Engraving  page 28,

from John Pordage’s ‘Theosophia Mystica‘, London, 1683.

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Today’s sharing from the Blue House of Via-HYGEIA, is an excerpt from professor Arthur Versluis ground-breaking study, ‘Theosophia, Hidden Dimensions of Christianity‘, published in 1994 by Lindisfarne Press. Our excerpt, ‘Visionary Imagination‘, runs from page 165 to 172.

This is scholarship at its best: building much needed bridges of inter-textualities & inter-modalities between seemingly dissimilar traditions, and underlining the unitive aspects of practice & experience any practitioners ‘ridding the tiger‘ will recognize with a smile.

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‘In his many books on Sufism and Ismaili gnosticism, Henry Corbin unfolds for us the significance of the imagination, not as a mere organ of fantasy or delusion, but as the soul’s means of revelation and transmutation, what he calls ‘Active Imagination’. This unparalleled series of expositions on Islamic esoterism has had a quickening effect on many contemporary artists, poets, and writers, who through Corbin were able to recognize the spiritual power of the visionary imagination. (1)

What is perhaps not so well known is that Corbin came to Islamic esoterism through the essentially Protestant visionary mysticism of Böhme, Oetinger, Pordage, and Baader, and that more than one European writer has called Corbin a ‘Protestant theologian‘. (2)While keeping in view the works of Corbin—which we urge readers to examine in conjunction with this discussion—we will focus on the visionary imagination as a spiritual discipline in European theosophy manifested in the works of Böhme, Karl Eckartshausen (1752 1803), and Pordage.

It is true that at first glance one finds little indication of what discipline one might follow to understand for oneself the visionary spirituality of Böhme. Böhme’s work stands as a mysterious testament to visionary spirituality; his cryptic style and terminology seem to stand on their own, forming a complete cosmology based in alchemy to which we readers often do not possess the key. Long study, of course, makes us familiar with Böhme’s terminology and with the cosmology it reveals; but for entry into the visionary discipline that offers one actual access to Böhme’s mysteriosophy, one is better off working through the writings and images of his successors, in particular those of the English author, Dr. John Pordage.

We can begin, however, with an absolutely fundamental distinction between the two forms of imagination. Essentially, according to Böhme, there is one creative power in the cosmos, which he calls Magic, and which can lend itself to good or evil. But it is possible for the individual will ‘with the right true spirit‘ to enter into this creative power through ‘understanding‘ (3), just as it is possible for the misguided individual will to be ‘transformed into earthly, animal quality by the individual imagination of the false will‘, which ‘wills not with God‘, but ‘after the manner of the devils, who likewise stand in their own imagination of sensual knowledge‘ (4). In short, there is active imagination, and there is fantasy.

To distinguish between these two kinds of imagination is critical, for while visionary imagination, rightly employed, leads ultimately to paradise, fantasy leads ultimately to hell. In order to understand how this is so, one must recognize first of all that for our theosophers, our physical life on earth is an opportunity to determine, and in a sense to create, our afterlife. For in a discarnate state, what previously was a human individuality has its ‘protection‘ of incarnation removed, and the soul enters into a realm that reflects back to it its own nature. If that nature is uncontrolled and wrathful, it sees a hell; if, on the other hand, it has through the “science of the heart” entered paradise, this will be its state in the afterlife.

This is why Karl von Eckartshausen, another in our line of Hermetic theosophers drawing upon Kabbalism, and an eighteenth-century colleague of Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, writes in ‘Aufschlüsse zur Magie‘ [1788] [Elucidating Magic] that ‘our life on Earth is only the childhood of our existence‘, and that in this most secret of spiritual sciences, the discipline of imagination, ‘nothing is as dangerous as occupying yourself with the mystical sciences, and then falling victim of daydreaming‘ (5). Indeed, Eckartshausen entitles the final chapter—which consists in nothing but warnings against the dangers of false imagination—’A Chapter That Should Be Read Three Times‘ (6). Eckartshausen is so insistent on distinguishing between true and false imagination because this is truly the key to the spiritual science of the heart.

With these introductory observations, then, let us turn to one of the best examples of this visionary practice in Christian theosophy, that offered by Dr. John Pordage in his short treatises ‘Theologia Mystica‘, and ‘A Treatise of Eternal Nature‘, published in 1683 and 1681 respectively (7). The images Pordage offers us are remarkably simple but very profound, opening an entire subtle physiology and visionary science of the heart.

Pordage was not only a speculative thinker, but had also actually experienced that about which he wrote. Jane Leade attested to this in her preface to his Theologia Mystica, referring to ‘those wonderful Transportations he had (or rather they had him) for the space of three weeks together. . . . His outward Body lay in passive Stillness in this visible Orb‘(8).

Pordage’s imagery is very simple: he writes of an archetypal or eternal Globe of Nature, in which there are three Courts, the ‘Outward Court‘, the ‘Inward Court’, and the ‘Inmost Court‘, the ‘Holiest Place of all‘ (9). In this globe is an eye, which is the ‘Eye of the Spirit‘, or the ‘Abyssal Eye of Eternity‘. In the Inward Court one can see the Holy Trinity from the opening of the eye, which is ‘a lively, operative, reviving and yet amazing … sight,” that “no pen can decipher‘, for ‘it is only the Spirit of the Eye that can open itself‘ (10). When this eye opens, it ‘divides itself into three parts, the first of which is the Abyssal Eye, the second is the Heart, and the third is the outflowing Breath‘ (11).

This tri-une symbolism of the eye, the heart, and the breath—which reveals to us the ‘deep mystery‘ of the Trinity—three, yet in essence one—is the key to the science of the heart. To see how this is so, we will have recourse to the science of the heart of Ibn ‘Arabî, the well-known Sufi theosopher. Henry Corbin writes: ‘In Ibn ‘Arabî, as in Sufism in general, the heart (qalb) is the organ which produces true knowledge, comprehensive intuition, the gnosis (ma’rifa) of God and the divine mysteries‘.

Needless to say, this ‘heart‘ is not the organ that pumps blood, but rather is a subtle center in what we may call the physiology of the soul. Corbin writes of the heart’s theandric function, since its ‘supreme vision‘ is of the form of God; he points out that the heart in Sufism is the seat of pneuma, the spirit or divine ‘breath‘ of the being, and that the ‘gnostic’s heart is the eye, the organ by which God knows Himself, reveals Himself to Himself in the forms of His epiphanies‘ (12).

Corbin is expressing here precisely what Pordage conveys in his little treatise: that this ‘eye in the heart‘ is how God reveals himself to himself, in Pordage’s words ‘Face to Face‘ in the soul of the mystic (13). This is a mysterious unity in multiplicity: the gnostic in his heart ‘sees‘ with the eye that is the eye of God, God’s own eye. The heart ‘opens‘ to become the realm in which God contemplates himself in the gnostic’s soul. Pordage writes:

‘This sight of God’s attributes from the opening of the Eye in the Abyssal Globe, is both a ravishing and amazing sight, for you do not behold the Ideas or Similitudes of things, but the things themselves intellectually, which causeth most inexpressible joys, and extasies in the Spirit of the Soul, to which nothing in this world can be compared‘ (14).

The opening of the inward eye reveals an angelic world composed of images that are more real—and more delightful—than anything in this physical world. We enter here a Platonic world of archetypes, what Corbin calls an ‘imaginal world‘. Pordage is insistent:

‘In the first place, I say that those Images and Figures which the opening of the Eye manifests are not Shadows and Empty representatives but Reall and Substantial ones, they are not only figures of Heavenly things, but the Heavenly things themselves. In the second place, I say that these Figures are living and spiritful representatives, not dead Images, for the fullness of the Living God fills them all with Life and Spirit and Power. In the third place, these figures are unchangeable [and immortal]‘(15).

The eye of the heart, then, opens to reveal the archetypal or spiritual world, which is alive with the ‘outflowing breath‘ of God.

This angelical world revealed to us in the eye of the heart is an ‘interworld‘ or an ‘imaginal realm‘ of the soul; it possesses a reality of its own, and a special kind of ‘materiality‘, although of course it is not physical. In it, ‘These spirits are endued with a spiritual kind of materiality from the Love Essence in the Heart of God’, and hence ‘are endued with the spiritual senses, of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling, whereby they are inabled to discern the object of the still Eternity‘ (16). The spirits, whose unity is symbolized by one ear, one eye, and one breath, possess a ‘language‘ of the spirits, and their food and drink is power from the Trinity.

Under consideration here is not theory; as Corbin wrote, ‘it is an initiation to vision. Is it possible to see without being in the place where one sees? Theophanic visions, mental visions, ecstatic visions in a state of dream or of waking are in themselves penetrations into the world they see‘(17). Thus in question here is not syncretism, but a common mode of perception, ‘from the participation of all‘— Protestant and Islamic theosophers alike—’in a common prophetic religion‘(18).

These theosophers all belong to ‘the same temple of Light, the same kingdom of spiritual man‘(19). It is not surprising, then, that access to this temple within is gained through precisely the same subtle physiology of heart, eye, and breath. The parallels between the gnostic exegesis of Ibn ‘Arabî’s work by Corbin, and Pordage’s use of the symbols ‘eye, heart, and breath‘ are not accidental; this exact parallelism suggests simply that European Christian theosophy had come to realize the same esoteric physiology and theophanic symbolism as the great Shaikh of medieval Islam. It goes almost without saying that such unanimity about specific symbols and their meanings in the soul is not a matter of ‘cultural influence‘.

Rather, this parallelism demonstrates clearly that one need not abandon the Christian tradition as being devoid of the profound spiritual vision and praxis found in Islamic esoterism and in Asian religions.

At the same time, we must be aware that there is a perpetual conflict within Judaism, Christianity, and Islam between the esoteric and the exoteric or, to put it another way, between the ‘companions of the light‘ and inner vision on the one hand, and the literalists on the other. Indeed, it would not be wrong to suggest that exactly this conflict between the literalist Pharisees and Sadducees on the one side, and Christ on the other, began Christianity itself.

It is no doubt worth contemplating deeply why it was that Christ said ‘my kingdom is not of this world‘, and why history records the persecution and martyrdom of so many visionaries in all three religions by the ‘orthodox‘ of these religions themselves—not to mention the martyrdom of Socrates, that earlier visionary. One must wonder whether it is possible to follow the path of Christ without understanding how spiritual vision and literalism conflict.

Certainly in any case theosophy is the path of spiritual vision, of opening the eye in the heart that perceives hidden reality. While this opening often leads to conflict between the theosophers and those of a literalistic, dogmatic mindset who do not like to be reminded that spiritual vision or direct revelation is at the center of their religious tradition, this opening of the inner eye nonetheless remains central to any religious tradition that is to remain vital.

Without the active imagination, without the continuation of revelation, without direct contact with authentic spiritual experience, a tradition becomes sclerotic and withers. However controversial it may be, what we see in theosophy is the heart of religious experience, its lifeblood, its renewal through the discipline and gift of opening the spiritual eye’.

Notes:

1. Among such poets and artists one may include Kathleen Raine and her circle, members of which are found in Australia, India, Europe, and America.
2. See Richard Stauffer, “Henry Corbin, Theologian protestant,” in Henry Corbin, ed., C. Jambet (Paris
L’Herne, 1981), pp. 186–191.
3. Böhme, Sex Puncta Theosophica, 5, §9–24.
4. Ibid., 2, §23.
5. See Karl von Eckartshausen, Aufschlüsse zur Magie (München: Pflüger, 1923 ed.) II.159.
6. Ibid.
7. The full titles are: Theologia Mystica, or the Mystic Divinitie of the Aeternal Invisibles, viz. the Archetypous
Globe, (London: 1683) and A Treatise of Eternal Nature with Her Seven Eternal Forms (London: 1681).
8. Pordage, Theologia Mystica, p. 7.
9. Ibid., p. 16.
10. Ibid., p. 31.
11. Ibid., p. 32.
12. Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination, op. cit., p. 221.
13. Pordage, Theologia Mystica, p. 37.
14. Ibid., p. 34.
15. Ibid., pp. 51–52.
16. Ibid., p. 87.
17. Corbin, Creative Imagination, op. cit., p. 93.
18. Ibid., p. 92.
19. Ibid., p. 93.

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