16

Bipartition of the Traditional

Spirit; Asceticism

Having explained the spirit that animated the caste system, it is now necessary to discuss the path that is above the castes and is directed at implementing the realization of transcendence—in analogous terms to those of high initiation, yet outside the specific and rigorous structures characterizing it. On the one hand, the pariah is a person without a caste, the one who has “lapsed” or who has eluded the “form” by being powerless before it, thus returning to the infernal world. The ascetic, on the other hand, is a being above the caste, one who becomes free from the form by renouncing the illusory center of human individuality; he turns toward the principle from which every “form” proceeds, not by faithfulness to his own nature and by participation in the hierarchy, but by a direct action. Therefore, as great as was the revulsion harbored by every caste toward the pariah in Aryan India, so, by contrast, was the veneration felt by everybody for a person who was above the castes. These beings, according to a Buddhist image, should not be expected to follow a human dharma, just as one who is trying to kindle a fire ultimately does not care what kind of wood is being employed, as long as it is capable of producing fire and light.

Asceticism occupies an ideal intermediary state between the plane of direct, Olympian, and initiatory regality and the plane of rite and of dharma. Asceticism also presents two features or qualifications that from a broader perspective may be considered as qualifications of the same traditional spirit. The first aspect of the ascetic path is action, understood as heroic action; the second aspect is asceticism in the technical sense of the word, especially with reference to the path of contemplation. Beyond complete traditional forms and in more recent times some civilizations have arisen that were inspired in different degrees by either one of these two poles. Later on we shall see what role the two aspects have played in the dynamism of historical forces, even on the plane that is related to the ethnic and racial factor. In order to grasp the spirit of an ascetical tradition at a pure state it is necessary to leave out of consideration the meanings that have been associated with the term asceticism in the world of Western religiosity. Action and knowledge are two fundamental human faculties; in both domains it is possible to accomplish an integration capable of removing human limitations. The asceticism of contemplation consists of the integration of the knowing faculty (achieved through detachment from sensible reality) with the neutralization of individual rationalizing faculties and with the progressive stripping of the nucleus of consciousness, which thus becomes “free from conditionings” and subtracts itself from the limitation and from the necessity of any determination, whether real or virtual. Once all the dross and obstructions are removed (opus remotionis), participation in the overworld takes place in the form of a vision or an enlightenment. As the peak of the ascetical path, this point also represents at the same time the beginning of a truly continuous, progressive ascent that realizes states of being truly superior to the human condition. The essential ideals of the ascetical path are the universal as knowledge and knowledge as liberation.

The ascetical detachment typical of the contemplative path implies “renunciation.” In this regard, it is necessary to prevent the misunderstanding occasioned by some inferior forms of asceticism. It is important to emphasize the different meanings that renunciation assumed in higher forms of ancient and Eastern asceticism on the one hand, and in most of Western and especially Christian asceticism on the other hand. In the latter, renunciation often assumed the character of a repression and of a “mortification”; the Christian ascetic becomes detached from the objects of desire not because he no longer has any desire, but in order to mortify himself and to “escape temptation.” In the former, renunciation proceeds from a natural distaste for objects that are usually attractive and yearned for; this distaste is motivated by the fact that one directly desires—or better, wills—something the world of conditioned experience cannot grant. In this case, what leads to renunciation is the natural nobility of one’s desire rather than an external intervention aimed at slowing down, mortifying, and inhibiting the faculty of desire in a vulgar nature. After all, the emotional phase, even in its purest and noblest forms, is only found at the introductory levels in higher forms of asceticism; in later stages, it is consumed by the intellectual fire and by the arid splendor of pure contemplation.

A typical example of contemplative asceticism is given by early Buddhism in its lack of “religious” features, its organization in a pure system of techniques, and in the spirit that animates it, which is so different from what anyone may think about asceticism. First of all, Buddhism does not know any “gods” in the religious sense of the word; the gods are believed to be powers who also need liberation, and thus the “Awakened One” is acknowledged to be superior to both men and gods. In the Buddhist canon it is written that an ascetic not only becomes free from human bonds, but from divine bonds as well. Secondly, moral norms, in the original forms of Buddhism, are purported to be mere instruments to be employed in the quest for the objective realization of superindividual states. Anything that belongs to the world of “believing,” of “faith,” or that is remotely associated with emotional experiences is shunned. The fundamental principle of the method is “knowledge”: to turn the knowledge of the ultimate nonidentity of the Self with anything “else” (whether it be the monistic All or the world of Brahma, theistically conceived) into a fire that progressively devours any irrational self-identification with anything that is conditioned. In conformity to the path, the final outcome, besides the negative designation (nirvāṇa = “cessation of restlessness”), is expressed in terms of “knowledge,” bodhi, which is knowledge in the eminent sense of superrational enlightenment or liberating knowledge, as in “waking up” from sleep, slumber, or a hallucination. It goes without saying that this is not the equivalent of the cessation of power or of anything resembling a dissolution. To dissolve ties is not to become dissolved but to become free. The image of the one who, once freed from all yokes, whether human or divine, is supremely autonomous and thus may go wherever he pleases, is found very frequently in the Buddhist canon together with all kinds of symbols of a virile and warrior type, and also with constant and explicit reference not so much to nonbeing but rather to something superior to both being and nonbeing. Buddha, as it is well known, belonged to an ancient stock of Aryan warrior nobility and his doctrine (purported to be the “dharma of the pure ones, inaccessible to an uninstructed, average person”) is a very far cry from any mystical escapism. Buddha’s doctrine is permeated by a sense of superiority, clarity, and an indomitable spirit, and Buddha himself is called “the fully Self-Awakened One,” “the Lord.”^[1]

The Buddhist renunciation is of a virile and aristocratic type and is animated by an inner strength; it is not dictated by need but is consciously willed, so that the person practicing it may overcome need and become reintegrated into a perfect life. It is understandable that when our contemporaries, who only know a life that is mixed with nonlife that in its restlessness presents the irrational traits of a “mania,” hear mention of nirvāṇa (in reference to the condition experienced by the Awakened One), namely, of an extinction of mania corresponding to what the Germans call “more than living” (mehr als Leben) and to a superlife, they cannot help but equate nirvāṇa with “nothingness”: for non-mania (nir-vāṇa) means nonlife, or nothingness. After all, it is only natural that the modern spirit has relegated the values cherished by higher asceticism to the things of the “past.”

A Western example of pure contemplative asceticism is given by Neoplatonism. With the words, “The gods ought to come to me, not I to them,”^[2] Plotinus indicated a fundamental aspect of aristocratic asceticism. Also, with the sayings, “It is to the gods, not to good men that we are to be made like,” and, “Our concern, though, is not to be out of sin, but to be god,”^[3] Plotinus has definitely overcome the limitations posed by morality, and has employed the method of inner simplification (άπλώσις) as a way to become free from all conditionings in that state of metaphysical simplicity from which the vision^[4] will eventually arise. By means of this vision—“having joined as it were center to center”^[5]—what occurs is the participation in that intelligible reality that compared to which any other reality may be characterized as more nonlife than life,^[6] with the sensible impressions appearing as dreams^[7] and the world of bodies as the place of radical powerlessness and of the inability to be.

Another example is given by the so-called Rhineland mysticism that was capable of reaching metaphysical peaks towering above and beyond Christian theism. Tauler’s Entwerdung corresponds to Plotinus’s άπλώσις and to the destruction of the element of “becoming” (or saṁsāric element) that Buddhism regarded as the condition necessary to achieve “awakening.” The aristocratic view of contemplative asceticism reappears in the doctrine of Meister Eckhart. Like Buddha, Eckhart addressed the noble man and the “noble soul” whose metaphysical dignity is witnessed by the presence of a “strength,” a “light,” and a “fire” within it—in other words, of something before which even the deity conceived as a “person” (i.e., theistically) becomes something exterior. The method he employed consisted essentially of detachment from all things (Abegescheidenheit), a virtue that according to Eckhart is above love, humility, or mercifulness, as he explained in his sermon On Detachment.^[8] The principle of “spiritual centrality” was affirmed: the true Self is God, God is our real center and we are external only to ourselves. Fear, hope, anguish, joy, and pain, or anything that may bring us out of ourselves, must be allowed to seep into us. An action dictated by desire, even when its goal is the kingdom of heaven itself, eternal life, or the beatific vision, must not be undertaken. The path suggested by Eckhart leads from the outside to the inside, beyond everything that is mere “image”; beyond things and what represents the quality of a thing (Dingheit); beyond forms and the quality of form (Formlichkeit); beyondessences and essentiality. From the gradual extinction of all images and forms, and eventually of one’s own thoughts, will, and knowledge, what arises is a transformed and supernatural knowledge that is carried beyond all forms (überformt). Thus one reaches a peak in respect to which “God” himself (always according to his theistic view) appears as something ephemeral, that is, as a transcendent and uncreated peak of the Self without which “God” himself could not exist. All the typical images of the religious consciousness are swallowed up by a reality that is an absolute, pure possession, and that in its simplicity cannot help but to appear terrifying to any finite being. Once again we find a solar symbol: before this barren and absolute substance, “God” appears as the moon next to the sun. The divine light in comparison with the radiance of this substance pales, just as the sun’s light outshines the moon’s.

After this brief mention of the meaning of contemplative asceticism, it is necessary to say something about the other path, namely, the path of action. While in contemplative asceticism we find a mostly inner process in which the theme of detachment and the direct orientation toward transcendence are predominant, in the second case we have an immanent process aimed at awakening the deepest forces of the human being and at bringing them to the limit, thus causing a superlife to spring from life itself in a context of absolute intensity; this is the heroic life according to the sacred meaning often displayed in the traditional Eastern and Western worlds. The nature of such a realization causes it to present simultaneously an outer and an inner, a visible and an invisible aspect; conversely, pure contemplative asceticism may also lie entirely in a domain that is not connected to the external world by something tangible. When the two poles of the ascetical path are not separated and neither one becomes the “dominating” trait of a particular type of civilization, but on the contrary, both poles are present and joined together, then the ascetical element feeds in an invisible way the forces of “centrality” and “stability” of a traditional organism, while the heroic element enjoys a greater relationship with the dynamism and the force animating its structures.

In relation to the path of action, in the next two chapters I will discuss the doctrine of the holy war and the role played by games in antiquity. I will further develop the topic of heroic action given the interest it should evoke in Western man who, by virtue of his own nature, is more inclined to act than to contemplate.

Footnotes

1. J. Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening.

2. Porphyry, The Life of Plotinus, 10.

3. Plotinus, Enneads, 1.2.7; 1.2.6.

4. Ibid., 1.6.9.

5. “For here too when the centers have come together they are one, but there is duality when they are separate.” Ibid., 6.9.10.

6. “The perfect life, the true, real life, is in that transcendent intelligible reality, and other lives are incomplete traces of life, not perfect or pure and no more life than its opposite.” Ibid., 1.4.3.

7. Ibid., 3.6.6.

8. Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense, trans. E. Colledge and B. McGinn. (New York, 1982), 286.