Federica wrote: ↑Sun Jul 17, 2022 8:10 pm
Thanks Ashvin, I have really appreciated and enjoyed this reading in all its - as you say - epic unfolding.
As for the contemplation of the School of Athens, this isn’t an act I am familiar with in any way. I have to admit, I have encountered some resistance to contemplating in particular such a big, crowded overview type of gigantic Renaissance fresco. I tend to perceive these as impenetrable to me, or as fanciful interior decor, meant to extravagantly please the pope in office who ordered them to his palace. They are usually populated with an outpouring of filler-characters that, according to the painter’s mood, take this or that resemblance. In this one for instance, Plato has the semblance of Leonardo for some reason, and the traits of the painter himself, and his colleague’s, are also lent to some of the characters. Just to say that I am naturally not drawn to painted scenes like this one.
However, having read the background interpretation, I have taken the time to look at the scene and I have been surprised to notice how the architectural perspective stands out as a meaningful agent, bringing life to the action at the center. To me the perspective has stood out as the real enabler of the crucial scene. Through this savvy spatial organization, the conversation between the two philosophers seems to grow in presence and to reverberate through the dimensions, until it extends out. It might very well be the first time I have found some relevance, and not boredom, in considering artwork of that sort!
About the value of the essay in itself, it’s stunning to realize how common but hopeless it is to expect to understand the ancient philosophers and poets without the least idea of how their worldview embedded in cosmic unity is worlds apart from today’s individuated ego. I already had a vague sense of that gap - not that I learned that in school unfortunately - but this reading really offers a deep and deft perspective on the inner workings of this divide and its interrelated unfolding in art, philosophy and evolution.
I have found the tale of this human journey, from the warmth of the spiritual sun to the responsibilities of the sun-from-within, beautifully accounted for and paced, with the times of disenchantment, or expulsion from the womb of nature, and later the emergence of selfhood. It’s particularly interesting - requiring further reflection - that the birth of modern man - I read expulsion from nature’s womb as birth - is set in coincidence not with the sacrifice of Christ, putting the solar principle within the individual, but with the definitive lost of cosmic unity with nature, symbolized in the fresco by the passage from Plato to Aristotle, or from red spiritual sunset to the blue darkness of the unknown.
So modern humanity is said to be born with the intellectualizing philosophy of Aristotle. Then with the Christ it moved from infancy to adulthood, with the emergence of the ‘individual solar ego’. Before today I had never heard about this blindness to the color blue, and that it matches the literature! This parallel between the ancient Greeks’s experience of color and the yet-to-come experience of selfhood, in relation to color theory, is amazing. There is one point that remains unclear to me in that respect. It’s that in the experience of blue and cold colors the light ‘recedes from the viewer’. How can light ever recede from the viewer? I am missing this link, however the idea that, until Plato, Greeks couldn’t see blue from their embedded position in nature, lacking as they were all personal agency independent from it and its deities, makes real sense.
The next interesting turn in the journey is that 400-year period between Plato and Christ, the infancy - or darkness? - of modern humanity, when the world of spirit had already faded away from human perception, while the ‘ontological sanctuary’ of Plato’s ideal forms had been built up. The spiritual sun was gone, the cord of mystical participation was cut, but the sun of individuation was not there yet.
With his concepts that precede things, Plato had forced humanity out of merger with nature. Then with Aristotle, humanity volplaned down into immanence of concepts in things. Fitting them back in things as instances of nature, Aristotle set the premises to scientific reasoning, and the fragmentalizing energies of intellect were released. Concepts were constrained in the tight chest of immanence, got petrified, and crushed into ‘fine rationalistic dust’. This connects with what you and Cleric often refer to as the crystallized intellectual thoughts of our times. It’s interesting to consider the historical-philosophical perspective of how this came about.
Apparently what’s suggested is that these universal concepts were all humanity could cling to during that meantime. So those universalia have been the one force that, first with Plato, has pulled humans out of cosmic unity, originating modern times.Then with Aristotle, those concepts have dragged us down into the immanence of things, bringing about the premises of a long era of rationalism. From there, we have traveled all the way down to complete abstraction and today’s ‘pluriverse’ of particularisms.
The conclusion resonates with my current reflections on sacrifice and death. Midway along the trajectory to our present time’s afflictions, Christ has gifted humanity with the sun of Love that radiates from within, the seed of unity with creation again, though in an new sense, and since that sacrifice was made, there is no way back to passive reliance in salvation coming from above. My last takeaway, and core of many discussions here, has been that salvation only comes ‘according to one's own initiative’. (I have given up on alchemy and honeybees for now).
For the reader, even the unsophisticated one who might miss a number of subtleties, it’s an insightful, stunning tale of the adventurous emergence of modern humans. Thank you!
PS. A trivial note on pronouns. Great intention of acting against common practice with pronouns, although, in this one application, the result sounds odd to my ear, like in “the world enjoins the human being to awaken from her slumber that she may fulfill her role…” Anyway I am only noticing this because, in fact, the one pronoun that should have been feminine is the one in reference to the author of that painting of Virgin Mary clothed in golden yellow. That the painter is a woman is just the kind of minor detail I personally would have liked to be made aware of, and maybe your friend would too.
Thank you for this great feedback and sharing of your insights, Federica. There is a whole lot to be explored in your comments. You have clearly followed the essay's core meaning with impeccable reasoning. I just realized that I forgot to include the link to the full essay, but I'm glad you found it -
https://theoriapress.substack.com/p/the ... archetypal
Let's begin at the Center - Christ incarnate. It's very useful to understand this 'Mystery of Golgotha', which denotes all the events over those 3 years from the baptism of Jesus to his death-resurrection (and then actually beyond to the event at Pentecost, in which the Spirit descended into the disciples), as a Cosmic Idea. Similarly to how the idea of a musical symphony, guided by the conductor, will precipitate into the flow of beats, notes, chords, instruments over time, this Cosmic Idea has precipitated into the whole of humanity's evolution on Earth. At the same time, it was also a singular historical series of events in human history. So it is really the Mystery of all mysteries! In its occurrence, we see all the archetypal polarities united - the One-Many, Time-Space, Macrocosmic-Microcosmic, Heaven-Earth, Invisible-Visible, Moral-Natural (Historical), etc. - which of course is symbolized in the image of the Cross. Yet it also shows us how the polarities
will be united through human evolution as we progress - it is what makes possible the uniting through the individuated human soul. Every human individual will go through the Christ events as he went through them over those years.
As you can imagine, the depth of significance here is endless and we can't really comprehend what exactly happened yet, but it does stand at the very Center of our existence and evolution. And we now stand at the time when the Mystery is becoming demystified, so to speak - its higher reality is precipitating into our consciousness in a way that can be concretely known and, therefore, perceived (like the ancients could begin perceiving the color 'blue' as Self-consciousness emerged). We can each go through our 'road to Damascus' moment, which was, in fact, Saul of Tarsus perceiving Christ through higher imaginative cognition, thereby being initiated into the new Mystery and becoming Saint Paul. So the events of this Mystery are unfolding throughout the entire course of human evolution on Earth. All the prior ancient Mysteries of Indo-China, Persia, Egypt, and Greece find their fulfillment in this One and it is now bearing its fruit for modern man - the individual, awakening human heart and mind is the new 'Mystery Center'.
Now this may clarify your question about Plato and Aristotle - the beginning of ancient Greek philosophy was a key 'measure' which unfolded from the Cosmic Idea - the overarching conducted symphony - of the awakening Self. It marks the very beginning of humans feeling themselves to have an inner, independent thought-life as such, and the difference between Plato and Aristotle really highlights this transition. (I'm glad you gained deeper appreciation and insights into Raphael's painting from the essay, which I did as well - now you are perceiving more of the esoteric dimension to exoteric culture). Even at the time of Homer, it was still felt that inspirations came directly from the Gods and the human merely acted as a vehicle of its expression. Philosophy as such only becomes possible with the emergence of the inner thought-life. The Christ events are truly at the Center, and all these other developments revolve around it like planets around the Sun, or like the solar system around the black hole at the Center of our Galaxy. There is a very lawful and traceable development of the Self-awakening which occurs even from the ancient Indian civilization. We find the most ancient recorded and sublime image of this in the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. Krishna is none other than the Christ being, pre-incarnate.
There is one point that remains unclear to me in that respect. It’s that in the experience of blue and cold colors the light ‘recedes from the viewer’. How can light ever recede from the viewer?
Well, we can remember here that all phenomena can only be understood from the first-person perspective, the only perspective there is. That is at the core of Goethe's color theory, while Newton's theory takes the standard 3rd-person view which concludes "light" to be some entity existing independently of human thinking perspective and agency. When we perceive the blue sky during the day, for example, we are perceiving the darkness of outer space through light, or "dark lightened". There is simply no meaning to this approach if we don't remember the "we are perceiving" part. It is the case that another living organism, with a different mode of consciousness, would be perceiving another color or no color at all, perhaps experiencing the force interaction more as a smell or taste or an inner shock. As an aside, secular scientists also talk about 'light receding from the viewer' in terms of "blue-shifting" (or the attenuation of light as "red-shifting"), but not realizing its actual significance from first-person perspective.
"blue-shifting" (noun): the displacement of the spectrum to shorter wavelengths in the light coming from distant celestial objects moving towards the observer.
We should note that we are never perceiving Light or Darkness directly. They are supersensible forces, which the abstract scientist can only refer to as "wave-lengths" and such. What we perceive is the interplay of Light-Darkness from our given perspective, which manifests as colors. And all the various forms we perceive around us can be understood as arising from the intersection of these color-forces. Steiner developed a very interesting method of painting which utilizes this understanding, where the forms emerge out of the interweaving colors painted.
The conclusion resonates with my current reflections on sacrifice and death. Midway along the trajectory to our present time’s afflictions, Christ has gifted humanity with the sun of Love that radiates from within, the seed of unity with creation again, though in an new sense, and since that sacrifice was made, there is no way back to passive reliance in salvation coming from above. My last takeaway, and core of many discussions here, has been that salvation only comes ‘according to one's own initiative’. (I have given up on alchemy and honeybees for now).
Very well stated! It's not necessarily that we have stopped relying on higher powers above for our salvation, but we must take the active initiative to "seek first the Kingdom of God in righteousness" before "all these things will be added to [us]". We must meet the descent of the Christ being, who is now dwelling on a higher plane of consciousness, with our own ascent. Nevertheless, no salvation is possible without the ongoing efforts of the higher hierarchies to raise us up. The whole theological debate between salvation by "works" or by "faith/grace" is yet another polarity which is united through the Christ impulse - unlike what the modern evangelicals proclaim with their abstract dogma, these can coexist harmoniously.
Yeah, the honeybees are best left for another time, but they are a fascinating topic. It is yet another unnecessary tragedy of our times that they are in such peril from our ignorance of the higher worlds which they represent.
PS. A trivial note on pronouns. Great intention of acting against common practice with pronouns, although, in this one application, the result sounds odd to my ear, like in “the world enjoins the human being to awaken from her slumber that she may fulfill her role…” Anyway I am only noticing this because, in fact, the one pronoun that should have been feminine is the one in reference to the author of that painting of Virgin Mary clothed in golden yellow. That the painter is a woman is just the kind of minor detail I personally would have liked to be made aware of, and maybe your friend would too.
I don't quite follow. I assure you that Max is not playing any of the recent 'pronoun games' that are so common. The human soul, and the Soul in general, is usually referred to as female. Actually the pronouns are of great importance in esoteric spiritual tradition - "He", "She'", "It", "I", have profound significance, so it's yet another disappointment that people feel they can be so carelessly thrown about and interchanged for our own convenience these days.
Also, Max himself may come across this thread, as I alerted him to its existence, in which case I obviously defer to his own answers to your questions.