Author: Tsuzuki

CHAPTER XIV
Dark Intelligence

Those whom initiates are entitled to call profane, the vile multitude, that is to say the feeble masses perverse in mind and heart, those who adore a shadowy god or pay lip service to atheism (you know the type of people I mean) always listen without understanding, because they are presumptuous and unreliable. If a doctrine is presented to them in an absurd form to please them, they inevitably understand it in an even more absurd sense and often take it completely the wrong way.
Thus, when they repeat mechanically that there is one God in three Persons you will find, if you question them, if you question them, that for them this means one Person in three Gods.
They have been told, and they repeat, that God, that is to say the fount of infinite goodness, is everywhere, but they concede that there are vast spaces of darkness where God is not, where eternal damnation, or deprivation of God, is suffered.
'What would you do' asked the theologian Tauler to a poor man or, rather, to a poverty-stricken man, because the poor man was the theologian himself, 'What would you do if God was intending to throw you into Hell?'
'I should take Him with me', answered the sublime pauper, 'and Hell would be turned into Heaven.'
Theologians may admire this reply but they will certainly not understand it.
'Yes,' some doctor of the law will say, God is in Hell, but only as an avenger.'
'Play the part of the executioner and we shall get rid of the Devil who is now redundant; that will be something gained anyway.'
When they talk about redemption, they mean that God, having consigned all His children to the Devil (for the very serious matter of an apple) in a fit of anger, has been obliged to suffer unending death to ransom them eternally and securely.
If you mention the Qabalah to them they invariably visualize it as a coded grimoire which is used to summon the Devil and to rule the fantasy world of sylphs, gnomes, salamanders and undines. If the conversation turns to magic, they think of it in terms of Circe's wand and enchanted cup which changes men into swine. They easily confuse Zoroaster with Muhammad and, as for Hermes Trismegistus, they think that that is some strange name used to mystify the ignorant, just as the word 'Bogy-man' is used to intimidate children.
Ignorance, like faith, has its orthodoxy; and if one happens to know things which are unknown to the so-called learned, one is a heretic in their eyes. Because there are no new truths, the wise men of this world support their authority on tottering error.Besides, it is well known that accepted error props up almost every standpoint. 'How dare you answer the High Priest like that!' shouts an officer as he strikes Jesus who has spoken with respectful firmness. 'Are you trying to say, you nobody, that when the authorities accuse you they expose their own ignorance? Are you telling us that you know something unknown to the powers-that-be? So the High Priest is wrong is he, and you know he is wrong? He is talking nonsense and you are talking sense?'
Napoleon I detested ideologies because he himself was the world's leading ideologist. He wanted to carry all before him without resistance, but was unable to offer any resistance when the striking power he had deployed for so long was suddenly turned against him.
Since the dawn of history, we see that it is always the lie which has ruled the earth, while truth has asserted its rule from time to time in violent disasters and plagues. Cruel and inflexible Truth! Is it surprising that men do not like you? Time and again you destroy the illusions of kings and commoners and if, on occasions, you have your devoted servants, you abandon them and turn them over to the cross, the stake and the scaffold! Blessed are those who die for you, but wiser are those who serve you with sufficient adroitness to avoid a useless martyrdom. There is no doubt that Rabelais was a greater philosopher than Socrates, since by hiding behind the mask of Aristophanes he managed to escape the attentions of the breed of Anitus and Melitus (who are always with us).
Galileo, whose name in itself would make the Holy Inquisition a laughing-stock for all time, had sense enough not to brave the torture chamber and the dungeon. Contemporary documents show him as a prisoner in a palace drinking with the inquisitors and signing inter pocula (between drinks) his ironic deed of abjuration, far from saying with a stamp of his foot and a clenched fist, 'Eppur si muove' ('It does move, all the same'). It is said that he added, 'Yes, I affirm on your word that the earth is immobile, and if you like I will add that the heavens are made of glass, and if it pleased God that your foreheads were the same they would let in the light'. Rabelais would have turned and said, 'Let's drink on that!'
Would it not be the most ridiculous form of suicide to die in order to prove to fools that two and two make four? A theorem which has been demonstrated cannot be denied, and the abjuration of a mathematical truth is nothing more than a farce and a grimace, the absurdity of which will attach itself to those who can seriously exact it in the name of an alleged infallible authority. If Galileo had gone to the stake for protesting against the Church, he would have been a heresiarch. By abjuring as a Catholic what he had demonstrated as a scientist, he killed the Catholicism of the Middle Ages.
One day someone handed the author of this book an article from the Syllabus saying, 'Take a look, here is the formal condemnation of your doctrines. If you are a Catholic, admit the charge and burn your books; if, on the other hand, you are going to persist in your teachings, don't let's hear any more about your catholicity.'
The article from the Syllabus is number seven in Section Two and the doctrines it condemns are these:
'The prophecy and miracles made known and recorded in Scripture are poetic fictions and the mysteries of the Christian faith are an epitome of philosophic investigations; contained in the books of the two Testaments are mystical inventions and Jesus Himself is a myth.'
What was the astonishment of the person who was trying to confound me when I said that these were no doctrines of mine. I said to him, 'Here is what I teach or, rather what is recognized by the Church, by science and by myself.'
'The narratives of the prophecies and miracles in the Bible have a poetic form which is peculiar to the oriental genius. The mysteries of the Christian faith have been confirmed and explained, as to their expression, by philosophic investigations. The Old and New Testaments contain parables and Jesus Himself has been the subject of many parables and legends.'
I fearlessly submit these propositions to the Pope and to the future Council, and am quite certain in advance that they will not condemn them.
What the Church does not want, and rightly so, is to be deliberately contradicted. Her infallibility is needed to maintain peace in the Christian world, so she must preserve her infallibility at all costs. If she were to say that two and two make three, I should take care not to say she was mistaken. I should endeavour to find how and in what manner two and two could make three, and you may be sure I would be successful. For example: two apples and two halves of an apple make three apples. When the Church seems to utter an absurdity, it is merely an enigma propounded to test the faith of the faithful.
Needless to say, it will be a grand and moving spectacle, this next General Council, when the queen of the Old World, wrapped in her tattered purple, declares that she is more sovereign than ever at the moment she falls from her throne, and proclaims her extended tights and new pretensions in the face of imminent spoliation. The bishops will be as heroic as those sailors of the Vengeur who, on a ship ready to founder, were full of defiance instead of surrendering and fired their last broadside as they nailed their flag to the remaining stump of the mainmast.
Besides, they know that a compromise would utterly ruin them and that the altar flames would go out as soon as they ceased to be in darkness. When the temple veil is rent the gods depart, to return when new dogmatic embroidery makes a new veil lightproof.Night is for ever backing away from the advance of day, but only to take possession of regions on the other side of the globe which the sun has abandoned. There is need of darkness, there is need of impenetrable mysteries to baffle that dark intelligence which believes in the absurd and combines the despotism of a limited reasoning power with the immeasurable audacity of faith. Daylight circumscribes our horizons and gives us a sight of the limits of the world; it is night, more than anything else, boundless night with its immense haze of stars, which gives rise to our sense of the infinite.
Study the child, he is man as he leaves the hands of nature, to use the language of Rousseau, and see the bent of his mind. Realities bore him, fictions excite him; he understands everything except for mathematics; he would rather believe fables than history. It is because the first period of life has a joyful infinity about it; it is because the future seems so marvellous in the initial stages of existence that it is natural to dream of giants and fairies in the middle of such miracles. It is because the poetic faculty, the divinest of human faculties, represents the world at first as a cloud in the sky. This sense is a sweet folly which is often wiser than reason, if I may so speak, because our reason always brings us face to face with narrow limits which science attempts to push back bit by bit, whereas poetry leaps into infinity with its eyes shut and strews there all the stars of our dreams.
The task of the Church is to keep the beliefs of a childish fancy within bounds. Fools are indisciplined believers and the faithful believers are fools who recognize the authority of that wisdom which is represented by the priesthood.
Let the priesthood only become a real priesthood and the leaders of the blind no longer blind themselves and the Church will save society by recovering her great virtues and her power.
Science itself requires the night in order to observe the multitude of stars. The sun conceals the stars from us; the night shows them to us, and they seem to flower in the dim sky like superhuman inspirations shining in the darkness of faith. Angels' wings look white during the night; by day they are black.
Dogma is not unreasonable, it is extra-reasonable or supra-reasonable and has always summarized the highest aspirations of occult philosophy. If you read the history of the councils you will always see a glimpse of progress and reason in the trends set by the great heretics. The Church always appears to affirm what is absurd and to come down on the side of the dark intelligence. Thus when Arius thought he was safeguarding the unity of God by imagining a substance analogous but superior to that of God (the substance of God, who is immaterial and infinite!), the Church proclaimed at Nicaea a unity of substance analogous to the unity of God.
When an attempt was made to represent Jesus Christ as a hybrid personage composed of a divine person and a human person, the Church rejected this blend of the finite and the infinite and declared that there could only be one person in Jesus Christ. When Pelagius took an exaggerated view of human pride and the obligations of free will and consigned the mass of sinners irremediably to Hell, the Church affirmed that grace which works for the salvation of the unrighteous and makes up for human failure by the virtues of election. Pompous Protestants are indignant at the prerogatives accorded to the Virgin, Mother of God, and do not see that in this adorable personification, humanity has been snatched from the contamination of original sin and the act of generation has been rehabilitated. This woman who is extolled is a glorified mother: Credo in unam, sanctam, catholicam et apostolicam Ecclesiam. (I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church).
Catholic (that is to say `universal') doctrine resembles the cloud which went before the children of Israel in the desert - obscure by day and bright by night. This doctrine is a stumbling block to false sages and the light of the ignorant. At the crossing of the Red Sea, the cloud stationed itself between the Hebrews and the Egyptians, according to Exodus. It shone on Israel and blotted out the light for the Egyptians. Thus has it always been for the universal dogma, which is only comprehensible to initiates. At one and the same time it is dark and clear. To do away with the shadow cast by the pyramids, the pyramids would have to be knocked down; the same is true of the obfuscations inherent in the eternal dogma.
It is said and repeated daily that no reconciliation is possible between religion and science. But people are using the wrong word: the one they should be using is not `reconciliation' but 'fusion' or `confusion'. If science and faith have so far appeared irreconcilable, it is due to the continual vain attempts to mix them together or to take one for the other. There is only one way of reconciling them and that is to distinguish between them and to separate them one from the other completely and absolutely. It would be just as ridiculous to ask the Pope how to demonstrate a theorem as it would be to ask a mathematician to settle a theological puzzle. The Immaculate Conception of the Virgin is not a question of embryology and the table of logarithms has nothing to do with the tables of the law. Science is compelled to admit whatever has been proved; and when faith is regulated by a reasonable authority, which it is also necessary to accept, it can reject nothing that is an article of faith.
Science will never demonstrate the existence of God or of the soul, and the Church has been forced to retract in the face of the proofs for Copernicus' and Galileo's systems of the universe. But does this signify that she can be deceived in matters of faith? No, all it means is that she must keep within her own jurisdiction. Even she does not claim that God has revealed to her the theorems of universal knowledge.
What science can observe are the phenomena produced by faith, and it can then, according to the saying of Jesus Christ Himself, judge the tree by its fruits. It is obvious that a belief which does not make men better, which does not elevate their thoughts, which does not strengthen their wills for goodness, beauty and justice alone, is an evil and perverted belief. The Judaism of Moses and the Bible made the grand nation of Solomon and the Maccabees. The Jewry of the Rabbis and the late Talmud has made sordid usurers who infect the ghetto.
Catholicism, too, has its corrupt Talmud, it is the insane hotchpotch of theologians and casuists, it is the jurisprudence of the inquisitors, it is the nauseating mysticism of the Capuchins and the sanctimonious. The enemies of Christianity and the impure gain a substantial and shameful advantage from these doctrines. It is against this that one must protest by all available means, and not against the majesty of the orthodox dogmas.
As far back as the first centuries, when religion was both protected and contaminated by the Empire, certain Christians who are now called saints by the Church put the desert between them and their places of worship. Maybe they loved the altars with all their heart, but they went to weep and pray far from them. The present writer is a Catholic of the desert.
However, there is nothing frightful about the Thebaid, and he has always preferred the Abbey of Thelema, founded by Rabelais, to the Hermitage of Saint Anthony. The human race no longer needs ascetics, it needs sages and workers to live with it and for it: that is the price of salvation in these days.
There is a white god and a black god in the Qabalah of Rabbi Simeon Ben Jochai. In nature there are `white' men and `black' men and in occult philosophy, too, we find a white intelligence and a black intelligence.
Before the study of light can be scientific, it must be possible to calculate the intensity and direction of shadow. The painters with the greatest technical ability are those with a knowledge of light and dark.
A good teacher must be able to put himself in the place of those who find learning hard.
The dark intelligence is the divination of the mysteries of the night, a sense of the reality of invisible forms.
It is belief in a dim possibility. It is a beam of light shining into a dream. At night, all creatures are unsighted except those which, like the owl, the cat and the lynx, have phosphorus in their eyes. During the night, the owl can devour those birds which are then defenceless; let us have lynx eyes to help us fight the owls, but let us refrain from setting fire to the forest on the pretext of giving the birds some light.
Let us have respect for the mysteries of darkness while keeping our lamp lit, and let us also know how to throw a veil around our lamp so as not to attract those insects which, during the night, love to drink human blood.