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. By contrast, the second interpreter addresses himself to "people who 183 THE CONFIGURATION OF THE TEMPLE OF THE KA'BAH THE CONFIGURATION OF THE TEMPLE OF THE KA'BAH are too human not to have been disheartened by the world", that is to say, they are implicit in it. We are not less aware of the current peremptory by what is offered to them by sociology, demography and the economy; assertion that the scientific study of religious fact cannot accept any and if he leads us into the "Human comedy" as into a walled town, it is appeal to a Revelation or any recourse to the intervention of a transcendent because "this walled town opens onto Heaven". It is this, and this alone, power. Obviously, it is impossible to discover in a fact something which which is in accordance with Balzac's statements, when he foresaw that one has started by denying it possesses. Considerable ingenuity has been some people, faced with his painstaking collection and depiction of facts as employed in converting the interpretation of facts into established fact. For facts, would imagine that he belonged to the school of the sensualists or example, we have passed from evolution as an interpretation of a collection the materialists. This is so far from being the case that he refutes such a of facts to "the fact of evolution" (neglecting to note that the real fact was school vigorously, adding: "I do not share the belief in the indefinite evolutionism). In turn, equal ingenuity has been employed in converting a progress of societies. I believe in the progress of man over himself. Those fact into an interpretation, in order to reduce the original phenomenon (the who perceive in me an intention to consider man as a finite creature are Urphanomen) to certain elementary facts which are supposed to explain it. therefore strangely deluded." Religious fact, for example spiritual fact, is "explained" sociologically by Here Balzac calls to witness his mystical masterpiece, Seraphita—"the the conditions of production and consumption, or psychologically by actualization of the doctrine of the Christian Buddha", that is, of Sweden- reference to the misfortunes of infancy and childhood, lived as a series of borg—as a sufficient response to all attempts to diminish the meaning of catastrophes. What is striking about our time is that so many people his work. In short, for the first interpreter Balzac is a prisoner of nineteenth- accept these explanations without noticing their ludicrous inadequacy as century society. He was created by it, and is therefore contingent and regards the object being explained. From the start, in effect, we are superfluous. For the second interpreter Balzac is the creator, he who presented with unbalanced and atrociously mutilated forms, because our "embraces within his work the society of the nineteenth century as well as fundamentally agnostic science denies us recourse to a suprasensible that of other centuries. Society is his creation. It cannot do without him."1 dimension which alone makes it possible to perceive the integrality of a If my reaction to this contrast has led me to stress it here, it is because it form. In the same way, the visible dimension of a being, its terrestrial appears to me typical and exemplary, in the sense that it is characteristic biography, only ever reveals an infinitesimal part of its potentialities. We of the situation we face when we try to understand what is implied by the can speak of the configurative action of the Spirit, of form as a task to be ability to outline a spiritual world, to grasp, in a form and a figure, a world accomplished by the Spirit (which is our theme in Eranos), with full which is not within the scope of sensory perception. Indeed, for several meaning only if we are in possession of a space into which we can project generations Western man has exercised inexhaustible ingenuity in enclosing the totality of this form. Such a space was known to the science of religions himself within his experience of this earthly world, carefully shutting of" and to traditional theologies as the eschatological dimension, in which the all exits through which he might leave it, even though it means lamenting spring of the arch is achieved—a spring which will never be ours so long his solitude and the absurdity of his condition. At the same time he as we remain on this side of our "scientific" proof. ' persistently refuses to recognize that it is his own philosophies which have In this connection, it is not mere chance that a text by Balzac should reduced him to this state. He means to stay on the ground floor, and 2 represent Swedenborg as the "Christian Buddha". My essay on com- systematically ignore the fact that there are, or might be, upper storeys. parative spiritual hermeneutics brought out a remarkable convergence be- Religious fact in itself postulates the existence of these upper storeys— tween Swedenborg's hermeneutics and the hermeneutics practised in Ismaili i The first interpretation (the one which refuses to ascend any higher than the ground gnosis. This convergence occurred with regard to the necessity of there floor) is by Andre Wurmser, La Comedie inhumaine. The second is that of Maurice Bardeche, Une lecture de Balzac. For the terms in which the contrast is rendered, sec 2 Cf. my 'Hermeneutique spirituelle comparee', in Face de Dieu, face de I'homme (Paris, Philippe Senart's review of the two works in 'Combat' (Thursday, February 4, Fayard, 1984): D. T. Suzuki's statement accords literally with Balzac's feeling 1965), p. 9. about Swedenborg. 184 185 THE CONFIGURATION OF THE TEMPLE OF THE KA'BAH THE CONFIGURATION OF THE TEMPLE OF THE KA'BAH being an intermediary world between the sensible and intelligible worlds, the thesis that Swedenborg reiterated so frequently in his vast work: in the a world I designate as the mundus imaginalis, the kingdom of subtle bodies, spiritual world, as in the material world, there are spaces, even though the "eighth clime", the limit "where spirit takes on body and where the nothing is evaluated there according to them. Everything is assessed body is spiritualized" (the kingdom of the Geistleiblichkeit).3 In the absence according to states, "and as a result the spaces there cannot be measured of this world, the idea of subsistent spiritual Forms would be unthinkable. as they are measured in the world; they are viewed in and according to the Yet prevailing opinion, philosophical or profane, maintains that what is state of the interiors" (of the internals, rather).5 In other words, spaces spiritual does not possess form. Form is always that which confers a figure which are measured by inner states presuppose, essentially, a qualitative on matter, in the sense of "physical" matter. or discontinuous space of which each inner state is itself the measure, as In contrast to this, our first affirmation in connection with our present opposed to a space which is quantitative, continuous, homogeneous, and task must be the existence of spiritual Forms which subsist as such. This measurable in constant measures. Such a space is an existential space, gives full weight to the thesis correctly propounded by a Swedenborgian whose relationship to physico-mathematical space is analogous to the thinker in the following terms: relationship of existential time to the historical time of chronology. "Here is the point in which philosophers and Christians have made the Highly instructive, also, are the changes in the feeling for and expression of mistake, fatal not only to all true knowledge, but to all knowledge of spirit. space in the figurative arts of Western man.6 The problem was how to It has generally been assumed that the only way to arrive at a true idea of suggest the third dimension that is lacking in a plane surface.