With Love, Eliphas Lévi

Warm greetings to you friends, known and unknown.

I begin this year jolted, personally jolted. So much so, that I am not sure how to continue this weblog. More will be said. Tomorrow, perhaps.

Then, just in the last hours I have been jolted again – by the enormity (to say the very least) of what James Lovelock is saying today about civilisation (and so, so much more) being destroyed by global warming.

If you have not heard, I urge you to go to the site of the fine British newspaper, The Independent, which devoted its **entire** first three pages today to Lovelock's claim. Lovelock's own words are here:

http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article338830.ece

But the related articles also deserve to be ***studied***.

On this matter, I will remain in silence, till more has been digested.

Today I will be very personal and simply say that my heart has been crying out these last hours: “Secularism isn’t working! …

Secularism, rooted in epistemological blindness leads inevitably to blindness of values … The loss of simplicity and devotion to a higher ideal that Ireland, for example, once had - can be laid at the door of secularism, scepticism and the materialism and hyper-individualism that followed in its wake …”

Cry from the heart. And very subjective. More time is needed …

For now, I will just say that as this blog has unfolded, it will have been obvious that I sometimes draw on some unusual Christian thinkers. These include the non-Catholic, non-confessional esotericist Rudolf Steiner. And also the very Catholic anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot.

But as this new year of my weblog gets off to a faltering start, I want to invoke a third unusual source: the great 19th century French Catholic Hermeticist, Eliphas Lévi. And without much further comment today, simply resurrect his voice once more.

For as bizarre as it may no doubt seem, I feel his voice addresses – however adequately or not – the only answer I am able to see to the tragedies intimated above.

'Able to see' that is, after many years of reflection. I am then, unable to see another answer after all these years...

Certainly not in the New Age movement which, it seems to me often plays into affirming the subjectivism of secularism … Among other things …

‘However adequately or not’ - I wish to repeat in regard to Eliphas Lévi. For although he was a man of **magnificently** radiating heart and human wisdom, his formulations can at times be excessive and extravagant.

No matter. I affirm the heartfelt essence, if not all the particulars of his message.Through the veils of prejudice, he saw the Power and the Mystery of the Sacramental Church - which is the Power and the Mystery of Christ ...

Here then, is my friend, the Catholic deacon, Alphonse Louis Constant speaking from Paris in the 1860’s and 70’s:

“Homo sum humani a me nil alienum puto. I am a human, and nothing human can be foreign to me. This is what God has said to the world in the Spirit of the Christian Revelation.”

“The ancient rites have lost their effectiveness since Christianity appeared in the world. The Christian and Catholic religion, in fact, is the legitimate daughter of Jesus, king of the Mages. A simple scapular worn by a truly Christian person is a more invincible talisman than the ring and pentacle of Solomon.

The Mass is the most prodigious of evocations. Necromancers evoke the dead, the sorcerer evokes the devil and he shakes, but the Catholic priest does not tremble in evoking the living God.

Catholics alone have priests because they alone have the altar and the offering, i.e. the whole of religion. To practise high Magic is to compete with the Catholic priesthood; it is to be a dissident priest.

Rome is the great Thebes of the new initiation. It has crypts for its catacombs; for talismen, its rosaries and medallions; for a magic chain, its congregations; for magnetic fires, its convents; for centres of attraction, its confessionals; for means of expansion, its pulpits and the addresses of its bishops; it has, lastly, its Pope, the Man-God rendered visible.”

(By which,in the last instance, Lévi may simply have meant that the two thousand year history of the See of Peter is due not to arbitrary human invention, but to a Sacramental Mystery that reveals Christ in a particular way ...)

“The supernatural is the eternal Paradox of the infinite desire. Man craves to assimilate himself with God, and he does so in the Catholic communion. From a Rationalistic point of view and considered in a purely natural manner, this communion is a thing of colossal extravagance.

In the Catholic Communion they eat the spirit of God and the body of a man! Eat a spirit, and an infinite Spirit! What madness! Eat the body of a man! How horrible! Theophagy, and Androphagy! What claims to immortality! And yet, what can be more beautiful, more soothing, more really divine than the Catholic Communion?

The religious want, innate in man, will never find more complete satisfaction; and how vividly we feel that it is true, when we believe in it. Faith to a certain extent creates what she affirms; hope in the superhuman never deceives, and the Love of the divine is never a deception.

The First Communion is the coronation of the human royalty, it is the inauguration of the serious side of life, it is the apotheosis and the transfiguration of childhood, it is the most pure of all joys and the most true of all happinesses.”

Now I might add to what Eliphas Lévi says here, that I realise many children today do not experience this.

Nonetheless, I was shocked, SHOCKED by the inexpressible joy which the confirmation in the Catholic Church so unexpectedly invoked in me on Easter night, 2000.

Giving me the most profound, unnamable richness, that only seems to unfold more, year by year by year. Yes, I know what lies behind Lévi's words, as to this most pure of happinesses ...

And Lord, the wholesomeness, the mysterious calm and peace of this divine-human wholesomeness, engendered by Sacramental Union with your Being ... perhaps that is what we need now more than ... my voice trails off.

O Lord.