Gurdjieff Beyond the Personality Cult: Reading the Work and Its Re-Workings Notes on René Zuber’S ‘Who Are You Monsieur Gurdjieff?’

Religion and the Arts 21 (2017) 176–188 RELIGION and the ARTS brill.com/rart Gurdjieff beyond the Personality Cult: Reading the Work and Its Re-Workings Notes on René Zuber’s ‘Who are You Monsieur Gurdjieff?’ Vrasidas Karalis The University of Sydney Abstract This article is a philosophical, aesthetic, and existential exploration of a small book written by one of Gurdjieff’s disciples, René Zuber (1902–1979), under the title Qui êtes-vous Monsieur Gurdjieff? (Le Courrier du Livre, 1977, éditions Éoliennes, 1997 and in English, translated by Jenny Koralek, Arkana, 1980). Formally the book belongs to a hybrid genre mixing autobiography, philosophy, religious reflection, memoir, and essay. It was composed by Zuber in order to interpret and contextualize Gurdjieff’s teaching and presence particularly during the last years of his life in Paris. At the core of the narrative rests the strange, tense, and somehow ambivalent relationship between Zuber and Gurdjieff, a relationship of equal admiration and reservation, in an attempt, after the death of the master, to establish the proper intellectual and phenomenological locus for Gurdjieff’s work. Keywords G. I. Gurdjieff – esoteric Christianity – René Zuber i Introduction According to all the information we possess from various memoirs and autobiographical accounts, it is obvious that encountering G. I. Gurdjieff must have been quite an arduous and frustrating experience. Even for the people who admired him, such as the architect Frank Lloyd Wright or indeed like P. D. Ous- pensky himself, the relationship with the “Master” must have been full of unin- tended consequences. It seems that Gurdjieff overwhelmed his students with © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/15685292-02101007 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 11:59:58PM via free access gurdjieff beyond the personality cult 177 the force of his personality, the aura of his presence, and the immediacy of his teachings. The combination of theory and action, of story and ritual, is what historically distinguishes Gurdjieff’s work from the similar attempts by Theos- ophy, Anthroposophy, and the ritual forms of other secret societies in the first half of the twentieth century. The very success of such societies—especially amongst the circles of intellectuals, artists, and thinkers—represents a crucial moment in the history of religious sensibility in the West, as institutional religions started disintegrating or became involved with pointless cultural wars of attrition against the central ideological systems of modernity, namely Dar- winism, Marxism and to a certain degree psychoanalysis (Karalis, “Mr Gur- djieff’s Legacy” 253–256). Theosophy and Anthroposophy emerged from the margins of cultural legitimacy to claim a place in the public sphere, while at the same time asserting the right to maintain a certain secrecy vis-à-vis the core teachings of their beliefs by attributing the origin of their ideas to invisible Masters who used the leader of the movement as their conduit for a new revelation. In the context of such revelations “charismatic leadership” became one of the most significant dimensions in the articulation of “esoteric knowledge.” A. P. Sinnett’s Mahatma Letters (1923) had established an important precedent by providing a new kind of revelation while maintaining the idea of an incom- municable “esoteric” teaching. In the introduction to the Letters, A. T. Barker stressed that: “It cannot be too strongly emphasized that in thus externalizing the source from which he seeks inspiration, the student sacrifices all possibility of the grand realities of spiritual attainment and direct knowledge” (Sinnett 4). Gurdjieff’s approach was quite different and became mainstream after the new dispensation of religious or meta-religious sensibilities that took over the West and the East in the 1960s. However, its innovative character and radical approach to religious phenomenology primarily as mental act can be seen in his conscious decision to democratize, to externalize, its manifestation, by making its re-enactments a public experience through music, dancing (the Movements), or theatrical performances, or finally through very personal autobiographical narratives about the source and the origin of the new revelation (Petsche, Gurdjieff and Music, passim). Such externalization, or opening up of its visual manifestation, through the ritual dances established a link between the causal and the symbolic, the visible and the imagined, creating thus a counter-religiosity, which, despite giving the certainty of link with the past, gave the opportunity to the individual to actively and consciously redefine its posi- tion with the continuum of a communal praxis. The historical context of the high modernism in the 1920s with the fragmentation of time, the abolition of the transcendental and the subjectification of the symbolic found in Gurdjieff’s system of “harmonious” development a powerful antidote, which ultimately Religion and the Arts 21 (2017) 176–188 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 11:59:58PM via free access 178 karalis appealed to the ability of the individual to synthesize incongruities and polar- ities, indeed to reconstitute the locus of sacrality outside the traditional forms and spaces of numinosity, while at the same time actualizing the potentialities of the self. Gurdjieff’s presentation was uneven and in most occasions the Master over- powered the Disciple. Therein also we can locate the ambivalent element in Gurdjieff’s anthropology, which Anthony Storr noted in his anti-guru diatribe Feet of Clay (1996). Despite Storr’s cautious rejection however, the very success of Gurdjieff’s teachings indicates that they covered an important gap in the socio-cultural and psychological dynamics of the period. Storr himself stresses that his teachings “bewitched so many interesting and intelligent people” (23), indirectly foregrounding an intrinsic value in the communicability of his ideas which belonged to a period when the “nostalgia for the absolute” was relocated to new forms of philosophical religions, revisiting the older model of Renais- sance philosophical, indeed Neoplatonic, religions of Pico della Mirandola and Marcilio Ficcino. In a recent study,Costica Bradatan pointed out that with them the idea of human life as “a project of self-fashioning” was for the first articulated and established the intellectual matrix for the re-imagining of religious philosophy for contemporary European thinkers (13). Bradatan observes that the key to the understanding of the act of philosophizing in contemporary terms can be located in Mirandola’s “key phrase” about man as “‘a creature of indeterminate nature’ (indiscretae opus imagines, literally ‘a work of indistinguishable form’).” As Bradatan suggests: “God must have a messy working style indeed. That’s the only explanation why man has been left in such a raw state: a creature of imprecise, indistinguishable (indiscretus) contours, a work still in progress—a rough draft really” (Bradatan 16). Gurdjieff understood human nature as being in an incomplete and almost confused state, and the purpose of the teacher’s personality and work was to consciously reshape, indeed refashion, the center of its existential presence. The renaissance idea was reinvigorated in the late nineteenth century through the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, a thinker who reduced human life into “an aesthetic phenomenon” and understood philosophy as an autobiographical unfolding of a discontinuous self. The idea that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon are existence and the world justified” (Nietzsche 38) prepared the way for the new forms of self-fashioning that were to be expressed later both in philosophy and in esoteric thinking. Michael Hamburger traced the movement of prophetic and exhortatory German writing from the start of the twentieth century in (Hamburger A Proliferation of Prophets). This concept was re-articulated by Raymond Furness in Zarathustra’s Children: A Study of a Lost Generation of German Writers (2000), in which he traced the spiritual and Religion and the Arts 21 (2017) 176–188 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 11:59:58PM via free access gurdjieff beyond the personality cult 179 visionary influence of Nietzsche on a group of seven German thinkers (Furness 1–16). The period was full of apocalyptic and eschatological expectations, moti- vated by symbolic dynamism, radical imagery, and somehow spurious meta- physics, together with narrative visions of utopian societies constructed in iso- lation and through the efforts of communal bonds between disciples. There are two books, both composed by migrant writers from the cultural periphery, that combine the Nietzschean cult of the charismatic individual as found in Thus Spake Zarathustra and the autobiographical transcultural hybrid imagery, that can be detected in the semantic horizon of Gurdjieff’s work, especially of his Meetings with Remarkable Men (written in 1927). These are Ameen Rihani’s The Book of Khalid (1911) and Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (1923). We could also add a later novel expressing the same angst concerning origins, Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (1943), as well as Mikhaʾil Naʾima’s The Book of Mirdad (1948). In their own distinct way each one of these books combined traditional forms or knowledge and narrative structure with very strong elements of autobiographical commentary, in their attempt to establish a unifying pattern for thinking and acting under conditions of fragmentation, exile, and trauma. “Self-fashioning” however was the underlying subtext in all such efforts: the image of an individual self, irreducible to its historical circumstances or its psychological particularities, is what inspired these writers as well as many thinkers at the same period. Such perception of the self was within the intellectual horizons that Gurdjieff found himself in after moving to Petersburg and his meeting with P. D. Ouspensky. In the final sentences of hisTertiumOrganum (1921), Ouspensky declared: “Therefore the true and real progress of thought is only in the broadest striving towards knowledge, that does not recognize the possibility of arrestment in any found forms of knowledge at all.

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