Near Lake Siljan, Sweden --Photograph by Rainer Kleinedawe
with permission
 

 

The Angel of the Earth
By
Tom Cheetham1

1This essay is excerpted from “Before I was A Planet: Poverty, Poetry and the Theory of Things,” a talk given at the 2001 Eranos Conference, Ascona, Switzerland.

Listen to these excerpts from a haunting meditation, written by Henry Corbin in 1932 at the edge of Lake Siljan in Sweden. He called it Theology by the Lakeside:

Everything is but revelation; there can only be revelation. But revelation comes from the Spirit, and there is no knowledge of the Spirit.
It will soon be dusk, but for now the clouds are still clear, the pines are not yet darkened, for the lake brightens them into transparency. And everything is green with a green that would be richer than if pulling all the organ stops in recital. It must be heard seated, very close to the Earth, arms crossed, eyes closed, pretending to sleep.
For it is not necessary to strut about like a conqueror and want to give a name to things, to everything; it is they who will tell you who they are, if you listen, yielding like a lover; for suddenly for you, in the untroubled peace of this forest of the North, the Earth has come to Thou, visible as an Angel that would perhaps be a woman, and in this apparition, this greatly green and thronging solitude, yes, the Angel too is robed in green, the green of dusk, of silence and of truth. Then there is in you all the sweetness that is present in the surrender to an embrace that triumphs over you…
…[A]t each moment where you read in truth as now what is there before you, where you hear the Angel, and the Earth and Woman, then you receive Everything, Everything, in your absolute poverty. But as soon as you have read and have received, as soon as you consider, as you want to understand, as you want to possess, to give a name and restrain, to explain and recover, ah! there is only a cipher, and your judgment is pronounced…
… you are the poor one, you are man; and he is God, and you cannot know God, or the Angel, or the Earth, or Woman. You must be encountered, taken, known, that they may speak, otherwise you are alone…2

2.In Christian Jambet, ed., (1981), 62-3. My translation.

We are the poor ones, and only in poverty can we hear what the earth may speak. But we in the dominant cultures do strut about like conquerors, and we have tried to gain dominion over creation. But in doing so, we risk finding that we are finally alone, on a dying planet, isolated from and in conflict with the voices that are not our own.

When we live as we are mostly living now, dominated by our own ideas and our own increasingly extravagant and damaging tools, by the ideas and inventions of what threatens to become a single homogeneous global culture, we suffer from a stultifying restriction of our capacities for experience, thought and expression, and of our capacities for love and relationship, for hearing other voices, both human and non-human.

Living on the Earth in something like the manner of which Corbin speaks is radically different from how we generally live. And in order to have any chance of understanding what that kind of life might be like we have to know what he means by poverty. There must be something important about poverty - the founders of all the major religious traditions emphasize its necessity, even if their followers fall far short of the mark. I had better be clear, in this age of polarization between the enormously wealthy and the desperately and hopelessly poor, that the poverty in question is not the deadly scourge of the oppressed. It is, first of all, a consciously chosen attempt to live free from greed, acquisitiveness and the desire for wealth in material possessions above and beyond the essentials for a healthy life. Every tradition has its exemplars. The Persian word darwish, was applied to the Sufis, to the mystics, and from it we derived the word dervish: it means the poor one.

Recognition of poverty as the fundamental condition of human existence grows out of an awareness of something more basic that Corbin calls mystical poverty: all things derive not from themselves, but from a source that is the grantor of Being to everything. Metaphysical poverty is the true state of all beings: each and every thing has nothing in itself, is nothing in itself. The 17th century Shi'ite mystic Mir Damad heard "the great occult clamor of beings," the "silent clamor of their metaphysical distress;" it appeared to him as a music of cosmic anguish and as a sudden black light invading the cosmos.3This is a direct perception of what philosophers call the contingency of being. It is the experience that gives rise to the great question of metaphysics "Why is there something rather than nothing?" For the gnostic it takes the form of a shattering moment of annihilation and terror, undoing all the solid foundations upon which the ego and the literal world are built. In Corbin's words,

3 Henry Corbin (1994), 112.

The black light reveals the very secret of being, which can only be as made-to-be; all beings have a twofold face, a face of light and a black face. The luminous face, the face of day, is the only one that…the common run of men perceive… Their black face, the one the mystic perceives, is their poverty… The totality of their being is their daylight face and their night face…4

 

4 ibid., 112-113.

The wonder and terror in the face of the fact that there is, but only by the inexplicable grace of God, something rather than nothing, provide the opening to the Unknown that lies at the heart of all religion, and of all knowing. To cover over this terrible wonderment is to block access to an Absence that is not the empty Nothing of nihilism, but the unknown and unknowable source of everything: the necessarily Hidden God beyond all being.

We know from Corbin's work that there are two darknesses: the darkness of evil that refuses the Light of God, and the shattering Darkness of the Black Light at the approach to the Pole that annihilates all human knowledge and pretension and is the final dangerous trial of the mystical journey. Perhaps it is an intimation of this divine undoing of human arrogance that lies behind the post-modern desire to deconstruct the claims to positive knowledge that define our rationalist heritage. But this destructive frenzy too often remains trapped within the confines of human language and ends in nihilism, solipsism, apathy and resignation. This leaves the way open for the radical dogmatists, both technological and religious fundamentalists, who have no patience with abstract debates about democracy or relativism: they simply go about their business of changing the world.

We need to learn from Corbin that the antidote to both nihilism and the dogmatic fundamentalism that is always constellated with it must come from a kind of positive deconstruction of the self in the vision of the Deus absconditum, the divine Beyond Being which is the source, the Breath that grants being to all things. Corbin writes,

Any metaphysical doctrine which attempts a total explanation of the universe, finds it necessary to make something out about nothing, or rather, to make everything out about nothing, since the initial principle from which the world derived, and which must explain it, must never be something contained in this world, and simultaneously it is necessary for this initial principle to posses all that is necessary to explain at once the being and the essence of the world and that which it contains… It is necessary…that this initial principle be at once 'all' and 'nothing'… [This] is a…nothing from which all things are derived. This is the Nothing of the Absolute Divine, superior to being and thought. 5

5 Henry Corbin (1981). My translation..

This Black Face of the majesty of Divinity is the essential counterweight to the Face of Light, the Face of Beauty of the revealed cosmos. You cannot have the one without the other. Majesty without Beauty is annihilation pure and simple. Beauty without Majesty would be an unthinkable Absolute frozen in eternal, changeless immanence - a permanent, horrible, all-pervading Final Truth. All of Creation is balanced between these poles, constantly created, and constantly undone in the divine interplay between transcendence and immanence.

The Absolute beyond-being is also, in the Abrahamic tradition, the Absolute Subject. The Giver of being can never be an object, a thing. In its infinite fecundity and mystery, its forever-receding depth and absolute Unity, it is the unifier, the guarantor of the individuality of every being. As such, it is the archetype of the Person, and of the interiority that infuses all the beings of the Earth experienced as an Angel.

It is the inexpressible Mystery of this primordial Darkness that it simultaneously establishes and shatters the human person. And it lies very close at hand. It is the still, small voice of the Hebrew Bible; and in the Qur'an, God says "I am closer to you than your jugular vein." Were we to learn this, to know that the presence of this absence is immediate, just beyond the face of the beauty of the world, we would need far less than we think we do. Our mode of being would be far less needy. We would know that scarcity and plenitude are complementary, not contradictory. We would understand the necessity of poverty as the prerequisite to the experience of the fullness of the world. For the things of this world grow opaque when we try to control and possess them, and they hide their connections among themselves, with us, and to the darknesses of the divine. They withdraw into themselves, lose substance and block our access to the riches at the roots of things. So our desperate neediness and grasping at the world and our fear of poverty and of the Dark close us off from ourselves and the worlds that we can inhabit.

Many of our tools, perhaps now most of them, originate from a hypertrophy of this neediness and this fear. As a result of these implements, the rich nations are consuming the resources of the earth at a terrifying pace and the gap between the wealthy and the destitute widens. We need to develop a kind of counter-technology that can begin the difficult tasks of defending us from the dominion of the tools we have invented, and of working to prevent the social catastrophes that always follow when the rich are able to ignore the suffering of the poor. To be successful a counter-technology cannot be a denial of human wants and needs - on the contrary, it must help us to see that everything we need is already at hand. It cannot be based upon the inflated and inflating assumptions of modern technology: that knowledge is always power, and power is always good, and that knowledge must inevitably be exercised by changing the world.