by R. Bruce Elder

Ours is a time that has experienced the darkening of the world, a spiritual decline that results from our having broken with both the earthly and the divine, i.e. with what is below and what is above us. The gods have deserted us and we humans are in the process of being transformed from creatures of flesh into objects of metal.

There is need of deep and saving counsel, like a diver's, descending to the depth, with keen eye, and not too much perturbed

-- Aeschylus: The Suppliants

In our time, a gruesome hatred of everything creative has become so strong and all pervasive that the worst affliction that can befall a person in these times is to have an original idea. (The same hatred is expressed in modern culture's abhorrence of the feminine.) Existence has lost its vertical dimension, and experience has been flattened out into a single plane.

Ours is a Faustian age -- Faustian in the original understanding of that myth -- for it is an age that embraces the preposterous belief that anything that can be known is worth knowing. Our learning is not edification but indiscretion. Whenever a new pathway opens, our scholars explore it, even if it leads to the devastating understanding unlocked at Los Alamos. But our unrestrained curiosity is simply the most obvious (albeit generally unrecognized) symptom of our spiritual tedium.

We pay a high price when the mind's demand for knowledge is not curbed by moral vigilance. The gift of reason, like the gift of love, required jealous guarding; as has become painfully obvious, like love, it too can lead to corruption and sin. For reason, just as much as curiosity, can succumb to temptation, can be corrupted and can even, when sufficiently goaded by curiosity and unrestrained by wisdom, become complicitous with evil. It has indeed come to pass, as Pascal predicted at the beginning of the scientific revolution that it would, that reason has become corrupted with its own corruption.

We of today are the last men of our civilization foretold by Nietzsche, for what has, until recently, been the dynamic agent of Western civilization has come down to us in a depleted, weakened, terminal form. Long ago, Plato identified reason with virtue and virtue with happiness; in his view, truth-seeking was a virtue. But Plato understood reason as the faculty which enabled humans to apprehend essences and believed that the essence of anything was bound up with the purpose for which it exists. Thus reason, according to the classical understanding of that faculty, allowed humans to know what purpose a thing was fitted to serve. However, thinkers such as Bacon and others who were instrumental in establishing the fundamental beliefs of the modern era disconnected reason from teleology. They advanced the reductive belief that only the patterns of occurrences amongst things are discernible by reason and not the ends which are served by things being as they are. There arose from this the dogma of modern science that both human and non-human nature can be completely understood without employing the concept of final cause or end. The result of this dogma is that the relation of the parts of the totality of existence to the whole (which, after all, is the expression of the goal to which all things tend) has disappeared into obscurity. We moderns fail to apprehend the essential relationship between reason and the summum bonum and lacking knowledge of that relationship, we have become disturbed in our passions and appetites. Reason, in the form of the ensemble of techniques for the mastering of nature has become parasitic, egotistical, destructive and blindly ungrateful to its Source.

We are now reaping the grim harvest that was planted when the philosophers of the Ages of Reason and of the Enlightenment advanced the blasphemous idea that human reason existed in a state of pre-established harmony with Divine Intelligence and consequently, that the more humans know, the better they know God. This teaching closed us off from the peace that passes understanding. The radical theology of the Enlightenment put us in the hands of the devil who has lured us with "truths" that are utterly at odds with our own nature and the nature of the world. We did his bidding and became guilty of moral offenses against the Order of Things, and this has happened primarily because we lack the understanding that there is knowledge that we should not possess. The mind has broken its ties with the soul as we have emphasized unduly the value of knowledge and have pursued the quest for any knowledge regardless of that knowledge's effects within the totality of human nature. In losing contact with the WHole, we have become divided against ourselves, as reason and passion vie against each other for power and aggrandizement, without even a trace of saving love. We have become accursed as our passions struggle with our reason for pride of place.

Because we have forsaken knowledge of the Whole, we have come to understand reality only as heterogeneous fragments that, to practical reason, seem utterly incommensurate. We have lost what only love can disclose: the unity of reality, its coherence, its enduringness, the constancy of its structure -- in short, its eternal order. We know only the practical and the accessible for we have turned away from the Mystery. In our hearts and minds we have reduced reality from a Mystery in which we are overwhelmingly involved to a problem that we can master. Indeed, we have reduced existence itself to a concept. Our souls have been taken over by the practicalities of the machine and our panic helplessness has driven us to taking shelter in superior human intelligence. Our spiritual blindness has hidden from us the fact that many of the so-called Great Men -- Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Newton, even Hegel -- are the grave-diggers of Western history. The technical frenzy that characterizes the modus vivendi of present-day humanity has made us forgetful of the spiritual strength of the earth. The darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the transformation of humans from flesh to metal, the spread of the hatred of fertility and creativity are all processes that have gone so far that they sometimes seem irreversible. They have proceeded so far that we no longer even remember what we lost in forsaking our humanity, and are unable to gauge how far we have declined. We have shut ourselves off from the light and darkness has entered our souls.

Our most valued form of thinking has declined from prayer to analysis, and analysis presumes what is false -- that we stand outside reality.

Our most valued form of thinking has declined from prayer to analysis, and analysis presumes what is false -- that we stand outside reality. It denies that we are immersed in reality and in denying our participation in Being, it is one of the causes of our spiritual malaise. We have been deformed by closing ourselves off from the Divine in existence.

The modern world as it has been established in the images of scientism is a structure, a closed and finite circle that, being finite, promises an end to History. But as Nietzsche knew, the end of History has been transformed by a relentlessly swelling nihilism into the death of God and the Odyssey of "the last men." Reason has become a victim of its own effulgent power. Faust's determination is no longer the price he has paid for selling his soul in exchange for the promise of success in his search of truth. The modern Faust, being an objective searcher after truth, has concluded that he certainly struck an excellent bargain since he lacked a soul in the first place. But the devil has not been cheated: soon the modern Faust will discover that he has been in Hell all along, without even knowing it -- a dull Inferno that lacks any meaning to a person who does not even recognize, as moderns do not, the significance of the terms, "damnation" and "salvation."

Upon the base of these ideas, the sections of The Book of All the Dead up to the conclusion of Illuminated Texts were made. The turning point in the cycle is Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World, for in this part, the pain of disconnection from what truly is and the anguish of resentment at the absence of Being rises to an apogee. But such damnation is surely the failure of human being to meet its destiny in the integrity of Being; it is the agony of a creature that has lost in a grim singularity and incapable of heeding the intimations of deprival just as much as he/she is debarred from any contact, within the fleeting span of his/her perishable existence, with what is sure, serene, and uncorruptible. Lamentations is the product of an effort toward salvation, for it depicts a journey intended to carry us back to the origins of North American civilization and to re-establish the broken relationships with things that are.

In fact, Lamentations describes the journey prescribed by the Romantics. If history had begun with humankind in communion with nature, in its course, we have become separated from nature. Through the course of history, we have gone from integration through spiritual crisis to alienation. Now another spiritual crisis promises to effect a redemptive reintegration with the cosmos and our own possibilities, for through this crisis, our origin has fallen into our future from whence it calls us to return to our possible greatness.
However, the Greeks had already offered us a great truth: ta .. megala panta episphale .. All that is great lies within troubles. The journey turned out to be a journey into despair. It is impossible for a modern to grasp the origin in its originary state, just as it is impossible for a modern to remember the primal meaning of an ancient temple or the rituals of so-called primitive people. The sacred has been rendered profane, the real has been converted into simulacra. My hopes were consequently torn apart on the rack of time and history as the journey turned out to be mere errancy, progressing from one place to another, from one thing to another, but not toward Being.
Furthermore, in making Lamentations, I sought after an experience so primal that it could be a means of conversion. (For this reason, the film presented several historical figures who underwent metanoia: Newton, Palestrina, and Liszt.) But this search, too, was in vain. No single experience can turn people from ways of error -- experience can only initiate the conversion process by supplying intimations of a fecund reality that our form of living has closed off.

Despite these failures of its project, Lamentations did teach important truths. For when the flight within the world of things leads to nowhere, it carries us beyond the world. The journey led into the desert, and in the desert, one enters the solitude in which he/she can hear the subtle voice of the spirit. In the desert, one discovers that the errancy of moving from place to place, from thing to thing, is truly a needful wandering and that the need which wandering expresses belongs to our essence. Consequently, attention to ourselves in the course of our wandering constitutes an opening which allows us to be.

Moreover, Being is perpetually in transformation, perpetually "beyond itself and towards a goal." Hence, by virtue of its needfulness, wandering can teach us about the inner nature of Being. Seeking without for a truth that could serve as a redemptive insight, I discovered instead a truth we ourselves are within. The quest was animated by a restless heart that did not become quiet until it reached beyond everything that is toward that which is beyond beings.

I arrived at these insights through the searingly painful recognition that to be born a modern does not simply mean to be born into a time of need, it means to belong to such a time. That is, I came to recognize that fateful destiny of time and to recognize that ours is a time of deprival and lack. But to speak of deprival, of lack or of a need is to speak not only of what is absent but also of what might salutarily supervene. The anguish that thoughtful people feel of our time is a means of rising above the tranquilizing but deceptive self-assurance in which the mass of people live out their impoverished, fallen lives. It opens us to the knowledge from which the last men have closed themselves off, the knowledge that we are never at home in the world of things and that we rest only in Being.

Seen in this way, the anguish that thoughtful people of our time feel is essentially an acute form of feeling that Homer narrativized in The Odyssey -- that is, nostalgia which, according to the meaning of the original Greek is the pain of returning home (nostos: return home; algos: pain). The anguish of our time is a call to go back, to return to some more primal, more immediate, perhaps less articulate but certainly more genuine state -- a vocation issued by the Ground of Being summonsing us to return to the destiny It sets forth for us. But this call comes from afar, and calls us to an Afar, from the Beyond-being which is also the Unmanifest. For this call, which can speak only through anguish and to anguish, is the Unmainfest's form of self-disclosure inasmuch as the Unmanifest discloses itself in the form of absence which always provokes anguish.

Only in foundering can the call of the Absent One be heard. Hence this anguish, too, can be understood as an opening, for it serves to make us ready to hear the call from the Ground and to prepare us for the presencing of Unpresented. Our anguished foundering can disclose what reason cannot: it can disclose the Divine's anguished love for beings. The idea that the Omnipotent should be required to undergo anguish is repugnant to reason, but it can be disclosed by our anguish because our anguish resembles Its anguish.

History, to be sure, teaches us that those who wait in despair are very close to salvation and that anguish itself is very close to insight. A turning point in the making of The Book of All the Dead was the recognition that reason is the adversary of thought. It was this that really allowed me to begin thinking. the fate of the modern, technological era involves the degradation of the external world by reducing it to the empty and unsubstantial nothing of mathematical abstractions. But even this degradation creates an opening for a new creation. Ahead of us there lies an opening -- an emptiness that harbors possibilities and is pregnant with the promise of new world-founding acts.

Experiencing the difficulties which are set forth in Lamentations, those involved in the attempt to reconnect with a more primal reality (and which make it ontologically impossible to succeed in that endeavor) taught me another great truth, the need to protect the truth of the past. For the destitution which characterizes our present arises within our orientation toward the future. Our being has become almost entirely being-toward-the-future.

In order to transform ourselves, we must open ourselves to the revelation that the past lingers within the present and that the present bears the germ of the future.

In order to transform ourselves, we must open ourselves to the revelation that the past lingers within the present and that the present bears the germ of the future. This demands patience, for only patience can disclose the Mystery by which Being becomes time. Patience teaches us to linger in the gift of the abiding present and to allow things to emerge into the lighted clearing of radiant appearing. It teaches us to cease manipulating things and to turn from willing to waiting. In giving oneself over to mild patience, one becomes attuned to the still, silent other side of the world. But this mild patience must be tempered by a resolute rigor for it is certainly very hard to hear this still voice.

In the wake of the revelations which came in the making of Lamentations, I proceeded to Consolations (Love is an Art of Time). Consolations is in three parts. The first part, entitled The Fugitive Gods, depicts the awakening of memory of the departed gods (or of the revitalizing of our dimmed sense of the sacred) by experiencing intimations of deprival. The second part, The Lighted Clearing, is a long meditation on the gift of things. Part three, The Body and the World is a celebration of the creativity of the relationship of self to other.

The subtitle of the works points toward the fact that Consolations is fundamentally about love. For, though our thinking moves amongst the nets of analytic and calculative reasoning, it does not really rest there. The Real can be disclosed by love as it cannot be by reason and by love we can be caught and held but by reason, never. For what love discloses is a fullness that cannot be contained within any conceptual limits. Whatever can be properly attributed to this Fullness can also be properly denied it, for this Fullness is the Beyond of all finite manifestations which emerge from it. It is utterly transcendent and this transcendence is never reduced by any being's emerging from It.

True thinking dwells within an originative unveiling which brings those beings which come to pass to light for the first time. Such thinking involves a sacrifice for it rises above the things that are in order to allow what is Wholly Other than what is to be revealed. In thinking the Thought, the thinker sacrifices him/herself to and for originative and essential thinking itself, for we do not think this thought -- It thinks in us.

The sacrifice that the true thinker makes is also an implicit thanking, for it expresses the grace that human beings have in nature that allows human beings to be, in their relations with things, the trustee of the power through which the things that come to pass are made present. For the original and essential thinking of human being is an echo of the Being through which the advent of what comes to pass takes place. It is a reflection (an echo) within the human being of the Word of Being through which occurs the presenting of beings.

But the sacrifice itself is wordless, as it is a form of devotion that unveils the illuminative Word that shines within the being of whatever is. Yet in this sacrifice, human being gives thanks that the presencing power of the Word is reflected into human words, that the Word finds a home in our common languages. Within the splendid and effulgent poverty of the sacrifice, the treasure of the incarnation of Being appears inasmuch as through the sacrifice of beings-that-are, the favor Being is bestowed on human being. In essential thinking, we give thanks for the grace whereby the light of Word illuminates words and brings things out of obscurity into the presence of disclosure.

We who are slow and long deliberating are gradually learning to persevere in the face of the continuing failure of the gods to appear. ("Why is Consolations so long?" the voice of the mass-speak asks. This is the all-too-obvious answer.) We live in the hope of turning every glance into that Light of Heaven by virtue of which things are disclosed into appearance and every sound into the Word that calls forth the Hidden.

But beyond the Light there is Darkness; beyond the Known, there is there Obscure; beyond the totality of everything that is, there is nothing. And every coming-into-appearance is concealing of this Other -- the mysterious the awful Always-More and Always-Hidden which appears only by dissimulation, that is by hiding or concealing Itself in disclosing things. Still, whatever is, is a revelatory note from the Unknown gleaned from the appearance of what is known. The Bright of the seen and the heard manifests itself in unison with the Dark of the Unseen and the Unheard. The Gods surprise us in their proximity to what surrounds us. The Dark, in all its Vastness, is very near to what is right at hand. We learn how closely linked together are beings and Nothingness, freedom and necessity, simulacra and the Real. Nor are the practical and the mysterious two separate things.

The analytic and calculative reasoning of scientism has dulled the clarity of the awe we can feel at the gift of things.

The analytic and calculative reasoning of scientism has dulled the clarity of the awe we can feel at the gift of things. The failure to make the sacrifice involved in rising above beings and discovering, in the anguish and dread provoked by sacrifice, that we have been abandoned and forsaken, closes us off from Nothing, from the Unmanifested Essence which is that from which whatever comes to pass arises; it is only in sacrificing beings that we can discover the Unfathomable Vastness that transcends the things of the world.

The sacrifice involved in originative thinking discloses the Whole that gives us what is sacrificed in the first place. Therefore, the sacrificial offering only returns to the Unmainfest something that it had bestowed upon human being as a gift, just as words return to the Word in their own silent self-sacrifice. The sacrificial act, however, also teaches us that these gifts are not needed and that only the Originary Nothing needs to be cherished and protected. It is in this knowledge that the artist offers him/herself as a sacrifice to Creation. As Coleridge remarked in Biographia Literaria: "The primary imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perceptions, am as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM." Like all sacrifice, the sacrifice of things is, above all else, a self-sacrifice, the goal of which is to make human being identical with divine Being.

This sacrifice is demanded. It is demanded by the awesomeness of the Presence we confront in deepest silence and by its transcendent majesty. This sacrifice, because it is an opening to the Transcendent, is the source of all moral and spiritual regeneration, for it revels an immensity of the Beyond that makes us aware that we are not our own. Through the act of sacrificing beings, we are brought to the Nothing which is beyond beings and that confrontation makes us aware that we chose neither to come into being nor to pass from being. That the temporal span of being is consigned to us by an Other is our surest proof that we belong to It.

The love of Being fostered by the renunciation of beings and by submission to the Wholly Other discloses the secret of the Imperishable, for it makes us aware that nothing ever disappears, that the past is retained in the present since it is embodied in words. Contemplative love reveals the abiding presence of the Word within words. Contemplative love reveals the abiding presence of the Word within words. Loving submission reveals that reality is not an assemblage of things -- it is a stream in which possibility and actuality are mingled. Being is not an object, external and inert, to be known by a look. It is a life to be lived and known and cherished in one's commitment. Being is the home of faith and faith is the being of spirit. Love, not intellect, is the only appropriate medium of knowledge when what is apprehended is the loveliness and loveworthiness of what is loved. And this form of knowledge makes apparent that values are simple facts. The reality of participation in Being goes far beyond reason. Love is the medium through which the unmanifest shines and becomes radiant. But pain, insecurity, anguish, and doubt are too a part of this love for they are proofs of the Unknown.

Even within the degraded world of modern technology a light gleams out, for art bring forth truth in its radiant splendor. In a work of art, divine Being is introduced to human beings. Artworks thus create a dialogue between divine and human destiny. But when we take an analytic attitude toward works of art (or when we consider an artwork as just one more object amongst other objects) and fail to take them into our inwardness, then the gods depart. My primary purpose in making The Book of All the Dead has been to create a form which might encourage those who see it to open themselves up so that the coming-to-presence of the work itself and, ultimately, of beings, can be profoundly experienced. If I succeed, then I will also succeed in helping the gods return to their home which is also our resting place.

The coming-to-be of work that is truly a work of art entails the sweeping away of everything that is and the founding of a new world. In this founding, a work of art not only reveals the power by which beings come to be, it also displays the Word's illumination of words, the saying of which in a work of art, brings forth the world. Accordingly, in Consolations (Love is an Art of Time), I have tried to create a fresh language for a new series of experiences through which appear what has hitherto not been displayed and a distinctive speech that is worthy of the Mystery of which this language speaks.

Only art displays language speaking itself. Scientific inquiry into language simply turns language into another object and (as a decade and a half of the tedium of semiotic studies attests to) does not reveal the power of language. But in displaying language speaking itself, works of art acquire the force of the Numinous. Artworks reveal that language exists in order that we might undergo an experience through it -- the experience of the presencing of the Numinous in and through language. It is only in the work of art that this great truth is revealed -- that language is concerned only with itself and speaks in order to say nothing but its own saying.

But the dereliction of the present age, the age of the world's darkening, has left us homeless. In the time of the ancients, language had constituted such a dwelling place by simultaneously erecting and embodying a world in which things could abide. But the saying of words no longer erects a world; the denigration of language into names has entailed that all that is created in speaking is an assemblage of things and events. Thus it is that Lamentations, as a piece which reflects upon destitution of our age, conveyed a sense of coming too late, after the gods had flown. Consolations, on the other hand, as a piece which endeavors to hold forth redemptive possibilities, proceeds to the recognition that though the gods have departed from our time, they are still living, though over our heads and in a different world. in Consolations, I offer a few humble attempts at forging a language that can call to that world and bring it a little closer to our own, a language that can speak not only of the gods that have flown but also of the gods that are approaching. Consolations is given over to the effort of remembering the most elemental words and to pronouncing them in order to restore the home of the fugitive gods. In displaying the illuminative power of the Words, Consolations places what is within the dimension of greatest reality, the dimension of the pure act of illumination itself, which transcends what is and which abides unchanging. Consolations' pronouncements re-member the Holy. they manifest that which does not change through the flow of years. And that as Kant saw years ago, is time itself. Love is an art of time.

-- R. Bruce Elder