, and his uncovering of the senses of Beauty in the work of Corbin is stunning.
Beauty is the strength of imaginal theology, and its hope—that which holds the possibility of guiding our longing to its destination. And Beauty is the core imagination for any culture seeking this destination. Beauty is not something given but strived for through purification of soul.
Beauty here is completely objective, “subjectively objective.” By this term I mean that in imaginal metaphysics all dualism is resolved so that there is no longer a subject-object distinction; rather, subject and object are one. Further, Beauty is not an abstract concept but rather the theophany of Sophia. And, while Beauty is a sort of destination,
She is a destination that takes us always farther into the unknowing. The path of Beauty is epistemologically complex because it is based in non-dualism of knowing. In imaginal knowing, you know only through the aspect of the known within you. But, it must also follow that an object known, knows when it is known.
Beauty is understood completely interiorly but not subjectively. The difference between a world based in Beauty and one based in a theology of Salvation is more than an interesting comparison of two cosmologies.
Cheetham shows how destructive technology is tied to Christian theology of Salvation. Drawing on the philosopher Gianni Vattimo, Cheetham shows that radical freedom is the destiny of the Christian tradition, and that such freedom makes the earth a playground of destruction.
There are no longer any boundaries. The section of this book concerned with technology is fascinating in that the view of freedom coming from Vattimo’s understanding of Christianity is based upon the notion that with freedom there is always the risk that a choice to make a world in harmony with the spiritual worlds does not seem to be an option.
The difference between freedom and nihilism collapses. Such a view commands a great deal of reflection, for powerful elements of this view can certainly be seen in the present world in which we find wars being fought pitting these two—freedom and nihilism—against each other, ‘which may in fact, then, be wars of self-destruction.
This country’s battle cry is freedom and strikes out at the apparent nihilism of terrorism. But, what if freedom, as presently politically
understood, is no more than a form of nihilism?
This view of freedom without limits as nihilism is not completely accurate. Freedom is nihilism only when it is not filled, completely, with the content of love. So, to read technology as the fulfillment of the Christian tradition, and the Christian tradition as finally nihilistic in its total freedom, leaves something out. It leaves out the option of the choice of love.
The difference, then, between the Christian tradition and the kind of technological world it ultimately creates, and Islamic mysticism and the kind of world it imagines, hinges on the detailed process of metamorphosis and initiation into the source of love, the Beloved, described in such detail in Islamic mysticism.
Exoteric Christianity lacks a necessary angelology as a way of proceeding to the Beloved, and without such an angelology it almost certainly does lead to nihilistic freedom.
The intricate and careful way Cheetham works out these concerns is truly wondrous. In particular, his section on the radical work of Archetypal psychologist Wolfgang Giegerich is invaluable.
While James Hillman takes Jung toward the direction of Corbin but never reaches the autonomy of spirit, Giegerich takes Jung toward the direction of Jung’s alchemical view of spirit freed from matter, which leaves matter, and indeed the world, open to the kind of nihilism suggested by Vattimo.
We have rid the world of things from their status of being the appearance of the shining of the gods and the angels, says Giegerich. And we are left with only one god, the one we have created, technology, best exemplified by the bomb.
It is not, however, particular technologies Giegerich is talking about, but rather the world-creating/destroying idea of technology as how we save ourselves. The description of the intricacies of this view and how Giegerich arrives at it are worth the price of admission to this book.
Giegerich’s view of the incarnation, however, is based on an incapacity to imagine that God became fully human in Christ. Fully human. For Geigerich, the incarnation of God is incarnation into a different kind of flesh than the rest of humans. Flesh from above, is, in Giegerich’s view, not the same as natural flesh. It is, in effect, technological flesh.
The event of this “technological” flesh has ultimately meant that abstract technology
is our god.
Cheetham wants to make the most difficult case possible for valuing the world and then finding how it is possible to find meaning and avenues of responding to the longing for wholeness that will not go away. It is easy and rather cheap to begin with an abstract notion of wholeness. That approach, characteristic of the New Age movement and those captured by nostalgia for a past that never was, is abstract and begins by turning away from the world as it is now.
Cheetham is one of the most courageous thinkers I have ever read. He shows the very basis of the now dominant worldview, and he shows how this basis is indeed nihilistic, and as he is doing so, he also shows us the way out, which is by going through the labyrinth, not ascending to thoughts that ignore our situation of being lost in the labyrinth.
The way through the nihilistic, technological world, is twofold: love, described as an initiatory process with definite and clear steps of purification and perception, and the resanctification of the world. And this twofold path has, in addition, to be founded in a priority of the imaginal in order to avoid making a false dichotomy between spirit and matter.
The last section of the book concerns the word as the way out of nihilism and the way to rightly respond to archetypal longing for wholeness. The living, breathing word, not those collections of words found in the dictionary and strung together into dead sentences.
Cheetham begins a reflection on the word based upon Ibn ‘Arabi’s view of language as the unique articulation of the divine Breath. Our breath, articulated, nondualistically, belonging both to us and to world, speaks human and cosmic reality simultaneously.
This is poetic, creative speech, speaking without knowing in advance what one is going to say. Speaking that lives in the region of holy Silence. The excursion into spirit must always return to soul in order to be connected with sensuous reality, and it is with speech that this return continually occurs, embodying spirit without collapsing it into matter.
We come, then, to a new understanding of soul, soul as the embodying process of spirit, and as the spiritualizing process of matter. These intertwining processes live together in word-breath.
The world speaks and the symbols of its speaking are the breath of God. The discipline needed to hold technological destruction at bay is the capacity to read the world.
This discipline requires, says Cheetham, an imaginal asceticism, an ongoing purification process that works to keep us from falling into the false desires of the present worldview and inspires courage to be fully present to what is present.
These few indications of what you will find in this book will, I hope, entice you to enter into a study of a work that certainly does not belong to the world of throwaway books. This book requires slow reading, for as you read these living words you are undergoing a transformation.
At the end of reading, the world will not be the same. ~Robert Sardello, Green Man; Earth Angel, Foreword, Page xi-xvii
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