What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak… . It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us. – Gaston Bachelard 1
We are living out the consequences of three great crises: a rupture between the individual and the Divine, a severing of the felt connection between human beings and the living earth, and a profound breakdown of long-held assumptions about the nature and function of language. In traditional terminology, we are witnessing a collapse of the structures that make sense of the relations among God, Creation, Logos and the human person. Two of the catastrophes are fairly easily categorized; they are spiritual and environmental. The third, the crisis of Logos, is more diffuse and more fundamental. It is a crisis of meaning.
These crises may be understood together, as part of single, coherent story. I can’t claim that this is the best story that can be told about how we arrived at our current situation, but I think it is a good story; that is, it is a fertile, living, open-ended story that suggests its own continuation, its own kinds of resolutions. And I must admit, my fondness for this story is born of a strong desire to find something original, that is, something at the origin, that can serve us all as a kind of common ground.
In his late writings Henry Corbin articulated particularly clearly a powerful vision of the unity of the religions of Abraham. It is a mystical and esoteric view of these religions, in that it gives precedence to the inner significance of religious experience rather than to the social forms that contain and channel the potent forces to which religious experience can give rise. These logocentric religions share a story that centers on the revelation of the Word of God. Corbin writes,
The drama common to all the ‘religions of the Book,’ or better said, to the community that the Qur’an designates as Ahl al-Kitab, the community of the Book, and that encompasses the three great branches of the Abrahamic tradition (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), can be designated as the drama of the “Lost Speech.” And this because the whole meaning of their life revolves around the phenomenon of the revealed holy Book, around the true meaning of this Book. If the true meaning of the Book is the interior meaning, hidden under the literal appearance, then from the instant that men fail to recognize or refuse this interior meaning, from that instant they mutilate the unity of the Word, of the Logos, and begin the drama of the ‘Lost Speech.’ 2
For Corbin much of Judaic, Christian and Islamic history can only be understood if we see it as the theater in which the drama of the conflict between the literal and the hidden meaning of the Word is played out. To the degree that the Word becomes only public property, to that degree is the true meaning lost.
I think it is fair to say that all Corbin’s work was at root devoted to illustrating deep commonalities between the mystical and often heretical traditions within Christianity and Islam, and of both with similar movements in Judaism. This effort he understood as akin to the attempts of early Christian hermeneuts to reconcile the stories in the four canonical Gospels. The original work of harmonization written by the Syrian Tatian in the 2nd century took its name from Greek musical theory: his Diatessaron means “according to four.” The traditional name for the underlying unity of the Gospels is the Harmonia evangelica. Corbin suggests that his own work is based upon an underlying Harmonia Abrahamica.3
One of Corbin’s early influences, whose importance for his work can’t be over-emphasized, is Johann Georg Hamann. It is Hamann’s view of language I want to single out. In a short but crucial essay that Corbin in fact translated, Hamann writes,
Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race; even as the garden is older than the ploughed field, painting than script; as song is more ancient than declamation; parables older than reasoning; barter than trade. A deep sleep was the repose of our farthest ancestors; and their movement a frenzied dance. Seven days they would sit in the silence of deep thought or wonder; - and would open their mouths to utter winged sentences.
The senses and passions speak and understand nothing but images. The entire store of human knowledge and happiness consists in images. The first outburst of creation, and the first impression of its recording scribe; - the first manifestation and the first enjoyment of Nature are united in the words: Let there be Light! Here beginneth the feeling for the presence of things. …
Speak, that I may see Thee! This wish was answered by Creation, which is an utterance to created things through created things… . The fault may lie where it will (outside us or within us): all we have left in nature for our use is fragmentary verse and disjecta membra poetae. To collect these together is the scholar’s modest part; the philosopher’s to interpret them; to imitate them, or – bolder still – to adapt them, the poet’s.
To speak is to translate – from the tongue of angels into the tongue of men, that is to translate thoughts into words – things into names – images into signs… .4
The language of poetry is as close as we can get to the language of the angels. It is a language of images, of imagination. And the imagination is central to the psycho-cosmology that Corbin describes in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi and in Shi’ism. Nature itself speaks, and it takes a special kind of attention to hear it. As Hamann wrote elsewhere,
It takes more than physics to explain nature. Physics is only the abc. Nature is an equation of unknowable grandeur; a Hebrew word of which only the consonants are written, and to which the understanding must add the diacritical vowels.5
Corbin’s account of Western history traces the progressive loss of the Breath of Compassion that articulates those vowels and so gives life and soul to the world. He warns us that the history of the West has been the theater for the Battle for the Soul of the World.6 He calls us to struggle in that long combat by turning towards the inner recesses where the Angel of the Earth and the Angel of Humanity dwell. His emphasis is on the Light that illuminates the path of the mystic out of this world in which we are in exile. On his view, perhaps the most crucial event in this long history was the loss in the Christian West in the 12th century, of the angelic hierarchies of Avicenna and Neoplatonism that had provided the connection between the individual and the divine. The loss of the intermediate world of the Imagination that they inhabit, of the realm of the imaginal, occasioned all the schisms that split the West: religion and philosophy, thought and being, intellect and ethics, God and the individual.
From the first to the last then, Corbin tells a tale of human life in which the place of language and the Word is central, and in which the quest for the lost language of God and the angels is the fundamental problem. It is the question that underlies the unity of the three branches of the Abrahamic tradition.
In his masterful treatment of the prophetic tradition, Norman O. Brown too relies on Corbin’s work for insights into the history of these interconnected and tragically divided religions.7 Islam is the last in the sequence of the great Revelations, and so sees itself as the end of the prophetic tradition. Following Louis Massignon, Brown takes Sura XVIII as the central book of the Qur’an, and the central episode of this Sura is the meeting between Moses and Khidr. Khidr is a mysterious figure, who acts as Moses’ Guide and initiator into the secret meanings of the Law and of the world. He is the archetypal hermeneut whose speech is the lost poetry of Creation. In the Islamic tradition he is identified with the Old Testament figure of Elija. Khidr is the personal Guide, and Corbin says, equivalent to the Paraclete and the Hidden Imam, to the Christ of the Cross of Light; he is the Verus Propheta, the inner guide of each person, the celestial Anthropos and Angel of Humanity whose appearance to every person is each time unique.
Brown writes that the question posed by Islam, at the end of the prophetic tradition, after Moses, Jesus and Mohammad, is What comes after the Prophets? In Brown’s words, “The question is, Who is Khidr? And, What does it mean to be a disciple of Khidr? … Pursuing that question, Ibn Arabi said that he had plunged into an ocean on whose shore the Prophets remained behind standing.”8
This question is equivalent to asking how we may recover the Lost Speech.
In order to have any chance of answering this question we must examine very closely the state of Language for us now, at the end of the Prophetic tradition. Norman O. Brown has suggested parallels between the revealed language of the Qur’an and, astonishingly, Finnegan’s Wake. The Qur'an, by means of its pulverization of human language, is more avant-garde, more post-modern than Finnegan's Wake. In its structure, its allusiveness, its ambiguities, its imagery and its poetry “the Qur'an reveals human language crushed by the power of the divine Word.”9 God's Word unmakes all human meanings, all the proud constructions of civilization, of high culture, and returns all the luxuriant cosmic imagery back to the lowly and the oppressed, so that in their imaginations it can be made anew. Brown says
The Islamic imagination, Massignon has written, should be seen as the product of a desperate regression back to the primitive, the eternal pagan substrate of all religions - that proteiform cubehouse, the Ka'ba - as well as to a primitive pre-Mosaic monotheism of Abraham. The Dome is built upon the Rock.10
The way to start a new civilization, Brown says, “is not to introduce some new refinement in high culture but to change the imagination of the masses… .”11
The world is shattered. Language is crushed by the Word. We return to the Origin out of which alone new worlds can be made. But what is this soil out of which the luxuriant cosmic imagery grows? The return to that pagan substrate is not without danger. It suggests as well the Blut und Boden of Aryran supremacy, and the genocide of the very people who provide the root and origin of the entire Tradition of the Word.
Is that truly the meaning of the end of the Prophetic tradition? Is it bounded by Abraham and Auschwitz? What is the meaning of the Word, of Logos, after the unspeakable catastrophes of the 20th century? Is there any hope of recovering the Lost Speech now? What kind of meaning is possible in the absence of the God of Belief? What can the human response be to the long history of failures to embody the Breath of Compassion? In order to answer the fundamental questions posed by our place in the Prophetic Tradition, we must grapple with the enormity of our situation. I know of no more powerful and uncompromising analyst of our predicament than George Steiner. In his work we find a prolonged and intense concentration on the confrontation of creative imagination with inhumanity and evil. In Steiner’s treatment of the relation between Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger all our themes come together with an intensity of focus that is staggering: Language, God, Logos, Earth and the human person.
The poetry of Paul Celan is the result of the encounter of the creative power of human language with the unbearable bestiality of the Holocaust. Celan’s late verse exists on the edge of intelligibility, where human meaning shades off into the unknown reaches of the soul and of the world. Though fluent in several languages he chose German for his poetry, the language in which the inhuman and the demonic was, for his time, given expression and reality. The darkness of the unknown sources of language and human meaning and that of the unbearable demonic are thus brought together in a terrible tension in his writings at every moment. His work represents a stunning example of the awe-ful struggle in which human creativity and the reach of the soul towards light contend with the monstrous evil of which we are capable and that threatens to negate every breath of love and compassion that we take. As Corbin has taught us, there are two darknesses, and to confound them is a disaster of cosmic proportion: there is the darkness of the evil that refuses the Light, and the Luminous Darkness at the approach to the Divine.
Heidegger too struggled with the relation between language and being throughout his life. His work unquestionably stands as a towering monument to human thought. But his legacy is as deeply ambiguous as his writings are difficult and perplexing. It is not merely that he was, however briefly, an enthusiastic supporter of National Socialism. As Steiner argues, it is his almost total silence about the Holocaust after 1945 that is damning and nearly impossible to understand. Is it possible to reconcile this silence with the deeply lyrical writings of his late works?
In Steiner’s view, Heidegger’s metaphysics is throughout an effort to think immanence without transcendence. From early on he categorically refused the theological. His work is an attempt to think Being without recourse to categories of transcendence. Much of his writing is indeed “pagan” and full of references to the earth, to the soil, to tradition and to the gods, and seems deeply rooted in the immediate realities of a pastoral life. His attempt to return to “the eternal pagan substrate” that is the origin of religion has been much praised by various ecologically minded philosophers for these reasons. His writings are deeply suggestive for anyone involved in trying to rethink the modern Western relation between the human person and the earth. Much of his work is also profoundly anti-technological in character, and this as well has made him attractive to environmentalists of many kinds. His critiques of modern instrumental thought and action are profound and stirring. And yet there is a certain hollowness, a profoundly “abstract” character to his work that is troubling to say the least. There is an impersonal and inhuman tenor to his thought that is at times revelatory and entrancing. Yet from Being and Time on there is, as Steiner says, nowhere for an ethics to take hold, except perhaps one based on an impersonal aesthetics of nature. Heidegger’s “mystical” tendencies are rooted in a realm beyond the ethical. Steiner writes, “Far beyond Nietzsche, Heidegger thinks, feels in categories outside good and evil.”12 And increasingly in the later works, in strong contrast to the early talk of authenticity and resolve, his categories are beyond action and he speaks in a “poetic” language only of letting-be.
Paul Celan’s struggles with language, thought and being are in many ways parallel to Heidegger’s. But the great Jewish poet’s existence is defined by the Holocaust. Steiner writes,
Together with Primo Levi (and both men chose suicide at the height of their strengths), Paul Celan is the only survivor of the Holocaust whose writings are, in some true degree, commensurate with the unspeakable. Only in Levi and Celan does language, in the exact face of subhuman yet all too human enormity and finality, retain it reticent totality.13
Celan was deeply immersed in and constantly preoccupied by Heidegger’s writings, and his readings of Hölderlin, George and Trakl. The intensity of the relation between the two is not “merely” a mark of intellectual interest, but of deep spiritual affinity: “What is absolutely clear is the degree to which Paul Celan’s radically innovative vocabulary and, at certain points, syntax are Heidegerrian.”14
This relation was not one-way. Heidegger knew Celan’s work well and “in a rare public act, attended Celan’s readings. Even on the basis of incomplete documentation, the intensity and depth of the inward relationship is palpable…” And yet, there is a chasm separating these two men that is of vast historical, spiritual and ethical implications; a chasm that is unbridgeable. Steiner narrates a drama of epochal significance:
The two men were present to each other with rare force. The crystallization of that reciprocal presentness was Celan’s visit to Heidegger’s famous hut at Todtnauberg a few years before Celan’s suicide… . Of the encounter we know only what Celan’s enigmatic recall tells us, or, rather, elects not to tell us. That there came to pass a numbing, soul-lacerating deception…is unmistakable… . Celan came to question…Heidegger’s perception or non-perception of the Shoah, of the ‘death-winds’ that had made ash of millions of human beings and of the Jewish legacy which informed Celan’s destiny… . Celan was taking the risk of an ultimate trust in the possibility of an encounter, of the renascence of the word out of a shared night… . So far as we know…that trust was violated either by trivial evasion…or by utter silence… . Either way, the effect on Celan can be felt to have been calamitous. But the issue far transcends the personal. Throughout his writings and teachings, Martin Heidegger had proclaimed the deed of questioning to be of the essence; he had defined the question as the piety of the human spirit. Whatever happened at Todtnauberg, when the foremost poet in the language after Hölderlin and Rilke sought out the ‘secret king of thought,’ blasphemed against Heidegger’s own sense of the holiness of asking. It may, for our epoch at least, have made irreparable the breach between human need and speculative thought, between the music of thought that is philosophy and that of being which is poetry. Much in Western consciousness has its instauration in the banishment of the poets from the Platonic city. In somber counterpoint, Heidegger’s denial of reply to Celan…amounts to a banishment, to a self-ostracism of the philosopher from the city of man.15
And so we arrive at the final, horrible outcome of that rupture in Western culture between thought and being which was the constant and central theme of Henry Corbin’s life of theological meditation. When the cosmology of angelic mediation between the individual and the divine is shattered, and the mediating function of the anima mundi and Imagination destroyed, then the breach is opened separating thought and being, God and humanity, knowledge and ethics, imagination and knowledge, human language and the Word, spirit and matter.
What is lacking in the thought beyond metaphysics that Heidegger provides is that Breath of Compassion which breathes life and sympathy into the world. And this Breath is the substance of the soul of a Person. In the Abrahamic Tradition it is the trace of that Person in all things that gives them their being. Heidegger tried to erect a philosophy denying the need for the category of the Person and the transcendence implicit in that Being, and it is this that is ultimately responsible for his failure, for the emptiness and inhumanity of his work. Paul Celan experienced in an almost unimaginable degree the loss of this Person, and his work resounds in the emptiness of that Absence. But it is only because of the anguish at the loss and the exile that results from the withdrawal of God that his search for language, so close to Heidegger’s on the surface, is a deeply human cry for meaning betrayed.
If the Prophetic Tradition is not to conclude with finality in this moment of immeasurably tragic drama, then a means must be found of learning to speak again, of learning to think again, to feel again, of bringing these shattered fragments of a life into some wounded yet living whole. Perhaps it is more than we can hope that we will be able to succeed. And yet there is no question that the attempt must be made. We must try, in the face of all that is darkest in this night of the world, to learn what the Sufis call “the thought of the heart.” And we must do this by struggling to learn again the languages of the world.
Notes
1. Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, 195. This translation is that of Colette Gaudin in the Preface to Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, lvix.
2. Corbin, “L'Initiation Ismaèlienne ou l'Esoterisme et le Verbe,” 81.
3. Corbin, “Harmonia Abrahamica.”
4. Hamann, “Aesthetica in nuce,” 141-142.
5. Hamann, Hamann’s Schriften, I (509), ed. Friedrich Roth, Leipzig, 1821-1825, quoted in Corbin, Hamann, philosophe du lutheranisme, 47. My translation from Corbin’s French. Corbin’s essay on Hamann was written in 1937, 33 years before he wrote Harmonia Abrahamica. Corbin says that Hamann had a deep understanding of the Semitic languages, as of course he did himself.
6. Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi'ite Iran, xvii.
7. Brown, “The Prophetic Tradition,” and “The Apocalypse of Islam.”
8. Brown (1991b), 93.
9. Seyyed Hossein Nasr quoted in Brown, “Apocalypse,” 90.
10. Brown, “Apocalypse,” 92.
11. Ibid.
12. Steiner, Martin Heidegger, xxxiv.
13. Ibid., xxxi-xxxii.
14. Ibid., xxxi.
15. Ibid., xxxi-xxxiii. My italics.