Dante's Vision of the Heavenly Rose
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VOL. 20 NO. 1 Easter 2020 Journal of the Sophia Foundation Dante’s Vision of the Heavenly Rose “[In Canto XXXI of the “Paradiso”] Dante sees an enormous rose, symbolizing divine love, the petals of which are the enthroned souls of the faithful (both those of the Old Testament and those of the New). All the souls he has met in Heaven, including Beatrice, have their home in this rose. Angels fly around the rose like bees, distributing peace and love. Beatrice now returns to her place in the rose, signifying that Dante has passed beyond theology in directly contemplating God, and St. Bernard, as a mystical contemplative, now guides Dante further.” (Wikipedia: from Dorothy Sayers’ Notes to this section of the “Paradiso” in her translation of The Divine Comedy.) St. Bernard later pleads with the Virgin Mary on behalf of Dante, that he may persist and pursue his vision further (from the “Paradiso,” Canto XXXIII): Now he who has seen the lives of souls, one by one, from the deepest pool of the universe even to here, begs you, of your grace, for enough strength to lift his eyes, higher, towards the final bliss: and I, who was never so on fire for my own vision as I am for his, offer you all my prayers, and pray they may not be wanting, asking that, for him, you might scatter every cloud of his mortality with your prayers, so that supreme joy might be revealed to him. Illustration by Gustave Doré CONTENTS Editor’s Overview .................................................................................................................................................... 3 “My Empress Has a Lofty Palace” .................................................................... VLADIMIR SOLOVYOV ............... 8 Stages in the Incarnation of Sophia Leading to the Rose of the World ..................................................................... ROBERT POWELL ............... 9 Transparency, and the Unveiling of Evil in Our Time: Sophia’s Technique of Wisdom........................................................................ BILL TRUSIEWICZ ............. 16 Russian Sophiology and Anthroposophy ..................................................... NATALYA BONETSKAYA ............. 25 The Prophetic Bylina and the Russian Mission ........................................................ HARRIE SALMAN ............. 41 Building Bridges, East and West ................................................................................ HARRIE SALMAN ............. 49 The Grail of ChristoSophia .......................................................................................... CYNTHIA AVENS ............. 52 The Eucharist and the Mass of the Lamb and His Bride ......................................... ROBERT POWELL ............. 59 The Mystery of Golgotha, Heaven, and Earth ............................................... NIKOLAI BELOTSVETOV ............. 71 Novalis’s Vision of a New History, a New Humanity.............................................. JOHN O’MEARA ............. 77 The Master Peter Deunov on the Great Wave of Love ........................................................................ ............. 82 The Master Peter Deunov and the New Passover .................................................... EMILY MICHAEL ............. 85 “That Nothing Should Be Lost” .................................................................................. ROBERT POWELL ............. 98 Editor: John O’Meara, Layout design: Aline Francoeur Contributing Editor: Emily Michael, Consultant Editor: Robert Powell The views expressed in the articles published in Starlight are the sole responsibility of the authors of these articles and do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial board of Starlight. Some articles may have been shortened, and some articles may have been edited with stylistic changes. This is the nineteenth electronic issue of Starlight. The electronic issue is free, which allows us to reach many more people. If you wish to receive Starlight in a printed version, please send a donation of $55 or more to the Sophia Foundation to cover the annual cost of two issues. Please include a note with your donation indicating that you are requesting printed copies of the journal to be sent to you. Donors will not automatically receive a printed copy of the journal—only upon written request. All issues of Starlight from the Fall 2005 issue to the present are available as pdf downloads. Link: https://sophiafoundation.org/portfolio/starlight-journal/ Sophia Foundation Admin. Office: Administrator: Telephone: 303-242-5388 4500 19th Street, #369 Kim Marie Email: [email protected] Boulder CO 80304 Website: sophiafoundation.org 2 Editor’s Overview While experiencing, towards the end of the Paradiso, his stupendous vision of the White Rose, which is to say his vision of the Divine or Heavenly Sophia as She presented Herself in his time,1 Dante turns to discover that St. Bernard has suddenly replaced Beatrice who until then had been standing alongside Dante guiding him along on his visionary path. Beatrice at this point has returned to the place that has long since been reserved for her in the Rose, and very soon St. Bernard is intoning his prayer to the Virgin Mary on Dante’s behalf, that he may persevere in strength to enter still more fully into his vision of the moment. Dante had become in respect of this power of vision, if not the chief, a highly significant representative of his epoch, just as some 500 years later Novalis would become arguably the chief representative of his epoch, looking ahead to another fulfilment of Sophianic vision in another manifestation of Her intensifying power brought still closer to our earthly experience today. Like Dante, Novalis could also speak of a great intercessor with the Virgin beyond his beloved Sophie who had been leading him up to that point. This intercessor Novalis mysteriously designates our “brother,” and Novalis entreats us to follow in the footsteps of this brother: we are to follow him in his blazoning of an emerging new humanity that will now be creating still more intensely under the banner of the Virgin (the subject of John O’Meara’s article below). As Robert Powell shows in the lead article of this issue, Divine Sophia has, since Dante’s time, been in the process of incarnating more and more fully into our cosmos, having left the Cosmic Sun, into which Dante peered, and since the 18th century—around the time of Novalis’s birth—entered the sphere of our cosmic Zodiac. There will be still further stages of Her incarnation in the future, bringing Her more immediately into the spheres of the Sun and the Moon and finally the etheric ground of the Earth itself in the 6th post-Atlantean cultural period that lies some 1500 and more years away. Such is the great panoramic view which is offered to us of a New Heaven and New Earth that is already germinally in the making in our own time, inasmuch as we can now begin to conceive of it, and forthwith begin to live in the shadow of its influence.2 The present issue offers a number of key expositions that bring this extraordinary panoramic vision forward, focusing the great event of the gradual Coming of Sophia into our own sphere of conscious thought, as conveyed especially through the spiritual-cultural work of Rudolf Steiner and the Russian Sophiologists. The further question is thus addressed: how humankind has been going out to meet this great Coming of Sophia of which we have become especially conscious in our time, a question which raises the further matter of the “path” that is required to properly live into this most far-reaching event as “panorama.”3 In a good number of the first articles in the present issue the view is stressed that one such path lies through Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy or more specifically the AnthropoSophia Being Who is at the center of Steiner’s work and with Whom we have been exhorted to 1 See Robert Powell’s contribution to The Mystery of Sophia, Bearer of the New Culture, The Rose of the World, Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 2014, p.109: “Those who know the mystical tradition relating to Divine Sophia will know that this image relates to Sophia, referred to as the Heavenly or Celestial Rose.” 2 For the further implications of this Coming of the Divine or Heavenly Sophia (the main subject of the present issue) in relation to the greater Sophia, or Trino-Sophia, also in Her two other aspects of Divine Mother and Holy Soul, see the article “The Riddle of the Sophia: An Inquiry into Her Many-Sided Manifestations” from the Easter 2017 issue of Starlight. This article functions as a full review of The Mystery of Sophia, Bearer of the New Culture, The Rose of the World, cited above, with a focus especially on the visions of Estelle Isaacson that are also contained in this book. See also, by Robert Powell, The Most Holy Trinosophia and the New Revelations of the Divine Feminine, Great Barrington, MA: Anthroposophic Press, 2000. 3 Robert Powell offers this distinction between “panorama” and “path” in a section of an article to be found among the last pages of the Easter 2019 issue of Starlight, p.74. 3 align ourselves as one form in which Sophia is making Herself directly known to us today. More and more, Anthroposophy has come to be seen as one of the sure ways by which Sophia lifts us at last unto Herself as it were from the more limited and much challenged evolutionary condition in which we find ourselves at present. Given this singular focus in the first part of this issue, the further question is raised