4 the Configuration of the Temple of the Ka'bah As the Secret of The
4 The Configuration of the Temple of the Ka'bah as The Secret of the Spiritual Life according to the work of Qadi Sa'id Qummi (1103/1691) I. The Spiritual Forms The themes that we ponder together in Eranos from year to year have the virtue of inducing in us, during the preceding months, a state of premedi- tation which is peculiarly favourable to lucid reaction. It was in this manner, and with regard to this year's theme, that I found myself reacting over the winter to two works on Balzac which had just come out. For, in their respective interpretations of the work of our great novelist, these two books form a contrast as striking as it is instructive for what we are about to discuss. The first of these works is meant to be addressed to "people who are human enough not to limit their attention to literature alone"; yet it then presents us with a Balzac so dependent on nineteenth-century society that he occupies some quite minor position in it, like that of a clerk, and his society could very well have done without him. Because of his bias, the interpreter keeps us on the ground, or, more accurately, he refuses to rise, in dealing with Balzac's work, higher than the ground floor of the "Studies of Manners" where the archives are stored. There is no question of going up to the first floor, the floor of the "Philosophical Studies", "where one can discover a hidden order of things", let alone of going up to the second floor, that of the "Analytical Studies", where it is possible to "meditate on natural principles, and to see in what ways societies fall away from or approach the eternal laws of truth and goodness." It would be hard not to define this mutilating interpretation as counter-sense, because—to go no further—it contradicts Balzac's express statements.
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